megameter

A great use of bitwise operators I came up with recently was to define a unique key with two sides(source and destination) in a single int. Just allocate one bit of the int to defining which side is represented and you have partitioned the space; everything after that is an exercise in masking and bit-flipping to determine matches.

Compare with the "sidecar a bool" approach that tends to come to mind to solve this task without bitwise operations; now you have to define a whole structure for it. It works, but it ain't elegant.

An example I know of that resembles the bricklayer problem is synthesis of human singing vocals into MIDI sequence data. There is now a history of products around that check off the boxes - one (Vochlea Dubler) debuted just last year - and every time, it demos well but the potential audience ends up rejecting it, because it does not really add what they thought it would add to their workflow. Even if the results themselves come out usable(already a wicked problem since the DSP has to deal with a multitude of recording scenarios while achieving low latency), users discover that they need to be talented at "singing like an instrument" if they want to play instruments by singing, which is a technical barrier, not an assistance to spontaneous creation. Practically speaking, they're better served creatively by button input tools that work top-down(e.g. pick a scale, then the keyboard only plays notes within that scale) since those define down the medium and therefore perform a creatively assistive function with a legible design paradigm(different scale = different sound).

Increasingly I have absorbed "work" into a three step feedback cycle - something comparable to OODA but with a more contemplative purpose. It's really intended for creative projects but it scales and generalizes nicely to many life things:

1. Principles - why you do a thing

2. Benchmarks - what defines success and failure at making the thing

3. Mediums - how thing is made

The starting point - the review - is often to-do list like. The to-do list's function is mostly taken care of within five minutes of heading out the door for a walk with out-loud self-talking: "So, yesterday this happened. And I want to do this today." Verbalizing it(while a bit surprising to passerby) makes a huge difference because it does the "getting it out of me" function that all these apps do, and then lets the thought disappear into conversation without a List of Shame forming.

But the thing I say I want to do is usually defined in terms of medium(the specific actions I take or techniques I will be using). If I agree I can drill down to specifics until I've designed an exact step-by-step process. If I disagree with that it's going to happen that I loop around to either the principle(is there a good reason?) or the benchmark(am I measuring the goal correctly?).

Blockage can usually be identified by pointing to one part of the cycle that doesn't work. I have to get all three parts to cohere for an action to matter. So I will have days where I act and then learn that the benchmark is wrong, thus needing to throw away the result but getting a little bit closer to coherent design.

All of this happens outside the formal workplace, mind. The principles and benchmarks of the business, after all, are independent of my own. But it pushes me to find useful perspectives and get away from hours-on-clock production, which I needed to do when I started working for myself. I've ended up with all my income deriving from investment, which could also be seen as "cheating the system". I actually worked backwards from the outcome(hmm, somehow that happened) to what made it happen(identifying and refining how I operate). When I do the analysis it's really clear that the times of my life that were most stressed were the ones where obligations made me act, act, act without being able to go through the loop, so now I'm trying to apply it more consciously.

Competitive judo has grown a plethora of rules of this type - restricted holds, stalling penalties, 20 second timers for the ground game. My teacher participated in some of the conferences leading to those rule changes, and he said it boiled down to getting the bodies to fly for the TV cameras. A lot of combat sports end up being slow and passive without rules propelling them into action.

The focus of browser development was(and always has been) a kind of Worse-is-Better thing of supplying sexy features to wow users. While client apps are definitely sexy, the overall shape of the browser wars was towards throwing in many bullet-point features of varying utility and complexity - so, not just JS, but JS plus CSS plus additional media types(including plugins). Once you have a client scripting thing with traction, it sucks the air out of the room for a slightly-better client scripting thing. And this could be said of ActiveX, Java, and Flash - they did not keep traction based on what they did better than JS, but what they did that was simply impossible in JS(which mostly amounted to I/O access or certain media types).

The economy nominally runs on money and productivity, but human beings run on emotions, credit and blame. So everywhere you look, if there is an opportunity to gain credit for something (even if financial incentive isn't there, like most of the arts) there is some cutthroat competition to have that credit reassigned to you, by fair means or foul.

The ticket out of this - in an individual sense - mostly comes through following well-worn ancient wisdom around virtue - humility, integrity, diligence, etc. That gives you an edge over the long run because the virtuous stuff enables sharing and therefore access to a trusted network studying the most interesting problems available(and from there, higher-profile life opportunities), while someone who is out to "make a name for themselves" is spending all their time looking over their shoulder trying to push down the competition and toot the horn on their own work(which is tailored to min/max credibility, not to study anything in particular).

