It's Cold in the Information Age

https://natalian.org/2019/01/07/Winter/

by akakievich • 7 years ago

125 118 7 years ago

natalian.org

nafey• 7 years ago

70s and 80s were relatively quiet on the tech innovation front. We might be headed for a couple of decades like that.

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

The end 70s and then the 80s brought personal computing to the masses. I wouldn’t call that quiet.

pbourke2• 7 years ago

Oh you mean the era in which the personal computer was invented?

ngcc_hk2• 7 years ago

And unix and C, on top of apple, pc, sql, ... I guess only mainframe and smart phone is not of that era. And if there is no internet it will be invented. How cold is that? 100 degree c.

Zen master may be you are - step into hot water and feel it is cold. It is not the flag that not move I guess it is all in your mind. I still think the flag move a bit sorry. Quite a bit.

keyle• 7 years ago

I look forward to this couple of decades then!

segfaultbuserr• 7 years ago

I recommend reading The Soul of A New Machine.

TeMPOraL5• 7 years ago

You mean literally the era that most innovation in this industry happened in? :).

tannhaeuser5• 7 years ago

Except for having invented the microprocessor, the x64 and ARM ISAs, Unix, C, SQL, SGML, TCP/IP, digital audio and video, electronic music, GUIs, logic programming, and basically everything we're taking as granted today.

Edit: x86 of course

314• 7 years ago

The x64 ISA was invented in the late 90s. The rest of the list looks accurate.

labster• 7 years ago

Unfortunately for those of us living in the Anthropocene, it's hot.

pbourke2• 7 years ago

I really don’t get articles like this. You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars. Your cellular phone is more powerful than the time-sharing systems of 25 years ago. There is pervasive wireless broadband internet available in much of the world. Single computers can be bought with dozens of cores and a lake of RAM. You can look up nearly any piece of human knowledge in a few seconds. The labor of millions of engineers can be accessed via APIs which you can use to assemble a stunningly capable application with a minimal team.

trabant003• 7 years ago

You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars.

On which you deploy an web app that has 30 working components written in 10 different languages that is able to do a fraction of the work a single vertically scaled server that runs 3 C written components. And has less than two 9 uptime. No one person can grasp it mentally. Is statically linked and must be updated piece by piece, unable to use the distribution repos and upstream work. Oh, and man, what man? Every one of the 30 components is "open core" with cool new invented terminology that pushes you into paying for consulting or reading spaghetti "object oriented" code. It also has stack trace for logging.

How ungrateful of little sysadmin old me not to appreciate progress.

sascha_sl2• 7 years ago

Your comment mirrors the article. A bunch of projection, written out.

Lots of people do microservices for the wrong reason, with the wrong model. They don't realize this model asks for a lot of initial overhead per process for visibility and early investment into figuring out how these services communicate.

For instance, a service that sets off 3-4 layers of HTTP requests is an indicator of a bad microservice architecture.

A service that uses a shared data bus (e.g. Kafka) but can survive without it however...

That doesn't mean things are regressing. People have always done the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

sgt101• 7 years ago

So, why are we doing this?

In truth because the world of C (I was a C and then C++ programmer 30 years ago) did not enable the production of effective applications cheaply and quickly. Yes - you can write anything, but it took months and months and months.

We've traded efficiency for productivity. We have been able to do this because of Moore's law and all its friends.

Also, C code is hellish to read and understand (#define anyone?), and logging almost never happened.

As a sysadmin you will be able to look at the organisation you work in and count up the number of sysadmins, my guess is that there are less than 50% of the number 10 years ago, maybe that's the problem?

taneq• 7 years ago

That's because as a sysadmin you can now do work in a week of plugging components together that would have taken three months for a team of five to pull off with C.

theamk2• 7 years ago

Don't work in such place then? Seriously, there are always good and bad places.

In fact, when you said "two nines" -- this is like 15 minutes of downtime per day -- I immediately thought about one of my jobs (long time ago) which involved website running on Windows Server, using a mix of ASP and DLL files. It would routinely go down for tens of minutes each deployment because someone would update the DLLs in the wrong order.

There was also using PHP with Apache. As a sysadmin, remember all those times when you had to hunt all the Apache-spawned processes and kill them by hand, so you can finally apply new configuration? Or when an .so file update made an app server not start, but that darned start-stop-daemon was silently eating both exit code and error message?

