My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s (2019)
gwern.net
gwern.net
I watch old movies and TV shows and am struck by how powerful people seem to be when they don't need to look at a phone a hundred times a day. Like the desire for constant improvement has left us unable to tolerate a lower level of stimulation.
Growing up in the 90s and 2000s it was ok to constantly want more because there constantly was more. Every year was a noticeable improvement. Where's it getting better now? I use my smartphone for the exact same things I was using it for ten years ago, except now it has fewer buttons and I can't replace the battery. I can't help but feel like it would've been far better for me if I hadn't been conditioned to expect unending improvement.
Late 90s you're into the internet era. Early 90s, basically no internet.
What I find the most shocking is the difference in cultural values.
This summer I was watching some reruns of a popular 1990s show. I forgot the name (could be friend or seinfeld?) but it boiled down to body shaming then gay shaming a man who's short and suffers from hair loss. Gross.
It may have been ok to broadcast that back then, but I found that not comical at all and very painful to watch.
I have no idea of the context: I just watched this episode and I found it shocking enough to not bother trying more episodes.
> It would be fascinating if today's viewers might see it as an endorsement of those behaviours!
When watching, I didn't have enough context to say if it was an endorsement or not, but the body shaming and gay shaming were synchronized with a laugh track, so it's not just that it was considered to be ok for main characters to engage in such behaviors, it was intended as humor
I don't find that funny, but shocking and sad.
Whether you can enjoy 90's (or earlier) content really depends if you can view it in the context that produced it; if you go all "death of the author" it's just going to seem cringe.
I don't wish death to anyone. I try to separate the author from the art, so there are many things I can enjoy: I'm listening to Bing Crosby's White Christmas. He may have been a bad person [1], but the song is nice. If he was singing hate stuff on a happy melody, I wouldn't enjoy it.
This TV series making fun of bad things is something else.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbqqeb/isnt-it-funny-that-bi...
i.e. everyone can relate to George drivingmand thinking of the perfect comeback to a mean spirited comment.
It's not about finding characters sympathetic or not. It was very inappropriate, like if 2 characters were talking around a coffee, then one suddenly flipped the table and punched the other character in the face and everybody laughed while he was spitting teeth and blood.
I would find that disturbing, because it's not relatable.
The show was to be about humor, and it was popular, so I thought it could be relatable, but It wasn't.
I have watched and enjoyed many other popular shows (ex: Sliders, TNG, Stargate, I want to do X-files next) but I can't enjoy this "comedy" because it's not fun.
Certain groups absolutely have valid reasons not to return to 90’s cultural norms but a pretty large majority would have no objection, at least initially.
Plenty of small-i internet, if you knew where* to be. Trailblazers came out in 1985. IMPs had been around since 1969, and I think ARPANET itself had been decommissioned by 1990.
* you couldn't just download whole-book scans either (HN frontpage at 45K would've taken nearly a minute to xfer on a home line), so there were already plenty of dead-tree reasons to be associated with these institutions anyway...
I’m very nostalgic of the optimism of the 90’s, but I do also remember VHS tapes and photographic film (which I love as a medium but it’s amazingly inconvenient these days) which were clearly compromises.
On the other hand, the 90’s were amazing for gaming. The PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were breakthroughs that have held up quite well I think.
One of my first major bummers was registering for classes using a UNIX shell, a decade older than myself. Without naming the school, I always respected the friend-from-hometown who decided to attend our public state school after our first semester at "the top tier" school [hers was a better choice].
----
I'm about to begin digitizing VHS from my early-90's childhood — it's incredible to see what ML is allowing for upscaled restorations, often direct from tape (i.e. without having to use analogue video cables)!
If I could find locally a decent-condition N64, I'd buy it immediately.
I note that both ML and Erlang were around at the time. I have no experience with or knowledge of Lisp in production to know if it’s a serious answer or not. For me, Lisp has always been there as a timeless alternative in the same way that visiting the countryside is always an option in between feverish daily life in whichever city I live in at the moment.
I love perl! Last year for Christmas the release of cosmopolitan perl inspired me to write a perl web server: https://github.com/csdvrx/PerlPleBean/
It may have been an exercise in futility in 2022, but it taught me many things about the http protocol (and it was fun)
Another important one is some degree of cross-platform capability - also pretty much table stakes today (it helps that the platforms are significantly more homogenous) but less common (and/or pricier) back then.
So, it wasn't frustrating because of its limitations. We largely weren't even aware it was very limited. Everything seemed new and every new development was exciting.
Forced, frequent software updates weren't a thing, and everyone hates those now. Software often becomes less useful over time, and you can't easily opt out of that. Now, we know faster internet connections are possible, but they aren't available to many of us. When Comcast drops signal for the third time today, there's nobody I can call about it. Earlier today in a different thread I related some challenges getting Linux to boot on some new hardware, and one of the replies was, "well yeah, that's store-bought computers for ya". The stuff we had seemed pretty decent because we didn't know what we were missing; now, the stuff we have is frequently frustrating because we (some of us) remember it better.
Early 90s, I would've been on eWorld, I think -- just graduating from local BBSes and getting started in international networks. I genuinely miss the community feel of eWorld. It's something I haven't really experienced on the modern internet since I stopped using IRC a decade ago. You know what eWorld didn't have? Trolls. Or ads on every single interaction. Or an interface that was suddenly, bewilderingly different one day -- for the third time in a year. I didn't feel bad using it, like I was reluctantly giving more money to a megacorporation that would use the money to find new ways to annoy and exploit me. Yeah, sure, it tied up a phone line and was kinda slow and limited in features, but we didn't know any of those things were supposed to be frustrating.
Someone suggested it was because the 1990s were the "peak of technology", but a great counterpoint was provided with this link.
