computer parts posted:

It's because you're getting old, sorry.

NewForumSoftware posted:

Blue Star posted:

Yeah but i think everything made within the past 35 years is dumb crap, going back to a few years before I was even born. Basically everything thats been invented in my lifetime is dumb crap that the world didnt need or ask for. Yeah we got video games and internet crap, whoopdie doo. Meanwhile the climate is getting worse and theres no way to stop it.

Blue Star posted:

Yeah but i think everything made within the past 35 years is dumb crap, going back to a few years before I was even born. Basically everything thats been invented in my lifetime is dumb crap that the world didnt need or ask for. Yeah we got video games and internet crap, whoopdie doo. Meanwhile the climate is getting worse and theres no way to stop it.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

That, also, is typical of Google: solving the technology alone.

Optimus_Rhyme posted:

Does anyone else think we just have too much drat technology nowadays? And not even good technology, just stupid poo poo. Like why is AOL even a thing? Why are there so many shareware programs? Who cares about the latest IBM clone???? Its all just dumb crap.

I think its because we're living in an age of technological stagnation. We arent getting any real progress in anything important, so all we've got left are PCs and dumb shareware crap.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

What was invented 36 years ago that was so good and important?

duz posted:

Me.

Non Serviam posted:

The problem is that significant scientific advances are not as Sexy as idiotic 6 second videos, dick pics that disappear without a trace or an app that sends the word "bro." The silly stuff gets reported a lot, either to praise or to mock it, and so we don't hear about the important, world changing stuff, unless we follow specific subjects.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Weird how when people talk about historical culture the cultural stuff is what people talk about and the history of invention is always a side thing, but no one can see cultural trends as anything but stupid and frivolous when it's their own culture.

Like yeah, you can find books about roman's incremental improvements in grain farming, but the number of books about that is infinitesimal compared to "history of rome" books that talk about the political and social trends of rome.

Non Serviam posted:

The problem is that significant scientific advances are not as Sexy as idiotic 6 second videos, dick pics that disappear without a trace or an app that sends the word "bro." The silly stuff gets reported a lot, either to praise or to mock it, and so we don't hear about the important, world changing stuff, unless we follow specific subjects.

So it's not the there aren't amazing new things happening right now, it's that YOU don't know about them.

If we list great recent advancements, what would you list? I'd include HPV vaccine, YouTube, cloud computing, radio on the Internet and emojis (OK, not those last two).

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Humans overall place more importance on social things once food is taken care of; that's probably why. It has a lot to do with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, I imagine; plus farming is pretty boring. You plant some things, you do some stuff to the soil, then later bread happens. Pfft, boring...but politics, wow...who the gently caress knows what's going to happen?

Nobody ever got stabbed 37 times over a legal dispute by a loaf of bread.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Humans overall place more importance on social things once food is taken care of; that's probably why. It has a lot to do with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, I imagine; plus farming is pretty boring. You plant some things, you do some stuff to the soil, then later bread happens. Pfft, boring...but politics, wow...who the gently caress knows what's going to happen?

Nobody ever got stabbed 37 times over a legal dispute by a loaf of bread.

pentyne posted:

So what happens when Twitter goes up for sale? It's become such an integral part of modern communication that I can't imagine that any national body would be allowed to own it without people flipping the gently caress out but it's probably too expensive for something like a World Wide Web Consortium responsible for maintenance and development of the app.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

It's been up for sale for some months, but the buyers are backing away because of the hacking scandal -- if all those accounts are hacked, they lose value to the buyer. Google and Salesforce have both backed away.

Non Serviam posted:

The problem is that significant scientific advances are not as Sexy as idiotic 6 second videos, dick pics that disappear without a trace or an app that sends the word "bro." The silly stuff gets reported a lot, either to praise or to mock it, and so we don't hear about the important, world changing stuff, unless we follow specific subjects.

So it's not the there aren't amazing new things happening right now, it's that YOU don't know about them.

If we list great recent advancements, what would you list? I'd include HPV vaccine, YouTube, cloud computing, radio on the Internet and emojis (OK, not those last two).

pentyne posted:

Did Twitter not employ 2FA or is it really just that easy to hack someone's social media account?

Arsenic Lupin posted:

It's been up for sale for some months, but the buyers are backing away because of the hacking scandal -- if all those accounts are hacked, they lose value to the buyer. Google and Salesforce have both backed away.

pentyne posted:

The news stories now from all the big time Vine Stars make it seem like they, the most popular and engaged personalities on the app, saw this coming over a year ago and tried to leverage their star status to force Twitter/Vine to start making changes and roll out new features. It seems like Twitter execs were either incapable of making any of the major changes the app needed or honestly didn't understand their own business model.

For all of the obsession marketing execs and corporate types in general have for "millennial and/or social media stars" when it comes to raising profits, at the end of the day they still treat them like idiot scum who don't know a thing about how to run a business and by god we've done this right for 4 decades how can we be wrong now?

computer parts posted:

Chicken Pox vaccine is a pretty big thing too that most people probably won't think about (because they were infected long before it was invented).

