My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s | Hacker News Reader

My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s

gwern.net

382 pointseru197 comments

A counterpoint to this that may resonate with some:

* I _feel_ significantly less hopeful than I did in the 1990s. Things _seemed_ to be heading in the right direction in lots of important areas then. Now I feel significant anxiety about whether my kids will live in a dystopia within the next 30 years

* Many of the improvements listed reduce hassle and stress in some ways, and markedly increase stress and anxiety in other ways. I had ZERO concern about my identity being stolen in 1995. My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years and caused significant anxiety and hassle.

* Many of the improvements to convenience feel like a bad trade. Having information and services a click away has begun to feel almost like a burden. Everything has to happen instantly now. This has been a negative from a psychological perspective for me.

----

I know some of this is just that I'm 25 years older and I'm trying to subtract that out.

I understand that objectively this is a good time to be alive in many, many ways but I feel significantly worse than I did then.

If I could return to the 1990s at my current age I would do so in a heartbeat.

> I had ZERO concern about my identity being stolen in 1995. My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years and caused significant anxiety and hassle.

I have never been robbed, and I live in a place American suburbanites have told me is “dangerous.” But I have had my ID stolen. And to be honest I’d much rather be hacked or miss an ATM skimmer than having someone sticking a gun in my face demanding my wallet.

This is a good point and I was thinking about this as I read the article and wrote my reply. I've also never been the victim of violent crime and I admit that if I had been I would likely feel differently about this.

I've had both.

Identity theft takes longer to resolve. Physical altercation is usually more immediately resolved, though the adrenaline and residual stress can take a long while to overcome.

Overall though violent crime is down nationally. That said my partner was robbed, pistol whipped, wrongly accused by the cops of being the robber, and then spent months recovering from a pistol-whip induced concussion. So yeah, sometimes a simple street robbery can take some time to resolve.

My condolences -- that really sucks.

>>Having information and services a click away has begun to feel almost like a burden. Everything has to happen instantly now. This has been a negative from a psychological perspective for me

I feel you. I recently upgraded to a dumbphone (~1 month), no apps. Basically, I can do calls, even texting is too irritating. Yeah some stuff is harder, but the psychological burden has lessened to a marked degree.

I'd love to hear other ways people have figured out how to reduce the constant low-level anxiety in our daily lives.

> My identity has now been stolen 3x in the last 10 years

Something I've been curious about recently that maybe you (or others) can help clarify:

What do people count as having their "identity stolen"?

I've had probably three times where I've had fraudulent purchases made after someone stole our credit card info. Does that count?

In my mind, identity theft is more people taking out loans in your name or something like that.

Which is it?

I agree...simple credit card fraud shouldn't be counted as identity theft. There are plenty of ways for people to get your card numbers and your basic information that won't allow them to go on to more serious impersonation fraud. In my case I had someone file a tax return in my name and try to open credit accounts at a later date. The incidents were probably all unrelated but I had to put a 7 year fraud alert on my 3 major credit bureau accounts which required a police report, a report to the FTC, and letters to the credit bureaus.

Yea that sounds like a huge pain. Thanks for clarifying.

Does anyone know if there's a way to basically indicate, "I'm not planning to buy anything on credit" and freeze your credit the way you would freeze a bank account?

Then again, I don't have a great credit score to begin with, so maybe that is enough to keep people from being interested in impersonating me...

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faq...

Thanks!

I think these are great counterpoints, and important to consider.

I would offer that I think we are more worried about dystopia because we are so much more aware of all of the ways the world can turn into a dystopia, but I don't think that necessarily tracks with the actual likelihood of dystopia.

I read a lot of history, and I occasionally find myself wishing I had lived in a... more "exciting" time, or a more authentic time, but then I remember that I would probably just be a normal person in that exciting or authentic time, possibly not even aware of the exciting-ness because I'd be trying not to starve to death or die of cholera.

We feel like a ton of crazy stuff is happening all the time, but history has always been that way. You'd be hard pressed to live for 80 years (period, ha!) in any historical period anywhere in the world and not end up going through at least one or two of wars, famines, disease-outbreaks, oppressive governments, fires, earthquakes, riots, etc. And maybe it'd be easier to deal with because you wouldn't see it coming on twitter for two months before it killed you... but man, reading history, a lot of people die, all the time, often for no reason or really bad reasons. And fewer people die now, but we're a lot more aware of it.

> I would offer that I think we are more worried about dystopia because we are so much more aware of all of the ways the world can turn into a dystopia, but I don't think that necessarily tracks with the actual likelihood of dystopia.

Unless you live in part of the world that became dystopian in the last 30 years, any optimism you had in the '90s that dystopia was far away was not false confidence. It was borne out by the facts.

If you feel less optimistic now, that might be due to valid concerns, and it might also be borne out by the facts. We'll see.

I also don't think people in the '90s were poorly informed compared to now. Sure they didn't have much of Wikipedia, but on the other hand, nonfiction journalism was in a better state and the internet (although less widespread) was also not as finely tuned to create information bubbles.

I think in the 90’s, people were just a single digit number of years removed from the end of the Cold War, just a few decades removed from the Great Leap Forward, another few decades from the holocaust and gulags, not to mention WW2, which had a combat death toll that is just utterly unimaginable today, but which was comparable to WW1, just a few decades before that. Then there was the Spanish Flu in there. That just barely covers the past hundred years, but there were a ton of people alive in the 90’s who had lived through all of that. Anyone born since the late 80’s has lived through basically nothing like that.

Certainly, lots of bad stuff has happened in the meanwhile, but in my opinion, nothing that remotely approaches WW2 or the Great Leap Forward as far as death and destruction, and I think it’s hard to argue that anything like that is more likely to happen in the future than it was in the 90’s (which also gave us attempted genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda). I think people in the 90’s were informed, but they weren’t bombarded with negativity the way people are today. That’s not because there wasn’t negativity around.

I don’t remember where I saw it, but someone had a post about how far the Overton window has shifted in politics, and compared quotes from Bill Clinton on immigration in the 90’s to quotes from modern day Republicans (if I recall, they sound almost identical) to emphasize just how much our sensibilities have changed, which was another illustration for me of how our perception of the nearness of dystopia is not necessarily very accurate.

Ok the contrary, I feel we are not aware enough. Recently the atomic bulletin of scientists put the doomsday clock to 100 seconds, even closer than the Cuban missile crisis. The reason they gave were tensions with Russia. That’s a huge threat, and it’s not getting much attention.

Really you would think today we shouldn’t have to be worried about wars with Russia or China, and having endless, escalating conflicts in the Middle East. Not to mention the environmental crisis.

Runaway oligarchism in another concern, ever since the 70’s income inequality has gotten significantly worse.

This is perhaps interesting as a meta-example, because I’m confident that I would trust in the institution behind the Doomsday Clock during the Cold War.

In today’s climate, I don’t. It becomes just another menacing signal where I don’t have the time, energy, or even ability, to untangle whatever web of alliances is motivating them to scare me.

The "Doomsday Clock" is a biased and meaningless political statement. There are no objective criteria for measuring our proximity to Armageddon. Relations with Russia are poor but we're nowhere near nuking each other.

We could set up a prediction market.

(How to design a contract to evaluate the possibility that the world and thus the economy will be blown up is a bit of a puzzle. But it's totally doable.)

I’ve read that while inequality within countries increased, inequality between countries has decreased dramatically (and is arguably much more important as it records the huge reduction in poverty in Asia in the past 50 years).

And I’m not worried at all about war with China or Russia, or at least not more worried than I would have been in the 90’s. I don’t think the events of the past 20 years are evidence that war is more likely now than it was then.

The environmental crisis I think rises to the level of something that has gotten worse, but I think we also should at least consider that environmentalism in the 90’s was mostly about pollution, which basically doesn’t exist in the West anymore the way it did for most of the 20th century. So like, mission accomplished! (/s)

Now we’re dealing with climate change, which a lot of people in the 90’s thought was going to be a giant problem, but which wasn’t the subject of huge media panic the way it is now. That’s not to say the panic isn’t appropriate, just that if it is, the sense of peace that everyone is saying pervaded the 90’s was definitely unwarranted.

Another thing that's a major improvement to me: I can take public transport in a place I'm unfamiliar with, and I don't have to sit anxiously hoping that the bus driver will actually remember to call out my stop and let me off - I can just look at the screen that displays the upcoming stop.

