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Whining about change
Aug. 24th, 2017 03:20 pmthe thing that bothers me sometimes is you can't just learn one set of things and get the hang of them and be like yaay, good enough
like, my computer skills were pretty good in the 90s.
That's a laughably pathetic standard now.
But for a couple thousand years if you'd learned reading, writing, and how to use a book, scroll, pamphlet etc then you'd got the hang of it. Card catalogues are also handy... though I'm super grateful for modern search engines, don't get me wrong. But your basic information retrieval skills were, one you could read, covered.
Now you've got the hang of things for a few months until everything changes again.
In ways the younglings doing the programming think are intuitive, that to the rest of us are not.
Or just in the sense that some key whatsit you were using simply stops existing, without notice, and now it's all fall apart.
I mean it used to be quite difficult to break up communities, they used to have to physically leave, and incidents of 'went to pub, pub not there' were pretty rare, ish.
... pub not there increasingly common. where do people even go to be social? for a lot of them never the pub in the first place, but, how to be finding...
... and the internet is great for finding. most internet communities are like a dozen regular posters from all over the world who would never have found each other in the first place without the internet. yaay internet.
But the failure mode is just, like, everyone goes away, and you never know where or why.
But for tech you were using to read things, the most likely problem is there's a bazillion possible replacements, none of them acting quite the same way, all of them involving installing things or giving details away, with security and privacy concerns no single human brain can possibly keep up with.
Everything keeps changing, in really rich ways, lots of good new stuff emerges...
... but finding out about it and getting the hang of it before it fails is increasingly difficult.
And it seems like everything fails, on a shortening spiral, because nobody has figured out capitalism on the internet and everything still has to cost someone something, and so companies get sold, sold, sold, until they're sold for peanuts to somewhere that probably shuts them down.
Ridiculous juggling.
I keep saying we build on sand, but the sand in question keeps being tossed around like glittery juggling balls.
I mean it's grand and glorious at the high points
but
everything keeps moving.
like, my computer skills were pretty good in the 90s.
That's a laughably pathetic standard now.
But for a couple thousand years if you'd learned reading, writing, and how to use a book, scroll, pamphlet etc then you'd got the hang of it. Card catalogues are also handy... though I'm super grateful for modern search engines, don't get me wrong. But your basic information retrieval skills were, one you could read, covered.
Now you've got the hang of things for a few months until everything changes again.
In ways the younglings doing the programming think are intuitive, that to the rest of us are not.
Or just in the sense that some key whatsit you were using simply stops existing, without notice, and now it's all fall apart.
I mean it used to be quite difficult to break up communities, they used to have to physically leave, and incidents of 'went to pub, pub not there' were pretty rare, ish.
... pub not there increasingly common. where do people even go to be social? for a lot of them never the pub in the first place, but, how to be finding...
... and the internet is great for finding. most internet communities are like a dozen regular posters from all over the world who would never have found each other in the first place without the internet. yaay internet.
But the failure mode is just, like, everyone goes away, and you never know where or why.
But for tech you were using to read things, the most likely problem is there's a bazillion possible replacements, none of them acting quite the same way, all of them involving installing things or giving details away, with security and privacy concerns no single human brain can possibly keep up with.
Everything keeps changing, in really rich ways, lots of good new stuff emerges...
... but finding out about it and getting the hang of it before it fails is increasingly difficult.
And it seems like everything fails, on a shortening spiral, because nobody has figured out capitalism on the internet and everything still has to cost someone something, and so companies get sold, sold, sold, until they're sold for peanuts to somewhere that probably shuts them down.
Ridiculous juggling.
I keep saying we build on sand, but the sand in question keeps being tossed around like glittery juggling balls.
I mean it's grand and glorious at the high points
but
everything keeps moving.