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QuarkJets posted:I've done this, you just keep handwaving away all of my posts and creating strawman arguments in their place. If you want to continue believing that special relativity is useless to the physics of lasers and MRI machines then I no longer feel compelled to stop you Not useless, just orthogonal.
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Feb 1, 2016 02:42
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Game consoles are dead - every kid should have the chance to hack and code and mod. Minecraft's popularity (and origins on PC) hints at this potential - a new creative mindset.
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Feb 1, 2016 03:03
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Pussy Cartel posted:Moore's Law was never actually a law, and no one ever said that simply sequencing the genome would actually accomplish miraculous things all by itself. I know Moore's Law wasn't literally a scientific law; it was just an observation. But the point is that the pace of progress has definitely slowed down. This might not be so bad for consumers, since our smartphones and tablets are about as good as we would need them to be for our emails, texting, Youtube watching, etc. But I remember reading that there are difficulties with reaching exascale supercomputing. This isn't a huge deal for consumers but it's going to be harder to advance in any field that requires better and more powerful computing power. As for the genome, you're right that nobody said that just sequencing the genome would "accomplish miraculous things", but people have been hyping "personalized medicine" for like 20 years now, and it still seems to be this far-future thing. Same goes for stem cells, "regenerative medicine", and so on.
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Feb 1, 2016 06:09
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Not that I really understand the physics, but wouldn't it be hard to do anything involving high-speed and energy particles if you had to look at things like diffraction (demonstrated in the double-slit experiment) and just sort of shrug? Like, isn't fundamentally not understanding that a photon is both a particle and a wave sort of a barrier when you are trying to shoot photons at things? Also, from what I understand, quantum tunneling is relevant to everything from the touch-screen on the phone you have a ~50% chance of reading this with to the hard limitations that our current processor technology is running into. e: also, to be That Guy who quotes Wikipedia on a subject he has limited real understanding of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Quantum_vs._classical_emission_processes posted:The mechanism of producing radiation in a laser relies on stimulated emission, where energy is extracted from a transition in an atom or molecule. This is a quantum phenomenon discovered by Einstein who derived the relationship between the A coefficient describing spontaneous emission and the B coefficient which applies to absorption and stimulated emission. However, in the case of the free electron laser, atomic energy levels are not involved; it appears that the operation of this rather exotic device can be explained without reference to quantum mechanics. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Feb 1, 2016 |
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Feb 1, 2016 06:20
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Blue Star posted:I know Moore's Law wasn't literally a scientific law; it was just an observation. But the point is that the pace of progress has definitely slowed down. This might not be so bad for consumers, since our smartphones and tablets are about as good as we would need them to be for our emails, texting, Youtube watching, etc. But I remember reading that there are difficulties with reaching exascale supercomputing. This isn't a huge deal for consumers but it's going to be harder to advance in any field that requires better and more powerful computing power. A bunch of people have already pointed out all sorts of advances that have been made. Just because we aren't living in the hyped up cyberfuture that dumbshit futurists and the likes of Wired and RU Sirius always try to promote doesn't mean that we haven't seen phenomenal advances, and if you can't see past flying cars and instantly regrown limbs and organs, I don't know what to tell you. Feel free to wallow in stubborn pessimism, I guess. 
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Feb 1, 2016 06:56
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Blue Star posted:I know Moore's Law wasn't literally a scientific law; it was just an observation. But the point is that the pace of progress has definitely slowed down. Then I realized that there was lots of work being done in things like optimization, multi-core processing, heat/voltage efficiency and whatnot that was comperable. The numbers don't go up quite as much, but progress is still being made. Also, point for dim cyberfucked future that I just found out about in the USPol thread: China has a gameified metric called Sesame Credit that basically aggregates your online activity to determine how much of a Good Citizen you are. That's some shady poo poo. All possible thanks to the ubiquity of our online presence. FilthyImp fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Feb 1, 2016 |
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Feb 1, 2016 07:09
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Pussy Cartel posted:A bunch of people have already pointed out all sorts of advances that have been made. Just because we aren't living in the hyped up cyberfuture that dumbshit futurists and the likes of Wired and RU Sirius always try to promote doesn't mean that we haven't seen phenomenal advances, and if you can't see past flying cars and instantly regrown limbs and organs, I don't know what to tell you. Feel free to wallow in stubborn pessimism, I guess. i havent seen any of these avddances, Besides, I'm not 'wallowing'. I said in my first post itt that I think it might be a good thing to have a "stagnation" period. Look at climate change and pollution. The oceans are acidifying. Look at how extinct everything is getting. Aren't rhinos extinct now, or something? Maybe it's good that we're having a decline, the planet might actually recover a bit.