Also (though it is lumped in with smartphone's "too much to list"): if I reply to someone's text message, I can actually read that message while I'm typing up the reply.

> I can take public transport in a place I'm unfamiliar with

Pre-smartphone, I had immense trouble taking public transport in a place I'm familiar with. Usability seems like the last concern of the people who design most bus systems, at least in the US.

I frequently think this when traveling and, if anything, it's probably gotten worse. It used to be a case of giving some cash to someone in a booth. Now it's often about fumbling around with some machine, hoping your credit card works if you're in a different country, figuring out what the appropriate fare type is, etc. Oh, and doing this in a tourist destination like an airport so there's a long line of people doing the same thing. No one who designs these systems gives more than 30 seconds thought to their use by people who don't use them every day.

In Melbourne, the designers got their comeuppance. The barristers ganged up with the judges, and for a while it became a principle of Victorian law that the ergonomics of public transport tickets were irredeemable, and anyone who claimed to have made a reasonable attempt to pay their fare would be let off.

That didn't last long, but the panic it provoked in the bureaucracy was hilarious.

20yrs ago on holiday in Switzerland the bus announced every stop ... still waiting to get a bus-stop with a timetable in my UK city (the stop is a post with a list of bus numbers on).

I took busses to go places ever year of the 90s and I've never heard of a driver actually call out any stops, back then you just had to already know exactly where you were going to get off at the right stop. I would stick to routes I was already familiar with. Not only that but you had no idea of the schedule (when the bus would come) you had to already have a physical copy of the bus schedule. Kept copies of the bus schedule for select routes at my house, but who knows if they've been updated or not since you grabbed it.

Took a bus in my home town recently and the upcoming stop was labeled with an LED board like on a train. I couldn't imagine something like that 20 years ago. I agree it makes travel 1000% better and I would have gone to less familiar places if it were available back then.

> I took busses to go places ever year of the 90s and I've never heard of a driver actually call out any stops, back then you just had to already know exactly where you were going to get off at the right stop.

Yeah, the method you had to use where I'm from is to know where you had to get off, then ask the bus driver when you hop in whether they're actually going there - then they'd call out your stop, usually.

Not the greatest, especially not for a shy kid like I was.

Maybe people in the 90s were less anxious about having to walk back one stop.

I love the positivity. It's true that a lot of minor improvements in products and services have added up to a relatively frictionless experience. He forgot to mention that GPS is ubiquitous and you can travel great distances with no prior planning, find great restaurants, book hotels, etc. You can also hail a Lyft or Uber with ease in most urban areas. And now, even grocery delivery is very commonplace.

Adulting in 2020 is child's play.

> He forgot to mention that GPS is ubiquitous

Hinted at with:

> we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our radios, or our GPSes

Which I took partly to mean that a Garmin gadget is not considered worth anything. Sure as hell can't fence it. Everyone's got GPS!

(But also yeah, lower crime rates.)

Or even better, GPS in our pockets with live maps

Ask me how I updated my old standalone GPS using a virtual machine + USB. Bonus points: when the update starts the USB device ID changes.

I had the same issue with a Navigon device. The trick was to set the virtualisation software to automatically attach all devices (maybe even on port X) to the VM. After that it worked flawlessly.

> Adulting in 2020 is child's play.

As a fairly new adult in 2020, :(

There’s no reason to want more difficult times. It does not make you better. It just wastes your time.

Perhaps you misunderstood; I think being an adult is a lot of work…

I’m not sure how old you are, but as a late-20s person, you grow into adulthood quite quickly. FICO scores, time and financial management, mortgages, bills, etc...all of those are (rightly) complex when you just enter into adulthood, but their difficulty quickly fades away.

Hopefully!

One thing people tend to forget when talking about improvement in tech is the added stress social media creates for the younger generations. The pressure from outside is higher now then when we 40+ grew up and became adults. There are blogs and youtube stars showing you what you should be, there are comments to tell you that you are not good enough. And if you are female, they will tell you even worse things.

There are facebook to show you that your "friends" have a much nicer house than you, they have vacations in warm countries, they eat at expencive restaurants and their kids are wonderful geniuses and certainly don't watch TV all day or eat any sugar. And so on.

The mental stress is grinding our young down and we do see the results of it already. The modern sickness is the burnout of youth.

I don’t have a constructive comment, I just wanted to point out that your phrase _“The modern sickness is the burnout of youth.”_ is beautiful and really struck a chord.

I don't know, man. I know social media presents different stresses.

But fuck. I'm bisexual. I literally knew no one like me. I did get shunned by folks deciding I was lesbian. I was pressured into being girly, into fitting in, into simply going to church and acting like everyone else.

I've been turned down for a job because I'm female - in the 90's, long after this should be a thing. It was another female that did it.

I could have, with the internet, found a couple of folks more like me. (It still does this: My spouse and I met over the internet). The internet brings all sorts of resources (some toxic, some wonderful). I'd argue that it is us that are failing the children because we aren't teaching others how to harness this good for, well, good.

Stress is just different now. Luckily, the trend isn't "Suck it up and go on with life" for the most part now - so we actually know about these stresses.

>> Stress is just different now

I agree with you that a lot of the discrimination and pressures you faced are marginally better now in the aggregate but the fundamental change I'm seeing is the always present, ubiquitous social media pressures. Kids cannot get away from it.

When I was bullied in middle school I looked forward to getting home and especially weekends so I could escape my tormentors for a few days. That respite is gone now. Every kid 12+ is attached to a phone during their waking hours and even when they are not present their online persona is at risk of being bullied & pressured, waiting their for the next time they check updates, messages or really just glance at their screen.

I'm also not convinced we've lost the "suck it up" attitude. Perhaps for major "events" or transgressions, but a lot of this is now standard operating procedure and we completely accept it, the same as previous issues in the past. Just check the comments here on HN; this is a relatively civil group yet I've never needed a moderator to remind me of a relatively obvious code of conduct when talking with strangers or associates in real life.

I had AIM in the 90s and some behavior I experienced back then would now be considered cyber bullying. It's not unique to this era.

I also would not say that relying on being able to escape your physical tormentors on the weekends is a good solution either. Dealing with bullying has always been a challenge.

You can't even get away from it by pretending facebook or other social media don't exist. Someone will create a profile for you and set you up even worse. You have to be on all social media to protect your name. And it's not 12+, it's closer to 8+. Facebook is out though, that's where the parents hang. You don't want to be where your parents are.

We just need more unions. They are historically the only thing that actually worked to level the playing field between employee and employer.

> Adulting in 2020 is child's play.

Weirdly taking care of kids is not substantially more convenient nowadays. It's hard to compare, because most of us haven't had kids with a 25 year gap, but I do know a guy who has done just that.

Tech is a double edged sword with kids. You can throw a tablet at them to placate them for a while, but often it leads to the kid being difficult when you take it away.

You still need to sit with them to put them to sleep, nobody seems to have made an app that buys back that time. Again, tech sort of looks like it will work ("I'll put on a soothing melody from YouTube") but often it backfires somehow.

Kids misbehaving? Where's the app to fix that?

And then there's the whole education side of things, where tech promises a lot more than it delivers. The only things I find useful are Khan Academy and various times table type apps. They're just straight replacements for a person, which is great. Anything more complex, I'm very sceptical of.

Haha, yeah I wouldn't say parenting is child's play. Pretty sure that's an NP Hard problem.

Another guy here (28 year gap): While I agree with the general statement (past/today), the specific situation (children with high age differences and the same parent) is different.

I am much more relaxed then 30 years ago. Some things have settled in terms of economic circumstances, own ambitions etc. Some work against (health), but if not extreme, the positive factors outweigh the negative. Also, dealing with technology is probably more mature. We have a 10-year old boy and a 4-year old daughter without smartphone, devices are our own and are only used together with us. It causes no problems. Probably it helps to have the separation between an offline world before and an online world afterwards in one's own history, as well as the strategies to lead a life under both premises.

Working on a vibrating hot water bottle to get my toddler to self soothe.

The dream is a sleepbox. You know, close the lid and kids are asleep.

A friend trained his kids to go to sleep while he held them and danced to heavy metal music. I was shockingly effective and so far from the classic routine I really think consistency is the important factor.

I like that concept. Don't try to calm them to sleep -- expose them to a higher intensity stimulus than their own urge to cry -- sensorally overwhelmed, but comforted in safety, they fall asleep.

While it may work for some hearing damage can be permanent, both for the child and adult.

