My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s

https://www.gwern.net/Improvements

by eru • 6 years ago

382 197 6 years ago

eru4• 6 years ago

Inspired by discussions on 'The boss who put everyone on 70K' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22440922) about inflation and quality improvements (or lack thereof) since 1950.

jhvkjhk2• 6 years ago

Hello, I like your typography but how did you achieve small caps in Source Serif Pro? I use Adobe Fonts to deliver the same font to my blog, but it said ‘smcp’ is not included in the OpenType feature of this font.

What's more, how did you make the fantastic Gothic style drop caps? ‘WhatFont’ said it's Source Serif Pro but it looks far more different!

hobofan• 6 years ago

I think eru meant "inspired [to post this link here]". I'm pretty sure that eru is not gwern.

gwern3• 6 years ago

I believe the Source family only recently got smallcaps, in 2017: https://blog.typekit.com/2017/01/10/introducing-source-serif... So you need to upgrade.

The Gothic drop cap is nothing to do with Source, but it is from Deutsche Zierschrift, one of 5 drop cap fonts (Cheshire Initials, Deutsche Zierschrift, Goudy Initialen, Kanzlei Initialen, & Yinit).

In one of the clever performance tricks we use (https://www.gwern.net/About#design), we subset them all into multiple font files, one initial per file, which makes them almost free in terms of bandwidth. The CSS for positioning them is quite tricky, however, due to subtle brokenness in browsers (particularly Firefox), so you'll have to inspect the 'DROP CAPS' section of https://www.gwern.net/static/css/default.css carefully if you want to imitate it.

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

I love the positivity. It's true that a lot of minor improvements in products and services have added up to a relatively frictionless experience. He forgot to mention that GPS is ubiquitous and you can travel great distances with no prior planning, find great restaurants, book hotels, etc. You can also hail a Lyft or Uber with ease in most urban areas. And now, even grocery delivery is very commonplace.

Adulting in 2020 is child's play.

function_seven• 6 years ago

He forgot to mention that GPS is ubiquitous

Hinted at with:

we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our radios, or our GPSes

Which I took partly to mean that a Garmin gadget is not considered worth anything. Sure as hell can't fence it. Everyone's got GPS!

(But also yeah, lower crime rates.)

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Or even better, GPS in our pockets with live maps

Ask me how I updated my old standalone GPS using a virtual machine + USB. Bonus points: when the update starts the USB device ID changes.

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

Adulting in 2020 is child's play.

As a fairly new adult in 2020, :(

dijit• 6 years ago

There’s no reason to want more difficult times. It does not make you better. It just wastes your time.

Moru2• 6 years ago

One thing people tend to forget when talking about improvement in tech is the added stress social media creates for the younger generations. The pressure from outside is higher now then when we 40+ grew up and became adults. There are blogs and youtube stars showing you what you should be, there are comments to tell you that you are not good enough. And if you are female, they will tell you even worse things.

There are facebook to show you that your "friends" have a much nicer house than you, they have vacations in warm countries, they eat at expencive restaurants and their kids are wonderful geniuses and certainly don't watch TV all day or eat any sugar. And so on.

The mental stress is grinding our young down and we do see the results of it already. The modern sickness is the burnout of youth.

ivanbozic• 6 years ago

I don’t have a constructive comment, I just wanted to point out that your phrase _“The modern sickness is the burnout of youth.”_ is beautiful and really struck a chord.

Broken_Hippo2• 6 years ago

I don't know, man. I know social media presents different stresses.

But fuck. I'm bisexual. I literally knew no one like me. I did get shunned by folks deciding I was lesbian. I was pressured into being girly, into fitting in, into simply going to church and acting like everyone else.

I've been turned down for a job because I'm female - in the 90's, long after this should be a thing. It was another female that did it.

I could have, with the internet, found a couple of folks more like me. (It still does this: My spouse and I met over the internet). The internet brings all sorts of resources (some toxic, some wonderful). I'd argue that it is us that are failing the children because we aren't teaching others how to harness this good for, well, good.

Stress is just different now. Luckily, the trend isn't "Suck it up and go on with life" for the most part now - so we actually know about these stresses.

speedplane• 6 years ago

We just need more unions. They are historically the only thing that actually worked to level the playing field between employee and employer.

lordnacho• 6 years ago

Adulting in 2020 is child's play.

Weirdly taking care of kids is not substantially more convenient nowadays. It's hard to compare, because most of us haven't had kids with a 25 year gap, but I do know a guy who has done just that.

Tech is a double edged sword with kids. You can throw a tablet at them to placate them for a while, but often it leads to the kid being difficult when you take it away.

You still need to sit with them to put them to sleep, nobody seems to have made an app that buys back that time. Again, tech sort of looks like it will work ("I'll put on a soothing melody from YouTube") but often it backfires somehow.

Kids misbehaving? Where's the app to fix that?

And then there's the whole education side of things, where tech promises a lot more than it delivers. The only things I find useful are Khan Academy and various times table type apps. They're just straight replacements for a person, which is great. Anything more complex, I'm very sceptical of.

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

Haha, yeah I wouldn't say parenting is child's play. Pretty sure that's an NP Hard problem.

mbeex• 6 years ago

Another guy here (28 year gap): While I agree with the general statement (past/today), the specific situation (children with high age differences and the same parent) is different.

I am much more relaxed then 30 years ago. Some things have settled in terms of economic circumstances, own ambitions etc. Some work against (health), but if not extreme, the positive factors outweigh the negative. Also, dealing with technology is probably more mature. We have a 10-year old boy and a 4-year old daughter without smartphone, devices are our own and are only used together with us. It causes no problems. Probably it helps to have the separation between an offline world before and an online world afterwards in one's own history, as well as the strategies to lead a life under both premises.

dr_dshiv2• 6 years ago

Working on a vibrating hot water bottle to get my toddler to self soothe.

The dream is a sleepbox. You know, close the lid and kids are asleep.

PaulDavisThe1st• 6 years ago

You still need to sit with them to put them to sleep, nobody seems to have made an app that buys back that time.

I don't know why anyone would want to buy back that time. I might even pay to be able to do that again.

hyko• 6 years ago

“electric cars will be ordinary things in 5–10 years; self-driving cars not long after that” If we’re counting things that haven’t happened yet as improvements to our quality of life, why not include a cure for all disease and holidays on Mars?

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

Electric cars are already fairly ordinary in certain parts of the world. Not necessarily the most common, but nobody will give you a second glance now if you have one.

hadlock2• 6 years ago

We were at Carmax (nationwide used car dealer) on Thursday evening and they had probably 15 plug in battery electric "electric cars" on their lot of ~500 cars. Not a significant fraction, but three different models were available to choose from, and competitively priced against the other cars on the lot.

Broken_Hippo2• 6 years ago

We aren't even close to a cure for all disease nor holidays on Mars, though.