Our economy is perpetually in a state of having the two outlooks overlap each other which accounts for the mixed messages - as soon as a good idea gets popular it gets gamed and gatekept. Keep in mind that we have only grudgingly managed to accept - within the last few centuries - that good economies are not premised on simple conquest and exploitation. We still have a long way to go.

By the late 1980's early versions of Cubase et al. existed. These were not yet DAWs in the modern sense(while there were some very early high-end examples of multitrack digital audio, that phenomenon waited until memory and storage were cheaper) but they were competent sequencers and could drive MIDI devices easily. Building up a MIDI sequence and then exporting that to the game engine format was the preferred workflow for the studios on PC attempting full scores(rather than "tunes and jingles") starting in this timeframe since it offered the flexibility of hiring traditional composers who could record in from a keyboard and then do some cleanup and edits for the target device as needed, including simplified beeper versions.

The tracker music/custom sequencer formats operated in a parallel universe alongside the MIDI workflow and were more often the provenance of scrappy demosceners and independents who saw an opportunity to completely control the output quality(as long as it was sample-based). Not everyone literally used a tracker type of workflow and there are examples like MML(Music Macro Language) as another idea of source formats, as well as the low-level "enter hexcodes in a machine language monitor while the playback routine is running" (used by some C64 composers.) If you played a DOS game made with QBasic it probably used the PLAY statement to control the beeper, with an MML-style syntax. This style of syntax would appear again with programmable mobile ringtones.

In the mid-90's the balance shifted again towards CD audio, ushering in simple drum loop sequences as the quick-and-dirty audio filler of choice, and everything since then has largely been variations on that theme with more tracks and processing.

Economy: So many pieces have been shuffled around, intervened with, and exposed to different business climates that what we are experiencing(and will continue to experience) is like strings on a marionette breaking, making it swing out of control. Think of the chaotic nature of shortages that we've experienced - the illusion of smoothly controlled supply logistics is broken. I do believe the inflation narrative will really kick in at some point, but I also suspect it'll be milder than we thought because there are many parts of the economy that have had a reset to norms, which creates opportunities for newcomers with higher quality or productivity to establish themselves. Not every city is going to turn into a Detroit because of one pandemic - the vacant storefronts will get used eventually for something, and whatever the something is, it'll probably represent more effective land use than what came before. So I see it as a case of real GDP, employment, wages rising transformatively in some instances. The foundational premise of minimum wage service businesses, for one, has been getting tested by pandemic-related intervention. When minimum wages get pushed up universally, businesses tend to look for capital deployments that let them pay fewer employees more. That could read as inflation, but also be experienced as a boom, depending on what side of things you're on.

Pandemic: Stop and go behavioral cycles will persist for some time to come. While the death rates are fading wherever vaccine deployment has taken hold, my initial thought that it would feel "over" for me when everyone I knew was vaccinated has not come to pass, because I realized that I don't want a "mild" case of Delta, but neither do I want to stay home. So I go out places still masking and have invested in new fashion masks, and this is probably going to be a generational shift.

Social/Culture: One of the biggest things happening right now is the loosening of the Boomer generation's grip on power and culture. It was going to happen anyway, but the shock of the pandemic gave it a kickstart as more people decided to make their life change now and not wait. In every town people want to be in, there's been turnover, and that is a resetting of the narrative, a opportunity for a new social life. If we take Stauss-Howe's generational theories as true, it's the shift from 4T to 1T - the ongoing resolution of a slowly unfolding crisis resulting in new societal baselines. Nobody I have met in person since reopening, when visiting bars etc., has wanted to connect online or asked "so what do you do" (which was seemingly ubiquitous in the US not so long ago) - cautious interaction, self-rediscovery, resetting of beliefs seems to be the trend. This is going to come with some fallout to "losing" group affiliations - anyone who senses their old group is falling apart, which many of them are(political groups, economic alignments, etc.), gets frantic and reactive. For a historical example, the Turner Diaries is a prime example of the kind of screed written by someone who feels their world has been "lost", framing it as an incoherent apocalypse in which the worst actions are justified as good and sensible. Expect a continuation of mass shootings and the like from people who think that the government has had a Commie takeover or somesuch.

Ending tipping needs a top-down enforcement of norms akin to pandemic response measures. The restaurants that try to go it alone confuse and sticker-shock their customers, unfortunately.