Though I suspect shushing in their ear is based on a similar phenomenon.

I do the same thing with loud house/techno/trap music. Works like a charm

>You still need to sit with them to put them to sleep, nobody seems to have made an app that buys back that time.

I don't know why anyone would want to buy back that time. I might even pay to be able to do that again.

Thanks, I was about to write that in response.

He's not even scratching the surface.

'Heart Surgery' used to be a really big, scary ordeal. Now they do much of it on an 'outpatient' basis - home the next day.

Putting the brakes hard on a car from the 1970's might mean you slide the thing into whatever you were driving towards. The sensitivity and intelligence of car control these days makes old cars seem like horse and buggy.

A woman doing a more classically male job in the 1980's was a big deal, a statement, and they would be told constantly 'they didn't belong'. My younger nieces doing research have never met with any such resistance, just the opposite (They're still younger though, this will change a little later).

Vinyl, CD's, tapes, whatever: you had to collect them and physically go to stores to get music, video or any content. The content revolution is mind-boggling.

You generally did not know or communicate with people from other countries. What you know about Russia came from books in the library or a few scenes on TV, or maybe a ridiculous Hollywood film.

Clothing was something you bought for 'durability'. It was expensive and unfashionable.

And this since the late 20th century.

Those who have been alive for a long time, say Queen Elizabeth who's 1st Prime Minister was literally Churchill ... it's almost impossible to fathom the change they've seen in their time.

> Clothing was something you bought for 'durability'. It was expensive and unfashionable.

And 'fashionable' writing on cheap disposable clothes is an improvement?

>Clothing was something you bought for 'durability'. It was expensive and unfashionable.

That's the one thing I don't think is a real improvement. Fast fashion is wasteful and has lead to actually quality clothing being really hard to find. There's this old fruit of the loom t shirt I have that will probably survive all my current ones.

This is a good point. Growing up, we seldom bought new clothes - they'd have to be literally falling apart before we got new ones. Largely I suppose because clothing was so much more expensive, but also, I think, because we had much more of a "utility" view towards it, rather than the "fashion" view that is much more prevelant today.

In the UK, I recently saw a TV advertisement encouraging people to not be so wasteful with their clothing, and to wash it less frequently so it lasts longer and we use less resources.

I thought this was interesting to see, and I was reminded of some friends who spend hundreds of dollars on clothing every single month.

Back then there was no "fast fashion" because very few could afford to go through lots of clothes.

Fast fashion and quality probably don't go together, but the quality of more expensive clothing has become ridiculously good. $20-30 t-shirts last >5 years and "outdoors" clothing is so much better than anything even 10 years ago.

>Clothing was something you bought for 'durability'. It was expensive and unfashionable.

Lol, you should really look at pictures from 30+ years ago; people dressed much better than they do now, and were more obviously physically fit to boot.

People dressed more formally, but 'most people' did not dress 'better', they simply couldn't afford it.

Almost all North American men in suits looked like fools wearing brown paper bags because suits were never fitted tailored properly. Even less expensive suits nowadays can at least have a decent cut and fit close to reasonable, even if there is still a huge variety of 'weird stuff' that people invariably buy anyhow.

Now there are more ways to look crazy but at least if you want to dress kind of properly, it's within grasp for most people.

> Vinyl, CD's, tapes, whatever: you had to collect them and physically go to stores to get music, video or any content. The content revolution is mind-boggling.

I used to sit by the radio, ready to hit record if a song I liked came on. Now, nearly every song is available to me, on demand, for free. (I actually pay ~$8 a month for it, but I don't have to.)

I used to watch episodes of Star Trek when they aired, and if I missed it, I just had to wait a few months until it aired again. (Often, football aired immediately before and it would run overtime, so they'd just start Star Trek partway through the episode.) Also, if the signal was super-staticy, you could play with the antenna for a while, but most likely, you just lived with it.

Now, I can go watch whichever episode I want at any point, static-free. It's not free (unless I pirate it), but it's included in an annual subscription I already had for other purposes (free shipping).

We (my family) used to spend hours hunting through used bookstores. There were various books by my favorite authors I never found, despite dozens (hundreds?) of hours searching through dozens (hundreds?) of used book stores.

Now I can go buy them online and have them in a couple days, or if they're available as ebooks, a few seconds. A few years ago, I was waiting at a bus stop, and decided I wanted to re-read one of my favorite books. I promptly downloaded it and was reading it before the bus arrived.

My parents had (actually...have) a large cabinet to store their records and tapes. And then another smaller one to store VHS tapes. And then couple more to store DVDs. And a closet full of floppies. Digital media saves me a room worth of space in my house. (Books are an order of magnitude more space -- they have literally tens of thousands.)

>Vinyl, CD's, tapes, whatever: you had to collect them and physically go to stores to get music, video or any content.

Bigger difference - you didn't know what you were getting until after you'd gotten home, unwrapped and listened to it. Maybe you'd heard one song from the album on the radio, maybe you had heard other stuff by the band, or maybe you just bought it because the cover artwork looked cool or you'd heard the name of the band somewhere. $20 for a CD, and you just hoped it'd turn out to be something you liked because that would be the only new music you heard until you bought another one.

Movies were similar. On TV, there was a blurb in TV guide, at the rental store, a blurb on the back of the box, and at the theater, just a poster. That's all you knew about it until you watched it, which could be awhile. Now, you hear of a potentially interesting movie and you can instantly read cast, summary, reviews, and links to related movies. If you're still interested, you can be watching it inside of 5 minutes, with subtitles.

Also mobile connectivity consisted of your beeper going off, then you stopping whatever you were doing, going to find a payphone, calling the number and hoping whoever beeped you was still waiting for you to call in and that you could get through the call before you ran out of quarters.

We had internet then, but mostly used local BBSes, and it was still dialup at 1200 or 2400 bps, all text mode. You watched the text scroll onto your screen as it downloaded.

And big difference - no multitasking. If you were chatting on IRC, that's all you were doing. You didn't have other windows, so there was no chatting about something you were doing in another window. You weren't talking on the phone and couldn't get calls because the modem was using the line. You wouldn't get emails until you closed IRC and opened your email client.

But that leads into the negatives.

No anticipation. Hinted at above, you looked forward to getting a new CD on payday, or getting home to see that movie that you'd rented, or your favorite show that came on on Fridays, or hanging out with friends on the weekend. Now that you can access any of that any time, there's not much to look forward to.

Related, time has lost much of its flavor. Back then you could tell time by whatever theme song you'd heard most recently, or the type of show playing on the TV in the background. Different days had different lineups, so family sitcom night had a different flavor than back-to-back horror movie night. 24-hour on-demand makes all time equal and flavorless in that sense. Modern connectivity also means you can work from home in the middle of the night, find people to talk to online, shop online for anything, so even the difference between night and day has lost some flavor.

And most of all, we've lost downtime. It takes a conscious effort now to unplug, have nothing to do, and get bored. In the past, that was when we would hang out with friends, read long-form books, go for a walk and explore, observe the world around us, strike up a conversation with strangers, learn new things or try new hobbies, be creative and imaginative. But now that we're drinking from the firehose, it takes real effort to get bored, or to relax. We do a lot less of all those things now, and it has a psychological and social impact.

In the filter bubble that I inhabit, articles like this are breaths of fresh air - much needed reminders that everything is not gloom and doom.

Permanently moored as I am in my bubble though I can't help feeling that this type of article more an attempt to balance the narratives that I and my peers are fixated on, rather than paint a complete picture: so what about the trajectories of climate change, wealth inequality, opioid crisis, debt crisis, nuclear warfare threat, pandemic vulnerability, soil depletion etc?

I guess this is the nature of human discourse: we don't typically try to provide complete pictures, we tend to paint alternate pictures (aiming to support different courses of action?) in contrast to other narratives.

In the best of worlds all perspectives are based in reality, painted in earnest, and readily available, enabling a rational discourse. In reality that's obviously not always the case, filter bubbles being a case in point.

I agree with almost all of this list, and what I assume are the motivations for creating it, but it definitely leaves out problematic aspects. Not just the ones you list, but things like:

not watching crummy VHS tapes: the decline in ownership and reduction in ability to record / remix media.

playing phone tag: now that normal humans have access to broadcast media, the easy to avoid 'holiday slide show' or gossip sessions have become almost impossible to avoid in whatsapp groups, etc.

