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I have a gut feeling that SerenityOS is going to have the same kind of progress that Linux had. Started as a little hobby side project "but nothing serious" but could eventually become something that ends up being a really useful. We will see where it is in another 5 years. Coming from a completely fresh base means that it has not gather the same technical legacy as others and that could really play to its hands in years to come.
Alan Watts said it about LSD - but equally applies to MDMA. Use it like a scientist uses a microscope. Use it to observe but then you go away and work on what you have experienced. Don't get fixated on the observation stage.
It is one of the easiest things to do that has a sizeable impact on the world.
I don't want to defend the Hiltons but that is just one example of something that was very common during that time period. In the 50's/60's - the idea that we would not solve the fundamental issues of the era over the coming decades would have been laughable.
When it comes to material shortages, fusion power, limits of computer chip scaling, global warming, over fishing, plastic waste, hyper effective battery storage, nuclear deescalation etc... have all been answered a lot with - they will think of something. Yes, there have been improvements but with most of these things, we have also missed the mark by a long shot. And decades later, we haven't. Sometimes it is right, look at what we did with CFC's. But it is by no means something I would hitch my wagon to.
John Michael Greer calls phrases like these 'Thought-stoppers' Little saying that we have that mean we don't have to face the ugly truth of something or are just trying to be a little too optimistic about the future in the face of hard times. "Housing prices only go up", "They will think of something", "Stock prices only go up", "It is different this time", "The fundamentals don't matter any more" etc.
No as has already been answered. The example I can directly think of is modelling of specific weather patterns across Australia. A model that works in predicting weather 2 weeks out may work today but not work so well in 5 years.
Global Warming is happening, that is not just a realm of modelling but is directly observable today. The models on a broad scale look to be working very well, specific locations and reactions not so much.
It is possible to make broad engines that work but also get the finer details wrong. Signal : Noise ratio and all of that.
I feel for the Weather pattern folk. All of the one I have spoken to over the years are pretty cool. They are trying to model an insanely complex system - oh but thanks to global warming they are struggling to make models that work for longer than a few years because it all keeps changing!
Depends on the examples you use I guess. I mean early last year King Gizzard dropped The Dripping tap. an 18 minute prog rock jam thing where there is a good 5 minutes where they repeat this 41 times like a mantra.
"Drip, drip from the tap don't slip Drip, drip from the tap don't slip on the drip"
The repetition is through the roof on that gem.
Do not mistake technical viability with economic viability. The 1st Breeder reactor went into service in 1962, there have been many after and they have all meet the same fate.
Yes, they can breed their own fuel but the total cost of doing it is wildly prohibitive.
You can get gold/uranium/lithium from Ocean water, try and do it at a price people will actually pay for it. You can get minerals from space, so long as the market rate of $10 million a ton is viable... etc.
As always, if I get proven wrong - that will be a great day!
Sorry this may seem a little snarky but - "They will think of something" - the universal band-aid for I want it to be true but I rationally don't know how.
When ever I hear that, the optimist in me wants it to be true. The pessimist thinks otherwise and nowadays the pessimist usually wins.
We will have hotels in orbit by the 1970's - they will think of something! That was a legitimate thing that the Hiltons proposed back in the 1960's.
I think the big thing is that all those original achievement don't defy physics to achieve them. It was a case of ignorance and the belief that we just were not that smart. And while there was a big period of exponential growth - there is an upper limit.
We aren't going to Galaxies in a few hundred years - the time to Andromeda is 2.5 Million Light Years. Unless we fundamentally have physics wrong, we aren't doing that any quicker no matter how hard we try.
There is a blog called, 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. The idea was to take our current energy requires of Earth and extrapolate it at the current 3% year over year growth. I believe it is by the year 3,400 we would use all the energy of the Milky way. The idea was to prove that we cannot grow forever, because in 1,400 years we would somehow use all the energy of a space 100,000 light years across. Good luck with that.
Space is is just so astoundingly empty. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a scale model of the solar system.
https://stkildamelbourne.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/S...
The Sun is about the size of a Fridge. Pluto is 9KM (5.6 miles) away and the size of a pea. Walking that really puts it all into a tangible scale. And that is merely 5.5 Light hours at full scale. Space is HUGE!
It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials before they ever get truly space bound.
They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero.
Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.
