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from the put-on-the-special-glasses-to-see-through-their-disguise dept.
Daniel Wilson, the author of Robopocalypse, has a new book out on the shelves called The Clockwork Dynasty.
There's a great moment in The Hobbit when Bilbo Baggins is exploring a stinking troll cave and finds an ancient Elven short sword, lost for centuries, buried under the muck. It's Sting, baby. And nobody wonders whether Sting will be less powerful than all the flashy new swords on the market. They assume that it's more powerful.
In some of the most engrossing worlds ever imagined—Star Wars, The Hobbit, and even Dune—the older something is, the better. The characters in those stories respect the achievements of their long-disappeared ancestors, and they honor the technological feats of heroes whose deeds have turned to legend.
Maybe we're drawn to these stories because they're so different from our own society, where we're obsessed with the latest, freshest version of any gadget—and it's off to the trash heap with whatever falls out of date. If Bilbo had found an iPhone in that cave, I highly doubt it would have been worth wielding for the rest of his adventure and then passed down through his family.
In my latest novel, I wanted to capture that feeling of awe for the past and bring it into our present. The Clockwork Dynasty acknowledges that our ancestors had incredible technological triumphs—and imagines that some of them are still walking among us, machines disguised as people. Older than cities, these avtomat (a Russian word that can mean robot) fight their own ancient wars in the shadows, even as they quietly go about shaping our civilization in the image of a world they lost millennia ago.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/08/how-to-build-an-ancient-robot-overlord/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Slartibartfast on Thursday August 03 2017, @02:17PM (7 children)
It's right there, writ large, in The Orange One's motto: "Make America Great *Again*". Yearning for a past remembered as superior is a fundamental human flaw; each generation, in turn, is certain that the young ones are going to Hell in a handbasket. And the music sucks.
Blah, blah, blah.
Precisely none of this is new; even in the Bible, I seem to recall Paul (?) telling someone to mellow out; yes, things were bad, but they weren't so bad as all that, and he rather doubted Jesus would be putting in his return gig just yet.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 03 2017, @03:46PM (6 children)
Yearning for a past remembered as superior is a fundamental human flaw; each generation, in turn, is certain that the young ones are going to Hell in a handbasket. And the music sucks.
Not really true. There are a lot of things which really do get worse over time.
For instance, keyboards. The keyboard I'm typing this on is a cheap, mushy piece of crap. That's how almost all keyboards are these days. But back in the 80s, IBM Model M keyboards were commonplace, and were excellent. Of course, they cost a lot more too... And yes, you can still get high-quality keyboards, but very few people actually do, and good luck getting them to let you use one at work.
Another thing that's objectively worse is user interfaces, as proven by the Windows 8/10 Metro interface, and all the horrible websites with ridiculous amounts of wasted whitespace. UIs for desktop computing hit their peak in the mid-2000s IMO. UIs for mobile devices are still evolving and are certainly better than in the early 2000s (styli suck!), but we've paid for it with desktop computing going straight down the toilet in usability and style (note today's horribly garish color schemes that are all the rage).
I really wish people would stop bringing up the music thing. Today's popular music really is crap, and it's not just nostalgia: the music industry has fundamentally changed due to technology. Back in the 60s-80s when music was objectively better, we didn't have the internet (in popular usage), digital music downloads, etc. It'd be interesting if someone wrote a dissertation about all this, but suffice it to say the environment is fundamentally different. Likewise, the environment of the latter 20th century was very different from, say, the mid-1800s. I'd say the music was probably better in the latter 20th century than the 1800s due to diversity, and the presence of mass-produced recordings (in the 1800s, you would only be able to hear music live, unless you count player pianos, so in reality most people just didn't get to hear a lot of music at all except maybe some crappy performances at their local church, or their relatives singing). Not all music today is crap; there's some great stuff to be found on the internet if you look hard, but it won't be from the mainstream record companies like in the days of yore. But we don't have the well-defined trends now that we had back then, caused by the ability of the music industry to discover innovators and then market the hell out of them nationally on the radio. You're just not going to see something like Led Zeppelin these days. But this might be a temporary thing; the WWW is really less than 25 years old at this point, so we're probably going through an adjustment phase as a society in many ways.
Things are not always improving. And things aren't always going either up or down either. Things go in cycles, sometimes getting better, other times getting worse, and different things rise and fall at different times. Right now, IMO, music has gone way downhill, desktop computing is going down, US governance is really in a shambles, but cars are getting better and better, and biological and medical sciences are improving fairly quickly (e.g., CRISPR). Back in the 70s, the music was great (well, rock was, disco wasn't), but crime was out of control, cars were ugly and crap (and spewed lead into the air), men's hairstyles were awful (we're seeing a return of this too), everyone smoked cigarettes, but at least we were able to build infrastructure. Back in the 80s, there was a lot of great music (even the pop music was fun to listen to; Autotune hadn't been invented yet), cars were still ugly and crap but at least better than the 70s, men's hairstyles were good but women's hairstyles were pretty awful, smoking was going away quickly, lots of great video games came out (NES), but we had Reaganism and the "me" generation and were worried about getting nuked. Now, men's hairstyles largely suck (at least with the younger hipsters and all the men growing beards), and women's are pretty great. I could go on and on, but hopefully you get the point. Every age has its good and bad features, and they come and go.