Personally, I think technological progress offers us more optionality: you can now use CDs like in the 1990s but you can also stream. You can use terminals but you can also use GUIs.
No one is forced to adopt technology they don't like. We may be unfamiliar with some old technology, but any technology can be very nice and useful if we can take the time to weight the pros and the cons.
You can then mix and match: I like sixels in the terminal, but I prefer Wayland for GUIs. I discover music on streaming sites, but I prefer to buy CDs for the tactile sensation or download FLACs from supraphonline.cz because I don't have to worry I will lose access to some of my past purchases.
No.
* None of the privately-owned car parks I know of take cash.
* The UK government is moving to compulsory electronic filing for small businesses.
* The managing agent used by my landlord has decided that paper contracts are no longer acceptable.
I can walk everywhere. I can close my business. I can live under a hedge. But realistically, I am forced to use technology which was not designed with my interests in mind.
(...and before someone argues, "you could just buy an old, non-spying car", you'll only be able to do that for so long. And pretty much never with a new vehicle.)
I'm also rural, and I feel like this push is being largely driven by people who can regularly afford new phones and upgrade to the latest thing, and who live in cities with excellent reception.
The people operating mygovid & other identity apps would like the widest device support possible but to some extent their hands are tied by compliance requirements and what their security auditors tell them.
I like my current S10+ which is 3.5 years old, and the fact that it's no longer on the latest Android version is completely ridiculous.
I don't even know what I can upgrade to if I want to keep using my microSD card and my wired headset.
Except the opposite is true, and this fact is becoming increasingly pronounced. Technology doesn't exist in the vacuum - it costs money, resources and labor to manufacture and support artifacts like cars or CD players or CDs themselves. Almost everyone on the production side is trying to aim for where everyone else - producers and consumers - will be, while maybe steering it a little. As a result, you have a moving island of "what's current" speeding on the vast ocean called "you're on your own, and shit out of luck".
Nobody is forcing anyone to buy vinyles or CDs, but enough people like them, so they aren't on their own: the market provides.
Everything has costs. My refusal to carry a cellphone has opportunity costs for me, but also opportunities like maybe a longer attention span?
> As a result, you have a moving island of "what's current" speeding on the vast ocean called "you're on your own, and shit out of luck".
You have the freedom to use any technology, and go to any technological island.
You don't have the freedom to force others to cater to your tastes, or to imprison them on your island if they prefer to be somewhere else.
I like sixels, but I know it's a niche preference so I don't expect other people will provide me the technology I want. Instead, I create it for my own use, but I also think it's genuinely nice tech that can grow and strive if it gains enough momentum.
If it's as good as I think it is, others will join me on this island and it will grow.
If not, then I'm wasting time and effort, and maybe it's a good thing that I'm on my own and sh*t out of luck, because eventually it'll make me stop.
What you see as negatives, I see as positives, a way to coordinate the large number of individual preferences in society: everyone can vote with their time, effort and money.
That one would be a tough for a lot of people nowadays in the US because it could be a safety issue.
In the first half of the '90s there was a lot of infrastructure to support people who did not have mobile phones, such as plentiful pay phones in public places and emergency call boxes along highways.
Now only a few states still have emergency call boxes on the highways, and pay phones have dwindled from a high of 2.6 million in 1995 to under 100k.
> That one would be a tough for a lot of people nowadays in the US because it could be a safety issue.
Everything has costs, including safety.
> Now only a few states still have emergency call boxes on the highways
If my car stops on the highway and I stand next to it waving my arms, I think someone will eventually come or at least call for help.
If you step into a public library you are likely to have access to a large amount of music. It does not matter that much whether the medium of that music is CD or vinyl - the primary technology is the library, the medium is just facilitative, enabling more of it to be archived and made available.
Cities are known as the oldest "technology of civilization" because they operate in this context of providing something that you could not simply choose to have or not have - it has to coexist across a broad number of people. You can buy a different vehicle to drive on the road, but the road and the other people on it are part of the city, and the city is a package deal: you may be able to move to a different city, but you don't get to choose every detail.
>No one is forced to adopt technology they don't like.
And what if I prefer to keep using my old 2g Nokia brick or if I want to get crt monitors or plasma TVs? And if lynx is still my browser of choice, I'm probably going to have a hard time applying for jobs or renting an apartment.
I could list any number of obsolete technologies that will simply cease to exist in the not too distant future, and just as many that are already totally extinct. Some technologies just no longer serve a purpose and are lost to time once replaced.
My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865 - Feb 2020 (197 comments)
But things absolutely just work so much better now! The only thing I miss is portable gaming, but now the we have the steam deck and switch!
Charts like this encapsulate it well:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...
Some examples:
* Environment: air quality in most places has continued to improve (and considering the growing evidence on the harms of air pollution, this may well be the single most important item on this whole page), forest area has increased, and more rivers are safe to fish in - yeah except that are only statistics related to USA, not to mention the Detroit area water pollution thing that it is still going on. Or all the PFAS related drama happening recently.
* LASIK surgery has gone from an expensive questionable novelty to a cheap, routine, safe cosmetic surgery - yeah, almost cheap, safe sure, but none of the people I met actually says they'll do it again (sample N=5), for various reasons. Some: they did have to take glasses again after a few years, colors were less vivid, eyes were less hydrated.
* Food, it is nice that fast food aren't shitty anymore, but there are still plenty of contaminations happening (not only in USA but all-over the world). Moreover, the food is becoming worse because of the lack of microsubstances (and soil degradation) as well as the increase in CO2. Agriculture output is damped by climate change.
And outside of North America, the change isn't even half-assed.
The amount of bribes and regulatory capture needed to maintain that... I can only imagine.