Ready to play Quake 3 and then someone decided to bring a G4 Mac. Easy to communicate right "It just works!"... :D
Actually that would make sense. I usually eat much later 8-9pm and so that crash would come after the work day is done.
I will shoot from the hip on this one. I don't have any sources directly at hand but across a lot of western countries the amount of new licenses has been declining for well over a decade. It is only a matter of time until the sales start to catch up to this.
Car ownership for a lot of people is now a necessity rather than a desire. It is becoming seen as a functional burden rather than a symbol of freedom. Why spend a sizable amount of your income feeding a 2 ton steel beast unless it is absolutely needed?
It is a wave that has come before and will come again.
Task gets out sourced. They save some money initially. Managers how did it get a promotion and then skips out to the next company. Out sourced work ends up costing more than the original in house work. In house work grows. Rinse and repeat.
If you can survive the wave you will be fine. It just depends on how brutal they get with the initial lay off.
To add to what others have said about the utility of books. A deeper question is, why should it have any purpose? Can we not just do something just because we do it. Not everything has to quantified into a manner of a positive transaction. It can just be 'for nice'.
I know this is an argument of 'ignorance is bliss'. But one wonders if the subject would be aware of this decline?
If you are in decline but unaware of it, is that a bad thing?
Yeah, I'm going to be one of those folks. Intermittent fasting always worked for me.
I think because it just keeps everything even or at least the hour-to-hour delta to a minimum. When you break it down into smaller meals, even if you are following the low calories through out the day, it can create a higher high/low that can swing through out the day.
Your mileage may vary.
I am not so keen on photon transistors, at least not in the short term. I have seen them proposed for decades but progress has been slow at best. Maybe some folks will figure it out and we will make that leap but current progress is not looking great. As for Carbon nano tubes, I'm not too familiar with the applications of this for transistors but it does sound like something that can get us a little further down the road.
All this arm chair speculation. All the people that work on these things would know far better than me. And I mean ALL the people! ;)
This is something I think in the next 5 years will become a major thing. Broadly speaking from an OS level, the folks that optimize their software the best will see big benefits. I have advocated (lightly so) to some Linux folks that we should start moving to where the situation will be by the end of the decade. Optimize now before we have too.
The pessimist (AKA Stallman) in me is thinking that vendors like Apple and Microsoft are going to use things like their Security processors to force people to buy new hardware. Software optimizations can potentially keep older hardware going for a lot longer, but by having an arbitrary security chip requirement - folks can be forced to purchase new hardware every few years as older model support is dropped. We are already seeing this in Windows 11.
While we will not have a year of the Linux desktop, the ability for the speed optimizations to be more open to all people could be a sizable win for the platform. Provided the ability to do this isn't locked down.
Lithium is widely known about, the real challenge is getting it.
I'm not worried about the abundance of lithium, it is the speed at which we can get it that is the issue. One can still have a shortage even if there is an abundance of potential materials. And starting new mines is a long process. The quickest I have ever seen a decent mine come online from initial approval is 8 years.
Materials we should worry about long term in terms of total volume would be stuff like Cobalt, Nickle and Graphite. But not in the next decade.
A big part of the whole issue of mining is something I always have to bring up to some folks. There are four ways to categorize in which a material is available.
The is the resource, how much we theorize is available. Lithium is a great example, there is loads of the stuff.
There are the reserves, how much we actually know exists. Where it is, what grades etc. This is always lower than the resource.
There is if it is technically extract able. Do we have the technology to get it out? What good is a reserve if it is 200KM under ground? The total of this is always less than the reserves.
And finally, what is economically viable. Say we can still get the materials, are people willing to pay for it? This is my big argument against mining asteroids. This is always less than what is technically extract able.
Once you past through those 4 gates then we can start talking. Don't just talk strategy, talk logistics. It is boring an dirty but it is were the rubber meets the road.
The abundance argument is the same used for silicon and solar panels. Yes it is everywhere but there is a reason we mine quartz rather than just boiling up random patches of dirt to get the stuff.
Many acted like the internet was this weightless thing, now folks are starting to see that they may have to pay the bill in some fashion. This goes for the ecological factors as well.
The Japanese concept of `Mono no aware` seemsto fit into this ideal. The tragedy and loss of life itsef
It is a funny thing. This was during the big push for everything Smart phones, apps and viable streaming changing tastes and the domination of social media. That combo simply knocked it off its pedestal in no time.