USB cables: Physically different connectors for different functions is a good thing. I have usb cables that can carry data (at I think 4 different speeds), usb cables that can only carry power, usb cables that can fast charge, usb cables that can power delivery charge, usb cables that can carry thunderbolt. I have lots of these cables and I have no idea which are which. I do very much like that some of these cables can act as power and screen and input now, but usb is pretty frustrating. It's great that almost everything charges with the same cable these days - for which I credit the EU rules about phones rather than innovation, (but usb-c vs usb-micro, and even a few hold out usb-minis mean it's still not perfect), and the usb micro cable has been much less reliable than things like the old nokia power jacks, with many of my tablets developing problems with charging and connectivity because of the usb port.

search engines: Search engine quality goes in waves. I've definitely had some years where google returned me worse results for my searches than I used to get in the good old days.

batteries: the power tools I have with batteries are less powerful, go wrong more often and have to be charged (and never are, because I don't use them enough).

Oh I forgot to mention screens - until the iPhone, you almost never saw someone trying to use a device with a cracked screen. Now a significant proportion of people use a touch screen device with a cracked screen (or cracked screen protector) every day.

Yeah a lot of this is vastly oversimplified. You didn't have to clean ball mice every week or for most people, ever. VHS being crummy didn't mean we enjoyed it less. Fansub sites today are under constant legal attack by copyright lawyers.

Frankly I miss the days when the online racist death threats were posted by xXBoner420Xx to his Xanga page instead of posted on Facebook by Ted Smith from your company's accounting department.

> not watching crummy VHS tapes: the decline in ownership and reduction in ability to record / remix media.

what do you mean by this exactly? I can agree it's sort of sad that people don't usually own a physical/local copy of whatever movies/music they enjoy, but you can still buy physical copies of most media if you really want. I'm pretty the inflation-adjusted price is lower than it was in the early '00s. you could certainly argue that streaming is so convenient/cheap that it precludes this kind of ownership for most people.

the reduction in ability to record/remix media I completely disagree with. the shittiest smartphone camera records better quality video than a good consumer camcorder from the '90s, and you can edit the footage with free software on any computer.

>speaking of batteries: batteries are built-in—remember how advertisements always had to say “no batteries included”?—so no more mad scrambles at Christmas for AA or AAA batteries to power all the presents

I don't like this trend at all. I've thrown out so many perfectly good products because the bespoke built in battery couldn't keep a charge anymore.

With good ol' rechargable AA/AAA batteries, you typically get a way higher capacity than the cheap built-in batteries in small electronics, and the product lifespan is years longer.

I enjoyed the list too and think about a lot of these things when I encounter them in my daily life too. But the major downside I see is that a lot of these improvements are coming via an escalating consumerism. Things like disposable clothes are probably more the product of exploiting labor and externalizing costs like polution than they are the product of technological improvements increasing efficiency. The same thing is happening with larger items like applicamcea which are increasingly being replaced due to part failures rather than repaired.

Counteracting this though is my personal favorite innovation of our times, secondary markets for everything! eBay, Postmark, Amazon, surplus resellers like Marshals and Ross etc have made it so much more possible to connect a good with its buyer rather than hording or junking it.

I am perhaps glass half empty sort of person but it’s important for me how far is it to go than how far have we came. The fact is that it’s been literally 50 years since moon landing and Mars landings is still as far as it was in 90s. Cancer survival rates have improved but curing cancer is still as much as pipe dream it was in 90s. Less people are poor but eradicating poverty and providing basic education, food and health for all is still as much away as it was in 90s. I can go on but us Twitter generation take too much pride out of rather silly little things while ignoring the things that matters the most.

> nuclear warfare threat

I'm not happy with the way things are going on that front. And things may be considerably worse than they were in the 1990s. They're far better than they were in the 1980s, though.

Climate change is a serious problem, but until China shut down I was sure we'd crossed a tipping point to solar, which makes the problem solvable, though not easy. Now I think there's some risk that the PV manufacturing won't restart somewhere else.

Wealth inequality is an immensely less serious menace than at any time since at least Columbus. If it doesn't look like it, that's because you aren't looking at China and India 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 years ago.

The opioid crisis is a big problem. A lot of people who need opioids can't get them because of laws, or they can get them but without reasonable guarantees of quality (again because of laws), and so they die of fentanyl overdoses. Hopefully we can solve that problem, but it's been a century and a half, so it probably won't be soon.

I don't know about the debt crisis. What's the crisis? People (and imaginary people) owe each other money, which is also imaginary. Sometimes they can't pay it and go bankrupt. This is kind of stupid but it's relatively harmless most of the time.

Nuclear warfare continues to be a threat, but it's much less of one than at any time since, say, 1959. There's no Cold War, the massive nuclear arsenals have been mostly scrapped, and really what you need to worry about there are drones.

Pandemic vulnerability is a big deal. Especially in March and April of this year. But the situation will improve rapidly after that.

Soil depletion is potentially a big deal, and it's an incentives problem with a lot of interests vested in the status quo ante. The Netherlands may be showing a solution.

Saying things are actually good or better is pretty subversive, or conservative, depending on your view. Somewhat related to the Varian Rule, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule which is documented as: "A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade."

We still have poverty in north america, but it's not a lack of conveniences, food, or material goods. It's something else. It's not just money, because lots of poor people earn money. Even people with mobile homes often own their homes. It's something else, like hope, mobility, culture or something.

> food,

It's still nutrition and food insecurity are still an issue. Calories are plenty but large number of poor still suffer from malnutrition because healthy food is very expensive and neighborhood deprivation creates food deserts.

> Even people with mobile homes often own their homes

Mobile home business in US are huge predatory business model that keeps people poor. Private equity companies buy and own many mobile home parks and the loans for mobile homes are expensive, plus the homes are bad investment. They lose value just like a car. John Oliver made an episode about this.

>It's something else,

Relative poverty is real poverty. It goes against all evidence to claim that only absolute poverty is real poverty and only thing that should be addressed. Just being poor hurts even cognitive functionality and causes stress. People who have less options, less time to make decisions, are forced to long term of short decisions that are non-optimal.

There has been a great natural experiment testing the culture theory and direction of causal link.

In the 80's when drug epidemic ravaged black neighborhoods there were two theories. One theory was that poverty causes desperation, destroys culture and brings drugs and destroys neighborhoods. Another theory was that culture causes poverty and drug use and creates bad neighborhoods.

Opioid crisis provides great second data point and natural experience. It turns out that when poverty and financial insecurity hits white middle class neighborhoods, they are just as susceptible to drug epidemics, destruction of cultural values as black neighborhoods.

It seems that relative poverty and decreasing options and loss of hope creates culture and behavior more than other way around.

Conflating culture and race doesn't provide a strong control. The effects of drugs on poor black and white groups in the U.S. are similar. I don't think poverty and the effects of drugs are because someone is racialized, however I do think it matters very much where they grew up, and how. Race is a proxy for class in the U.S, because class is the last real american taboo, imo.

I would also agree that the effects of racist policy impacts how they grew up, and that in turn becomes culture, but where I diverge is that the solutions to "how to not be poor," and "how to stop making people poor," are different.

The tech changes we've had have clearly raised all boats, and yet we undeniably still have poverty. What it means is that making peoples lives more convenient, giving them more stuff, and spending on the lower level needs in the hierarchy doesn't end poverty. This is the crux of what the Gwern article shows.

It has to do with ability to achieve and self-actualize. Broadly, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a handwavy metaphor for it, and the technology changes we've had in the last 30 years provide belonging (social media), not a lot of security, and probably come at the cost of self actualization.

Given the clear quality of life improvements from technological change, we can see with some certainty that merely providing more of the things that technology change already and inevitably provides is not a solution to multi-generational self-reinforcing poverty.

That is the subversive implication.

It’s kind of the rat park idea right.

YouTube how-to videos. You can look up so much. From fixing a washing machine to replacing parts on cars, to installing windows on a house, and learning math or programming, and a million other things. I'm learning the Banjo as my first insrument with online videos.

Well...

> not getting lost while frantically driving down a freeway; or anywhere else, for that matter

I had a real "The Machine Stops" moment a few months ago when I was trying to get to a doctor appointment, and I'm running late, so I fire up the map app on my phone, enter the address, and get on the highway... and no internet. And yeah, I hadn't been to this location enough to know how to get there, and it's in a twisty maze of passages, all just enough alike each other to make "hopeful" navigation worthless.

Rebooted the phone, got the internet again, got to the appointment, whew.