(Score: 1) by Slartibartfast on Thursday August 03 2017, @05:46PM (2 children)
With all due respect, bah, humbug. Of *course* there are plenty of individual elements that get worse -- commoditization, as a rule, makes things "cheap" -- in both senses of the word. On the other hand, life expectancy is up, Linux is everywhere. When you cherry pick individual metrics, you can (dis-)prove anything you want.
As for keyboards, old-skool IBM, baby. 100+ WPM by day, weapon for attacking burglars by night.
40 years form now, the kids will complain how their 4 Tb/s mobile connections are too darn slow to download the NeWikipedia corpus in realtime, and how it all just seemed to work for their parents back in the day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @07:48PM (1 child)
> bah humbug
He proved existence by example, Slarti, so you're off base being negative! Look at his music example - the creative environment now is essentially 'global' and so there aren't local ecological pockets. Thus go extinct the niche fillers as pigs and rats and invasive plants churn out pop 'hits' within a deviation or two of The Mean, and local maxima and minima away from The Mean are smoothed out.
Globalization is bad for the number of species of pretty birds, most wouldn't argue; the same *does* hold for music!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 04 2017, @01:28AM
Fortunately, we also have many ways to find new music in both older styles and innovative styles. (Of course, nowhere near all the innovative ones will be good.)
The MAFIAA aren't the only ones capable of composing, performing, and publishing music.
The good stuff is still there, elsewhere. Your observations only hold for the MAFIAA.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday August 03 2017, @11:12PM (2 children)
I think you've solved your own problem there. You can get a better keyboard than the Model M for less than the Model M cost back then, so why haven't you? The Model M was two or three hundred bucks when it was first released (according to some random guy on a forum anyway -- https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=9629.0) [geekhack.org] Today, you can get a brand new Model M from Unicomp for under $100. Or you can buy a garbage keyboard for $10. So the good keyboards are just as good and also much cheaper (even ignoring inflation!)...but most people have decided that the only quality they care about is price, so from their perspective the $10 keyboard is still better than that $100 Model M. Personally, I prefer my Model M for RSI avoidance, but the cheap crap has its uses too. You can buy a laptop for $100-$200 today; imagine if the keyboard alone still cost ~$300! So quality has improved, prices have declined, access has been expanded to more people...none of that is bad.
UIs aren't worse; WINDOWS is worse. That's not much of a shock. The OS is in decline anyway thanks to the rise of mobile devices and chromebooks and such, but that doesn't mean the entire world is going with it. In fact, plenty of more casual users would say UI design has improved because they're using a tablet now and they find the tablet easier to use than their old PC. And the more technical users are already running something like Linux that isn't following this UI paradigm. So no, UI is not objectively worse, it's just that some vendors have started targeting a different market. If you're not in that market, pick a new vendor!
Well, there was certainly a lot of crap music back then too; often people compare the best from back then against the worst of today. I also think that's again a demographics/market issue more than an actual change in quality. I wouldn't even argue that the average quality of "popular" music has declined, but I think the percentage of the population that actually listens to "popular" music is decreasing too. There's just so much choice today that people who actually CARE about music are picking from a significantly larger catalog, so nothing that they listen to is going to reach that same level of popularity. The charts are now dominated by people like my mother, who when you ask her what kind of music she likes, would reply "I don't know...Something happy".
When something is new, it is ruled by experts. When it is commonplace, it is ruled by the least common denominator. If you want to measure whether quality has improved or declined, stick to a single class of user and how their experience has changed. You can't spend two grand on a laptop last year then go buy a Chomebook this year and start complaining about the great decline in laptop quality...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday August 04 2017, @03:42PM (1 child)
You can get a better keyboard than the Model M for less than the Model M cost back then, so why haven't you?
Have you ever tried bringing a mechanical keyboard to an office job? Even worse, a job where they have open-plan seating? Good luck with that. I have a Modem M at home, but there's no way I could have one at work.
The other thing is laptop keyboards: these have been going down the tubes too, with almost all laptops now having those stupid "island" keys that Apple popularized. Even the Thinkpad keyboards aren't nearly as good as they used to be. And laptop keyboards can't be swapped out the way desktop ones can.
UIs aren't worse; WINDOWS is worse.
No, it's the same on Linux: Gnome3 is an abomination, and everyone and his brother is pushing it in the Linux landscape (see Ubuntu finally giving up and adopting Gnome3 recently). Sure, you can opt for KDE or XFCE (or MATE or Cinnamon), but not many users do, and not many distros support these well. Everyone's jumped on the Gnome3 bandwagon. And Windows is still by far the dominant OS, like it or not. Good luck getting a job where you don't have to use it. Even in all the Linux-using software jobs I've had, I had to use Windows for Office, email, etc., and usually use Linux in a VM. These days, that means you're going to be using Windows 10, either now or very soon when your company migrates.