It got much better in the sysadmin world -- it is now easy to do the sane things, and all that containerization means that if programmers do provide something insane, it is trivial to clean up the mess.

khawkins• 7 years ago

The point of the article is that hype of most of these technologies doesn't nearly compare to the hype of 7 years ago. We've had smart phones, AWS, deep learning, promises of AR, crypto, etc. for at least that long, and nearly all of those feel like they're in stagnation compared to how exciting they were then.

It's not that they're not getting better, but they're in the transition period where they move from new frontier to commonplace technology taken for granted.

For example, it seems crypto might never be successful as a replacement for consumer direct spending due to bandwidth issues. However, as a backend currency for a front-facing financial institution it has untapped potential. The growth in interest from here will be gradual, but will probably elevate.

murftown• 7 years ago

Off-topic, but I came here to say that my long-standing fear just came true about the word "crypto"; namely, that I totally misread it in TFA as meaning "cryptography" - which is of course what the term always used to refer to - and honestly forgot that it might refer to "crypto-currency" until reading your comment.

I knew someday that would happen! I made up some story to myself that comments in TFA about "#cryptowinter" and "FUD in the community" might refer to communities losing confidence in cryptography techniques after too many companies getting hacked. Out of touch, I know, to not be aware of that hash-tag. O_o

I really hate that we have another meaning of "crypto" now so that misunderstandings like this can happen often. As programmers, we know how important naming is and how costly it is to create confusing collisions. Cryptography is too important of a concept in tech for us to not have a clean word for it. smh

apatters• 7 years ago

None of that directly describes business (or consumer) value. It is mostly a recitation of information technology statistics.

If you look at the period of say 1990-2010 there was an absolutely insane ROI on human capital invested into IT. Arguably this level of ROI only happens once or twice in a century. You had young guys in their basements, garages etc. inventing life-changing technology with no investment other than a PC, an Internet connection, and time. It basically all revolved around getting people a PC, a 'net connection, and a phone, and then delivering services over those things.

Everyone saw what was going on and there was an unprecedented global migration of labor into the IT industry. There was a perception that anyone could be a millionaire, and anyone could change the world, etc. and some degree of truth to it.

There's no denying that much of the low hanging fruit is now gone, and there are more people in the industry than ever before (many of whom had huge expectations based on what they had witnessed transpiring a decade or two prior). So of course you are going to have a changing industry and an expectations mismatch. The old days are over and they're not coming back.

Any new wave of innovation and disruption is at least as likely to come from a non-IT industry as it is from IT.

There are still trillions of dollars to be made in IT. Since the future is never evenly distributed, a lot of these dollars are in emerging markets, and/or in industries which are being transformed by the IT revolution's latest waves a bit late in the game.

But it is a different industry now, there are fewer opportunities for disruption and there are many many more fingers in the pie. In general the way this money is made will look a little bit more like how money's made in mature industries every year.

There's no fighting history and you're not going to be the next Steve Jobs. But the pie is so big that you can carve out whatever kind of little niche you would like, as long as you understand the rules of the game.

baybal23• 7 years ago

The biggest question for me is what we are gonna do as professionals in the coming "long winter."

We have not a single project for a "tech" brand in the pipeline, we are only now learning how do tech projects for complete industry outsiders.

Not so few have some tech expertise, but they are all strangers to ways of the industry. They all have own ideas where tech goes in their business model, and I can't say that all of them are "amateurish" or not thought through, I'd say some outsiders were better at running tech projects than some de-jure "insiders"

I bet that it will be all about ability to get more tech business outside of tech industry for us.

xxxpupugo2• 7 years ago

And that is the problem.

It has hit the plateau. Ideas with value have already been invented. You have hammers powerful than ever, but what are problems you can hit with it? That is the hard part.

Before we are finding more meaningful problems to tackle, keep inventing hammers doesn't make too much of sense, it is just waste of money.

Maybe the future of IT will be to proven its usefulness solving problems that are hard before the revolution of IT, and are still hard after that. Like cheaper/greener energy, reliable/faster transportation, more accessible healthcare and etc.

Causality12• 7 years ago

The only thing I can think of is that all my laptops (thinkpads & Apple MBP) are now rocking USB-C PSUs.

