I had two Amiga 1000s. It's one of several early computers I regret giving away.
I guess Amiga enthusiasts are an unusual bunch. If you note in the comments to this post, it devolves quickly into a discussion of mixed voltages on FPGAs.
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http://dbmarkham.com/
daniel@danielbmarkham.com
I guess Amiga enthusiasts are an unusual bunch. If you note in the comments to this post, it devolves quickly into a discussion of mixed voltages on FPGAs.
I have no politics in this matter, as I have no list of desired winners or losers and no desired end-state (aside from just being generally unhappy with the way things are in Turkey currently). I don't know how I could be less political.
It's a very complex situation, as you've pointed out. My only intent was to provide a shorthand evaluation of the area for others to dive down on if they desired. There is no one "Turkey", which is why I used the broad term. Of course it's much more nuanced. Thanks for the help.
1. Turkey wants a fight. I keep up on reading the western commentary and analysis about the region (Not the mainstream crap), and it's apparent to me that deeply-entrenched forces in Turkey want a fight. Our strategy so far is to do the best we can to ignore/placate them. I'm not sure how long that continues to work.
2. From time-to-time, we talk on HN about the internet becoming more and more walled off, with commercial ventures preventing competition and nationalistic devices like the Great Firewall of China preventing movement of information. There's not going to be one dramatic moment when we wake up and the net is gone. It's probably mostly gone now, and every day a bit more slips away unnoticed. We talk about and react to stories like this, but there are plenty of similar actions that nobody responds to. It's like Google customer support: the only way to make anything at all happen is to make a big stink, and in the long-run even doing that doesn't matter much to the average net user.
I am deeply unhappy and concerned about Turkey's future. I wish there was something I could to to help, but any response at all from the west will be used as political fodder. They're not in a good spot right now.
I clicked this title in order to see hi-res photographs of snowflakes. Instead I got a discussion of patent trolls and a bunch of other stuff that was not hi-res photographs of snowflakes. This was what I was looking for.
But the goal is specifically to conflate these two, isn't it? If I create a machine that beats a chess grandmaster, does it matter whether or not the machine "knows" how to play chess? If I create an app that takes you to a great restaurant for the mood you're in, does it matter whether or not it understands "mood" or "restaurant"? At some point, the stringing together of specific bundles of technologies becomes indistinguishable to the average person from real intelligence. (This probably happens far, far sooner for the average person than it does tech folks and researchers)
At that point, we've created something that for a specific domain _is_ intelligent: it reasons about things in an internal way that is opaque to us and provides what we perceive to be interactive value. Then, that thing just becomes another bundled to be assembled in an even larger chain. True AGI would be able to create and assemble the bundles.
But even then, the same end-state occurs: at some point whatever we're calling AGI will be able to do things with bundles of technologies that we perceive to provide interactive value. Will it matter at that point whether or not the machine is "truly" intelligent? (Apologies for the scare quotes, but many of these terms are quite suspect in this conversation and are used in all sorts of ways by authors)
To put it bluntly, the goal of AI work is to do cool stuff for reasons we're not exactly sure about. Otherwise it'd just be programming. We are using a lot of programming tools, like NN, to do this. At some point, various groups will fake themselves out and stop working in that area. Whether or not that's intelligence or not, whether or not anything new will ever happen in that field, is beside the point and not in the (commercial) scope of work. Aside from all the formal work and really cool stuff happening, in the end, when it gets used somewhere, this is a "looks good enough to me" situation. We're not looking to create intelligence, we're looking to create an uber-duber supreme version of Eliza for some given problem. The we find other, more complex and interesting problems. Then if we need to we'll join them together (There is a lot of detail that I have ignored, including how GANs play into my argument)
These are the natural ebbs and flows of popular opinion. It's seldom rational even without conspiracy theories being involved. Trying to control this back-and-forth by shutting down one side of the conversation is just going to increase the pressure until the natural cycle continues.
