Where the scientific & technical accomplishments of the past seem implausible---contrasted against the modern era challenge of trying to make a reliable & resilient API service---were it not for the documented evidence of their occurrence and these relics left behind to marvel at.
It's like some people pretend that no one is working on space ships, sustainable energy, electric cars, extending the human lifespan, genetic engineering, quantum computing, memristors, real-time communications platforms to remove national boundaries, etc, all of the stuff that is actually changing the world and is actually happening right now.
We're not in a dark age. If anything we're in the brightest age we've ever been in. So much cool shit is happening, so much groundbreaking and future-shaping research is occurring, and the very nature of what it means to be human is evolving faster now than it has in thousands of years... and the coolest thing about it is, so much is happening that people are able to forget about it. People are able to set aside the idea that they're holding the entire world in their hand, wirelessly, with chips as powerful as the most powerful desktops running silently, obeying their every command as they connect to the World Wide Web and complain to everyone around the globe that we must surely be in a dark age because we don't have government-sponsored space shuttles anymore.
And that communication may very well be bounced off a satellite placed into orbit by a private company with a launch that is so commonplace that it's not even announced on TV anymore. Dark age indeed.
Being able to talk to anyone in the world thru a device in my pocket - pretty incredible!
Being able to have my conversations remotely listened to by pretty much any nation state with a few million to spend with zero-day-phone-"forensics"-vendor-de-jour - pretty, ummm, something...
:sigh:
Is there truth in the idea that repairs take longer? Sure. Sometimes it's due to incompetence and lack of funding. Other times it's for the same reason that software takes a lot more effort to maintain/refactor than it took to write in the first place. There's a lot of momentum you have to undo if you want to make an old thing new again.
I dont know... Japan, Korea and Taiwan can build roads and public transit far better than they do it at home in Boston... And for a fraction of the cost.
> Is there truth in the idea that repairs take longer? Sure. Sometimes it's due to incompetence and lack of funding...
...of course, being able to explain why we are entering a new "Dark Age" would not negate the fact that we are.
I don't really see your point. It is easy to point to something that is crumbling in e.g. California because many of the investments were made in past decades. In Northern Europe e.g. overhead power lines are increasingly rare in urban settings. It isn't really investment in maintenance, but in upgrades.
Science has progressed rapidly in the last couple of decades. These days we are to a large extent limited by other factors, like organizing. For instance if you had a barrier separated self-driving lane on certain highways you could already have self-driving. Of course self-driving already exists in things like trains, there just isn't a lot of incentive to implement that. Having self-driving train carriages departing every minute is entirely possible with today's technology.
So to address the top comment I do think people are wasting their time, even those working on more qualified problems. Because without the larger support and investments it is like trying to bake a cake without eggs.
(I guess trying to bake cakes without eggs on a large scale could actually have a lot of merit, but you get the idea).
In the years 2011-2013, China used more concrete than the US did in the entire 20th century.
The creation of the modern internet is also a modern infrastructure marvel.
And you’d be surprised how rickety it is (a bit by design... a bit because there are still plenty of SPF... a bit because nobody bothers or is able to coordinate maintenance of core infra such as BGP)
Even the Allmighty Germans had a look at their, and were a bit horrified at what they found. (To their credit, it seems they immediately planned a wad of money for extraordinary refurbs)
Could anyone breakdown what those are, and why they might be world changing for a non technical audience?
There's been a lot of HN discussion about different articles that predict a huge commercial importance for memristors—or that say that they're not very useful or not very interesting!
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=memristor&sort=byPopularity&pr...
Dig around (wikipedia is a good start) - you can find enough information on how to build a memistor and play with it yourself.
It is silly, but still true, and not only because there is "no money for big science"
The amount of research being done went up 20 fold since the golden age, but there were nothing close to repeating the monumental feats of 20th century like the Green Revolution, 5 successful complete disease eradication programs, complete public education coverage, panpopulational vaccination programmes, and on and on...
A seldom-addressed question for something which has somehow become so predominant.
Consumption by itself does not add value to society. It's arguably harmful. Corporate profits do not directly add value to society. Once again, they are arguably harmful (excess productivity being siphoned off, etc).
Ads drive unnecessary consumption. Do you think our society would be better, or worse, if soft drinks had never been advertised? Or how about cigarettes?
Ads are neutral at best, and typically harmful.
For developed nations, there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. We can basically cure (or treat so well that it's the same as a cure) almost any disease that threatens to cut a life short. For many of the ones we can't cure yet, we have built amazing technology around as a stopgap. Spoons that stabilize themselves so Parkinson's sufferers can eat normally aren't cheap or easy to build, certainly not something that could have been done in the 20s or even the 60s.