Of course they are, and we run into it constantly in computing. You can encode text with images as a bitmap, as vector graphics, as symbolic content that references bitmaps or vectors, as an algorithm that procedurally generates any of the above...

While you can produce identical outputs from the different methods, it's not hair-splitting to say that the authoring process and hence the nature of the medium to shape expression is affected by choosing one. When you opt towards maximizing generality your production cycle can grow without bound because everything is possible by layering different media, even if all of it is unnecessary. That's how you end up with creative projects that take multiple years to decades to accomplish.

A major difficulty of dweb technology is answering "what's the point of it all" in a self-interested sense. For centralized, it's easy to motivate a Facebook because of the assumptions of user data and attention being valuable commodities. Doing this involves competition, so the platforms are also reasonably competitive in their "home turf" and boast high usage figures, even if they ineptly overreach into other markets.

But decentralized has to embrace a kind of indifference to its users that makes it more like a natural force. Having more users is mostly a pain and lacks direct profit incentives, since, by definition, the gates are lowered and there is no tax to collect. That makes the self-interest more of a principled do-gooder fanaticism which operates outside the benchmarks of market success, and as such there's a heavy influence from anti-capitalist ideology in a lot of dweb projects.

Of course, one form of reconciliation has come through the idea of re-injecting the market dynamic through cryptocurrency. This mode of incentive-setting can produce some tremendously ugly results, but looking at the projects out there(I am using Brave right now), neither does it seem to have failed outright either.

The thing that has always defanged authorities of the past is organizational inability to see where the game is changing. And the game has gone on for a long time - villages would do all sorts of things to operate outside of the vision of the local lords.

The probable source of disruption comes from people one step removed from the top who see an opportunity to shake up the system and turn an activist message into opportunistic gain. This is why we often see waves of "anti-corruption" campaigns, sudden policy shifts, etc. The politicians see a trend forming and jump on to it. When they get in power they walk some of it back, but they can't turn back the clock all the way.

The source of a trend towards GPC comes from a series of "small wins" like the recent breakthroughs in Right to Repair, from IP that has recently expired, and from nationalistic competition("world's free-est country" will always be a title up for grabs).

It only takes one little country that's a "hacker haven" to jump ahead of the rest for a clamor to erupt. The dominant players will conclude that the answer is to strongarm that country into the hegemonic framework; others in weaker positions will see opportunities in jumping on. Then the fight is waged economically, and if the resulting products and services are desirable, concessions are made.

Unit tests help verify individual components of a system - which makes them top-of-mind for library code.

I think the issue with them lies in that most developers aren't shipping libraries, they're shipping integrated systems, so there's no component worth testing. (you can always invent one, but that's just overcomplicating the code).

At the same time, it's also genuinely hard to write good, principled tests of integrated systems, harder than it is to code up a thing that kinda-works and then manually debugging it enough to ship. You have to have the system set up to be tested, and feature complexity actively resists this - you fight a losing battle against "YOLO code" that gets the effect at the expense of going around the test paradigm.

It's deceptively tricky to build out this kind of strategy. IP builds product awareness, but it doesn't lead to a sustained gaming audience, which needs something more akin to a platform strategy per franchise(a Madden, Mario, Guitar Hero, GTA, etc.) - you don't want to just make a "Stranger Things" game, because even if it's a deeply realized experience, it doesn't loop into another franchise in the way that, say, playing a Queen song on Guitar Hero will lead you towards seeking out the game's recommendation for other songs; neither will it have the kind of premise that is as self-contained and enabling for player projection as a GTA.

Netflix has become known for optimizing content against the algorithm's feedback and not really letting a show run to a natural conclusion before killing it. This is going to be troublesome if applied directly to gaming, since it won't create platform reinvestment.

Until I see more announcements I'm going to guess that this will turn out like Amazon Game Studio - lots of investment without results.

Like with gambling devices, redemption games all seem to have operator-adjustable payout.

I recall playing "Stacker" for a little while in the 2000's. It used an LED dot display for gameplay, which was a simple timing game where you "built" a tower by stacking up the blocks, with it getting faster at each level.

What it did was exactly as you describe: it had a minor reward level that you could always win, and then a few levels above that where the game would cheat and instantly warp the block ahead to make you lose. I did get a win out of it once(and got an iPod mini), so I think I did come out ahead, but that was it.

Overall, it's better to be good at pinball(replay scores) or DDR(adoration of strangers).