Electric cars, however, are common in some places (I'm in Norway, and they are everywhere here, and the infrastructure is spreading, both in the private sector and in public street parking). Other places, they are a growing trend that we've been measuring. The growth is picking up.

This wasn't a far-fetch prediction by the author.

irthomasthomas• 6 years ago

I agree, self-driving cars in about 10 years is extremely optimistic. I'm surprised to see Gwern espouse that view. I think it's revealing of the awesome power of Musk's own reality distortion field.

starpilot2• 6 years ago

Remember having to call movie theatres for showtimes?

hadlock2• 6 years ago

There's actually an entire episode of Seinfield about this, one of the main characters gets a new phone number and it's one digit off of the (in)famous MovieFone number in Manhattan.

starpilot2• 6 years ago

I know.

WalterBright• 6 years ago

yeah, and you wait and wait for the movie you want to come up, and if you miss the time you have to wait through the whole spiel again. Ugh.

gspr• 6 years ago

Interesting! Where I'm from, these were posted in the newspaper. But I do remember having to call to reserve seats.

jopsen3• 6 years ago

Remember opening a news paper and getting dirty fingers :)

paweladamczuk• 6 years ago

What is the notation the author uses for historical prices? The one with the year in lower index and some other number in upper index? I tried <your favourite search engine>ing that but I don't know how it's called.

aperiodic• 6 years ago

I've never seen it before, but it appears to be inflation notation. It's a subscript on prices, so the year is the original year of the price, and the cost above it is the inflation-adjusted equivalent in present-day dollars.

kranner• 6 years ago

The author has an article on it:

https://www.gwern.net/Subscripts

GordonS3• 6 years ago

I had the same question - I've never seen currency values written like this before, but find it a very clear and interesting way to do it.

gwern3• 6 years ago

The automatic inflation-adjusting is unique but hopefully self-explanatory. See https://www.gwern.net/Inflation.hs https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1029831368782635013

jariel2• 6 years ago

He's not even scratching the surface.

'Heart Surgery' used to be a really big, scary ordeal. Now they do much of it on an 'outpatient' basis - home the next day.

Putting the brakes hard on a car from the 1970's might mean you slide the thing into whatever you were driving towards. The sensitivity and intelligence of car control these days makes old cars seem like horse and buggy.

A woman doing a more classically male job in the 1980's was a big deal, a statement, and they would be told constantly 'they didn't belong'. My younger nieces doing research have never met with any such resistance, just the opposite (They're still younger though, this will change a little later).

Vinyl, CD's, tapes, whatever: you had to collect them and physically go to stores to get music, video or any content. The content revolution is mind-boggling.

You generally did not know or communicate with people from other countries. What you know about Russia came from books in the library or a few scenes on TV, or maybe a ridiculous Hollywood film.

Clothing was something you bought for 'durability'. It was expensive and unfashionable.

And this since the late 20th century.

Those who have been alive for a long time, say Queen Elizabeth who's 1st Prime Minister was literally Churchill ... it's almost impossible to fathom the change they've seen in their time.

OJFord• 6 years ago

Clothing was something you bought for 'durability'. It was expensive and unfashionable.

And 'fashionable' writing on cheap disposable clothes is an improvement?

ginko• 6 years ago

Clothing was something you bought for 'durability'. It was expensive and unfashionable.

That's the one thing I don't think is a real improvement. Fast fashion is wasteful and has lead to actually quality clothing being really hard to find. There's this old fruit of the loom t shirt I have that will probably survive all my current ones.

GordonS3• 6 years ago

This is a good point. Growing up, we seldom bought new clothes - they'd have to be literally falling apart before we got new ones. Largely I suppose because clothing was so much more expensive, but also, I think, because we had much more of a "utility" view towards it, rather than the "fashion" view that is much more prevelant today.

In the UK, I recently saw a TV advertisement encouraging people to not be so wasteful with their clothing, and to wash it less frequently so it lasts longer and we use less resources.

I thought this was interesting to see, and I was reminded of some friends who spend hundreds of dollars on clothing every single month.

nsm• 6 years ago

Back then there was no "fast fashion" because very few could afford to go through lots of clothes.

Fast fashion and quality probably don't go together, but the quality of more expensive clothing has become ridiculously good. $20-30 t-shirts last >5 years and "outdoors" clothing is so much better than anything even 10 years ago.

scottlocklin5• 6 years ago

Clothing was something you bought for 'durability'. It was expensive and unfashionable.

Lol, you should really look at pictures from 30+ years ago; people dressed much better than they do now, and were more obviously physically fit to boot.

jariel2• 6 years ago

People dressed more formally, but 'most people' did not dress 'better', they simply couldn't afford it.

Almost all North American men in suits looked like fools wearing brown paper bags because suits were never fitted tailored properly. Even less expensive suits nowadays can at least have a decent cut and fit close to reasonable, even if there is still a huge variety of 'weird stuff' that people invariably buy anyhow.

Now there are more ways to look crazy but at least if you want to dress kind of properly, it's within grasp for most people.

lkbm• 6 years ago

Vinyl, CD's, tapes, whatever: you had to collect them and physically go to stores to get music, video or any content. The content revolution is mind-boggling.

I used to sit by the radio, ready to hit record if a song I liked came on. Now, nearly every song is available to me, on demand, for free. (I actually pay ~$8 a month for it, but I don't have to.)

I used to watch episodes of Star Trek when they aired, and if I missed it, I just had to wait a few months until it aired again. (Often, football aired immediately before and it would run overtime, so they'd just start Star Trek partway through the episode.) Also, if the signal was super-staticy, you could play with the antenna for a while, but most likely, you just lived with it.

Now, I can go watch whichever episode I want at any point, static-free. It's not free (unless I pirate it), but it's included in an annual subscription I already had for other purposes (free shipping).

We (my family) used to spend hours hunting through used bookstores. There were various books by my favorite authors I never found, despite dozens (hundreds?) of hours searching through dozens (hundreds?) of used book stores.

Now I can go buy them online and have them in a couple days, or if they're available as ebooks, a few seconds. A few years ago, I was waiting at a bus stop, and decided I wanted to re-read one of my favorite books. I promptly downloaded it and was reading it before the bus arrived.

My parents had (actually...have) a large cabinet to store their records and tapes. And then another smaller one to store VHS tapes. And then couple more to store DVDs. And a closet full of floppies. Digital media saves me a room worth of space in my house. (Books are an order of magnitude more space -- they have literally tens of thousands.)

Falkon1313• 6 years ago

Vinyl, CD's, tapes, whatever: you had to collect them and physically go to stores to get music, video or any content.

Bigger difference - you didn't know what you were getting until after you'd gotten home, unwrapped and listened to it. Maybe you'd heard one song from the album on the radio, maybe you had heard other stuff by the band, or maybe you just bought it because the cover artwork looked cool or you'd heard the name of the band somewhere. $20 for a CD, and you just hoped it'd turn out to be something you liked because that would be the only new music you heard until you bought another one.