For developing nations, progress is still moving swiftly. They're now benefiting from treatments and vaccines that are taken for granted in the developed world, so their quality of life is increasing dramatically. Tons of effort is going into curing illnesses specific to their problems, like Bill Gates with malaria, condoms, and toilets, or Jimmy Carter with the guinea worm. And it's working.
We've chosen to fight harder battles because the easy fights are already won. Don't mistake that for a lack of progress.
Obeying _who's_ every command?
Disgruntled-tinpot-surveillance-state-of-Australia-resident...
But, with SpaceX and other private companies venturing into space? I feel like humans are doing pretty well.
For some the end of the shuttle program was a downer but it was probably the single best thing to have happened to NASA in decades. the Shuttle program if anything held NASA back. The investment alone made it near impossible to not use it and the cost of using it doomed money for other development.
Now we have Space X with a record number of launches, China going to the dark side of the moon, and even more private corporations reaching for space. We still have cooperation with Russia not withstanding all the political strife caused by their leadership. The EU has had great missions recently and even India is moving forward.
For example, when I stand in front of an SR-71 Blackbird and consider that it was created w/ slide rules & Friden mechanical calculators. When sophisticated automated design and analysis tools like FEA and CFD were still far, far away. It conjures a narrative for me, true or not, that they seemed to do so much with so little, and by contrast we seem to do so little with so much. Which results in a crude emotional response that is some hybrid of awe & despair.
Then a few days goes by, and I snap out of it.
My worry is that people who think "move fast and break things" is a good business strategy are now starting to move into transport, medicine, and other fields where the lives of random citizens are on the line.
Anyone's risk, even if there's no risk at all. Post on Reddit about how you replaced your own water heater and people will wag their finger at you for not having a licensed plumber do it all (as if the plumber would stop by the next day to check for leaks). People get off on trying to score virtue points virtue signaling about risk (not just on the internet, in real life too).
The Christmas tree (or do I have to call it a holiday tree because the "risk" of offending someone is too great) across the room from me might spontaneously catch fire. It probably won't happen so I don't care, that won't stop some anonymous stranger on the internet telling me I should use modern LED lights because they run cooler.
I understand not playing fast and loose with people's lives but the likelihood and magnitude of a possible bad outcome required to stall things has been getting smaller and smaller over the years and it makes getting anything and everything done more time consuming and costly. Before you could just put up a Christmas tree in the office if everyone wanted to, now you have to figure out if anyone could hypothetically be offended. Before you could just build a road or a bridge and deal with the environmental impact as it happens, now you have to do a study and account for the whereabouts of every drop of rainwater that will fall on whatever you're building before you even break ground.
There is a risk of a potential bad outcome inherit to everything. Somehow society has perverted itself into thinking that risk is a binary and all risk is bad and not work it.
Sensationalist journalism coupled with ability of the Internet to amplify the worst. If an astronaut died back then, maybe a few tabloids could have screamed in horror, while every other media would have depicted the tragedy as what it was: a highly trained professional who lost his life while doing something amazing but very dangerous whose risks he was well aware of. Today a tragic event like that one would produce such a level of trash that its effects could undermine political campaigns or have perfectly healthy businesses go belly up. It's just too risky.
The F-35 seems to my non-expert eye to have been poorly conceived but creating a more versatile aircraft instead of a bunch of more specialized ones is not inherently a stupid idea.
And for a military aircraft I guess the answer will always be 'really good'.
China may get to the mass-produced stage, but that's stil debatable, since they have issues with their engines.
And still I'd say - yes, it's better.
Isn't that an oxymoron?
Of course the design of the APC in your clip is only the opening of the disaster. Once it got to testing before the actual acquisition things got even more ridiculous to the point that I think people should have clearly been prosecuted for reason. But as Boyd said: You can either do something or be someone.
Did no technology programmes in the 60s fail or have limited success? All of them were complete triumphs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg
Nowadays money gets thrown at other things, stuff is still happening.
https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/locations.php
Of course, they've been gutted of electronics and engines, but still, anybody can walk right up to one with calipers and a tape measure... Good luck affording that much titanium though. It's a PITA to form and weld, too.
If you feel like you're working on something menial, do what you can to point your arrow in a direction you find meaningful. Often times, fields like biology desperately need people with technical skills that want to work hard on important problems.
Of course, in real life, space travel got boring. We couldn't afford the lunar colonies or spinning orbital platforms or missions to Mars we all thought we would see in a few years. It was only in Star Trek and Star Wars that space offered endless variety and new frontiers, but reality offered nothing but dust, and the billions of dollars we were spending flying people to go stand on the dust started to seem like a wasted effort.
Perhaps a more interesting question would be that of all significant/important knowledge in human history. Some information is more important than other; the name of a childless bachelor who lived in a small town 200 years ago is still knowledge, but it isn't helpful for very much.
Got us some selfies from the Moon though. Pretty neat