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Comment by robertelder | Hacker News Reader

It's common for people today to think of ancient Greeks as being very unsophisticated and primitive, but then when you start to read what ancient philosophers wrote you think "Wow, these guys really had things figured out, maybe better than we do now." I kind of feel the same way comparing modern GUI applications to ancient editors like ed.

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I find learning this lesson often enough made me realize that it's difficult to remember that people in the past were every bit as intelligent as people are now. They simply had fewer, older tools.

There's another related lesson there that progress, like evolution, is progress in a certain direction. No one said that direction is whatever you call "good" at the moment.

> people in the past were every bit as intelligent as people are now.

... and some evidence supports they were smarter...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/people-getting-dumb...

Good point.This argument that domestication lowers intelligence (among other powerful abilities) and that we are unquestionably domesticating ourselves is pretty damn solid. The only argument against it seems to be "... but my ego!".

Obviously there is some interplay with the fact that we develop new mental models and thinking tools to augment intelligence.

Also immersion as children in highly abstract ways of thinking further augments/multiplies raw intelligence (most convincing explanation to the Flynn effect imo).

I've lost the link, but there was an excellent article I read related to the amazing Otzi discovery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) describing how adults of that era (modern humans, primitive societies) would likely have been terrifying to us now in just how much they outclassed us in raw strength, intelligence and stamina. We would be relying a lot on the benefits of childhood nutrition and education to feel superior. This isn't completely convincing, there are a lot of factors in play, but those levels of brutal competition and danger would have a profound effect, especially epigenetically.

Which is why I have been learning and using emacs daily for a few years now, and it's amazing how much more powerful it is than I ever seem to fully understand. I'll think "now I have it all like I want it", and then a few months later I learn about a way to do X.

Especially as a sysadmin, I spend so much time in a ssh cli, that part of my reasoning was "I want to be able to do all my normal tasks without the gui." Gmail, news, and rss in gnus, irc in erc, org-mode (loving export to latex for reports), eww for browsing, and who knows whats next. Elixir and go modes are improving too, and my general productivity due to staying mostly inside a single ecosystem has really improved.

Another reason I have done this though, is I feel like it's less about gui vs text, and much more about FOSS vs proprietary. In a few years when everyone has an iBrain with Apple (NSA) inside, I intend to have a MEmacs brain that I have control over.

I think RMS will be vindicated in history as a man far ahead of his time.

Very true. I read Plato's Timmeus for a music theory class once and noticed that along the way of explaining his version of music theory, he also--from first principles only--deduced the existence of fundamental particles. He didn't call then protons, neutrons, and electrons, obviously. Be he got the basic idea correct: that all the things that exist are fundamentally built from the same things.

My mind was constantly being blown in that class.

I get a tiny ping of irritation every time I use an application to do some mundane, repeatable, well-defined task and it doesn't have a CLI.

But then you remember that Ed was designed to be used on what essentially was a typewriter, because dialup was so slow, that you couldn't send an entire screen worth of text at once. So you would basically be remembering the text in your head, while inserting and regexing lines.

And the great error handling when it doesn't know what you just told it to do. ?

It's not that they had dialup, or that they couldn't send an entire screen at once (though I'm sure these factors later helped keep ed around). The devices they were using were much more like a typewriter than you seem to think, they literally printed the text out on paper! The programmer didn't need to remember the text in their head, they had the paper right there to look at!

I haven't used ed, but I'm inclined to agree. People still make fun of me for living in the terminal.

Which philosophers? The only one I've read in any depth is Aristotle, and while he is clearly very smart, I agreed with essentially none of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

I do not understand your reply; Lorem ipsum text is tangentially related to Cicero, but he's Roman, not Greek.

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