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Feb 1, 2016 08:15
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Blue Star posted:I know Moore's Law wasn't literally a scientific law; it was just an observation. But the point is that the pace of progress has definitely slowed down. This might not be so bad for consumers, since our smartphones and tablets are about as good as we would need them to be for our emails, texting, Youtube watching, etc. But I remember reading that there are difficulties with reaching exascale supercomputing. This isn't a huge deal for consumers but it's going to be harder to advance in any field that requires better and more powerful computing power. Personalized medicine has already arrived. People routinely get different cancer treatments based on their genetics and their tumor's specific genetics. Breast cancer treatment has been significantly improved by the addition of SERMs (selective estrogen receptor something-or-anothers, modulators maybe?) for those who have estrogen receptor positive tumors, for example. There's a series of genetic tests to personalize warfarin dosing regimens, although they are too expensive to routinely use. Stem cells have shown promise in heart disease and neurodegenerative disease. While regenerating neurons has proven very difficult, regenerating their support cells, the glia, has been very successful. Stem cell bone marrow transplants are routine during treatment of liquid tumors. The problem with sequencing the genome is that we have since discovered it isn't the full story. Each cell's own genome is modified for its specific role by adding on chemical tags to selectively enhance or decrease certain gene expressions, creating an expression pattern for each cell type. This is done by methylation, acetylation, and various other chemical tags. We are only now starting to understand their role, although a few diseases have been identified as disorders of the "epigenome." Prader-Wili and Angelman's (happy puppet) syndromes were discovered to be due to different epigenetic disorders of the same gene, for example. In short, lots of this stuff is happening already, you just haven't heard about it. Cantorsdust fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Feb 1, 2016 |
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Feb 1, 2016 08:19
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Blue Star posted:i havent seen any of these avddances, Besides, I'm not 'wallowing'. I said in my first post itt that I think it might be a good thing to have a "stagnation" period. Look at climate change and pollution. The oceans are acidifying. Look at how extinct everything is getting. Aren't rhinos extinct now, or something? Maybe it's good that we're having a decline, the planet might actually recover a bit. But we're not having a decline, the few people who think that we are seem to not know anything about anything. And continuing down the road of progress might be the best way to mitigate or even reverse climate change.
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Feb 1, 2016 09:06
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"I'm too far up my own rear end/literally too dumb to recognize how the world was different a few decades ago. We're in an age of technological decline" or "The only metric of technological progress and/or acceleration is this one I made up just now. I have deemed recent technological developments to be Not Good Enough, especially considering that things I use a lot have already been invented! We're in an age of technological decline" Choose one and you too can be a valuable contributor to this thread. For some actual content: I've made this point before but the majority of posters who reject the idea that technology is still screaming onward are presumably middle class white men over the age of 20 in developed, English-speaking nations. I mean it's still incredibly stupid but I recognize that they can look around their rooms and say "Well it's basically the same as Dad's, but I have more electronic gizmos". Well, fine. But check this out:  The acceleration of the decline of worldwide poverty is a direct result of the technological development of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Even if the decline in poverty is the introduction of technologies that were developed during the industrial revolution (combustion engines, modern medicine, sanitation, etc) access was fundamentally limited to the richest of the rich until the rise of modern manufacturing, logistics, and vastly improved global communication.
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Feb 1, 2016 09:56
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Popular Thug Drink posted:...it becomes obvious that we’ve made much less progress since 1970...
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Feb 1, 2016 11:01
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Also this is a dumb discussion because its like trying to determine what is historically important at the time it happens. Yes, there are instances where the impact is obvious but like history its hard to gauge progress while you are experiencing it. Tech goes forward, noticeably or not. When the steam engine was invented it didn't appear everywhere in used instantly.