I did a lot of grinding out heavy reps when I was younger and less experienced(mid-30s now) but now I am suspicious of that whole idea. If I stick to two reps before failure - i.e. when I start really slowing down the movement - my recovery time post-workout becomes much better and I don't experience as much collapse-into-bed tiredness, but I'm still seeing progression. There's an old broscience debate about whether muscle damage is critical but my own observation is that if it is, you don't need a lot of it, and doing so would favor PED users with tons of recovery capacity.

I also shifted my focus away from the largest muscle groups towards hip/core/shoulders, under a similar reasoning that if what I'm up against is mostly recovery capacity, the small muscles can be trained safely at higher frequency and will have the most impact on injury prevention and avoiding the stoop, rounded shoulders, etc. that afflicts the old.

There is a certain thing that I realized and got somewhat good at only recently: what we call a social "skill" is a bidirectional skill of performance and appreciation. It has to be, to be communicative.

Therefore, being "good" at socializing is extremely contextual. People speak of having a different personality when they speak a foreign language. This is a predictable outcome, since without total fluency, they will neither speak nor listen with identical competence.

And this also means that a group like a high school class can have a nominal social order, but it's premised on popular appreciation, which molds a certain "type" into the cool kids - the ones who actively work on appealing to a broad "teen audience" in their communication. After getting a little bit of an edge, it self-reenforces and becomes what that class knows to appreciate, at which point the cool kid's performance skills don't actually have to progress much further and they can just coast along the wave through graduation.

It's more often people who can't be appreciated in what they're doing yet(immaturity from their classmates, lack of direction from parents and teachers, unusual thought patterns etc.) who get the "outcast" label. For the most part, they are not "bad" at socialising, they're just tuned differently.

And so if you go to a gathering assuming "actually, maybe everyone is pretty bad at communicating on average" and then look for ways to fill in gaps according to their filters and preferences, the doors can open really fast. It just takes a lot of knowing oneself to succeed, since your ability to adapt style can only go so far - you're better off giving an amazing performance in the communication styles you're good at than a mediocre one in a popular, more competitive style.

Like a lot of questions historical, the more one studies the Industrial Revolution, the more questions one has.

I have often wondered about exactly this kind of thing so it's nice to see a researched take on it. The thing in my mind was always that culturally, an image of "big city industry" arose at some point - but that point clearly wasn't the late 1700's, or even into the first decades of the 1800's. So then, when was it? There are a few reference markers that suggest when that image could have coalesced, though:

* The first railroads of the 1830's

* The gold rushes and immigration waves of the mid-19th (precipitated by faster communication and rising sea traffic)

* The Crimean and US Civil Wars, both "industrial" in their making.

* The completion of transcontinental railroads

* The creation of modern urban sanitation

* The organization of wage labor as a movement, including revolutionary forms

These markers seem to align well with the 1850's-1870's growth figure assessment. The world by 1880 had experienced a vast reallocation of physical resources and human capital, and fell into a new political context premised around those reallocations. In the emerging cities, by day, immigrants toiled in sweatshops; by night, those with the means came out to party underneath the gaslamps. More and more goods were available imported. If you travelled, you bumped shoulders with the vast crowds at hub train stations. And there was always news of something more being invented. All of that made the revolution a visible thing reorganizing everyday life, even if it only tangentially affected you. Before that period, while you might have heard of new developments from afar, most of them did not carry such sudden impact.

It's a little bit too pat in its conclusions.

When watching livestreams of riots, it's really evident that the chaos they produce is rather like little bursts of action, and not so much a sustained pandemonium. These bursts are a thing that can actually take place anytime and don't gain special value because of the riot, they are just more common, more easily prompted. Everyone gets behind on their narrative of events in the process; though the observers'll say something is happening according to their beliefs, it's not literally the thing that is happening.

And that isn't so far removed from just an ordinary "wild party" that hurts people or gets stuff smashed. It's riotous specifically because of the context and political impact. There aren't "sides" in a party, unless there's a gang fight or something of that nature. But a riot always expresses some politics.

I'd have to look it up to see which was first, but the ports of Pitfall! are a rough contemporary of Spelunker, which also has an infamous NES port. Both are Western-originated games about descending into caverns and collecting treasures. Spelunker in arcade is actually really interesting in how forgiving it is relative to most platformers of the time, while the NES game is its merciless counterpart.

I find that the question of "whether simpler" is summed up in the aphorism "it's easy to get wrong answers infinitely fast".