I think _maybe_ YT has some sort of long-game in mind where they come out with a business model, but this doesn't appear to end well for them or any of us. Treating complex and sometimes chaotic systems as if they were simple ones doesn't make for good results. If you think the question is whether or not the claims are true, you're not even close to the critical conversation society needs to have right now.
A while back I set out to write some books on creating technology: how to build the right thing, how to build things right (This is not a plug)
As part of that, I had to address the meta issue: how do we learn anything?
The answer was "questions", but it wasn't questions like you're probably thinking. It was meta, the universal class of all questions. Turns out, by simply asking questions, questions nobody knows the answer to, questions with bad premises, rhetorical questions, and so forth? We end up creating a shared language about the world around us. That shared language is the basis for any kind of joint creative effort. It's something we've been doing since childhood but never realized it.
I guess GPT-3 agrees with me! Woot!
So let's assume Musk nails it and can do this for $10M. Instead of my 20, imagine 200 100-ton landings of cargo on the moon, say over the period of ten years.
Instead of everybody sitting on Earth, trying to design-session-out the perfect lunar base, why not just keep regularly-delivering supplies, then learn how to build a lunar base while on the moon, figuring it out as you go? After all, just like SpaceX, we're not trying to build a lunar base. We're trying to build a factory for constructing lunar bases, eventually hundreds of them. Solving the modular/generic problem is what we want to do, not build another Space Shuttle.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like most of the people here, indeed most of the aerospace industry, naturally prefer these big, lumbering, paperwork-heavy, long-lasting bureaucratic programs. But without enough regularly-arriving supplies, why try to solve something up-front, all-at-once, and perhaps years or decades ahead of time when you can just figure out the bare minimum of things you need just as you need them?
But like I said, I'm probably missing something. I've been saying for 20+ years that our real problem is cost-to-LEO. Now that we're just barely beginning to address that, the next problem very well may likely be changing the way we think of large space-based programs. That could very well end up being a bigger problem than cost over the long run.
ADD: Seems to me that the Starship is a solution to delivering humans to space. We need reusable heat shields, booster packs, and payload capsules, along with an Earth-based mass-driver, to truly drive down cargo rates another 100x. At that point we'll begin seriously talking about becoming a space-faring species.
SpaceX is purportedly at some point going to be able to put 100 tons in LEO for around 100M. I'll roughly assume with a second launch full of fuel, a purchaser with the right gear could put close to 100 tons on the lunar surface for 200M or so, once they get the kinks out and the price down.
So why not just pre-purchase 20 of these for your favorite lunar project, such as the ULT? If they bring prices down you get a cool lunar base. If they don't, you don't pay. That much payload delivered to the moon for $4B would be an incredible bargain, and it also serves to further incentivize SpaceX.
I'm sure I have something about the economics wrong, but I don't know what. Seems to me like we should be very close to a lot of back-burner space projects getting off the drawing boards.
What don't I understand?
My theory is that while I'm interested in the personal lives of the people I follow, for the most part I couldn't care less about things they post with the direct intent of emotionally-manipulating me. So much of those kinds of posts are driven by loneliness, boredom, existential angst, and the comfort that public clanning brings people. While I'm completely committed to supporting and caring for my friends, these posts never bring them the relief they seek. Instead, it always ends up in a more-and more frenetic argument. I am almost beginning to think that for many of them, if they can't find that comfort online, they'll settle for a good fight. And after more than two decades online, I have never seen that comfort successfully delivered, aside from in a performative way.
So every time one of my friends re-posts or shares something I find emotionally manipulative, whether I agree or disagree with the sentiments, I take a look at the original source. Is this a source with, say, more than 10K followers? If so, my friend's participation in this communication stream is much more like a little propagandist than somebody who is either seeking or offering comfort. So I block the original source; after all, it'll just keep appearing again and again in my freed until one day it causes an argument.
