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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

Those are a bunch of statements that angry people with agree with, but you haven't presented any evidence for your claims, and I think they're mostly backward.

We're in the longest period of peace in thousands of years. Check out this cool graphic that puts in perspective: http://www.fallen.io/ww2/

People are mad about politics, but I don't think it's any worse than the cold-war, kennedy assassination, mcarthyism, being drafted to Nam. Reagan was a movie-star who became president.

Innovation is the fastest its ever been.

It's hard to say how corruption is changing, and whether accountability is greater or lesser now.

People are upset about the environment now, but consider stuff from the last 100 years (leaded gasoline, the banned-pesticides, radioactive toothpaste, etc etc).

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Not to sound adversarial, but you’re not presenting any evidence either. Where do you get that innovation is the fastest it’s ever been?

You’re not wrong, but THAT is the item you want evidence on? Especially here. This seems disingenuous.

Innovation in narrow fields is not representive of the greater whole. Sure, generative AI is booming, but mobile phones and computers haven’t evolved practically at all in the last 5 years. The general rate of innovation can be somewhat gauged in the increase of living standards, and to my understanding there has been little the past 10 years (in the West in general).

>but mobile phones and computers haven’t evolved practically at all in the last 5 years.

Lets do a fact check on this, that time span is the iphone X to iphone 14 Pro. Taking one metric, the geekbench score has gone from 2156 to 5383. So in that time phones have become more twice as fast. It released with ios 11, I wont even bother to list all the major improvements between 11 and 16 because it's a huge list.

There is so much more to expand on this but when even the most obvious stats show dramatic improvement, there isn't any point detailing the differences in camera, connectivity, features, etc.

Some people will argue that's simply incrementation and not innovation, even though there's serious innovation needed to jump from 10nm to 5nm architecture.

Even at that, if you want to simply do 'novel innovation' in things that are truly new or change your process...you can get phones with folding screens these days, that's pretty cool and wild to think about.

exactly. what more can do you with it? You can't watch more shows or play twice as many games of chess or something.

Yes the jump from 240p to 4K is enjoyable, but Marvel movies in 4k are still vacuous compared to something with meaning in 720p.

You can take better photos, have a longer lasting battery, send emergency sms via satellite. Scan objects and rooms with LiDAR, generate ai images locally with the massively improved SoC. Just to mention a few things off the top of my head. Just because _you_ aren’t doing anything interesting with the new tech, doesn’t mean innovation hasn’t been happening.

I agree innovation is happening, what I mean is that meaningful life change isn't happening. Yes I'll be thankful to be rescued if the emergency SMS works.

Phone benchmarks getting bigger arbitrary numbers as an example of innovation has to be a joke right? Fundamentals like the existence of mobile internet is HUGE. My phone giving more or less the same access to video, messaging, and webpages as it did in 2013 is stagnation.

What do you see as a genuine new feature?

> phones and computers

I sometimes end the day with 50% or more left on my phone battery. That didn't happen before my last upgrade.

10GbE is finally starting to filter down to consumer-level things.

Cloud stuff is starting to have Arm systems as a standard offering.

I can run an SSD as my only disk, rather than as an expensive small cache in front of a platter drive.

Risc-5 seems to be really starting to become a thing, even if it's hasn't fully just yet.

Of course everything's a good bit faster, but that's kind of a given.

These are all neat things, but I think i'm looking at it on another layer than these kinds of technological things.

I had always thought it was George Carlin, but maybe this was actually penned by a pastor in the 90s?

"The paradox of our time"

(first paragraph) " We have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less; we buy more but enjoy it less; we have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, yet less time; we have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgement; more experts, yet more problems; we have more gadgets but less satisfaction; more medicine, yet less wellness; we take more vitamins but see fewer results. We drink too much; smoke too much; spend too recklessly; laugh too little; drive too fast; get too angry quickly; stay up too late; get up too tired; read too seldom; watch TV too much and pray too seldom."

[1]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-paradox-of-our-time/

Love George Carlin, and love that quote.

- Taller buildings, shorter tempers: Yes, unclear (I think the average person today gets in fewer physical fights)

- Wider freeways, narrower viewpoints: Yes, unclear (I think in many ways we were even more narrow-minded 20 years ago. Do you remember the "Nuke Iraq" mentality?)

- We buy more but enjoy it less: Unclear, unclear

- we have bigger houses and smaller families: Yes, Yes

- more conveniences, yet less time: Yes, Unclear

gosh there's a lot of these.

In the past you could have centuries without any changes that weren’t social/political.

The fact we can even see quantifiable change in our lifetimes is completely new and limited to the last 200 or so years.

And nowadays we can see significant change from decade to decade.

It’s like looking in a mirror. You see it everyday so of course it doesn’t seem like anything’s changing. You need to look at the bigger context and look at the forest instead of trees. Try Hans Roslings 200 years in 2 minutes talk.

You're also missing the point that "innovation" in software does _not_ translate to "improvement" for a large part of the population.

You can use an app on your pocket-supercomputer to get a less-than-minimum-wage "independant contractor"/slave to bring you junk food at 10:00pm ? Sure, "Innovation". Is it "progress" ? Does it improve your life ?

There's way less trust in our society than they have been in many years. This is something that's been studied with evidence to back it up. You can see this in the week it took to elect a speaker of the house, something that hasn't happened (at that scale) since the 19th century.

Globally, nations that become more economically developed shift towards individualism and selfishness.

This is actually what you’d expect from practically any system where wealth and power centralize as a function of time. The pressure will grow until it eventually might pop.

This trust thing is true, but it doesn’t mean that institutions are lest trustworthy. It seems more that we have the tools (institutional, cultural, technological) to actually understand many systems better and see how untrustworthy they are. Basically, our vision is better, the situation isn’t worse.

Individualism is something I do half agree with. I’m not sure it’s a time-based thing tho, and I’m agnostic to whether it is good or bad. Collectivism in the past could be incredibly stifling and coercive. Hyper individualism can be alienating.

There is some middle ground and I actually believe we are in the process of moving towards it. Because if you talk to anyone, they KNOW there is a problem with how individualistic consumerism causes us problems, and they KNOW alienation is a problem. We are learning to balance our new-ish freedoms, prosperity, and individual flourishing with our deep need for community and solidarity. It will take time, but we will figure it out.

Could you elaborate on the 'longest period of peace'? I've read that before but where is the peace? How many wars are going on right now? I live in Europe, your references sound like you're from the states. There is a war in EU right now. USA has troops in many countries, news of them bombing shit weekly. Other parts of the world are not much better (wars in Africa, South America, different parts of Asia, genocides happening right now).

So what is this peace? Does it just mean we don't have world superpowers going at each other with full force?

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