Where software gets out of control really quickly is wherever you start to express a thing that is not essentially true on its own premises, and requires the introduction of a great number of assumptions. Commercial software falls into this pit unthinkingly since the business requirements create all kinds of assumptions: "it needs to support as many languages as possible" or "it needs to have calendar features" or "it needs to be compatible with this other system" are three super common ones that can create huge dependencies. So our software deviates from "truth" in some respect to get the job done of being presentable to other humans and doing the thing they expect.

At every layer of our current systems, we have little Swiss Army Knife components that can be set up to do anything to resolve these kinds of issues, which means that they do all of it somewhat poorly. Old software is often more like a chainsaw - it doesn't have much to configure, so it's inadmissable for a larger spectrum of tasks, but the thing it does, it does quickly.

Long run, though, I believe that true software crowds out false, even if there's a short-term advantage in getting the market to adopt something that does everything poorly and mostly serves the business, the next phase of that is a flight to quality, which currently manifests as everyone depending on some unmaintained open source code that works and does the job.

The term "character generator" in video specifically refers to hardware that overlays text onto the video signal. That is, in this case it's not a "text mode", it's a bitmap graphics mode used for text, which appears likely just going by the screenshots. There weren't many computer systems taking this approach in 1978, since any bitmap mode would be RAM-hungry, so they were usually either text centric(Commodore PET) or had both text and graphics modes and hybrids(Apple II, Atari).

It's a "where are the bullet holes on the planes that survived" kind of problem. The thing that overwhelmingly kills game projects is overscoped design, which manifests into a need for very detailed, configurable entities with rich scripting functionality. So if you pursue scalability at the level of the entity system itself, as a thing you should invest substantial engineering resources to - you are effectively saying, "yeah, I have a team of 100 people to throw at the game's implementation and they are going to add literally every feature we brainstormed and also stuff we haven't". Because if you actually don't intend to do that, then you can instead adopt a pattern of prototyping it in whatever works well for authoring, followed by profiling and hardcoding a fast path as necessary. "Fast from the beginning" is just guessing about the bottlenecks.

And that doesn't mean OOP is definitely good at the authoring task, either. It just happens to be good at kicking the can down the road and letting things work inconsistently, which may be correct in a prototype when you don't know if you're actually shipping that feature, and only poses an issue if you've tied the authoring to the runtime implementation in a deep fashion. Godot doesn't assume this; while it does have hierarchical relationships of objects, it has some boundary points with respect to reuse(scenes and scene instancing) that make the path of least resistance be to make separate authoring and runtime versions of entities, with one spawning the other.

The point is to not have abstraction power. The goal is to make the DSL be a direct expression of the intended thought, which usually means cutting it down to the point where it's reduced almost everything to preset categories. At that point, you don't need much of a language to build it in, so it ends up porting well to all of them.

The biggest thing was the replacement of the "success script" with a more philosophical approach.

The script is something that appears in all the big life decisions: what a good career, relationships, living well is supposed to "look like". I speak from the Millenial perspective but it's something roughly applicable to all generations - pressure to adopt a certain image. In adolescence the script, in some form, hits everyone really hard and becomes the life goal - and so by age 20, if you've had a stable life up to that point, you are groomed to be what society thinks you should be, and have internalised all those ideas.

At some point between then and 30 the cracks start to appear in the script. You're supposed to do X, but you want to do Y. Doing X will make you a lot of money, but you hate it. You actually like X when you were supposed to hate it. It turns out you don't want to become someone with more power and responsibility, or 2.5 children, or living an outragous Instagram lifestyle. You want a modest goal, like getting better at a hobby. Or maybe you're really good at something and it gets you acclaim, but you don't really grasp why that would be and start to reject it. Being told you're successful is ultimately just a way of playing to the crowd, isn't it? How do you be true to yourself without also dying?

And so, little by little, even if you seemed to have all that potential at 20, you probably get filtered out of the framework. Your life is something else, but how do you reconcile that? Some people mask to an increasing degree and find an addiction to help get them through the day. Others drop out and let themselves live more modestly instead of playing at being world-beating conquerers.

For me personally, seeing my parents age has been on my mind a lot. They definitely wanted me to be "successful" by the script. I was not succeeding at it, I felt miserable, was not earning much, and their involvement became increasingly distant and disengaged, repeating old aphorisms without examining the situation. But I realized, in some definitive sense, that I had broken past that when I checked my crypto holdings one day in spring of 2017 and realized they had suddenly become worth more than I had ever earned by working. I needed a few years to reset after that, but I got to watch my parents continue on basically the same trajectory they had had before, trying to write me back into the script: My mom used to want to have talks about "my future". Now she will sometimes say something about how I should be earning into Medicare. But my actual goals are much more near-term: if I live in a healthy way as best I know now, that seems more viable than hoping that Medicare exists in the future and that it will do something for me.

