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From the RooshV Forum:
I constantly get the vibe from people that they think our technology is skyrocketing, that we're living in a new tech age, "where was all this ten years ago?!" etc.
But I disagree with this assessment of our technology. It has made steady improvements in one specific space: software and electronic hardware. That is all. On top of that, the improvements on the hardware have not even been ground breaking. GPS is a ground-breaking invention. Smaller screens are not: they are just an incremental improvement.
Smartphones are merely the result of incremental improvements in the size and quality of electronic components. The only breakthroughs involved are ages old. The invention of the transistor, the laser, etc. The existence of google, facebook, uber, and so on, are merely inevitable "new applications" stemming from these improvements. They are not breakthroughs, they are merely improvements and combinations upon the telephone, the directory, and the taxi.
In my opinion, technology as a whole is borderline stagnant.
A list of why technology is still shit:
The posting goes on to list examples of incremental, rather than breakthrough, changes in the areas of:
- Electronics & Machines
- Energy
- Medicine
- Clothes
- Food
- Finance
Have we really stagnated? Have we already found all of the "low-hanging fruit", so new breakthroughs are harder to find? Maybe there is greater emphasis on changes that are immediately able to be commercialized and less emphasis on basic research?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 29 2017, @03:43PM
Yes, I remember when Google broke verbatim search and it stopped being a tool for serious research. There's absolutely no way to predict what nonsense it will display these days, even among the top search hits. Yes, you can still try to force it to actually use your search terms with the "allintext:" operator, but the subset of hits you get will still vary depending on stuff that shouldn't matter, like search term order. (Note I'm not saying the ranking merely changes; the actual complete list of hits that show up will vary for the same set of search terms.)
Don't get me wrong: Google is now a much more convenient tool for casual queries. It's utterly broken for serious research now, though. (And yes, there are other search engines that can restrict your queries in a more consistent fashion, but Google's database and ranking algorithms still make it superior -- if only it still allowed one to do "old timer" searches in a predictable way....)
So, no, new search algorithms are absolutely NOT better at delivering "exactly what [I] need." They're better at delivering something vaguely like what I might want if I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for.