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Low-hanging fruit

24 点作者 artagnon超过 1 年前

11 条评论

debo_超过 1 年前
&gt; A topic often discussed in Star Trek is how human society transcended its societal problems to finally have the leisure to innovate and conquer space. It&#x27;s 2024, and no major societal changes seem to be on the horizon.<p>People who quote Star Trek&#x27;s utopian view of technology should refer to the Star Trek universe timeline. The 21st century was very, very bad for Earthlings in that chronology. Some highlights include: eugenic wars, nuclear apocalypse, massive earthquakes.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timeline_of_Star_Trek" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timeline_of_Star_Trek</a>
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082349872349872超过 1 年前
To be a bit more optimistic: (in conjunction, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jcmit.net&#x2F;mem2015.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jcmit.net&#x2F;mem2015.htm</a>)<p>In the 1960s and 1970s, machines cost millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars-of-the-time, and the marginal new user was highly educated, so in order to make use of the hardware and wetware, the dreams had to be big to match.<p>In the 2010s and 2020s, devices cost hundreds or tens of current dollars, and the marginal new user is a teenager or preteen, so in order to monetise the hardware and wetware, the modal dreams are correspondingly least-common-denominator.<p>So — I think we may still dream big, but we do have to accept that computing &quot;crossed the chasm&quot; a while ago: Eloi-style small dreams are now the dominant culture, while countercultural Morlock-style big dreams have been driven underground...
javajosh超过 1 年前
The urge to do more and explore exists, but it is not the centralized monolith it once was, nor does it occupy the mainstream imagination like it once did. In fact, I believe that the internet has destroyed the very notion of &quot;mainstream&quot;. Culture is reduced to is lowest common denominator: money-mediated commerce. Capital does battle with itself in the infospace to manufacture consent, and capital&#x27;s tools are so efficient now that nothing can battle capital itself. The talented individual dreamer can sometimes find refuge in the whim of philanthropy, or occasionally a YouTube channel. But big, world-changing projects funded by government require a cultural coherence that is incompatible with capital&#x27;s demonstrated effect. The culture has lost a coherent notion of virtue, and that means the virtuous are at risk if they do not do what is expected of them, which is to plug in to the machine and stay plugged in or die.<p>The Great Change we need is to revitalize free speech. Speech should indeed be free, and paid-for speech should be made illegal. Or, if that is too radical, paid-for speech should require specific consent. No more lawyers and pundits paid to install their jaundiced opinions into weak-minds. No more advertisers paid to inflame greed and envy. It would be a world where, if you hear speech, you can be assured someone said it of their own accord, without a profit motive. In that world, speech would be truly free.
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__MatrixMan__超过 1 年前
This seems more or less right to me, but it sort of peters out at the end. Like hmm, we&#x27;re stuck, wonder why that could be? The end.<p>Let&#x27;s make some proposals about what we need to do to get unstuck.
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MichaelRo超过 1 年前
Maybe the IT recession is also related to the low hanging fruit having been picked. See the &quot;IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023&quot; thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38912125">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38912125</a><p>No point hiring 20,000 people and having them work 10+ hours per day including weekends to do what? The Metaverse that noone asked and noone uses? And there&#x27;s only so many social platforms specialized on people with curly hair one can make.<p>I know every generation said &quot;this time this is is, there&#x27;s not much to be invented anymore&quot; but if we add &quot;with little effort&quot; (i.e. reaching for the low-hanging fruit), we might actually be it.
aredox超过 1 年前
&gt; like in the 60s and 70s, an overwhelming majority of advances originate in the US<p>A lot of those advances were due to European immigrants educated pre-WWII in the best European universities emigrating just before, during and just after the war.<p>The US space program relied heavily on those scientists. Same for the US nuclear program. Two icons of the 60s-70s progress.
netsharc超过 1 年前
&gt;There is one major non-commercial entity on the internet making encyclopedic information available freely, and another for making research available freely. Both have high operating costs, and time will tell if donations will be enough to support them.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what the second org is, but isn&#x27;it so that the first org is filled with leeches pretending the org needs donations, while filling their pockets with those donations...<p>OK, maybe not directly filling their pockets... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=don%27t+donate+to+wikipedia&amp;&amp;ia=web" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=don%27t+donate+to+wikipedia&amp;&amp;ia=we...</a>
ncruces超过 1 年前
<i>The European Union was a major landmark, but it looks like more and more countries are breaking away.</i><p>What&#x27;s this supposed to mean?
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sigilis超过 1 年前
The idea that picking low hanging fruit is bad is very confusing. We should pick those fruit and explore the possibilities of what we have now.<p>It’s not like big ideas are illegal. Anyone who has one finds themselves in an incredible environment to try them. Money may be less free than a few years ago, but you can still get funding for promising sounding stuff without having to deliver much in advance. More people than ever have access to the types of equipment needed to make hardware and software. Heck, today’s Phillip K Dick could self publish if others didn’t see the value in their work.<p>We do have incredible new technologies and big projects happening right now, too. Decarbonizing the electrical grid is a truly gigantic project that seems to be happening despite the best efforts of some to stop it. Personalized cancer antibodies are saving lives that would not have made it otherwise. We’re making strides into understanding what it means to be conscious and intelligent through AI research, even judging current efforts to be insufficient is a kind of philosophical argument that is common now. Talking about the death of space exploration as we launch more sophisticated and numerous payloads than ever into orbit is just absurd. Private companies are in a space race, for crying out loud.<p>This article seems to be misguided, an assessment of someone who is looking at two decades of progress in the past and judging it against this year, which just started. Look at 2004 to now and tell me that the world hasn’t changed.
ppqqrr超过 1 年前
In my mind, the lowest-hanging fruit is: &quot;tech is now abundant, and great machine farms feed us all.&quot; Surprising thing is, most of us are already there - except the media (hand-in-hand with legacy corporations that need scared, docile employees) is incentivized to keep us thinking otherwise by focusing on homelessness and immigration.<p>They&#x27;re afraid of the general populace reaching the consensus that &quot;tech is now abundant, and great machine farms feed us all,&quot; because that would mean that most of us are free to explore and experiment without being subject to pointless human pyramids (i.e. corps), which represents unknown innovations and disruptions that might threaten said pyramids.<p>And a LOT of that mass-gaslighting relies on what the internet has become - a Judge Dredd-style Sprawl of a few monolithic power centers, with nothing but millions of noodle shops and nail salons (whose online equivalents would be e-commerce websites and commodity SaaS startups) in between.<p>Some time ago, the internet had a sensible structural ambition that a child could understand: a singular global network where nobody can stop the individual from adding a new node. That freedom is technically still there, but it&#x27;s been neutered in every way imaginable. And most who would support that freedom lost heart, like the author here.<p>What now? I think it&#x27;s simple - we try again. Go back to the original promise, and see how we can implement it better this time. An accessible, transparent, free network of simple documents and people. The tech is there, and the appetite is there, if you look at the success of products like LinkTree.<p>In fact, I&#x27;m working on building that right now, and I have high confidence in our go-to-market strategy. Email me (check my bio) if this interests you. I&#x27;d love to chat.
mcbishop超过 1 年前
&gt; we&#x27;re consuming tons of compute power to build bullshit-spewing chatbots<p>ChatGPT has become really valuable for me during novel programming... so this sentiment annoyed me a bit.
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