This, for the most part, leaves honest-to-goodness things my friends are actually experiencing in person, instead of vicariously. As long as that's the case, I try to allow wide latitude, after all, I want to learn and share from as many people as possible with differing views. If, however, I notice a pattern of pain, either pain they're experiencing that I can't help with or pain they're seeking to inflict in others in order to fight with them, I start the snoozing and nofollowing.
I wish I could say that this strategy has been highly successful. It has certainly made social media much less painful, but over time I'm finding that I'm pretty much zapping everybody. Very few people have the editorial discipline to actually be responsible worldwide publishers. Most of us will far too easily choose attention over quality conversations. Social media isn't helping us; it's hacking us.
I wish my friends on the right the best of luck. I think it's a good move. Anything to advance the destruction of this cognitive and epistemology monopoly is a win in my book. I look forward to seeing how it goes for them.
Most of the time, things start off for good reason and represent good practices. We just butcher the hell out of them when we start selling them to one another. (Same thing happens in reverse; once enough people destroy any goodness left in a buzzword, people oversell how bad the idea is when they start pitching their plan to get rid of it)
To be clear, I don't disagree with the premise that lots of microservices implementations are a clusterfuck of monumental proportions. It's just ranting and raving about devs and dev shops screw up stuff isn't exactly news to anybody. That's the natural state of affairs no matter what your flavor-of-the-week.
We get close to something useful near the end, "...focus on the right criteria for splitting a service instead of on its size, and apply those criteria more thoughtfully..."
The rest of this looks like a rehash of generally-accepted architectural principles, most of which were misapplied and resulted in us getting here in the first place. I'm not going to line-by-line critique this. There are far too many points to counter and I can't imagine the discussion keeping any sort of reasonable cohesion (hardy har har) if it spreads out that wide. Oddly enough, I find this discussion of why monoliths might be a preferable default state too monolithic to split up into reasonable chunks to analyze. Much irony there.
We got to microservices (or I might rather say we _returned_ to microservices) by following good code organization principles. Instead of starting with the resulting implementation (such as the DAGs and various models in this essay) and trying to argue first principles, it's better to start with first principles and then come up with criteria for evaluating various results.
I feel I would be neglectful if I didn't add this: if your code is right, whether you're deploying as a microservice or a monolith shouldn't matter. That's a deployment decision. If it's not an easy deployment decision, if you can't change by flipping a bit somewhere, then either your first principles are off somewhere or you made a mistake in implementing them. The way you code should all be about solving a real problem for your users. How you chunk your code and where those chunks go are hardly ever one of those problems.
Voters, and their representatives, made a deliberate effort to be as hands-off as possible to the early internet. It remained tax free. Public facilities were used. Section 230 was passed to remove the specter of liability and so on. We all did the most we could to stay away and let the net develop, knowing that if we came in too heavy-handed, not only would we destroy this new creation, we'd forever taint it in the world's eyes as just being some kind of US thing.
We had high hopes. We were open-minded and experimental. And here's where we freaking ended up: just another Standard Oil or United States Steel Corporation, only this time there wasn't any kind of behind-the-scenes mucking around in politics. It's directly in our face. (And when you point that out, the monopolies themselves will beg for regulation, knowing full well that by the time their money finishes paying off the legislators, the fix will be in. They'll set the wall so high they'll never have true competitors)
Not a happy political place to be, no matter what your particular political views.
A helluva lot of people joined these networks and got captured by the network effect because we were told or believed that they were open sites, just like the rest of the net. If content (or types of content) came along that folks didn't want? Nerds like us would make and give away (or sell) tools for getting rid of that garbage.
In a big way, what we're going through right now is fraud, plain and simple. It may not meet the legal definition, but to grow and scale using one model and then switch to another once you have a monopoly is a form of bait and switch. There's no way in hell I would have joined either site, and I would have vociferously told my friends and family not to join either, if they had been clear up front that this was what they were planning to do.
NOTE: I am not making a legal claim. I mean fraud in the moral sense. I understand with a zillion corporate lawyers that everything these guys do is wonderfully legal, no matter what the long-term social effects end up being. I am speaking in the vernacular, not legal sense. We were tricked.