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Feb 1, 2016 11:28
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Blue Star posted:I know Moore's Law wasn't literally a scientific law; it was just an observation. But the point is that the pace of progress has definitely slowed down. This might not be so bad for consumers, since our smartphones and tablets are about as good as we would need them to be for our emails, texting, Youtube watching, etc. But I remember reading that there are difficulties with reaching exascale supercomputing. This isn't a huge deal for consumers but it's going to be harder to advance in any field that requires better and more powerful computing power. I think you're just looking at specific things and drawing a conclusion while ignoring selection effects. You aren't aware of all fields of study at all times, that's impossible, it's the reason why people have specialties in the first place. You sound like those people in the 19th century who were like "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Ugh god guys I just can't imagine anything new or better or different from what we have now so like ugggh it must be IMPOSSIBLE!
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Feb 1, 2016 16:56
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SHISHKABOB posted:I think you're just looking at specific things and drawing a conclusion while ignoring selection effects. You aren't aware of all fields of study at all times, that's impossible, it's the reason why people have specialties in the first place. You sound like those people in the 19th century who were like "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Actually, it's even funnier because half the things he says are impossible are things we've already been doing for a few years in a lab setting.
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Feb 1, 2016 17:27
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SHISHKABOB posted:I think you're just looking at specific things and drawing a conclusion while ignoring selection effects. You aren't aware of all fields of study at all times, that's impossible, it's the reason why people have specialties in the first place. You sound like those people in the 19th century who were like "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Blue Star is right in that integrated circuit technology is running out of steam. We are now at the point (and have been for a while, I think) where making the transistors and wires smaller doesn't greatly improve the performance of the circuits on the computer chip, it mostly allows the chip designers to add more and alternate functionality to the chip for the same cost. The technology has had a pretty good run since the 60's/70's. And he is right in that it would be nice if the computer chips were to keep on getting faster, since faster computer chips would aid in technological development in many areas. Certainly it would make computer programmers' jobs easier. But the mistake he is making is that computer chips are not all of technology. Arguably they aren't as socially important as stuff like energy or medicine.
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Feb 1, 2016 17:51
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Even with the limits of miniaturizing the computing technology we have now we are still pushing new boundaries in computing power. The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge is going to come online in 2018 or so and is expected to be capable of calculating in exabytes (a billion billion calculations per second) and that isn't even accounting for things like quantum computing which we've still barely scratched the surface of.
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Feb 1, 2016 18:02
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Uncle Jam posted:It's more interesting than 'there's no progress!' 'No way, my phone screen is huge now!' All this technological change year after year is just microevolution! The last real change was when the US unlocked Modern Telecom III on the tech tree in 1969. 
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Feb 1, 2016 19:17
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Blue Star posted:i havent seen any of these avddances, Besides, I'm not 'wallowing'. I said in my first post itt that I think it might be a good thing to have a "stagnation" period. Look at climate change and pollution. The oceans are acidifying. Look at how extinct everything is getting. Aren't rhinos extinct now, or something? Maybe it's good that we're having a decline, the planet might actually recover a bit. Your post reads like it came from The Onion. Consider getting some self awareness.
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Feb 1, 2016 19:20
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Pedro De Heredia posted:The difference between the example of the washing machine and the example of Youtube is that the washing machine is creating free time. Youtube isn't. It is merely occupying the free time you already have. Now we're getting somewhere; you view a lot of information-related technology as ‘changing the way leisure time is spent rather than changing the amount of leisure time to spend’. But it depends on what you mean by work and leisure. You might say work/labor is what you have to do to gain wealth. But the term is often used for whatever it is you have to go through to get to the good part. I remember discovering that there was a religion called “Taoism” in a 1950’s Atlas. As I was just interested from a curiosity standpoint, studying Taoism is surely a leisure activity to me. Since there was nothing in the encyclopedia, and my schoolteachers knew very little about it, I waited a few weeks until my parents made a trip into town, and had them drop me off at the library. Over the next few hours, I tracked down a book on world religions that led to the main text (the Tao te Ching). There were two different translations in the library that seemed to be saying utterly different things. So how was I going to find out which one was more respected by Taoists or scholars ,or what the hell was going on, and why they were so different? No doubt there was plenty of commentary written on how to express Taoist thought in English, but that required going to the nearest “real” university-level library, some three hours away, finding out which journals might contain such a review, using that journal's subject index - anyhow, my question is, would all those hours be “leisure” hours or “work” hours? I’d say everything except looking at the two translations would be work. It sure didn't feel like leisure. About 100% of that work would have been eliminated by having today’s internet.