And yeah, we have our old bag of maps in the car, but they're old enough that I'm not sure the office is ON those maps...!

I was driving to a relatives house out of state when my phone died and I didn’t have a charger. I had their address and phone number only on my phone! I was panicking.

Luckily my phone was able to restart after a few minutes and I memorized the directions before it shut down again.

I still wonder what I would have done otherwise?

Off topic, I completely agree with most of these except "search engines typically turn up the desired result in the first page, even if it’s a book or scientific paper; one doesn’t need to resort to ‘meta-search engines’ or enormous 20-clause Boolean queries"

I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago. There used to be a lot more content on small personal websites or blogs that was really well done and useful.

Now search engines tend to only return results from massive well known websites and the actual relevant and interesting results is buried far far down in the results under all of the seo optimized content farms.

> I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago.

I completely agree. And it feels like it's steadily going down too, search results now are way worse than they were 5 years ago which were somewhat worse than 10.

I completely agree.

It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better. And yet more than ever, I struggle to find relevant search results.

For example, I enter a search term, and I'll get many results back that don't even contain the search terms. If I use double quotes, things often improve, but I'll still get results that don't contain my terms.

I really wish there was a "power user" mode, that basically made things work the way they used to work.

Maybe search engines have become more accessible to the average user, rather catering exclusively to power users making up (1-5%).

I actually wonder if there are search engines out there catering to power users.

This distinction between average user and power users seems to assume that people always stay at their current level and never learn. I feel the same with a lot of dumbed down software these days. Maybe it’s better for beginners but there is no path to learning how to do more advanced things because they don’t exist. So in total something got lost.

> It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better.

I complained about this from day one, and not once did I get anything but patronizing handwaving in response.

If I want to buy a pizza, I'll enter "buy pizza in $city" or something, but if I just enter "pizza", I want to see what every person on the planet would see if they used the English language version of the search engine (and then on top of that have the option of personal customization that I can undo or suspend anytime). IMO the convenience of "just typing 'pizza' when you want directions to the nearest pizza place" is nothing at all compared to the fracturing of the public space, for lack of a better way to put it.

> It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better. And yet more than ever, I struggle to find relevant search results.

The "always think they know better" is the issue IME. I'm fine with search engine trying to be smarter, but the paternalistic "no I think you want <completely unrelated thing>" is what bites.

And not only does it not work when I know what I'm looking for (because it gives me something else entirely), it doesn't work when I'm not quite sure either e.g. from time to time I dimly remember an interesting comment about something but don't quite remember the wording so I look for something similar, and never in my life has the search engine been able to guess it.

Which is fair enough, don't get me wrong, but then why mess with what I know I'm looking for when you're patently unable to guess when I don't?

> For example, I enter a search term, and I'll get many results back that don't even contain the search terms.

That is also my experience. It's also one of the issues I have with duckduckgo, AFAIK it ignores quoting entirely.

He is comparing to the '90s, not 2010. Search was terrible in the '90s.

If altavista, yahoo etc would've had to use their 90ies tech to fight the level of SEO spam that exists today, they would've been terrible, I have no doubt about that. That said, compared to Google today, it wasn't that terrible.

If you knew the right keyword, they'd typically produce somewhat useful results. That's not my current experience with Google. Google will ignore important, distinguishing keywords in multi-word queries, and seems to have given up on ranking content by anything other than link count, i.e. I get plenty of seo garbage in the top 10 that is published on domains with plenty of links. It's why subdomain/folder leasing has been a massive thing for the past two years. The content is typically shit and even the language is on a level that wouldn't pass in middle school, plenty of spinning and templates with few variations, 99% duplicate content from the same domain ranking on two consecutive spots etc.

I wish you could see random 10 items your 8 years ago search history and 10 items from last week and compare them. I am pretty sure picture would be different. My theory on this is then in years peoples expectations grew faster than the technology itself. Search is actually much better than past.

Many people here have search history from 8 years ago... Anyone volunteering to collect some data?

We have the history of searched terms, but do we have the search results from that time?

I'm sure the wayback machine or other similar projects have lots of search results pages indexed.

I would really like to see that. I've heard it so many times and I'm sure it's wrong memories.

I think the content farms are improving their SEO faster than the search engines are filtering them out. So the search is better and we see more garbage.

I lived in NYC for a year between 1996 and 1997. It was a great place to live then.

I had 2 roommates and we had full time internet. Through my Panix account? We had a LAN and played Diablo, Quake, etc. locally and online.

I bought a DVD player for $600 because I hated VHS.

I flew to Europe and Mexico around that time. Don’t remember flights being too expensive.

Personally, I’ve always been disappointed about how incredibly slowly the world changes.

The author was talking about 30 years ago. Google did well in 1998 because the state of search was dire and it was a commonplace that it couldn’t get much better. The first decade of google was revolutionary. The last decade as been a slow slide backwards in terms of utility.

Is it a "slide backwards"? It seems more like search is intentionally worse, because they're optimising for profit and not for "people being satisfied by search" -- having to spend 5 times as long on Google means more time seeing adverts.

So it's a reversion, but the company itself appear to be driving it.

I did indeed mean a deliberate worsening — not deliberate in the sense of an evil genius, but deliberate in the fact that value of the search to the user is no longer the prime objective.

What is the notation the author uses for historical prices? The one with the year in lower index and some other number in upper index? I tried <your favourite search engine>ing that but I don't know how it's called.

I've never seen it before, but it appears to be inflation notation. It's a subscript on prices, so the year is the original year of the price, and the cost above it is the inflation-adjusted equivalent in present-day dollars.

The author has an article on it:

https://www.gwern.net/Subscripts

I had the same question - I've never seen currency values written like this before, but find it a very clear and interesting way to do it.

The automatic inflation-adjusting is unique but hopefully self-explanatory. See https://www.gwern.net/Inflation.hs https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1029831368782635013

Inspired by discussions on 'The boss who put everyone on 70K' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22440922) about inflation and quality improvements (or lack thereof) since 1950.

Hello, I like your typography but how did you achieve small caps in Source Serif Pro? I use Adobe Fonts to deliver the same font to my blog, but it said ‘smcp’ is not included in the OpenType feature of this font.

What's more, how did you make the fantastic Gothic style drop caps? ‘WhatFont’ said it's Source Serif Pro but it looks far more different!

I think eru meant "inspired [to post this link here]". I'm pretty sure that eru is not gwern.

Yes, that's what I meant. I am not Gwern's alter ego.

I believe the Source family only recently got smallcaps, in 2017: https://blog.typekit.com/2017/01/10/introducing-source-serif... So you need to upgrade.

The Gothic drop cap is nothing to do with Source, but it is from Deutsche Zierschrift, one of 5 drop cap fonts (Cheshire Initials, Deutsche Zierschrift, Goudy Initialen, Kanzlei Initialen, & Yinit).

In one of the clever performance tricks we use (https://www.gwern.net/About#design), we subset them all into multiple font files, one initial per file, which makes them almost free in terms of bandwidth. The CSS for positioning them is quite tricky, however, due to subtle brokenness in browsers (particularly Firefox), so you'll have to inspect the 'DROP CAPS' section of https://www.gwern.net/static/css/default.css carefully if you want to imitate it.

Thank you, I will try to adjust my the typography of my blog based on your helpful explanation!

“electric cars will be ordinary things in 5–10 years; self-driving cars not long after that” If we’re counting things that haven’t happened yet as improvements to our quality of life, why not include a cure for all disease and holidays on Mars?

Electric cars are already fairly ordinary in certain parts of the world. Not necessarily the most common, but nobody will give you a second glance now if you have one.

We were at Carmax (nationwide used car dealer) on Thursday evening and they had probably 15 plug in battery electric "electric cars" on their lot of ~500 cars. Not a significant fraction, but three different models were available to choose from, and competitively priced against the other cars on the lot.

We aren't even close to a cure for all disease nor holidays on Mars, though.

Electric cars, however, are common in some places (I'm in Norway, and they are everywhere here, and the infrastructure is spreading, both in the private sector and in public street parking). Other places, they are a growing trend that we've been measuring. The growth is picking up.

This wasn't a far-fetch prediction by the author.

I agree, self-driving cars in about 10 years is extremely optimistic. I'm surprised to see Gwern espouse that view. I think it's revealing of the awesome power of Musk's own reality distortion field.