That's the kind of thing that's on my mind. I find things to study and pursue intensely, because that does seem to keep me focused and alive. The rest is just a means of getting there.

Author selects a different success benchmark, gets different results.

Casey's demonstration is specific to the claim that terminal text rendering, by itself, is "worthy of a PhD thesis", as written by a Microsoft employee. He makes no claim to Refterm being an actual terminal emulator, and he repeatedly says that it is not optimized, by which he means that he has never profiled it; it reuses Windows library code, implements a simple LRU glyph cache, and has an option to bypass conio and present a buffer passed directly through the kernel. The code is otherwise just a first pass at achieving the desired features, but it succeeds in demonstrating that a high-bandwidth terminal emulator is possible if pursued with any effort.

Yep. The reason why San Francisco has to be seen failing is because of the national implications of success. It's been a punching bag for decades, it just had a brief respite for a while.

I often use plogue's Portasound VSTi for FM tones. It's actually quite a bit more powerful than a real one since it can layer sounds and do some additional modulation.

You're getting at the part that I can expound a bit on :)

It's possible to engage with nihilism and say "I'm just going to survive pragmatically". It's related to the "state of nature" many philosophers will refer to as a pre-societal world. You can't have a society that's wholly nihilistic, but you can exist within society nihilistically in degrees, with the far end of that being the "off-grid live in a cabin in the woods" sort of disengagement. But even without going that far, it's also possible to engage with philosophical concepts and critiques without being ideologically attached to them.

Ideological attachment is what happens when you start converting all life events into phenomena relative to that ideology, and that's the thing that I see being shaken away from a fully normalized state("this is how the world is, there's no discussion to be had") to a vigorous, even violent argumentation(see: all the concepts you listed). And I can pinpoint that the shift happened almost instantly after the world achieved mass connectivity with smartphones, in the 2008-2012 period. Suddenly the US had its Marxists and anarchist voices emerge; trans rights became a major issue; and the "alt-right" took shape as well. We have a lot of visible ideologues in social media culture that will blame everything on the other ideology, where before those positions were buried by the consensus and relegated to subculture.

To me that makes it a "better" world in the sense of agency, because it's easier to examine the different positions. But it's also more fragmented as a society, more prone to bubbles of extremism. If my experience tracks, we're in a transitional state where many old attachments are being discarded while others are being taken up. (Since 2008, I went from being - to retroactively label things - a vagely cishet liberal, to a nonbinary asexual meta-anarchist, all terms I would have struggled with back then.)

My ideas on this mostly derive from Heather Marsh's philosophical writing, so you could say I am attached in that direction(it's equally true that I haven't been able to critique her work, in the sense that I literally just don't want to); her view coincides with that of the meta-anarchists(itself a newly emerging project of philosophical writings) which is why I now also use that as an identity label. I don't see myself as anti-identity, but I do see myself as anti-politics(despite having some occasional political engagement), because I accept Marsh's idea of there being both healthy attachments and unhealthy ones, and kicking my political attachment is like kicking a smoking addiction; I can try to curb it, but it often roars back to life if I look at the news.

It's clear to me that it's too easy to be Panglossian about our material conditions. Just thinking about the time frame I grew up within(1980's-2000's US) there were a lot of things that I now see as definitely bad and that have, in fact, all started to change in my adult life:

* The omnipresent nature of sweetened food and drink

* Car-dependent culture

* Mass media culture

* Simpsons-style dysfunctional nuclear families

* The whole array of corrupt policies and programs, cults-in-disguise(e.g. "troubled teen" schools), and ideologically driven movements; while we're hardly free of those things, and there are plenty of new or intensified versions of them, I believe there are also more ways to find a sustainable path outside those frameworks these days.

But if you asked me if life was good in 2000, I would be mostly in agreement, because my life seemed pretty good - I was told it was! But then I look back on it and it's like, nooo, actually, there were all these pieces that traumatized me, removed my agency, were bad for my health or made me settle for less. And I believe the same would be true if I had been experiencing life in 1970's.

Like, sure, in 1621 I'd probably have died at a young age. But I am on the hedonic treadmill with respect to life quality too. It doesn't matter to my feelings that now is the best time, if better is still possible.