Movies were similar. On TV, there was a blurb in TV guide, at the rental store, a blurb on the back of the box, and at the theater, just a poster. That's all you knew about it until you watched it, which could be awhile. Now, you hear of a potentially interesting movie and you can instantly read cast, summary, reviews, and links to related movies. If you're still interested, you can be watching it inside of 5 minutes, with subtitles.

Also mobile connectivity consisted of your beeper going off, then you stopping whatever you were doing, going to find a payphone, calling the number and hoping whoever beeped you was still waiting for you to call in and that you could get through the call before you ran out of quarters.

We had internet then, but mostly used local BBSes, and it was still dialup at 1200 or 2400 bps, all text mode. You watched the text scroll onto your screen as it downloaded.

And big difference - no multitasking. If you were chatting on IRC, that's all you were doing. You didn't have other windows, so there was no chatting about something you were doing in another window. You weren't talking on the phone and couldn't get calls because the modem was using the line. You wouldn't get emails until you closed IRC and opened your email client.

But that leads into the negatives.

No anticipation. Hinted at above, you looked forward to getting a new CD on payday, or getting home to see that movie that you'd rented, or your favorite show that came on on Fridays, or hanging out with friends on the weekend. Now that you can access any of that any time, there's not much to look forward to.

Related, time has lost much of its flavor. Back then you could tell time by whatever theme song you'd heard most recently, or the type of show playing on the TV in the background. Different days had different lineups, so family sitcom night had a different flavor than back-to-back horror movie night. 24-hour on-demand makes all time equal and flavorless in that sense. Modern connectivity also means you can work from home in the middle of the night, find people to talk to online, shop online for anything, so even the difference between night and day has lost some flavor.

And most of all, we've lost downtime. It takes a conscious effort now to unplug, have nothing to do, and get bored. In the past, that was when we would hang out with friends, read long-form books, go for a walk and explore, observe the world around us, strike up a conversation with strangers, learn new things or try new hobbies, be creative and imaginative. But now that we're drinking from the firehose, it takes real effort to get bored, or to relax. We do a lot less of all those things now, and it has a psychological and social impact.

nicolas_t• 6 years ago

Off topic, I completely agree with most of these except "search engines typically turn up the desired result in the first page, even if it’s a book or scientific paper; one doesn’t need to resort to ‘meta-search engines’ or enormous 20-clause Boolean queries"

I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago. There used to be a lot more content on small personal websites or blogs that was really well done and useful.

Now search engines tend to only return results from massive well known websites and the actual relevant and interesting results is buried far far down in the results under all of the seo optimized content farms.

masklinn2• 6 years ago

I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago.

I completely agree. And it feels like it's steadily going down too, search results now are way worse than they were 5 years ago which were somewhat worse than 10.

GordonS3• 6 years ago

I completely agree.

It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better. And yet more than ever, I struggle to find relevant search results.

For example, I enter a search term, and I'll get many results back that don't even contain the search terms. If I use double quotes, things often improve, but I'll still get results that don't contain my terms.

I really wish there was a "power user" mode, that basically made things work the way they used to work.

agarden• 6 years ago

He is comparing to the '90s, not 2010. Search was terrible in the '90s.

luckylion• 6 years ago

If altavista, yahoo etc would've had to use their 90ies tech to fight the level of SEO spam that exists today, they would've been terrible, I have no doubt about that. That said, compared to Google today, it wasn't that terrible.

If you knew the right keyword, they'd typically produce somewhat useful results. That's not my current experience with Google. Google will ignore important, distinguishing keywords in multi-word queries, and seems to have given up on ranking content by anything other than link count, i.e. I get plenty of seo garbage in the top 10 that is published on domains with plenty of links. It's why subdomain/folder leasing has been a massive thing for the past two years. The content is typically shit and even the language is on a level that wouldn't pass in middle school, plenty of spinning and templates with few variations, 99% duplicate content from the same domain ranking on two consecutive spots etc.

mda• 6 years ago

I wish you could see random 10 items your 8 years ago search history and 10 items from last week and compare them. I am pretty sure picture would be different. My theory on this is then in years peoples expectations grew faster than the technology itself. Search is actually much better than past.

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

Many people here have search history from 8 years ago... Anyone volunteering to collect some data?

buckminster• 6 years ago

I think the content farms are improving their SEO faster than the search engines are filtering them out. So the search is better and we see more garbage.

melling• 6 years ago

I lived in NYC for a year between 1996 and 1997. It was a great place to live then.

I had 2 roommates and we had full time internet. Through my Panix account? We had a LAN and played Diablo, Quake, etc. locally and online.

I bought a DVD player for $600 because I hated VHS.

I flew to Europe and Mexico around that time. Don’t remember flights being too expensive.

Personally, I’ve always been disappointed about how incredibly slowly the world changes.

gumby2• 6 years ago

The author was talking about 30 years ago. Google did well in 1998 because the state of search was dire and it was a commonplace that it couldn’t get much better. The first decade of google was revolutionary. The last decade as been a slow slide backwards in terms of utility.

pbhjpbhj2• 6 years ago

Is it a "slide backwards"? It seems more like search is intentionally worse, because they're optimising for profit and not for "people being satisfied by search" -- having to spend 5 times as long on Google means more time seeing adverts.

So it's a reversion, but the company itself appear to be driving it.

stareatgoats• 6 years ago

In the filter bubble that I inhabit, articles like this are breaths of fresh air - much needed reminders that everything is not gloom and doom.

Permanently moored as I am in my bubble though I can't help feeling that this type of article more an attempt to balance the narratives that I and my peers are fixated on, rather than paint a complete picture: so what about the trajectories of climate change, wealth inequality, opioid crisis, debt crisis, nuclear warfare threat, pandemic vulnerability, soil depletion etc?

I guess this is the nature of human discourse: we don't typically try to provide complete pictures, we tend to paint alternate pictures (aiming to support different courses of action?) in contrast to other narratives.

In the best of worlds all perspectives are based in reality, painted in earnest, and readily available, enabling a rational discourse. In reality that's obviously not always the case, filter bubbles being a case in point.

kybernetikos2• 6 years ago

I agree with almost all of this list, and what I assume are the motivations for creating it, but it definitely leaves out problematic aspects. Not just the ones you list, but things like:

not watching crummy VHS tapes: the decline in ownership and reduction in ability to record / remix media.

playing phone tag: now that normal humans have access to broadcast media, the easy to avoid 'holiday slide show' or gossip sessions have become almost impossible to avoid in whatsapp groups, etc.