Each time there's a push, only the changed files would appear in the repo. Both the private and public repos would be active simultaneously in order to do a build. In other words, your project would have two folders with git active, and the build would combine those folders as part of the CI/CD pipeline. Every now and then the process of taking all of the current master branch and moving it offline would happen again. In this way, you'd never have a public repo that would have anything more than a few files in it.
In this scenario, the only things that are being hosted publicly are tiny bits of source code that are changed in order to keep the base updating. And even then, on a regular basis they would be deleted.
tl;dr: simply because you have to take down a repo doesn't mean you have to take down a location for publicly developing F/OSS software. </speculation>
But it's a good question and I'll try to reply in a brief and somewhat hand-wavy way (due to the medium, space, etc) Everything I'm going to say has caveats. And I can't cover them all. Meh.
If you believe that the species as a whole has never been this unstable before, then the real question is this: what has changed? Whatever it is, it's obviously happened in the last 20 years, maybe even in the last 7 or so. The thing to do would be to identify those changes and come up with a testable theory that can be tested using the data. In general, however, I am persuaded that the overall problem is that we've incentivized consumer technology based on a battle for attention span. This isn't new; it's been going on forever. But the network effect has shot it through the roof, and even simple AI is proving quite capable of taking that business model even further. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so much money in it.
+If you accept that premise, then that's how the conversation should generally go. If you don't accept that premise, then we need to back up a bit and talk about the effects of technology in general.
Here's a more detailed explanation and defense of my underlying thesis I published twelve years ago. This just didn't appear overnight; a lot of folks were trying to ring the warning bells earlier. (BTW, when I published it on HN, it got a lot of votes, but it also got a lot of "Well, sure, but 1) there'll be a new startup that will replace big tech soon, 2) we'll just invent some new app that will solve the problems we have from the current apps, etc") It was a sad demonstration of how all of us tech folk have a tendency to do the best we can to deny and ignore any implications of what we're doing aside from wondering whether our server is up. (I exaggerate for effect)
http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry1.html?EntryId=recgcpfuOFUe...
EDITED FOR CLARITY (Addition marked)
Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the population are, well, nuts. Another 10% are so are willing to do anything to become famous. It has always been this way. (Of course, I'm just guessing the exact numbers)
What's happened is that these folks are using this wonderful new instant worldwide publishing tool we've made to continue their pathologies. And companies are happy to make money letting them do so as long as nobody gets too upset. We are now reaching the point where lots of people are getting upset and those companies are running around like a single fireman in a city on fire trying to figure out how to make their business keep going.
The good news is that we're still the same species as before, and we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society. The problem we have is that social media should not exist. It shouldn't be regulated, broken up, or any of that. It simply should not exist. The incentives here are not aligned with the survival of our species (There's a huge discussion of what to make instead. That's for another day)
I think the problem is not easy to solve, but it's certainly easy to explain. It's not the end of civilization as we know it, at least it doesn't have to be.
If you run a newspaper, you publish lots of letters from nuts and cranks. You run stories on some of the things they do. People love hearing about other colorful people in their community (as long as they're peaceful, of course) When you run news stories, the general idea is that you have an editorial staff which is either balanced politically and temperamentally or is able to fake being so, the goal being to cut off and prevent any appearance of the publication accidentally slanting news when there's a much better and generally-accepted way of telling it. If it's passionate, stick that shit in the editorial section where it belongs.
But there's no longer that distinction between news, quirky folks, and slice-of-life stories. In fact, the more that it's all muddled up, the more eyeballs you can reach. It's even become it's own anti-joke. I doubt many of the flat-earthers are actually serious, but it's a way to be wacky that the internet overlords overlook.
And there lies the rub. If you control the gateway to information for billions of people, you effectively control where they go online. And since you control where they go online, you control what they know. These things logically follow one another. If they didn't, so many billions of dollars wouldn't be invested in internet advertising every week. We control what you know and when you know it. Driving through town? Hey, did you know there's a great pizza restaurant a block away? Computers are our brain, and internet companies are making huge bank on knowing stuff for us and telling us what would be fun to do.