The OS is in decline anyway thanks to the rise of mobile devices and chromebooks and such, but that doesn't mean the entire world is going with it.
The entire business world IS going with it.
In fact, plenty of more casual users would say UI design has improved because they're using a tablet now and they find the tablet easier to use than their old PC.
You can't do real work on a tablet; that's an entirely different market. That's like saying that negative changes in commercial aviation (e.g., horribly tiny seats with no legroom) don't matter because you can just ride a bicycle and today's bicycles are better than ever (you can get a pretty nice aluminum road bike for $500 now).
Well, there was certainly a lot of crap music back then too; often people compare the best from back then against the worst of today.
Yes, except today there is no good mass-market music. It's all horrible, overly-compressed, Autotuned garbage. Things really are different now; they didn't have the Internet or American Idol back in the 80s. However, I will say it's pretty nice being able to get on YouTube and listen to whole albums of just about anything, including the classics of yesteryear.
There's just so much choice today that people who actually CARE about music are picking from a significantly larger catalog, so nothing that they listen to is going to reach that same level of popularity
This is true, but it also means there's no shared culture any more. You get in a car with someone you know and if they're one of those pop listeners you're likely to be listening to some hip-hop garbage that they're pushing on the radio.
You can't spend two grand on a laptop last year then go buy a Chomebook this year and start complaining about the great decline in laptop quality...
No, but I did mention laptops up above. Get a top of the line Thinkpad from ~2000-2005, and a top of the line Thinkpad from today, and compare the keyboards. There is a decline. Screens are generally worse too (compared to the late 2000s I think), because of the shift to 16:9 aspect ratios.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday August 04 2017, @08:10PM
So get a mechanical keyboard with silent Cherry switches or any of the many alternatives. Unlike when the Model M was new, we have many, many options these days.
Personally I much prefer the keyboard on my T450 Thinkpad over the one they had on the T400s. And my System76 Bonobo has a pretty decent keyboard too, I particularly enjoy having a full numpad on a laptop for the first time. And you seem to have missed my point anyway -- most people think cheaper *is* better. And in many ways it can be. You can get a better keyboard if you're willing to pay for it, but most people just want the cheap one, and that's still an improvement because it's much, much cheaper.
People have referred to Gnome as a "Fischer-Price UI" since long before Gnome 3, and there's good reason for that. Personally I prefer to use Enlightenment. Not many others do, which is fine. You are complaining that most PC users aren't PC experts, but PCs aren't just for PC experts anymore. We still need farmers and secretaries, and they need computers they can use too. If you want a system designed for experts, it's right there in the repos, go pick one!
Businesses...yes, that's a valid issue. But that's just a matter of inertia. Large corporations aren't particularly agile things, they're going to take some time to adapt to the changing software landscape. But they'll get there. And we're the kind of people that need to drag them forward on that. Also consider that even Windows 10 is practically state-of-the-art compared to the companies still running COBOL and FORTRAN code. Plus, businesses don't want to train people, so if their secretaries prefer Windows 10, they're going to stick with Windows 10. Us techies can adapt much easier than the rest of the workforce, so we get screwed. But again, that doesn't mean the entire world is falling apart. Just sucks for us that we aren't the rulers of this domain anymore.
I would say "Good mass-market music" is not a good thing, it's a symptom. Firstly, "good music" is rather subjective...but I think what we're really talking about here is "skilled musicians", right? But that's not the point of "mass-market". Mass-market music is music that's being pushed by the record labels or the radio stations or whoever else. It's not much better than an advertisement. In the past, that was the main way to discover new music, so the people who were interested in skilled musicians would naturally all be supporting the same musicians, because those were the only skilled musicians the labels would put out. Today, we don't have to rely on the labels. The artists I'm adding to my MP3 player lately are often just some guy in his garage on the other side of the country -- or even the other side of the planet. I'm listening to guys where the artist and also the record label have neither a website nor a Wikipedia page. Twenty years ago a band like that *never* could have gotten on the radio, and I never would have known they exist. Today, they'll get a few thousand fans almost instantly off their first album. Diversity is not decline; the fact that the whole world isn't aligning behind your personal preference doesn't mean everyone is having a worse experience. Most people want something slightly different, and today we can actually get it. And that's an improvement.
Well as I said, I think the Thinkpad keyboards have actually approved...I do miss the old 1600x1200 CRTs though. On the other hand, multiple monitors are getting *very* cheap, and we've got 4k coming up...hell just last night I watched a YouTube video of someone gaming in 16k. Better resolution is certainly possible. When I was in highschool I remember saving for months with my brother to save up $800 for an pretty poor Dell PC (one step up from the cheapest thing they had...I think it was a Dimension 2100)...but it *did* have that 21" 1600x1200 CRT. Adjusted for inflation the cost was around $1000, which today would buy you a gaming rig ($750 for a Dell XPS tower), a 24" 4k display ($180 for the LG 25UM56-P) and probably a Model M or equivalent keyboard too. How is that not better?