USB cables: Physically different connectors for different functions is a good thing. I have usb cables that can carry data (at I think 4 different speeds), usb cables that can only carry power, usb cables that can fast charge, usb cables that can power delivery charge, usb cables that can carry thunderbolt. I have lots of these cables and I have no idea which are which. I do very much like that some of these cables can act as power and screen and input now, but usb is pretty frustrating. It's great that almost everything charges with the same cable these days - for which I credit the EU rules about phones rather than innovation, (but usb-c vs usb-micro, and even a few hold out usb-minis mean it's still not perfect), and the usb micro cable has been much less reliable than things like the old nokia power jacks, with many of my tablets developing problems with charging and connectivity because of the usb port.

search engines: Search engine quality goes in waves. I've definitely had some years where google returned me worse results for my searches than I used to get in the good old days.

batteries: the power tools I have with batteries are less powerful, go wrong more often and have to be charged (and never are, because I don't use them enough).

kybernetikos2• 6 years ago

Oh I forgot to mention screens - until the iPhone, you almost never saw someone trying to use a device with a cracked screen. Now a significant proportion of people use a touch screen device with a cracked screen (or cracked screen protector) every day.

Causality1• 6 years ago

Yeah a lot of this is vastly oversimplified. You didn't have to clean ball mice every week or for most people, ever. VHS being crummy didn't mean we enjoyed it less. Fansub sites today are under constant legal attack by copyright lawyers.

Frankly I miss the days when the online racist death threats were posted by xXBoner420Xx to his Xanga page instead of posted on Facebook by Ted Smith from your company's accounting department.

leetcrew4• 6 years ago

not watching crummy VHS tapes: the decline in ownership and reduction in ability to record / remix media.

what do you mean by this exactly? I can agree it's sort of sad that people don't usually own a physical/local copy of whatever movies/music they enjoy, but you can still buy physical copies of most media if you really want. I'm pretty the inflation-adjusted price is lower than it was in the early '00s. you could certainly argue that streaming is so convenient/cheap that it precludes this kind of ownership for most people.

the reduction in ability to record/remix media I completely disagree with. the shittiest smartphone camera records better quality video than a good consumer camcorder from the '90s, and you can edit the footage with free software on any computer.

koala_man• 6 years ago

speaking of batteries: batteries are built-in—remember how advertisements always had to say “no batteries included”?—so no more mad scrambles at Christmas for AA or AAA batteries to power all the presents

I don't like this trend at all. I've thrown out so many perfectly good products because the bespoke built in battery couldn't keep a charge anymore.

With good ol' rechargable AA/AAA batteries, you typically get a way higher capacity than the cheap built-in batteries in small electronics, and the product lifespan is years longer.

DubiousPusher• 6 years ago

I enjoyed the list too and think about a lot of these things when I encounter them in my daily life too. But the major downside I see is that a lot of these improvements are coming via an escalating consumerism. Things like disposable clothes are probably more the product of exploiting labor and externalizing costs like polution than they are the product of technological improvements increasing efficiency. The same thing is happening with larger items like applicamcea which are increasingly being replaced due to part failures rather than repaired.

Counteracting this though is my personal favorite innovation of our times, secondary markets for everything! eBay, Postmark, Amazon, surplus resellers like Marshals and Ross etc have made it so much more possible to connect a good with its buyer rather than hording or junking it.

sytelus• 6 years ago

I am perhaps glass half empty sort of person but it’s important for me how far is it to go than how far have we came. The fact is that it’s been literally 50 years since moon landing and Mars landings is still as far as it was in 90s. Cancer survival rates have improved but curing cancer is still as much as pipe dream it was in 90s. Less people are poor but eradicating poverty and providing basic education, food and health for all is still as much away as it was in 90s. I can go on but us Twitter generation take too much pride out of rather silly little things while ignoring the things that matters the most.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

nuclear warfare threat

I'm not happy with the way things are going on that front. And things may be considerably worse than they were in the 1990s. They're far better than they were in the 1980s, though.

kragen2• 6 years ago

Climate change is a serious problem, but until China shut down I was sure we'd crossed a tipping point to solar, which makes the problem solvable, though not easy. Now I think there's some risk that the PV manufacturing won't restart somewhere else.

Wealth inequality is an immensely less serious menace than at any time since at least Columbus. If it doesn't look like it, that's because you aren't looking at China and India 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 years ago.

The opioid crisis is a big problem. A lot of people who need opioids can't get them because of laws, or they can get them but without reasonable guarantees of quality (again because of laws), and so they die of fentanyl overdoses. Hopefully we can solve that problem, but it's been a century and a half, so it probably won't be soon.

I don't know about the debt crisis. What's the crisis? People (and imaginary people) owe each other money, which is also imaginary. Sometimes they can't pay it and go bankrupt. This is kind of stupid but it's relatively harmless most of the time.

Nuclear warfare continues to be a threat, but it's much less of one than at any time since, say, 1959. There's no Cold War, the massive nuclear arsenals have been mostly scrapped, and really what you need to worry about there are drones.

Pandemic vulnerability is a big deal. Especially in March and April of this year. But the situation will improve rapidly after that.

Soil depletion is potentially a big deal, and it's an incentives problem with a lot of interests vested in the status quo ante. The Netherlands may be showing a solution.

Vinnl2• 6 years ago

Another thing that's a major improvement to me: I can take public transport in a place I'm unfamiliar with, and I don't have to sit anxiously hoping that the bus driver will actually remember to call out my stop and let me off - I can just look at the screen that displays the upcoming stop.

Also (though it is lumped in with smartphone's "too much to list"): if I reply to someone's text message, I can actually read that message while I'm typing up the reply.

quadrifoliate• 6 years ago

I can take public transport in a place I'm unfamiliar with

Pre-smartphone, I had immense trouble taking public transport in a place I'm familiar with. Usability seems like the last concern of the people who design most bus systems, at least in the US.

ghaff2• 6 years ago

I frequently think this when traveling and, if anything, it's probably gotten worse. It used to be a case of giving some cash to someone in a booth. Now it's often about fumbling around with some machine, hoping your credit card works if you're in a different country, figuring out what the appropriate fare type is, etc. Oh, and doing this in a tourist destination like an airport so there's a long line of people doing the same thing. No one who designs these systems gives more than 30 seconds thought to their use by people who don't use them every day.

pbhjpbhj2• 6 years ago

20yrs ago on holiday in Switzerland the bus announced every stop ... still waiting to get a bus-stop with a timetable in my UK city (the stop is a post with a list of bus numbers on).

astura• 6 years ago

I took busses to go places ever year of the 90s and I've never heard of a driver actually call out any stops, back then you just had to already know exactly where you were going to get off at the right stop. I would stick to routes I was already familiar with. Not only that but you had no idea of the schedule (when the bus would come) you had to already have a physical copy of the bus schedule. Kept copies of the bus schedule for select routes at my house, but who knows if they've been updated or not since you grabbed it.

Took a bus in my home town recently and the upcoming stop was labeled with an LED board like on a train. I couldn't imagine something like that 20 years ago. I agree it makes travel 1000% better and I would have gone to less familiar places if it were available back then.

Vinnl2• 6 years ago

I took busses to go places ever year of the 90s and I've never heard of a driver actually call out any stops, back then you just had to already know exactly where you were going to get off at the right stop.

Yeah, the method you had to use where I'm from is to know where you had to get off, then ask the bus driver when you hop in whether they're actually going there - then they'd call out your stop, usually.