Personally I think type-C might be the best example of moving the problem behind a layer of obfuscation rather than fixing it. If you look at a random device with a type-C port you have no idea what that port is capable of. Maybe it'll charge your Macbook but it won't charge your Asus. Maybe it'll support USB 3.1 or maybe it'll only be USB 2.0 like OnePlus. Counterintuitively, chances are if it's a phone and it does USB 3.1 then it won't support USB to HDMI or DisplayPort although some do, but if it's only USB 2.0 over type-C it'll probably support HDMI-out with a DisplayLink adapter. Maybe it'll break half the specifications just for the hell of it like the Nintendo Switch.

It's a bloody nightmare.

ajmurmann2• 7 years ago

And you haven't even talked about the cable yet...

Causality12• 7 years ago

It does seem inordinately prone to getting filled up with dust or mysteriously smooshed flat when you weren't looking.

povertyworld5• 7 years ago

The current crappiness of AR reminds me of the early days of MP3 players. Only a few geeks had them, and it took forever to load an album over the printer port if it didn't crash half way. Then 5 years later, everyone had an iPod.

Illniyar• 7 years ago

I was in highschool when MP3 players were a thing, just before and slightly after the iPod. Everyone had one.

I wasn't in a particularly affluent or tech-savvy area. It was cheap to buy and just required you to know how to move files from one drive to the other in a computer - which was a skill that was very common and was actually taught at schools in my area.

povertyworld5• 7 years ago

Well, I just remember I didn't see another person besides me with an MP3 player on public transportation for quite some time in the NYC area.

baddox• 7 years ago

What specifically looks similar to you? Consider there are many things which at some point only a few geeks had and which 5 (or 50) years later still only a few geeks had.

povertyworld5• 7 years ago

When Apple announced ARKit, this culturally geeky (not a tech) coworker of mine scoffed, saying Nintendo had something like that for the DS ages ago. That's exactly how geeks responded to the iPod with the infamous CmdrTaco post ("Lame") as a prime example.

xxxpupugo2• 7 years ago

People long for a MP3 player for listening music anywhere. I don't think AR has demonstrated a comparable use case that is as desirable as this.

ngcc_hk2• 7 years ago

Ask any IT people and public, how to follow up the changes? Can you use what is being done 5 years ago then now?

Yes it is better than in 1990 vs 1995 or 1995 vs 2000 etc. You really have to learn a total paradigm. Java, unix, windows, object programming gui ... now the basic is done but still no. The python you learn is not important vs the one doing AI for example.

thinkingkong• 7 years ago

Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.

TeMPOraL5• 7 years ago

This isn't complaining about today vs. life before the industrial revolution; it's complaining about today vs. last year or two, within a particular job sector.

In other words, total amassed progress may be amazing, but according to the author, its derivative in web/consumer tech sucks (I'm inclined to agree, even if not for the same reasons).

atoav• 7 years ago

We as engineers continue to make similar mistakes over and over again, with technological advancement blocking the knowledge transfer between generations. Everybody thinks they are smarter than the generations of engineers, programmers and mathematicians before them.

If “we” see a old Fortran program running some part of an airplane our intuitive reaction isn’t awe and admiration, but we spontaneously decide we can do it better. Some of these old creations run without flaw and yet the first intuition everybody gets is to replace them.

In structural engineering lessons like these had to be learned the hard way: only with collapsing bridges and hundreds of deaths, engineers start to realize that the technical progress in tooling (e.g. computers) didn’t automatically translate to safer and more stable structures and that the stuff they did back in the day is even more impressive looking back considering that.

I am not saying we are doomed: we have a incredible pool of interesting and cool solutions that worked reliably for ages. We just need to do a better job at not fooling ourselves with shiny new toys. We can’t jus assume historically hard problems become a piece of cake if we just throw the latest technology onto it, without even dealing with the lessons learned by the ones before us. This is hubris.

A good analysis of the problem gets you a long way towards the solution, that is why running around with hammers and picturing everything as a nail is already creating problems: machine/deep learning is good at solving some problems, but bad at solving others.

bsg75• 7 years ago

kubernetes's insane complexity proliferating

Is K8S any more complex than the other options for deploying apps across a fleet?

I’m genuinely curious because it looks complex to me, but I have little background to determine if what I see is complexity or unfamiliar territory.

naniwaduni• 7 years ago

Deploying apps across a fleet is far more complex than most of its practitioners need.

theyinwhy• 7 years ago

How is that? You create an object with some metadata and that's it. Don't know how that can be done any easier. I honestly get the feeling only people who have never used K8s deem it complex.