So if they don't like an idea, think it's dangerous, not only does it leave their platform, it ceases to exist for most people. In the physical world it may exist, but in the minds of the world it does not.
That is immensely fucked up. The only thing worse would be subtle algorithms that do the same thing but are black boxes and difficult to prove exist or how they work. At least in this instance we're all having an honest conversation about it.
I could make a long, long list of information everybody knew was dangerous that we would have happily shut down if we could: germ theory, heliocentric solar system, bacteria causing ulcers, and so on. I could make an equally-long list of information everybody knew was true and good for folks that we later abandoned: phrenology, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, homosexuality being deviance, etc. Hell, just look at how many times everybody that's serious have flipped around on issues during the pandemic. That's how it's supposed to work. At one point, we had ER physicians secretly going behind the backs of their hospitals to share information. This was both breaking their contracts and could have caused great harm to themselves, their patients, and the institutions they worked for.
Now these problems are solved. Ideas contrary to leading opinions just cease to exist, and ideas supported by leading opinion, mixed with a lot of heavy-handed emotion and hyperbole, get stuck at the top of your feed.
We don't fight you over wrongthink anymore. We don't stick you in the editorial section or write articles praising you for your creativity even if most of us disagree. You and your ideas just cease to exist as meaningful concepts; no mentioning, no chatting, no links, sometimes even no association with people who feel that way. We have certainly done a great job of fixing that pesky "How do we keep the most people using our service" problem. Congrats guys.
This would have been a good launching-off point to talk about the linker, or language design, which we did a bit of towards the end but in the wrong context, in my opinion. Instead this author was a bit too clever by half; a shorter article more focused on practical limitations might have been much more helpful to coders.
I think it's probably good to go into the project with an idea of why you're doing this. Are you creating what's basically an extended business card? Are you trying to help a particular kind of person that you know very well? Or are you chasing the goal of matching up a slice of knowledge with an eager audience?
There are other goals. For instance, a lot of disparate experiences in your career can come together to help on a certain section you're working on. This allows you to personally gain some synthesis from your experiences you might not otherwise. You can find new depth in ancillary areas as you go through and footnote, adding more depth to the things you're talking about both for yourself and the reader.
It's good to have those goals, even if you end up delivering a different kind of book than you had planned, because as a sole author something's got to keep you motivated for years. This isn't a software project, a job, or even a romantic commitment. Whatever you write, if it's worth writing, becomes a part of you. Like one of the other commenters says, if you have people on your team with published books they're likely to be busy responding to and helping folks interested in those areas. That doesn't go away simply because you move on.
Probably the best advice I can give for new authors is that it should be a lot of work, and once you finish each phase you'll say to yourself, "Now comes the hard part". This essay writer gave 50 presentations. Wow! That number of public appearances alone is a non-trivial amount of work. Don't forget contacting bloggers, podcasts, tech publishers, and so on. No matter where you are in the process, next up is the hard part.
None of that is any reason not to do it, of course. You just should be aware that if you're going to do a good job it's a major commitment. Prepare your outlook accordingly.
Best I can come up with, the changes were so incremental and advertised as features. There was no natural stopping point, so vendors kept going.
Sorry guys. No flex intended. It was only a metaphor.
Modernism is the idea that we've discovered all of the ways of doing things from nature and now we're just honing in on doing those better. My subject was "How people interact with the technology they create". In this sense, whether it's process, coding, UI or whatnot, most everything you read is just another example of old standards we've had for decades: structured code, CMMI, RUP, XP, FP, and so on. Whatever you pick, the idea is that there are already pre-discovered and well-trodden paths ahead of you. The message from modernism is "Don't worry; we've figured it all out. This is the way it should be."