Not the greatest, especially not for a shy kid like I was.

rv-de• 6 years ago

Maybe people in the 90s were less anxious about having to walk back one stop.

ptr• 6 years ago

Two other things he missed (or maybe that's the "too much to list" under smartphones) that have been a true revolution for me:

* Buying groceries in an app and getting them delivered directly to my door (without being super expensive nor low quality) same or next day. No more wasting time driving to a store just to run around in there trying to find everything. No standing in lines.

* Throwing away large pieces of garbage (boxes, furniture, recycling) without having to rent a car, you just take a photo with an app and someone shows up at your door within 30 minutes, ready to take it away for just $10-$20.

These things + living within biking distance of work makes it very easy to manage without a car.

jopsen3• 6 years ago

Robotic lawnmowers and vacuums are common, reducing number of hours spent on house work.

karatestomp• 6 years ago

The latter are edging into common territory. Still never seen one of the former in real life. See lots of lawn service companies at work. Maybe they’re regionally popular?

gwern3• 6 years ago

I understand they're a lot more common in the EU than in the US, but while I've seen robotic vacuums (Roombas), I've never seen a robotic lawnmower, and haven't used either yet.

zajio1am• 6 years ago

Yes, robotic vacuum cleaner is (IMHO) the biggest improvement in house work since dishwasher.

katzgrau• 6 years ago

programmers able to assume users have 4GB RAM rather than 4MB RAM

But with that, some programmers assume they can use all 4GB of RAM

ken• 6 years ago

I think I live in the 1990's still.

we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our radios, or our GPSes

I've had friends' cars broken into this way in the recent past. Not for radios, perhaps, but for anything else left in the car.

car security alarms no longer go off endlessly in parking lots

They do in Seattle. It's a rare day I don't hear at least a few minutes of car alarm, several times a day.

all cars have electrified power windows; I don’t remember the last time I had to physically crank down a car window

Not that rare. I last drove one a week or two ago.

radio stations have minimal static

Depends on the station, of course. A couple of the stations I listen to can be anywhere from "sounds great" to "can't make out a word", depending on weather, and which side of the hill I'm on.

TVs no longer have rabbit ears that require regular adjustment

Now we have HDTV antennas which require adjustment. When the signal is bad, instead of a fuzzy picture that's still somewhat watchable, you get a broken frame every couple seconds.

bambax• 6 years ago

How are electric windows in cars an"improvement"? It's different but it doesn't change your life in any significant way at all. Car safety is an improvement. Not this. Countless other things listed are in the same category. Was it so hard to have to rewind tapes?? Those are micro-comfort things that contribute exactly zero to our happiness.

I'm old enough to remember a time when there were no tapea at all. We weren't worse off. Everything was memorable. Now nothing is important.

Also, cheap airfarea, cheap, disposable clothes, etc. are destroying the planet faster than wver before. Counting "improvements" without externalities is absurd.

knolan• 6 years ago

When driving I can open and close or disable any other window on the car. This is very handy with kids.

transect• 6 years ago

In my truck I can lock all of my windows to keep kids from rolling them down. If I'm driving alone I can roll down the passenger window without leaning over the bench. My windows have a behavior where the window will roll all the way down automatically if I press the button with a certain duration.

All of these features mean I almost never think about the state of the windows while I'm driving for more than a split second. I think that's a safety win.

Also it's just nice not to have to roll down a window or rewind a vhs. Micro-comforts add up.

sethammons2• 6 years ago

I, for one, enjoy power windows. Better yet, I enjoy power windows that you press or half a second and they go up or down all the way. They now have power rear windows for trucks, which I'm marginally excited about when I get my next truck (hopefully not needing to do so for a decade or two). Very related is air conditioning in the car. When I was a kid, if you were hot, you cranked down the window and let hot air blow on you.

Rewinding VHS? One of the selling points for me on DVD was no rewinding and having scene selection. No more "be kind, rewind" signs anymore and getting a small fee at the movie rental store for non-rewound movie.

Sure, these are micro improvements in conveniences, but I enjoy them. People don't like waiting. Anything that improves that will improve someone's impression of the thing. Heck, I now prefer streaming over sliding in a DVD. It is only saving me, at most, a minute or two. But it is less waiting.

Enjoy the little things.

zeckalpha• 6 years ago

LED lights are more energy-efficient, heat rooms less & are safer, smaller, turn on faster, and are brighter than incandescents or fluorescents

And they last much longer. I’ve not had to change more than one LED bulb ever, and that seemed due to a flaky controller. I even bought a light fixture with non-exchangeable LED bulbs because the half-life of the bulbs is longer than fixtures now!

motohagiography2• 6 years ago

Saying things are actually good or better is pretty subversive, or conservative, depending on your view. Somewhat related to the Varian Rule, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule which is documented as: "A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade."

We still have poverty in north america, but it's not a lack of conveniences, food, or material goods. It's something else. It's not just money, because lots of poor people earn money. Even people with mobile homes often own their homes. It's something else, like hope, mobility, culture or something.

nabla9• 6 years ago

food,

It's still nutrition and food insecurity are still an issue. Calories are plenty but large number of poor still suffer from malnutrition because healthy food is very expensive and neighborhood deprivation creates food deserts.

Even people with mobile homes often own their homes

Mobile home business in US are huge predatory business model that keeps people poor. Private equity companies buy and own many mobile home parks and the loans for mobile homes are expensive, plus the homes are bad investment. They lose value just like a car. John Oliver made an episode about this.

It's something else,

Relative poverty is real poverty. It goes against all evidence to claim that only absolute poverty is real poverty and only thing that should be addressed. Just being poor hurts even cognitive functionality and causes stress. People who have less options, less time to make decisions, are forced to long term of short decisions that are non-optimal.

There has been a great natural experiment testing the culture theory and direction of causal link.

In the 80's when drug epidemic ravaged black neighborhoods there were two theories. One theory was that poverty causes desperation, destroys culture and brings drugs and destroys neighborhoods. Another theory was that culture causes poverty and drug use and creates bad neighborhoods.

Opioid crisis provides great second data point and natural experience. It turns out that when poverty and financial insecurity hits white middle class neighborhoods, they are just as susceptible to drug epidemics, destruction of cultural values as black neighborhoods.

It seems that relative poverty and decreasing options and loss of hope creates culture and behavior more than other way around.

motohagiography2• 6 years ago

Conflating culture and race doesn't provide a strong control. The effects of drugs on poor black and white groups in the U.S. are similar. I don't think poverty and the effects of drugs are because someone is racialized, however I do think it matters very much where they grew up, and how. Race is a proxy for class in the U.S, because class is the last real american taboo, imo.

I would also agree that the effects of racist policy impacts how they grew up, and that in turn becomes culture, but where I diverge is that the solutions to "how to not be poor," and "how to stop making people poor," are different.