Running a cluster yourself is another topic, although there are way more complex orchestrators on the market than K8s.

krinchan• 7 years ago

For my team, we abandoned k8s because of the insanity of just managing the cluster itself in AWS pre-EKS. Our team has a lot of low level OS and AWS knowledge, and it was just this massive undertaking and at every turn we were told, "Lol, just use Google Cloud."

My employer is all in on AWS, there's no way to change that. Furthermore, our accounts come with a lot of restrictions imposed by our central AWS team. VPCs, subnets, NAT gateways, etc. are all pre-provisioned and we are prevented from modifying them or creating new ones ourselves. The only real tool for k8s in AWS was kops at the time. It was so opinionated that it broke down very quickly when faced with all the IAM restrictions on our user accounts.

Now that EKS is a thing, we're looking to revisit it. But a lot of the pain might be coming from the fact that it seemed that "manage my k8s cluster for me" was under-developed on AWS at the time. Elastic Beanstalk's ECS platform was just the easier thing to start with for us.

peteforde2• 7 years ago

To quote David Mitchell (the comedian, not the author) it would be tempting to take this kind of thing seriously if it wasn't for a damnable sense of perspective.

Some thoughts:

1. Much like how the entire centrist media machine feeds off the insanity of the current US administration, somehow this article is at the top of HN. We put it there. (Well, 42 of you did, as of the time I wrote this.)

2. Perhaps the best-kept secret in the world is that it is getting better by almost every measurement. The late, great Hans Rosling was superb at breaking down these dimensions in video form (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo ) but if you want the real deal, I recommend Steven Pinker's excellent "Enlightenment Now".

3. I couldn't care less that Intel has "stalled" since you can now buy a Raspberry Pi that pwns my first computer by an order of magnitude or three and costs less than $25. Meanwhile, Apple is refocusing on Mac hardware again because so many "poor" people have phones now that they can see a sales ceiling... this means that a huge percentage of the planet has a significant computer on them all of the time.

4. Not only does age and wisdom allow you to observe tech over many cycles, but the older I get the more I realize that tech is nothing outside of its relationship to politics, culture, and ourselves. Look at how young children just assume everything is a screen, now. Tech is now an important aspect of the daily political conversation. In just 15 years we've gone from a society that rents VHS movies to one that feels entitled to comment, upvote and subscribe to everything they watch. It's fucking crazy how much tech has reprogrammed everything from the way we find love to the way we get from A to B.

Finally, to the author: sorry a lot of the comments here are negative. They aren't wrong, but we're still working on chilling out and defaulting to presuming that in any given moment, people are generally trying their best in this community. The good news: there's lots to be excited about in this "worst possible timeline" we've fallen into.

kashyapc• 7 years ago

Perhaps the best-kept secret in the world is that it is getting better by almost every measurement. [...] The late, great Hans Rosling was superb at breaking down these dimensions in video form [...] but if you want the real deal, I recommend Steven Pinker's excellent "Enlightenment Now"

Indeed. Thanks for plugging the inimitable Rosling (I'd also strongly recommend his excellent book, "Factfulness") and Pinker. Rosling has incredible anecdotes from the real world, and Pinker is methodical and rigorous. Each book is a companion to the other.

(Me brags: A few months ago I've had the pleasure of meeting Steven Pinker in person and even have a small chat about his book, the late Rosling, and other topics.)

And I hope Hans Rosling's exhilarating enthusiasm rubs off on many folks. I was so enthralled with Rosling's work that when I was in Sweden earlier this year, I took a train to Uppsala (where Rosling lived and worked) and spent a day there just to breathe some inspiring air. Rosling was a force of nature.

PS: Yes, for all the "positivity bias" that Rosling and Pinker are accused of, they repeatedly acknowledge that there's still a long a way to go, and never claim that everything is hunky-dory. As Rosling puts it: "Things can be both bad and better".

baybal23• 7 years ago

4. Not only does age and wisdom allow you to observe tech over many cycles, but the older I get the more I realize that tech is nothing outside of its relationship to politics, culture, and ourselves. Look at how young children just assume everything is a screen, now. Tech is now an important aspect of the daily political conversation. In just 15 years we've gone from a society that rents VHS movies to one that feels entitled to comment, upvote and subscribe to everything they watch. It's fucking crazy how much tech has reprogrammed everything from the way we find love to the way we get from A to B.