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Feb 1, 2016 21:36
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Fojar38 posted:Even with the limits of miniaturizing the computing technology we have now we are still pushing new boundaries in computing power. The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge is going to come online in 2018 or so and is expected to be capable of calculating in exabytes (a billion billion calculations per second) and that isn't even accounting for things like quantum computing which we've still barely scratched the surface of. My understanding is that they are struggling to find applications for quantum computers. I have heard that there is supposed to be a huge benefit for them over normal computers when solving the problem of factoring large numbers, but it is unclear if that benefit translates to other problems.
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Feb 1, 2016 22:36
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silence_kit posted:My understanding is that they are struggling to find applications for quantum computers. I have heard that there is supposed to be a huge benefit for them over normal computers when solving the problem of factoring large numbers, but it is unclear if that benefit translates to other problems. I went to a talk given by a guy working with quantum computing and protein folding, and basically he said quantum computers are not a magic bullet. At least the way they are now. I don't remember what he said about future prospects.
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Feb 1, 2016 22:56
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I think they don't even know if quantum computing in the way that gives speed up is even possible yet.
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Feb 1, 2016 23:04
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Most gains in the past 10 or so years have been in power savings and device density. The speed of single core peaked quite some time ago. Tools and products feed back, so what.
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Feb 1, 2016 23:13
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Perhaps goons like to obsess over per core performance growth stalling because they only use their computers for video games and think everyone else is as poo poo at multithreading as EA interns are.
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Feb 1, 2016 23:43
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I honestly can't see where Bluestar is coming from. I'm sorry but you must be living under a rock if you think our lifestyles now is (especially the Developed world) the same as the 70s. The really dismissive tone is also really weird too.
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Feb 2, 2016 01:55
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Well he could have used Wikipedia to learn about rhinos and ocean acidification on a slightly deeper level than "uhhhh I dunno lol " but that would require him to acknowledge that new things exist by using them. Unfortunately no technology exists to give Blue Star curiosity. But who cares about apps that will tell you if the restaurant you're going to is good or poo poo before you even get there, or access to an encyclopedia 100 times better than any that has ever before existed anywhere you are, or the fact that real social justice politics have entered mainstream conversation for the first time since the 1970s because of social media activists, or the fact that Jimmy Carter is 90 years old and survived loving metastatic cancer IN HIS loving BRAIN holy poo poo, or the other medical advancements that have allowed other people who would have been lost causes to live full and healthy lives, or the fact that the NSA has built a spying apparatus that makes 1984 look like a joke and is researching miniaturized drones that will give "bugging your house" a horrible new meaning, or that there might actually be a future for electric cars, or that Afghan wedding parties are being blown up by killer robots, nope I'm just going to complain about how technology has ground to a halt on this 17 year old web forum where people talk about 25 year old games and memes so old the mods have to install word filters to make people stop using them because I'm too up my own rear end to take notice of the outside world, WHERE'S MY GODDAMN JETPACK OBAMA 
Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Feb 2, 2016 |
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Feb 2, 2016 02:33
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Feb 2, 2016 03:04
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Woolie Wool posted:Afghan wedding parties are being blown up by killer robots I'm actually going to touch on this a bit. Technology has definitely revolutionized warfare in the past 70 years. It has revolutionized it to the point that the average American has now never been to war and is unlikely, as far as we can tell, to never be called to war again unless they join the military. 70 years ago, in contrast, an entire generation was drafted. Technology has created such powerful force multipliers of advanced weaponry, armor, and especially air power that our military does not rely on mass conscription anymore and has transitioned to a professional soldier service. Beyond the changes in military structure, the development of nuclear weapons and their subsequent refinement into hydrogen warheads delivered by a nuclear triad of ICBMs, nuclear bombers, and nuclear submarines has shaped the entire political structure of the world. For better or worse, an uneasy peace has settled among the developed nations. War has changed into proxy conflicts waged in developing nations--which is still utterly horrible and shouldn't be forgotten--but barring some unpredictable change in global politics, it is difficult to imagine a mass-mobilization, total war conflict in the WW2 style occurring again. Prior to WW2 European nations erupted in war every couple of generations. War has ended in Europe because technology has made it too costly. That's an enormous change from the 1940s.
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Feb 2, 2016 03:41
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