The tech changes we've had have clearly raised all boats, and yet we undeniably still have poverty. What it means is that making peoples lives more convenient, giving them more stuff, and spending on the lower level needs in the hierarchy doesn't end poverty. This is the crux of what the Gwern article shows.

It has to do with ability to achieve and self-actualize. Broadly, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a handwavy metaphor for it, and the technology changes we've had in the last 30 years provide belonging (social media), not a lot of security, and probably come at the cost of self actualization.

Given the clear quality of life improvements from technological change, we can see with some certainty that merely providing more of the things that technology change already and inevitably provides is not a solution to multi-generational self-reinforcing poverty.

That is the subversive implication.

mrfusion3• 6 years ago

It’s kind of the rat park idea right.

chasingthewind3• 6 years ago

A counterpoint to this that may resonate with some:

* I _feel_ significantly less hopeful than I did in the 1990s. Things _seemed_ to be heading in the right direction in lots of important areas then. Now I feel significant anxiety about whether my kids will live in a dystopia within the next 30 years

* Many of the improvements listed reduce hassle and stress in some ways, and markedly increase stress and anxiety in other ways. I had ZERO concern about my identity being stolen in 1995. My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years and caused significant anxiety and hassle.

* Many of the improvements to convenience feel like a bad trade. Having information and services a click away has begun to feel almost like a burden. Everything has to happen instantly now. This has been a negative from a psychological perspective for me.

----

I know some of this is just that I'm 25 years older and I'm trying to subtract that out.

I understand that objectively this is a good time to be alive in many, many ways but I feel significantly worse than I did then.

If I could return to the 1990s at my current age I would do so in a heartbeat.

jdavis7032• 6 years ago

I had ZERO concern about my identity being stolen in 1995. My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years and caused significant anxiety and hassle.

I have never been robbed, and I live in a place American suburbanites have told me is “dangerous.” But I have had my ID stolen. And to be honest I’d much rather be hacked or miss an ATM skimmer than having someone sticking a gun in my face demanding my wallet.

chasingthewind3• 6 years ago

This is a good point and I was thinking about this as I read the article and wrote my reply. I've also never been the victim of violent crime and I admit that if I had been I would likely feel differently about this.

tomrod2• 6 years ago

I've had both.

Identity theft takes longer to resolve. Physical altercation is usually more immediately resolved, though the adrenaline and residual stress can take a long while to overcome.

dhruvkar• 6 years ago

>Having information and services a click away has begun to feel almost like a burden. Everything has to happen instantly now. This has been a negative from a psychological perspective for me

I feel you. I recently upgraded to a dumbphone (~1 month), no apps. Basically, I can do calls, even texting is too irritating. Yeah some stuff is harder, but the psychological burden has lessened to a marked degree.

I'd love to hear other ways people have figured out how to reduce the constant low-level anxiety in our daily lives.

war10253• 6 years ago

My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years

Something I've been curious about recently that maybe you (or others) can help clarify:

What do people count as having their "identity stolen"?

I've had probably three times where I've had fraudulent purchases made after someone stole our credit card info. Does that count?

In my mind, identity theft is more people taking out loans in your name or something like that.

Which is it?

chasingthewind3• 6 years ago

I agree...simple credit card fraud shouldn't be counted as identity theft. There are plenty of ways for people to get your card numbers and your basic information that won't allow them to go on to more serious impersonation fraud. In my case I had someone file a tax return in my name and try to open credit accounts at a later date. The incidents were probably all unrelated but I had to put a 7 year fraud alert on my 3 major credit bureau accounts which required a police report, a report to the FTC, and letters to the credit bureaus.

ksdale3• 6 years ago

I think these are great counterpoints, and important to consider.

I would offer that I think we are more worried about dystopia because we are so much more aware of all of the ways the world can turn into a dystopia, but I don't think that necessarily tracks with the actual likelihood of dystopia.

I read a lot of history, and I occasionally find myself wishing I had lived in a... more "exciting" time, or a more authentic time, but then I remember that I would probably just be a normal person in that exciting or authentic time, possibly not even aware of the exciting-ness because I'd be trying not to starve to death or die of cholera.

We feel like a ton of crazy stuff is happening all the time, but history has always been that way. You'd be hard pressed to live for 80 years (period, ha!) in any historical period anywhere in the world and not end up going through at least one or two of wars, famines, disease-outbreaks, oppressive governments, fires, earthquakes, riots, etc. And maybe it'd be easier to deal with because you wouldn't see it coming on twitter for two months before it killed you... but man, reading history, a lot of people die, all the time, often for no reason or really bad reasons. And fewer people die now, but we're a lot more aware of it.

jbay808• 6 years ago

I would offer that I think we are more worried about dystopia because we are so much more aware of all of the ways the world can turn into a dystopia, but I don't think that necessarily tracks with the actual likelihood of dystopia.

Unless you live in part of the world that became dystopian in the last 30 years, any optimism you had in the '90s that dystopia was far away was not false confidence. It was borne out by the facts.

If you feel less optimistic now, that might be due to valid concerns, and it might also be borne out by the facts. We'll see.

I also don't think people in the '90s were poorly informed compared to now. Sure they didn't have much of Wikipedia, but on the other hand, nonfiction journalism was in a better state and the internet (although less widespread) was also not as finely tuned to create information bubbles.

Synaesthesia• 6 years ago

Ok the contrary, I feel we are not aware enough. Recently the atomic bulletin of scientists put the doomsday clock to 100 seconds, even closer than the Cuban missile crisis. The reason they gave were tensions with Russia. That’s a huge threat, and it’s not getting much attention.

Really you would think today we shouldn’t have to be worried about wars with Russia or China, and having endless, escalating conflicts in the Middle East. Not to mention the environmental crisis.

Runaway oligarchism in another concern, ever since the 70’s income inequality has gotten significantly worse.

sethammons2• 6 years ago

YouTube how-to videos. You can look up so much. From fixing a washing machine to replacing parts on cars, to installing windows on a house, and learning math or programming, and a million other things. I'm learning the Banjo as my first insrument with online videos.

scottlocklin5• 6 years ago

Funny; I always thought Gwern was around my age, but it seems like he either wasn't fully conscious in the 90s or lived some peculiar life out in the weeds.

Shit he missed:

1) Video conferencing is a big deal. Makes remote work possible and routine.

2) Bittorrent, libGen and SciHub have actually realized the dream of making information de facto free, even if it is illegal.

Agree on:

1) Logistics has improved immensely (in part due to ubiquitous computing and part to exporting manufacturing to all corners of the globe).

2) You can get more "weird" foods at walley world and Trader Joes (on the other hand, staples are more disgusting and obviously unhealthy -just look at people)

3) Spaced rep applications are useful. Not world changing, but useful. Ed Thorp did know about this in the 50s though (as I did in the 90s).

4) Electronics are much cheaper (and I make a lot more money to buy more of them). Linux works about as well as it did in mid-90s anyway. Laptop batteries MUCH better.