I think you caught the idea better than anybody else. The tech industry is no longer about the tech itself, and much more about everyday world around us. The tech ate the world — sure.

I can't remember the last project in our engineering company where we ever bothered with the product spec wise, and we haven't done anything like a PC or a smartphone in years. We almost solely work on "gadgetising" existing everyday stuff now — household appliances, toys, all kinds of vending machines, ad displays and installations, EV stuff, aircraft and rapid transit infortainment.

The essence and the shape of thing is way more important these days than what's inside. Things are definitely changing that way. Prime majority of our biggest clients these days are companies whose business had zero things to do with tech just few years ago, but is all about it now.

rorykoehler• 7 years ago

Re Rosling: I have a feeling that we are improving immensely at the base of maslows pyramid but there is plenty of sabotage occurring further up. The march towards authoritarianism in much of the world is one that jumps out.

FranzFerdiNaN• 7 years ago

Remove China from the numbers and Pinker and Goslings points pretty much disappear. Both aren’t a secret, they are well known and criticized a lot for their use and abuse of numbers.

oblio2• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure India also has a positive outlook.

And if we remove those countries we're removing half the world's population...

peteforde2• 7 years ago

Except, wait... tell us why we'd remove China (or any other part of the world that seems less important to you) again?

cheschire• 7 years ago

You know, maybe it’s not a bad thing if everyone takes a break from growing and changing. There’s plenty of ways where we would benefit from stability and refinement right now.

peter_retief2• 7 years ago

It is sad that open source has been hijacked by the likes of Amazon. However, open hardware is an exciting option with desktop fabrication, electronics and low energy wireless creating new opportunities for small entrepreneurs

tannhaeuser5• 7 years ago

I think the situation is a bit more complex: the proliferation of F/OSS itself has driven the market into the situation where integrating and running other people's commodity software is one of the only commercially viable options left. Another factor is that commodity hardware is so powerful, and has been for over ten years, that it just had to be put back into the hands of datacenters/clouds.

peter_retief2• 7 years ago

Sure, every generation has had its own challenges, there are cracks where new ideas can grow

ddmma• 7 years ago

From last years my personal favorite will remain ingesting sql into hadoop data lakes and query big data as sql

TeMPOraL5• 7 years ago

I don't know, #cryptowinter makes me feel warm inside, and for Uber I only wish it happened sooner :). What also warms my spirit is that it seems GDPR had a side-effect in that many other places are now considering implementing similar data protection regulation. So it's not all bad news.

That said, I sort of agree with the sentiment. Where's the technological innovation on the web these days? Where are the tools and technologies that allow me to work better than 10 years ago, and not just worse but with JavaScript, or worse but with high-resolution and shiny (yet bloaty and unergonomic) UI? What's there currently beyond WebAssembly (i.e. "all the old stuff, but in web browser", which has a few benefits)?

antidesitter2• 7 years ago

don't know, #cryptowinter makes me feel warm inside, and for Uber I only wish it happened sooner :)

What did you mean by this?

TeMPOraL5• 7 years ago

I mean that I consider cryptocurrency scene to be net social negative (a nasty breed of fraud, gambling and MLM) and cryptocurrencies themselves a technology that's an environmental disaster and which should have never left the research stage. As for Uber, their only innovation so far was showing the sheer scale at which you can make an inherently unsustainable business built on anticompetitive subsidizing and illegal behaviour without people noticing.

baybal23• 7 years ago

I can follow up on this with my recent work experience.

The microelectronics has been on the declining trend for half a decade. A lot of people were saying that we are heading for the "long winter" in the industry.

Long term investments into manufacturing are on the all time low. Only recent events with trade war made some bigger OEMs to reopen lines in 3rd world countries other than China.

It's important to make distinction that it's not only consumer good sagged, "enterprisey" stuff sees no growth either, and that's why people don't invest more in high end fab process because they don't see server chips, router chips, and memory going up in sales any time soon.

Why it's bad? It's bad because every time the industry moves up a node, it's paid by highest bidders first. If Intel/Broadcom/AMD and other big boys wouldn't have paid for 7nm, there wouldn't have been 7nm for the rest of us.

We may not see 5nm, despite EUV being "just months away"

On other hand, our engineering consultancy saw an enormous inrush of new clients, most of whom are complete newcomers to the industry. One of them is... a furniture company, and a big one.

dfrage2• 7 years ago

EUV is in production today with Samsung and TSMC's "7nm" processes, and the latter has started "5nm" risk production which uses even more EUV. Here's a recent SemiWiki article on details of what Samsung's foundry business is doing: https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor/259664-samsung-foundry-up...