The technical legacy of Flash made it a poor fit for touch screens. Apps filled that void with astounding speed.
This part is just a vague opinion I am riffing with - With mass available video, a ocean of video content may have changed tastes enough that the demand for interactive content diminished somewhat. Social media also killed of the dedicated website for a lot of places that used this technology and thus the demand for this stuff.
Once Google via Chrome closed the Flash hole, I do wonder if they will ever let anyone else to try and get in on that space? Time will tell.
That performance was so heavily tied to screen resolution was funny to see. It could crunch a reasonable amount of vector information, but the rasterisation would burn through processor cycles.
There were some projects when I was running on a G3 iMac where I would drop the render screen down really small to see how it would perform on a more powerful machine. It felt like if they even managed to get decent GPU acceleration possible then they could have solved a lot of these issues.
That is fair. Credit to the Chrome and Firefox teams that this is becoming less an issue over the last few years.
I see you work for the Dark side. j/k;)
Maybe I am just remembering it differently as this was more than a decade ago. But it seemed like almost every week, heck almost every day, another zero day would be discovered. Yes, this was the peak time of zero day exploits as every system was being hammered from all sides, but the Flash name came up far more often than anything else I recall expect for maybe general Windows Xp/7 issues.
As for performance, that was a major issue personally. I recall a time when I had nested items a few layers deep so that I could have a character with movable joints and the system was buckling under this work load. Going from fully ridged models running smooth as butter on 3DS Max to the same system crumbling under some basic vector graphics left a bad taste for me. It just always felt like it was dragging its feet compared with what these machine could achieve.
I don't recall any specific bugs only that recall the feeling of them. Sorry I am so light on specifics. A minor bug was that I do recall was as you rotated objects, there must have been a small rounding issue that meant items would slowly shrink as you rotated them multiple times while going about your process. It would take hundreds of such movements before it became noticeable, it was a funny little thing but would lead to some projects becoming a bit frustrating.
I say this as someone who absolutely loved Flash. I wish it had kept on going regardless of those issues. It just felt like it needed a Windows Vista to Windows 7 moment. Where it was taken to task and team got behind it to refine the project into something much more lean that still had the same functionality. Instead it felt like it was treated as that thing that would get barely any attention until it died from atrophy. That mobile wasn't taken to task is probably the thing that ended up killing it quick.
As someone else said here, Flash felt like a vision of the future. Where computers were tools of creation made easy not just consumption.
It was a pioneer in so many things and I wish it was still a part of the web. It made interactive media distribution so dang easy! Build it in Flash, add a single line of HTML and BOOM - multi-platform audio visual experience that could scale like a champ!
Yeah video kind of sucked, early Youtube performance a good example in that as it would bring my G4 Mini to it's knees! But for everything else it was such a visionary idea that we have lost.
On a tangent.
This is something that I feel a lot of modern technology has forgotten. That vision of not just new tech but tech that is enabling to even those that have no interest on the base technology. Flash had that vision, not just of creation but the ease in which it could be spread. Hypercard had that vision. Heck BASIC had that vision. As Steve Jobs always pushed in the early 80's, the computer is a cycle for the mind. Nowadays at times it can feel like the sedation of the mind.
Everytime I see here on HN another link about thing Ruby, GCC, CLANG, some JS framework, Tensor... something - I get it, in those fields it is all very cool and useful. But it is also very much for those that work in the weeds. Great for those that do that, but it also feels so lacking of that "Wow!" factor that I think brought a lot of us into this field. I hope we rediscover that one day and soon.
I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare.
But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems.
That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossible to implement it on that scale today than it was 20 years ago.
Theoretically you could run a Flash file on a Linux system via Konqueror browser and it would be identical to that on Internet Explorer on Windows 98. This is something we have lost.
It is a shame that Adobe/Macromedia treated it like absolute trash. A free/open solution that had the same good properties would have been brilliant but it never happened. Instead we have the whole HTML5+ stack. I mean it is cool and has done some amazing things for the web, but it is also a massive pain to manage. One browser update and boom, something has broken - time to get digging on what happened! Now it works on Chrome but not Firefox!? Oh dear.
I don't miss Flash itself, I mean to be charitable, it was a mediocre product at best. But that vision implemented in a sensible fashion could have been wonderful. Could have allowed for the decentralized web to continue on a bit longer than it has.