"air quality in most places has continued to improve, forest cover has increased, and more rivers are safe to fish in" This makes me really happy to read. I know that in the 90's, there was pessimism around the environment already (e.g., the hole in the ozone layer). It's really nice to know that from this person's perspective, things are improving.

> programmers able to assume users have 4GB RAM rather than 4MB RAM

But with that, some programmers assume they can use all 4GB of RAM

Two other things he missed (or maybe that's the "too much to list" under smartphones) that have been a true revolution for me:

* Buying groceries in an app and getting them delivered directly to my door (without being super expensive nor low quality) same or next day. No more wasting time driving to a store just to run around in there trying to find everything. No standing in lines.

* Throwing away large pieces of garbage (boxes, furniture, recycling) without having to rent a car, you just take a photo with an app and someone shows up at your door within 30 minutes, ready to take it away for just $10-$20.

These things + living within biking distance of work makes it very easy to manage without a car.

Remember having to call movie theatres for showtimes?

There's actually an entire episode of Seinfield about this, one of the main characters gets a new phone number and it's one digit off of the (in)famous MovieFone number in Manhattan.

I know.

yeah, and you wait and wait for the movie you want to come up, and if you miss the time you have to wait through the whole spiel again. Ugh.

Interesting! Where I'm from, these were posted in the newspaper. But I do remember having to call to reserve seats.

Remember opening a news paper and getting dirty fingers :)

Remember when newspapers started printing color photos in them :D

>stoves which are increasingly induction-based and safe rather than fire hazards burners/gas

As someone who enjoys cooking, the proliferation of induction based stoves makes me sad. I find cooking over a gas flame superior in just about every way (except obviously safety and energy efficiency).

Induction cooking just gives little to no feedback and makes it difficult for any pan tilting techniques (I love my garlic basted pan seared steaks...). Pretty much have to use something like cast iron for heat retention now.

I've solved this problem to my satisfaction at least. YMMV I use a scanpan on an electric stove, and just throw a tablespoon of garlic butter on top of the steaks and let em cook. Once they are ready to flip the butter has melted off and started cooking the garlic which I use with the butter to baste. I find I don't need to be moving the pan much.

Whilst the steak is resting I usually cook cut french onion in the same pan, when the onions are browned I de-glaze it with a half a glass of wine and let that reduce to get all the fond for an awesome pan sauce.

I think I live in the 1990's still.

> we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our radios, or our GPSes

I've had friends' cars broken into this way in the recent past. Not for radios, perhaps, but for anything else left in the car.

> car security alarms no longer go off endlessly in parking lots

They do in Seattle. It's a rare day I don't hear at least a few minutes of car alarm, several times a day.

> all cars have electrified power windows; I don’t remember the last time I had to physically crank down a car window

Not that rare. I last drove one a week or two ago.

> radio stations have minimal static

Depends on the station, of course. A couple of the stations I listen to can be anywhere from "sounds great" to "can't make out a word", depending on weather, and which side of the hill I'm on.

> TVs no longer have rabbit ears that require regular adjustment

Now we have HDTV antennas which require adjustment. When the signal is bad, instead of a fuzzy picture that's still somewhat watchable, you get a broken frame every couple seconds.

Robotic lawnmowers and vacuums are common, reducing number of hours spent on house work.

The latter are edging into common territory. Still never seen one of the former in real life. See lots of lawn service companies at work. Maybe they’re regionally popular?

I understand they're a lot more common in the EU than in the US, but while I've seen robotic vacuums (Roombas), I've never seen a robotic lawnmower, and haven't used either yet.

Yes, robotic vacuum cleaner is (IMHO) the biggest improvement in house work since dishwasher.

> LED lights are more energy-efficient, heat rooms less & are safer, smaller, turn on faster, and are brighter than incandescents or fluorescents

And they last much longer. I’ve not had to change more than one LED bulb ever, and that seemed due to a flaky controller. I even bought a light fixture with non-exchangeable LED bulbs because the half-life of the bulbs is longer than fixtures now!

My perspective as a child during the 90s, and was a teen in the 2000s. I've been working as a programmer the past 10 years.

https://www.designboom.com/technology/evolution-desk-harvard...

Looking at those two desks, I envy the person of the 90s. I envy them the physicality of their environment, of their mind. I envy that they get to actually, physically, organize their day and relate directly to people. The empty desk has nothing but an interface into an artificial world where we are now supposed to live and do everything. The room around that rectangle fades out and becomes as irrelevant as it is empty.

I understand that a lot of things are easier and neater now, but I am not sure if I thrive in this environment. It feels hollow and empty.

> nuisance software patents have been expiring (eg GIF, arithmetic encoding, MP3)

I can't wait until the day this list includes "software patents are no longer a thing"

Pretty exhaustive list ... here's one more:

* No need for a road atlas, or asking people for directions to their home and scribbling spoken directions down on paper * And even when MapQuest finally came around, no more need to print out the directions!

Comparing to 90s to today isn't fair to today. The 90s were a golden era (well, at least 92-99). Compare the 70s to today. Some thing are better, some things are worse, it probably balances out.

This made me look into Spaced repitition and wow are there really no apps on the iPhone that are free or inexpensive?? I’d love to just try loading up the multiplication tables for my kids.

> hotels and restaurants provide public Internet access by default, without nickel-and-diming customers or travelers; this access is usually via WiFi

Most sell your data.

Lots to be grateful for.

Funny; I always thought Gwern was around my age, but it seems like he either wasn't fully conscious in the 90s or lived some peculiar life out in the weeds.

Shit he missed:

1) Video conferencing is a big deal. Makes remote work possible and routine.

2) Bittorrent, libGen and SciHub have actually realized the dream of making information de facto free, even if it is illegal.

Agree on:

1) Logistics has improved immensely (in part due to ubiquitous computing and part to exporting manufacturing to all corners of the globe).

2) You can get more "weird" foods at walley world and Trader Joes (on the other hand, staples are more disgusting and obviously unhealthy -just look at people)

3) Spaced rep applications are useful. Not world changing, but useful. Ed Thorp did know about this in the 50s though (as I did in the 90s).

4) Electronics are much cheaper (and I make a lot more money to buy more of them). Linux works about as well as it did in mid-90s anyway. Laptop batteries MUCH better.

5) Cars are better: antilock brakes, crumple zones, airbags have made things much safer on the roads

6) Crime was much higher in the 90s than in the 21st century. Trend is reversing in the US at least.

Disagree/aesthetics

1) Clothing is vastly worse than in the 90s in every way; aesthetics, durability, materials

2) Muh weed isn't better than public smoking; I miss being able to smoke in public after a drink

3) Induction stoves are bloody awful and a huge regression from gas, even electric coil

4) Microbrews were much better in the 90s; everything is a disgusting IPA now, mostly to cover up the fact you're drinking toilet water. I'd rather drink coors light than an IPA.

5) Most coffee is actually worse; Peets and Starbucks burning their beans is an aesthetic atrocity.

6) Apples are still groace and covered in alar.

7) Average flights are cheaper, but travel is VASTLY more unpleasant. You used to be able to buy a paper ticket, then trade it on usenet for someone else's ticket. No ID required; just the ticket. Imagine that. No CNN blaring at you on the infoscreen making thought impossible (looking at you Atlanta). No anal probe at the boarding area. Your family could wave at you when you get on the plane, or hug you as soon as you get off. Total regression: I'll happily pay more for the old experience.

Just wrong:

1) Travel in the EU is vastly more expensive to an American than it used to be, and hordes of travelers from everywhere on the globe make it less pleasant as well. It's also worse from a visa perspective; you used to be able to do visa runs and stay on the continent basically forever instead of vacating Shengen every 90 days.

2) Most houses are actually NOT heated/cooled/insulated as efficiently as he thinks; presumably he just moved up a few socioeconomic brackets or moved some place warmer.

3) Coats? C'mon; if your coat is thinner, it's because you live in the Bay Area or something. High end winter coats are still goose-down.

4) AI/VR aren't really things except as LARP

5) Trichinosis wasn't a problem in the US in the 90s any more than it is now. Personally I can no longer eat US pork (it was fine in the 90s, just as it is in europe). See next point for why, perhaps

Shit that got worse and he didn't notice:

1) Everyone's fat; an aesthetic and libidinal apocalypse. Obviously something enormous and negative has happened in public health (cue 10 people responding to this, all with different "answers"), and nobody can identify what it is.