5) Cars are better: antilock brakes, crumple zones, airbags have made things much safer on the roads

6) Crime was much higher in the 90s than in the 21st century. Trend is reversing in the US at least.

Disagree/aesthetics

1) Clothing is vastly worse than in the 90s in every way; aesthetics, durability, materials

2) Muh weed isn't better than public smoking; I miss being able to smoke in public after a drink

3) Induction stoves are bloody awful and a huge regression from gas, even electric coil

4) Microbrews were much better in the 90s; everything is a disgusting IPA now, mostly to cover up the fact you're drinking toilet water. I'd rather drink coors light than an IPA.

5) Most coffee is actually worse; Peets and Starbucks burning their beans is an aesthetic atrocity.

6) Apples are still groace and covered in alar.

7) Average flights are cheaper, but travel is VASTLY more unpleasant. You used to be able to buy a paper ticket, then trade it on usenet for someone else's ticket. No ID required; just the ticket. Imagine that. No CNN blaring at you on the infoscreen making thought impossible (looking at you Atlanta). No anal probe at the boarding area. Your family could wave at you when you get on the plane, or hug you as soon as you get off. Total regression: I'll happily pay more for the old experience.

Just wrong:

1) Travel in the EU is vastly more expensive to an American than it used to be, and hordes of travelers from everywhere on the globe make it less pleasant as well. It's also worse from a visa perspective; you used to be able to do visa runs and stay on the continent basically forever instead of vacating Shengen every 90 days.

2) Most houses are actually NOT heated/cooled/insulated as efficiently as he thinks; presumably he just moved up a few socioeconomic brackets or moved some place warmer.

3) Coats? C'mon; if your coat is thinner, it's because you live in the Bay Area or something. High end winter coats are still goose-down.

4) AI/VR aren't really things except as LARP

5) Trichinosis wasn't a problem in the US in the 90s any more than it is now. Personally I can no longer eat US pork (it was fine in the 90s, just as it is in europe). See next point for why, perhaps

Shit that got worse and he didn't notice:

1) Everyone's fat; an aesthetic and libidinal apocalypse. Obviously something enormous and negative has happened in public health (cue 10 people responding to this, all with different "answers"), and nobody can identify what it is.

2) Everything as a service: back in the day you had to pay for utilities and maybe cable TV. Now you pay 10x what you used to for phone service (in the US; elsewhere else it's fine) due to oligopolistic pricing, and you have a bunch of dumb "apps" on your phone charging you, 3 different movie services, even your damn radio betrays you. Managing more such things is unpleasant and the whole world is basically a giant ripoff

3) Social atomization in the US is at all time high, mostly due to technology

4) Search engines, homeless people and Elsevier have destroyed physical libraries, and that's a real loss.

5) The internet is dumber and more corporate, and opinion makers now think that Usenet arguments on twitter are meaningful and real: something the rest of us got over around 1991

6) Cheap LED lights means designers put them everywhere, and you have to work hard to sleep in a dark room

7) Movies are shittier; big deal that I can watch a capeshit movie in 4k. I'm an adult and do not enjoy watching adults prance around playing make-believe in their underthingees. Supposedly we live in a "golden age of TV" but I don't see that either: they just rediscovered the 1930s serial format. You can watch any of 1000 things, but most of them are awful.

8) There are tent cities in the US, rapidly turning into Favelas

9) The ubiquity of internet telephony (a general good) has made telephone scams and spam calls much more annoying than playing phone tag

10) Cheap flights and transport has caused "barbarian invasions of Rome" level immigration problems, and will be a huge social problem in the next economic downturn, in part because the internet means ethnic enclaves don't have to assimilate to local culture. Globalization has generally destroyed the lower middle classes in most first world countries.

codeulike• 6 years ago

Induction stoves are awesome, and definitely better than electric coil at the very least. What has been bad about your experience?

dorfsmay3• 6 years ago

Induction stoves are bloody awful and a huge regression from gas, even electric coil

You must have used an underpower induction plate. Gas carries a lot of energy, a standard house power outlet cannot deliver that much energy.

Induction stoves with enough power are slightly less reactive than gas, and can only use cookware that is magnetic, but MUCH more energy efficient (you only heat the cookware, not the air around it) and much easier to clean than gas stoves.

Electrical coil are so slow to react to heat change that cooking in them is a different skill altogether, and makes some cooking more difficult.

scottlocklin5• 6 years ago

I listed as an aesthetic difference. Maybe some people like induction plates. My experience with them (in rentals, hotels and my present apartment) is they deliver very little heat, slowly. If there is some "not underpowered" variety, they're not used very often, and coil stoves work better. They also scratch easily; adding planned obsolescence to your stove experience. There's nothing scratchable in coils or gas stoves; and I'm pretty sure that's why the latter two have gone away.

grawprog3• 6 years ago

My problem with induction burners is half the cookware I own doesn't work on them. Turns out, even a lot of stainless steel pots and pans have aluminum bottoms. I also don't like the way the heat changes instantly, or near instantly. It changes the 'feel' of cooking. I don't really know how else to word it. I notice it most when bringing things down to a simmer. The pan cools down instantly instead of slowly cooling so I end up slowly lowering the temperature instead of just dropping it down.

They sure are great for boiling water though and I do find they work really well with cast iron pots and pans.

leetcrew4• 6 years ago

Induction stoves with enough power are slightly less reactive than gas, and can only use cookware that is magnetic, but MUCH more energy efficient (you only heat the cookware, not the air around it) and much easier to clean than gas stoves.

I kinda disagree on the cleaning bit. the induction stoves I'm familiar with have a glass top, which is great for cleaning off bits of food gunk, but terrible for doing stuff like seasoning a cast iron pan. on a gas burner, you just put a thin coat of oil all over the pan and put it on medium-high for 15 minutes or so. if you try this on a glass top, you end up "seasoning" the glass itself with a layer of polymerized fat. it's really difficult to get this off.

labawi• 6 years ago

MUCH more energy efficient (you only heat the cookware, not the air around it)

They can be even more efficient, if you put insulation between the glass and your cooking pot. The pot is about 1cm from the coil even when directly on the glass, so additional ~3mm is no issue.

I reduced the fan speed due to noise, so I keep 3mm pot-sized cardboard on my induction plate as a precaution, to reduce underside heat loss.

Without cardboard, the plate's lowest setting is slightly more than I would prefer for cooking (~100C, minimal boil-off). With the cardboard, I need to periodically turn it on/off or it's just too wild for cooking with cover on.

Maybe better designs waste less, but there is significant heat transfer through glass, which is then fanned out the back.

telesilla2• 6 years ago

7) Movies are shittier

Try looking outside Hollywood for your film selection - there are immensely wonderful things happening in cinema around the world and we have increasing access to the past decades. I'd start with Criterion Collection - every single release is fantastic. https://www.criterion.com/shop/browse?popular=coming-soon

scottlocklin5• 6 years ago

That's more or less what I do: note the paucity of CC stuff released in the 21st century. Movies wise: England and Europe in general release fewer, South Korea releases more (people starting to realize how good South Korean film is). I guess China releases more also, but it's hard to take them seriously. Hollywood though, is bloody awful, and the slope is definitely down.

notdang• 6 years ago

How do you watch them? in the country I live the cinemas are mostly for Hollywood movies. Tried to watch online, it says it's not available in my region. So torrents?