Intel's all 193 UV "10nm" node (roughly equivalent to the above 7nm) is a failure, we'll see if they can get their EUV using "7nm" node to ship in quantity. In all these cases the demand for less power consumption in battery powered devices continues to drive demand, even if that demand isn't as healthy as it used to be.

0x8BADF00D• 7 years ago

What he lists are not technical problems, they’re political problems.

Tech progress has always been incremental in nature. It seems “nothing is going on”, but there is a constant iterative cycle that will eventually automate almost every repetitive job or task.

It will be cold for many who do repetitive jobs and tasks.

Havoc• 7 years ago

Cold as in impersonal and lacking innovative warmth perhaps. Certainly not slow and in crisis as the author suggests

masonic• 7 years ago

  Internet speeds never seem to get better faster or more reliable

Sure they do. The problem is that tracking/adware consumes bandwidth and resources at the same increasing rate... or worse.

buboard9• 7 years ago

I love myself some pessimism but tech is not slowing, instead its HN being obsessed with things that don't matter.

- VR was a niche from the start, a lot of people were doubtful, and the people that weren't know that it 's not going to work and are already moving on.

- javascript frontends are great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the public-facing web doesnt use them, they 're irrelevant to tech's progress

- Uber has nothing critical to offer to technology except an also-ran in self driving cars

- kubernetes is relevant to like 100 people on earth, and doomed to be obsolete in 1 year. not critical to tech progress

- AWS isn't critical to tech progress either, its bubbled because of easy startup money and lazyness. will be a good thing to see it fade away. Meanwhile , check googles TPU offerings for some progress.

- Who needs a 3rd browser engine when every website looks like bootstrap?

Those said, crypto is entering the plateau of productivity. It 's being held back by hostile regulation , governments and banks and AI hasn't even started , its going to be a wild ride. The web is slowly decentralizing which will be huge too

vortegne• 7 years ago

"javascript frontends are the great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the web doesnt use them"

Wait what? Have you like, been on the web at all? How the hell are javascript frontends not used everywhere?!

oxfordmale2• 7 years ago

"AWS isn't critical either, its bubbled because of easy startup money and lazyness. will be a good thing to see it fade away" Wait what ? Have you, been on the web at all ? Ten thousands of websites are hosted, or partially hosted on AWS

buboard9• 7 years ago

they do have a lot of usage but barely everywhere. remember most of the web is wordpress.

tannhaeuser5• 7 years ago

Half the workforce in webdev has an average work experience of 5 years or less which leads to self-sustaining generational churn in this area, and a whole industry of bootcamps and fizzbuzz-style questions handed out to employers and webdevs alike. Being hellbent to deliver webapps regardless of fit is no progress, and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency.

tenebrisalietum• 7 years ago

I think what was meant is that phone apps are taking over. These use the web but not Javascript.

luckylion2• 7 years ago

I still believe in VR, but driven by porn, not games or productivity. That niche seems to be doing very well and has been a technological driver more than once. Basically everybody that I've talked to that was skeptical and tried it was a believer after they've tried it. When that goes mainstream, you've got a very solid market with lots of consumers.

It won't be the $1500 + a high end PC version of VR though.

buboard9• 7 years ago

thats not real VR though, and a high tech headset sounds like an overkill for that. You can place 4 screens around your head for similar and more cofortable effect :)

jhanschoo• 7 years ago

it's hard to take this comment seriously...

javascript frontends are the great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the web doesnt use them

By frequency of retrieval, JS frameworks are the majority of websites served.

kubernetes is relevant to like 100 people on earth

Even if it's not k8s, most companies benefit from a container orchestration system.

crypto is entering the plateau of productivity

cryptocurrency will always be a niche product until it can provide the same services and assurances that banks do. Most people overwhelmingly prefer the availability and security from carelessness, petty fraud, and mismanagement that banks provide that they even pay for these services, than the not-entirely-complete protection from state actors that crypto provides. That's what holding crypto back, not regulation.

buboard9• 7 years ago

the same services and assurances that banks

Cryptocurrency is meant to replace currencies and central banks, not banks (retail). Banks are institutions built on top of currencies (there are a lot of companies doing that with cryptos btw).