2) Everything as a service: back in the day you had to pay for utilities and maybe cable TV. Now you pay 10x what you used to for phone service (in the US; elsewhere else it's fine) due to oligopolistic pricing, and you have a bunch of dumb "apps" on your phone charging you, 3 different movie services, even your damn radio betrays you. Managing more such things is unpleasant and the whole world is basically a giant ripoff

3) Social atomization in the US is at all time high, mostly due to technology

4) Search engines, homeless people and Elsevier have destroyed physical libraries, and that's a real loss.

5) The internet is dumber and more corporate, and opinion makers now think that Usenet arguments on twitter are meaningful and real: something the rest of us got over around 1991

6) Cheap LED lights means designers put them everywhere, and you have to work hard to sleep in a dark room

7) Movies are shittier; big deal that I can watch a capeshit movie in 4k. I'm an adult and do not enjoy watching adults prance around playing make-believe in their underthingees. Supposedly we live in a "golden age of TV" but I don't see that either: they just rediscovered the 1930s serial format. You can watch any of 1000 things, but most of them are awful.

8) There are tent cities in the US, rapidly turning into Favelas

9) The ubiquity of internet telephony (a general good) has made telephone scams and spam calls much more annoying than playing phone tag

10) Cheap flights and transport has caused "barbarian invasions of Rome" level immigration problems, and will be a huge social problem in the next economic downturn, in part because the internet means ethnic enclaves don't have to assimilate to local culture. Globalization has generally destroyed the lower middle classes in most first world countries.

Induction stoves are awesome, and definitely better than electric coil at the very least. What has been bad about your experience?

> Induction stoves are bloody awful and a huge regression from gas, even electric coil

You must have used an underpower induction plate. Gas carries a lot of energy, a standard house power outlet cannot deliver that much energy.

Induction stoves with enough power are slightly less reactive than gas, and can only use cookware that is magnetic, but MUCH more energy efficient (you only heat the cookware, not the air around it) and much easier to clean than gas stoves.

Electrical coil are so slow to react to heat change that cooking in them is a different skill altogether, and makes some cooking more difficult.

I listed as an aesthetic difference. Maybe some people like induction plates. My experience with them (in rentals, hotels and my present apartment) is they deliver very little heat, slowly. If there is some "not underpowered" variety, they're not used very often, and coil stoves work better. They also scratch easily; adding planned obsolescence to your stove experience. There's nothing scratchable in coils or gas stoves; and I'm pretty sure that's why the latter two have gone away.

I've had induction for over 10 years at my parents place and there are no scratches. I have never even seen scratches on inductions stoves.

Compared this to the residue/grease that piles in hard to reach places when using gas, its completely different.

I use a Duxtop 9100MC 1800W induction plate for most of my cooking and it's quite powerful. Settings above 6 are only good for searing steak and boiling water. No scratches after five years.

Bought it because the apartment's dopey coil stove takes forever to do anything.

Full induction stove tops typically require higher amp line. I'm sure hotels don't put in special cabling just for that, and imagine the same with lots or rental place.

As other posters, my experience with mid quality fill induction tops is that they don't scratch (had the same one for over a decade).

Needing special cookware was the one thing that made us hesitate between gas and induction when we re-did our kitchen, but we let milk overbook one morning on an electrical coil stove and the decision was made to go with induction while we spend an hour cleaning that stove!

My problem with induction burners is half the cookware I own doesn't work on them. Turns out, even a lot of stainless steel pots and pans have aluminum bottoms. I also don't like the way the heat changes instantly, or near instantly. It changes the 'feel' of cooking. I don't really know how else to word it. I notice it most when bringing things down to a simmer. The pan cools down instantly instead of slowly cooling so I end up slowly lowering the temperature instead of just dropping it down.

They sure are great for boiling water though and I do find they work really well with cast iron pots and pans.

It can be just that simply your stainless steel cookware simply is not magnetic as opposed to having aluminium bottom, as about half of all stainless steel alloys are in fact not magnetic.

On the other hand it infuriates me that the cookware has to be magnetic in the first place. It should suffice that the cookware is conductive. I suspect that the only reason why it has to be magnetic is that the stove uses the magnetic properties to detect that there is some cookware. (In fact in industrial practice induction heating is mostly used to heat non-magnetic and often even “questionably conductive” materials)

Magnets stick to the top of the pan but not the bottom, i've checked. There's a dividing line across the middle of the pan separating the bottom from the top. From what i've read, they'll make the bottom of some steel pans aluminum because it'll help the pan heat up quicker than steel alone.

>I suspect that the only reason why it has to be magnetic is that the stove uses the magnetic properties to detect that there is some cookware.

I could see this. My main experience with an induction burner is with a single burner hot plate, but it seems to be pretty heavily safety oriented. It defaults to a timed mode when you turn it on unless you select otherwise, you can't leave it on high heat for longer than a certain time or it'll shut off automatically regardless of the setting, and it shuts off after about 30 seconds when you take the pan off or when you put non-magnetic cookware on. For something that produces no heat itself and seems to lack many of the fire hazards of normal burners it sure seems designed to ensure you're going to burn your house down.

The reason why you cannot keep induction stove indefinitely on the highest power setting usually is that the cooling solution of internal electronics is not designed to reliably dissipate the maximum power loss continuously (it is similar idea as turboboost of current intel CPUs, some stove vendors even market it as turbosomething(TM)). As for maximum power most european (ie. 230V) induction stoves are designed to be powered from two distinct AC phases and the electronics can distinguish between two distinct phases and both power inputs shorted together and limit maximum total power accordingly.

Induction stoves mostly run at 30kHz or so; at such a low frequency, your skin depth for non-ferrous metals is measured in centimeters to decimeters. Industrial induction heating sometimes benefits from such a deep skin depth, depending on the application, but it's a drag when you're cooking. Industrial induction heating that wants a thinner skin depth on non-ferrous metals uses higher frequencies, sometimes up to the MHz.

Induction heating does not heat up questionably conductive materials, unless you mean graphite.

What you call a feel is what I call a skill. It's a different skill to cook on electric coil vs gas or induction, and I find it more difficult on electric could, because you cannot do away with the inertia (beside removing the pan from the heat completely), and it is difficult to understand small changes in heat input, because of the lack of immediate feedback.

True, I do agree with you and the more practice I get, the easier it gets. For the first few times I would take the pan off the burner like an electric coil burner. I did learn to just lower the temperature instead eventually and I'm sure i'll get more comfortable the more I practice with it.

Honestly, I'm sure in the end, there's people who could argue the pros and cons of all three and they'd probably all be right. Personally, if I could have a dream kitchen I'd just have all three available and use whichever seemed most suited to what I'm cooking.

I'm starting to put together a new kitchen and this is essentially what I'm planning on. I used to think that gas was the only way to go, but now that I've lived in a house with a good 240V modern electric I see that they aren't so bad and are easier to clean. Gas cooking will come from my 1959 house's built in hibachi (I think that is what it's called) and induction will come in the form of an plug-in induction plate when I'm cooking big meals — No need to build the kitchen for the two days a year that I cook big meals — A 30" electric range is good enough for everyday cooking.

> Induction stoves with enough power are slightly less reactive than gas, and can only use cookware that is magnetic, but MUCH more energy efficient (you only heat the cookware, not the air around it) and much easier to clean than gas stoves.

I kinda disagree on the cleaning bit. the induction stoves I'm familiar with have a glass top, which is great for cleaning off bits of food gunk, but terrible for doing stuff like seasoning a cast iron pan. on a gas burner, you just put a thin coat of oil all over the pan and put it on medium-high for 15 minutes or so. if you try this on a glass top, you end up "seasoning" the glass itself with a layer of polymerized fat. it's really difficult to get this off.

Aluminum foil should solve that problem. The induction should still work and the polymeruzation should only end up on the pan and the aluminum foil.

Why would you season underneath the pan? The only part you need to season is the part that comes into contact with food?

the whole pan needs to be seasoned if you don't want it to rust. the actual cooking surface needs to get "refreshed" more often though.

in any case, the same problem occurs if any random drops of fat get sandwiched between the pan and surface, which happens pretty often just from splattering.

For what it's worth, seasoning in the oven is overall more effective in my experience.

As long as you have an oven, it doesn't really matter, since you can season there, or on your grill. It seems a little strange to ding induction on the basis of being bad at something you only do about once per pan, and for which there are moreover alternatives.

You can season it in the oven, or on an outdoor grill. That's a pretty infrequent thing to need to do.