Jommi4• 6 years ago

I don't want to be too hand-wavy, but this feels like such a "get off my lawn" type of comment that I can't even start to analyze it. So many of the items listed are 100% nostalgia or personal anecdotes generalized to a whole population.

scottlocklin5• 6 years ago

If you're going to bother replying you could at least list a thing or two which are not generalizable. You saying SOMA tent cities are a figment of my imagination, or they existed in the 90s or that air flight is now more easy and pleasant than in the 90s or what?

Pimpus• 6 years ago

Lamenting tent cities is "old man yelling at cloud" to you? I agree with his points. The Life of an average person is objectively much worse than it was 20-30 years ago. A person with great discipline can have a better life than ever, but it is hard not to feel empathy for the masses, so addicted to fake internet shit that they cannot even distinguish reality.

k__• 6 years ago

"Video conferencing is a big deal. Makes remote work possible and routine."

I work remote for 5 years now and only do video conferencing a few times a year and even then it seems optional.

On the other hand I'm a professional writer, so maybe I'm more used to expressing my thoughts via text than the average person.

ghaff2• 6 years ago

We use video conferencing pretty heavily where I work but you can mostly not broadcast video if you don't want to--although some groups prefer everyone to be on camera because they think, and I generally agree, it increases engagement. (And screen sharing is used quite a bit as well.)

But the bigger point I think is that we have the tools generally to support distributed and remote work--code/document repos, texting, collaborative document editing/viewing, easy conferencing (whether or not video), etc.

anthk• 6 years ago

Bittorrent

Usenet, FTPs, Napster, Edonkey, Kazaa...

harambaebae69• 6 years ago

Kazaa was chock full of adware and possibly full-on malware and centralized solutions like Napster were shutdown. Still using Usenet to this day tho..

pfdietz• 6 years ago

Photovolatic modules are vastly cheaper now, a factor of ~20. This has become a total game changer for the energy industry.

chapium• 6 years ago

Have movies changed, or have we? I recall movies in the 90's also being mostly terrible.

However, since the internet has grown its even easier to narrow our interests and diverge from the mainstream, developing more niche preferences. Movies still cater to widely accepted tropes.

neonate• 6 years ago

Although he doesn't mention libGen and SciHub by name, he does include: most books and scientific papers can be downloaded conveniently and for free. So that isn't one that he missed (assuming he didn't just add it).

eru4• 6 years ago

Thanks for the long list!

You should upgrade what (micro-) breweries you are drinking from. Or move to Belgium. IPAs have their place, but I'd rather drink a Lambic or a Gose etc. London also has a good selection of craft beers.

dot1x• 6 years ago

Agree with everything except induction.

Frost1x• 6 years ago

stoves which are increasingly induction-based and safe rather than fire hazards burners/gas

As someone who enjoys cooking, the proliferation of induction based stoves makes me sad. I find cooking over a gas flame superior in just about every way (except obviously safety and energy efficiency).

Induction cooking just gives little to no feedback and makes it difficult for any pan tilting techniques (I love my garlic basted pan seared steaks...). Pretty much have to use something like cast iron for heat retention now.

gonzo412• 6 years ago

I've solved this problem to my satisfaction at least. YMMV I use a scanpan on an electric stove, and just throw a tablespoon of garlic butter on top of the steaks and let em cook. Once they are ready to flip the butter has melted off and started cooking the garlic which I use with the butter to baste. I find I don't need to be moving the pan much.

Whilst the steak is resting I usually cook cut french onion in the same pan, when the onions are browned I de-glaze it with a half a glass of wine and let that reduce to get all the fond for an awesome pan sauce.

chris_st• 6 years ago

Well...

not getting lost while frantically driving down a freeway; or anywhere else, for that matter

I had a real "The Machine Stops" moment a few months ago when I was trying to get to a doctor appointment, and I'm running late, so I fire up the map app on my phone, enter the address, and get on the highway... and no internet. And yeah, I hadn't been to this location enough to know how to get there, and it's in a twisty maze of passages, all just enough alike each other to make "hopeful" navigation worthless.

Rebooted the phone, got the internet again, got to the appointment, whew.

And yeah, we have our old bag of maps in the car, but they're old enough that I'm not sure the office is ON those maps...!

mrfusion3• 6 years ago

I was driving to a relatives house out of state when my phone died and I didn’t have a charger. I had their address and phone number only on my phone! I was panicking.

Luckily my phone was able to restart after a few minutes and I memorized the directions before it shut down again.

I still wonder what I would have done otherwise?

davidjnelson• 6 years ago

Lots to be grateful for.

cosmojg• 6 years ago

nuisance software patents have been expiring (eg GIF, arithmetic encoding, MP3)

I can't wait until the day this list includes "software patents are no longer a thing"

s_r_n• 6 years ago

"air quality in most places has continued to improve, forest cover has increased, and more rivers are safe to fish in" This makes me really happy to read. I know that in the 90's, there was pessimism around the environment already (e.g., the hole in the ozone layer). It's really nice to know that from this person's perspective, things are improving.

mrfusion3• 6 years ago

This made me look into Spaced repitition and wow are there really no apps on the iPhone that are free or inexpensive?? I’d love to just try loading up the multiplication tables for my kids.

cma2• 6 years ago

hotels and restaurants provide public Internet access by default, without nickel-and-diming customers or travelers; this access is usually via WiFi

Most sell your data.

pjdemers• 6 years ago

Comparing to 90s to today isn't fair to today. The 90s were a golden era (well, at least 92-99). Compare the 70s to today. Some thing are better, some things are worse, it probably balances out.

speby• 6 years ago

Pretty exhaustive list ... here's one more:

* No need for a road atlas, or asking people for directions to their home and scribbling spoken directions down on paper * And even when MapQuest finally came around, no more need to print out the directions!

dusted• 6 years ago

My perspective as a child during the 90s, and was a teen in the 2000s. I've been working as a programmer the past 10 years.

https://www.designboom.com/technology/evolution-desk-harvard...

Looking at those two desks, I envy the person of the 90s. I envy them the physicality of their environment, of their mind. I envy that they get to actually, physically, organize their day and relate directly to people. The empty desk has nothing but an interface into an artificial world where we are now supposed to live and do everything. The room around that rectangle fades out and becomes as irrelevant as it is empty.

I understand that a lot of things are easier and neater now, but I am not sure if I thrive in this environment. It feels hollow and empty.

rjkennedy98• 6 years ago

it is now reasonably safe and feasible to live in (most) big cities like NYC, Chicago, or DC

Not it you make an average income.

My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s

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