Freakazoid_ posted:

I found out about this a few weeks ago and it blew my mind. Knowing there's a generation growing up without getting infected by an incredibly common (but hardly fatal) disease just baffles me, it's like someone found a vaccine for the common cold.

quote:

Varicella case fatality rates are highest among adults (30 deaths/100,000 cases), followed by infants under 1 year of age (7 deaths/100,000 cases) and then those aged 1 to 19 years (1-1.5 deaths/100,000 cases

Freakazoid_ posted:

I found out about this a few weeks ago and it blew my mind. Knowing there's a generation growing up without getting infected by an incredibly common (but hardly fatal) disease just baffles me, it's like someone found a vaccine for the common cold.

Optimus_Rhyme posted:

which hacking scandal? You talking about the lady that got bullied? Yeah, if only twitter had done something to stop the trolls, gotta keep those enrollment/engagement numbers up tho.

quote:

I do wonder what will replace twitter when it gets turned to MySpace 2.0. Like, will it be a competing service that exists today? Facebook is okay but I use that more for friends and family not hobbies and work stuff. LinkedIn sucks for that cause its mostly marketing/PR/publicist bullshit or 'I'm a thought leader look at me' garbage. I guess back to mailing lists and IRC (or Slack)

Freakazoid_ posted:

I found out about this a few weeks ago and it blew my mind. Knowing there's a generation growing up without getting infected by an incredibly common (but hardly fatal) disease just baffles me, it's like someone found a vaccine for the common cold.

Nessus posted:

It's possible that a relative dearth of big engineering/popular-science style technologies has something to do with shifts in R&D funding and popular fads, but it's also probable that we cherrypick the great treasures of the past and go "Look at all this stuff that happened over the course of the last hundred years. And what's happened in the last five? Pfah."

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Vine always had such a different demographic than every other social network (read: it had women and black people on it prominently), I wonder if twitter execs struggled to deal with a market that didn't seem to fit the market virtually every website has held for the last 20 years. Twitter itself seems less white and male than like reddit (or SA) but vine seemed unique in being the social media network other than pinterest you can't just sit down at the marketing table and say "run an ad for spiderman" and basically have gotten it close enough.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

I think the day of new social-media startups has passed; investors' experience has been that very few products, no matter how big their media shares, are actually monetizable, Facebook being the sterling exception. The next big thing, if there is one, is going to be exclusively for cellphones. I think Snapchat is doing okay with their advertising filters, but IDK.

cheese posted:

It's hard to look at https://about.twitter.com/company/press/leadership and not think that this was probably at least part of it. Not saying Jack, Dick, Nathan, Katie, Adam, Adam #2 and other white people names couldn't figure out how to market to young black women, but...

We are still fully in Investor Storytime, right? Who are the companies that are actually making money?

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I think it's more that the fantastic has become commonplace.

Look at the "word lens" feature in google translate. It might as well be literal magic spells. It is unfathomably advanced technology. If you went back 10 years to 2006 there is maybe ten different ways that an app like this would be literally impossible at any cost.

But at the end of the day it's not even that impressive, I had to put word lens in quotes because when google bought the company they dropped the branding and just put it in as a minor free feature in their free google translate app. It's just a natural synthesis of a couple technologies that are already 2 or 3 or 5 years old and the much worse base app is 5 years old already so the whole thing might as well be from dinosaur times. It's barely even impressive anymore, not even impressive enough to get a good name in the app. I bet at least one person reading this has to go look what this feature even does that makes it so neat. While the concept is a thing that we have ascribed as a magical spell since ancient times. We invented a magic spell and don't even care because the parts of it already existed 2 or 3 years ago.

Fantastic stuff comes out so fast now the scale that something has to be new is growing bigger and bigger. I don't even think anyone should go stare at word lens and fall to the ground weeping or anything, it's neat, but it is totally just a side function of the app.

Nessus posted:

It's possible that a relative dearth of big engineering/popular-science style technologies has something to do with shifts in R&D funding and popular fads, but it's also probable that we cherrypick the great treasures of the past and go "Look at all this stuff that happened over the course of the last hundred years. And what's happened in the last five? Pfah."

mastershakeman posted:

I've been arguing this for a long while - when you look at each decade in the 20th century you had incredible leaps in both practice and theory, e.g. flight and theory of relativity. By the end of the 20th century you have full on cloning happening. But with every company having an eye for nothing but short term profits it seems like the big jumps have been just shrinking computers down even more and putting them in our pockets and that's about it.

Nessus posted:

Looks like the big problem is it was on Google Glass, whose main market niche was SF techlords and the Frieza Force

silence_kit posted:

I think in the late 19th century/early 20th century we had a great explosion of advances in the what I'll call 'the physical science of real life' and those advances eventually worked themselves into real technologies which affected how people lived their lives.

In contrast, now progress in physical science has slowed down, and all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and physicists have not been studying 'the science of real life.' Instead, over the past 50 years or so they have been focusing on esoteric stuff like the Higgs Boson, which cannot really be engineered, and is barely detectable only inside of a massive billion dollar machine, or gravity waves, which are very weak effects, and can only be detected inside of a massive billion dollar machine. Not a lot of technology is gonna come from those types of things.