> MUCH more energy efficient (you only heat the cookware, not the air around it)

They can be even more efficient, if you put insulation between the glass and your cooking pot. The pot is about 1cm from the coil even when directly on the glass, so additional ~3mm is no issue.

I reduced the fan speed due to noise, so I keep 3mm pot-sized cardboard on my induction plate as a precaution, to reduce underside heat loss.

Without cardboard, the plate's lowest setting is slightly more than I would prefer for cooking (~100C, minimal boil-off). With the cardboard, I need to periodically turn it on/off or it's just too wild for cooking with cover on.

Maybe better designs waste less, but there is significant heat transfer through glass, which is then fanned out the back.

>7) Movies are shittier

Try looking outside Hollywood for your film selection - there are immensely wonderful things happening in cinema around the world and we have increasing access to the past decades. I'd start with Criterion Collection - every single release is fantastic. https://www.criterion.com/shop/browse?popular=coming-soon

That's more or less what I do: note the paucity of CC stuff released in the 21st century. Movies wise: England and Europe in general release fewer, South Korea releases more (people starting to realize how good South Korean film is). I guess China releases more also, but it's hard to take them seriously. Hollywood though, is bloody awful, and the slope is definitely down.

I also watch without hesitation films coming from say A24 or Annapurna. I agree, CC focuses on the older greats, but there is so much to capture..

How do you watch them? in the country I live the cinemas are mostly for Hollywood movies. Tried to watch online, it says it's not available in my region. So torrents?

Criterion Collection are physical media and streaming. If the streaming service isn't available in your country, then the disks may be your best bet.

If you live in a city and there's no theater showing smaller movies, that's not a problem, it's an opportunity!

I don't want to be too hand-wavy, but this feels like such a "get off my lawn" type of comment that I can't even start to analyze it. So many of the items listed are 100% nostalgia or personal anecdotes generalized to a whole population.

If you're going to bother replying you could at least list a thing or two which are not generalizable. You saying SOMA tent cities are a figment of my imagination, or they existed in the 90s or that air flight is now more easy and pleasant than in the 90s or what?

Probably the comments about how beer is bad, music is bad, tv is bad, coffee is bad and the internet is bad.

Mid 30s and I would agree with all of this in one form or another. There is a fine line between being a curmudgeon and a nostalgic connoisseur. Low quality beer and burnt coffee is real!

Disagree with OP about induction cooktops; they are magical.

And yet, I have amazing coffee in my house pretty much at all times, from all over the world -- and every market I visit has 300 different beers in a wide variety of styles (including gross IPA), and not just the four standards like it used to.

Low quality everything exists, and mass-market everything exists -- but niche interesting everything is cheaper and easier to get than ever.

I travel overseas often for work. Over the years, bringing gifts home for people has gotten much harder -- because the "good" versions of absolutely everything from everywhere are available at home for affordable prices already.

Finding something that isn't just a tourism-souvenir (like a shirt with the name of the place) keeps getting harder.

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". Existence, availability, and affordability converge differently for different things. I'd also argue that as the number of something increases (beers, for example), it drags the average down and it becomes more difficult to find the diamond in the rough (opportunity cost, paradox of choice, survivorship bias).

Or maybe the type of people who want to think of themselves as connoisseurs just have to become a lot pickier if they want to maintain the same condescending dismissal of easily available products.

It’s perhaps more fun to find a “diamond in the rough” than an “already cut diamond in a jewel store”.

Probably. I'm not much for "premium mediocre" [1] though. Availability and variety does not denote quality.

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...

Obviously low quality beer and coffee still exist. But these days I can find dozens of craft beers and a wide variety of fair trade, even somewhat recently roasted, coffees at the grocery store.

Cities are comparatively packed these days with higher end coffee shops and pubs/bars with extensive beer collections.

We don't all live in large cities.

And this has relevance to our discussion on generational improvements, how?

Not to mention you can get high quality beans shipped anywhere you want, so you're better off than before!

Early 40s — Weird how different I see this. You used to have to be in a city like Seattle to get good beer or good coffee — Now in small-town Kentucky or Indiana you can get both.

Yes, Starbucks sells burnt coffee — Don't go there! Go to the local coffeeshop that roasts their own beans. These exist in just about every city with a population of 100k or a college. I would say that coffee in general has become a lot better. At the high end not much has changed but the low end is much better than it was in the 90s and the average is still a lot better.

Beer — I can get some really good quasi-local beer in just about any grocery store in the country. Yes, lots of hoppy IPAs but there's always a lot more non-hoppy beers to choose from.

Lamenting tent cities is "old man yelling at cloud" to you? I agree with his points. The Life of an average person is objectively much worse than it was 20-30 years ago. A person with great discipline can have a better life than ever, but it is hard not to feel empathy for the masses, so addicted to fake internet shit that they cannot even distinguish reality.

the rate of homelessness is actually falling slowly in the US, although the absolute number is slowly growing with the overall population. the visibility of homeless people has grown a lot in certain places though, which I think is the real complaint if we're being honest.

Tent cities are a product of a broken society in the US, not a global worldwide phenomenon.

"Video conferencing is a big deal. Makes remote work possible and routine."

I work remote for 5 years now and only do video conferencing a few times a year and even then it seems optional.

On the other hand I'm a professional writer, so maybe I'm more used to expressing my thoughts via text than the average person.

We use video conferencing pretty heavily where I work but you can mostly not broadcast video if you don't want to--although some groups prefer everyone to be on camera because they think, and I generally agree, it increases engagement. (And screen sharing is used quite a bit as well.)

But the bigger point I think is that we have the tools generally to support distributed and remote work--code/document repos, texting, collaborative document editing/viewing, easy conferencing (whether or not video), etc.

>Bittorrent

Usenet, FTPs, Napster, Edonkey, Kazaa...

Kazaa was chock full of adware and possibly full-on malware and centralized solutions like Napster were shutdown. Still using Usenet to this day tho..

Photovolatic modules are vastly cheaper now, a factor of ~20. This has become a total game changer for the energy industry.

Have movies changed, or have we? I recall movies in the 90's also being mostly terrible.

However, since the internet has grown its even easier to narrow our interests and diverge from the mainstream, developing more niche preferences. Movies still cater to widely accepted tropes.

Although he doesn't mention libGen and SciHub by name, he does include: most books and scientific papers can be downloaded conveniently and for free. So that isn't one that he missed (assuming he didn't just add it).

Thanks for the long list!

You should upgrade what (micro-) breweries you are drinking from. Or move to Belgium. IPAs have their place, but I'd rather drink a Lambic or a Gose etc. London also has a good selection of craft beers.

Agree with everything except induction.

> it is now reasonably safe and feasible to live in (most) big cities like NYC, Chicago, or DC

Not it you make an average income.

How are electric windows in cars an"improvement"? It's different but it doesn't change your life in any significant way at all. Car safety is an improvement. Not this. Countless other things listed are in the same category. Was it so hard to have to rewind tapes?? Those are micro-comfort things that contribute exactly zero to our happiness.

I'm old enough to remember a time when there were no tapea at all. We weren't worse off. Everything was memorable. Now nothing is important.

Also, cheap airfarea, cheap, disposable clothes, etc. are destroying the planet faster than wver before. Counting "improvements" without externalities is absurd.

When driving I can open and close or disable any other window on the car. This is very handy with kids.

In my truck I can lock all of my windows to keep kids from rolling them down. If I'm driving alone I can roll down the passenger window without leaning over the bench. My windows have a behavior where the window will roll all the way down automatically if I press the button with a certain duration.

All of these features mean I almost never think about the state of the windows while I'm driving for more than a split second. I think that's a safety win.

Also it's just nice not to have to roll down a window or rewind a vhs. Micro-comforts add up.

I, for one, enjoy power windows. Better yet, I enjoy power windows that you press or half a second and they go up or down all the way. They now have power rear windows for trucks, which I'm marginally excited about when I get my next truck (hopefully not needing to do so for a decade or two). Very related is air conditioning in the car. When I was a kid, if you were hot, you cranked down the window and let hot air blow on you.

Rewinding VHS? One of the selling points for me on DVD was no rewinding and having scene selection. No more "be kind, rewind" signs anymore and getting a small fee at the movie rental store for non-rewound movie.

Sure, these are micro improvements in conveniences, but I enjoy them. People don't like waiting. Anything that improves that will improve someone's impression of the thing. Heck, I now prefer streaming over sliding in a DVD. It is only saving me, at most, a minute or two. But it is less waiting.

Enjoy the little things.

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