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Comment by eschulz | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of how time pieces such as sundials changed societies, and how some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development.

“The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces ! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .” ― Plautus

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Finally someone who understands me. Whatever becomes measurable, becomes controllable, which is the antidote to freedom, wildness, life (to some extent)..

I’m ethically torn whether to upvote this

My favorite Samuel Delany story is about a woman in a village who invents writing, and teaches it to all the children. She makes a rule that you're never allowed to write down people's names, as it will inevitably lead to keeping records comparing people, and thus leading to strife...

I haven’t read that one, do you know of a collection that has it?

I believe it's in Tales of Neveryon, 'the tale of old venn.' The whole series is extremely incentive and goes on some very different directions... The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals in 'Flight from Neveryon' was also particularly mind blowing.

There's a good Ted Chiang story about how writing conflicts with a village's tradition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...

Being able to have simplicity of working on a task until it is done when society didn't have these per hour scheduling concepts. I remember hearing this referenced when learning about Amish and Native American cultures. Essentially, this is what were doing. When it is finished, we move on to next. No arbitrary start/stop time because some hand on a dial is pointing at a certain number.

Note that Plautus was a comic writer, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. I'd treat is like a Seinfeld observational humor joke -- realistic but exaggerated.

> some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development

Platus lived 254 – 184 BC. Sundials are from 1500BC. While it's a great quote, it certainly wasn't a new invention when he wrote it.

Being invented doesn't mean that they became commonly used. Many ancient inventions took thousands of years to rollout and be adopted by the vast majority of humans.

Perhaps, but the quote also doesn't read to me like someone ranting about a new invention, just one that he wished had never been invented. Just like I might find myself occasionally cursing whoever invented the idea of an office building, even though it predates me.

Sure, but is there anything in that quote that suggests it's a reaction to new technology rather than just a rumination on existing technology?

Yep, they definitely could have bought it from Amazon.

The Mediterranean was a tightly connected civilizational region, so if a certain invention was in use anywhere, it would spread at the speed of a sailing ship to the rest of the coast.

Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the Levant. The sea was a highway to them.

Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did, and they knew how to make money by selling attractive goods.

I don’t really get what this comment is suggesting. It is seemingly sarcastic, because obviously Amazon didn’t exist at the time. But Amazon didn’t invent the concept of long distance trade…

Electric cars were invented in 1881 a full 4 years before the first internal combustion car.

Kinda interesting to ask what would have gone different if the infrastructure was in place to make electric cars 'good enough' as far as charging infrastructure.

As I understand it, the core problem back then was the batteries would mass half the car and lose a third of their maximum capacity in just 500 charging cycles.

Back when cars were new, there was no infrastructure for petrol either, that was something you got in tiny quantities from a pharmacy. (The diesel engine can run on vegetable oil, but I don't think Mr Rudolf Diesel himself ever did that?)

Diesel did use peanut oil, though only after someone else showed that it was possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Diesel#Use_of_vegetable...

Nice find, I missed that.

The batteries of the time were far less energy-dense and charged slowly. Lead-acid was the norm for EVs.

Infrastructure requires demand, and energy density and convenience of a contemporary battery versus gas engine means that no one was going to demand batteries when ICE was an option. We only figured the downside much later.

We figured out the effects of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere not a decade after the first working car prototype was build: https://www.rsc.org/images/arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

False equivalence to the white courtesy phone...

Using a vertical stick to track the sun's position goes back much, much further.

I do believe that time keeping, computers, and other technology are overused and overly relied on. (There is also damaging other stuff due to these technology, which is another issue. There are other issues too; these are clearly not the only thing.) They have their uses, but should not be excessive at the expense of anything else. If they fail, then you won't do unless you know and have not destroyed the older possibility, and if they do not fail, then you may be trapped by them. You should not need to know what time it is to sit down to eat, or to wake up and to sleep, etc.

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