DebtDeflation• 7 years ago

AI hasn't even started

AI/ML is actually everywhere already. To the point where most people don't even recognize it as AL/ML. The problem is that it's not the image of AI that has been sold to the public and even the tech generalist community by books like The Singularity and Superintelligence.

buboard9• 7 years ago

we are only seeing some first applications that are market-ready. Most of the research in AI is in things that are not ready to market but they mostly look promising, like AI diagnosis, image / video / sound /animation generation, signal analysis, various unsupervised learning methods etc.

bni• 7 years ago

"VR is struggling" - linking to Linus Tech Tips video from January nonetheless. Right...

Meanwhile Oculus Quest came out, and PCVR has or is about to enter the second gen.

shasheene• 7 years ago

I've played quite a bit with the Oculus DK1, GearVR, Oculus CV1 and the Oculus Go, and after 2 weeks of usage I can say the Oculus Quest is much better than any of them. Low barriers to putting the headset on and immediately walking around in VR is hard to overstate.

I think it will be a very big hit. The virality levels are very high with people showing their family and friends, who then want to go out and get their own.

The downsides are the games are a bit too expensive, and the headset itself costs $400 which is alright, but it does need to be cheaper if they want to achieve Nintendo Wii type sales figures (which the Quest fully has the potential to do).

ok_coo• 7 years ago

Exactly. I work in web/tech at a museum and I see AR/VR as the next big thing to hit the horizon. The potential is very big, and very cool.

It's not quite there yet, but it's coming soon and once it gets going, it will be as big as the iPhone hitting or greater. It just needs to hit that sweet spot of price, esthetic and functionality.

sek• 7 years ago

What you can see here is market maturity, this is a very common thing. There was just so much to do in the computer industry so far.

Look at the history of other industries, there have been hundreds of car companies before Ford took out most of them with the Model T.

Imagine you are one of those people working is the car industry before that. "Company X had a car that drove 50 miles per hour, a new record, insane! The last record got broken just a few months ago...".

What is happening in other mature markets with good dynamics is that gains come much more slowly and it becomes "boring" so you don't think about it too much. You get an incredibly efficient and secure car for a few thousand dollars, profits come from people who buy for status. If you look at the truck industry or aviation, the margins are really low, buyers mostly care about price there.

Most people don't need more than a smartphone, they already buy for status, others need a Mac or a cloud instance like truck drivers need a special kind of car to do their work.

There are just so many car companies, there will be just so many cloud hosters with will compete for ever shrinking margins to run your cloud-function-app magically infinitely scalable on their gigantic datacenters. If you want your own get a raspberry pi rack.

This is amazing, this frees so much energy and resources to focus on other stuff that matters.

Look at software, the next decades we can focus on creating ERP-Systems that are as perfect as Whatsapp.

Then SpaceX and Blue Origin will compete to bring your 3D-Printed robot spaceship into space you just simulated in your hyperrealistic Kerbal Space Program. The enabler here is price per kilogram to orbit.

That's where my imagination stops, because it's "the final frontier" and the problems there are really infinitely hard.

amelius• 7 years ago

Look at software, the next decades we can focus on creating ERP-Systems that are as perfect as Whatsapp.

Like with zero customizability?

coldtea• 7 years ago

Hopefully yes.

buboard9• 7 years ago

is market maturity, this is a very common thing

but the stock market is treating it as if it's still growing

AstralStorm4• 7 years ago

After which the bubble bursts.

LifeLiverTransp• 7 years ago

Consolidation was also the usual area where new attackers formed and old companys entrenched themselve mentally, becoming unable to see new opponents.

Ayesh• 7 years ago

About the leave of Uber. Grab is a terrible app compared to Grab compared to the UI, UX, and overall drivers attitude (personal opinion of course).

However for Indonesia, services like GoJek and Traveloka are picking up. I'm currently in Indonesia and GoJek has grown into a service that you can bail a ride to full market place with payments, vouchers, and rewards integrated into several consumer services such as package delivery, movie ticketing, Massages, make-up services, etc. They continue to offer even more and better services and gained a lot of attention die to Uber's leave.

In Georgia, for example, a relatively unheard of country, has a huge startup boom with many ride sharing apps, mobile money solutions, and the city Batumi is full of online casino kiosks.

It's probably a cold age in information age elsewhere, but certainly not din developing countries.

It's Cold in the Information Age

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