Continuing the metaphor, postmodernism is a critique of each of these from a standpoint of tearing them apart by way of understanding what's good and what's bad about each. It's certainly not a rejection of modernism by any means. It's simply an understanding of the various modern paths and what's wrong with each of them. In its classic sense, postmodernism is a way of deeply understanding and critiquing, many times by creating new works to contrast with the old methods, in order that the overall field can move forward. It's not a path of its own
Maybe this is where we ventured off-course. The word "postmodernism" has come to mean the universal tearing apart of anything that is traditional, ie deconstructionism. That was not my intent at all. In my mind, postmodernism at its best is a severe recognition of the flaws of various modern techniques as a way of honestly dealing with them, the challenging of the idea that everything important has all figured out from nature, not the tearing apart of western civilization. It's an analytical technique, which can involve creating new works of its own to show contrast. In its purest form it shouldn't be a movement, fetish, fad, or any of the things many of the practitioners and detractors squabble about.
Agreed that it could be a trigger word for many, especially how it's used today. That was not my intent. I'm just used to the deeper and more traditional use of the word. It honestly didn't occur to me what all that it's evolved into. I knew better and just wasn't thinking. Apologies for the confusion.
- Although these books are meant to help people who develop technology, frankly I'm not interested in what the average developer has to say about them. I wouldn't have liked some of my conclusions either had I read about them 20 years ago
- I have deliberately priced my books to only sell to people interested and dedicated in reading them This is the only reason I'm replying to you: I wouldn't want somebody else to go find the books and then start a flame war based on my price. If you can't afford it but are dedicated to learning, ping me. We'll work something out. Otherwise yeah, it's crazy high compared to the "Learn You Some Javascript in Five Hours" free YouTube-based courseware.
I don't think I could have done that even ten years ago. There's a perspective you get, kind of a postmodernism, where you both understand the topics and the common ways of addressing them, then are able to move past that. I guess geniuses reach that point in their teens. It might take a bit longer for the rest of us :)
There's a thing I see with younger tech authors where they don't want to admit it, but they're for the most part chasing fame. That's a different kind of creativity. I never was good at that and it hasn't gotten much better, either. Perhaps you need a good foundation in order to "bloom" eventually?
If nothing else, this makes for a great explainer video. Find somebody who needs to know it and show it to them. The key problem is that 99.9% of folks even when they understand the problem can't fix it.
Having said that, knowing beats not-knowing. There is good here.
Yeah. I liked it a lot as well, even though there was nothing new.
This documentary is like walking into a crack house and saying "Hey guys! I've got this great PowerPoint presentation on how bad crack is for you!"
Nice idea, I guess, but there's no reason at all I would think it has a chance of accomplishing anything.
These efforts appear, make a splash, and then ... dissolve. I wish it weren't so, but there are some extremely powerful social forces at work here. A TV show ain't going to do much.
It would be an amazing experience, for both the speaker and the mourners. Looking forward to hearing more about this story.
2. That programming and making stuff people want are two entirely different things, although programmers always assume that whatever you're building, it's the right thing. You can spend your entire career in programming, learning all sorts of goodness about things like Erlang innards, and never really understand what your job is.
3. That all of that mousing around, learning a new IDE every two or three years when I started was a complete waste of time. I automatically assumed that the more cool and shiny the programming environment, the easier it would be to code and the better my code would be. But no. grep and awk work (mostly) the same way now as they did 30 years ago, and any time I spent learning which hotkeys did that work in some long-lost dev stack was a complete waste of time.
4. Conversely, that UX beats internal architecture, every time. If folks are having a blast using your app, you win, even if it crashes every five minutes (How they could have fun if it crashed every five minutes is a good question. You might want to ask them)
5. The more smart people you throw at a programming project, the bigger mess you end up with. I know when I say that people are thinking of "The Mythical Man-Month", but it goes deeper than that. Even if you somehow manage to stay on-schedule, human communication around innovation stops working at a certain scale, and that looks like a hard limit. There are ways around it, using things like Code Budgets, following CCL, layers and DSLs, but nobody does that, so it doesn't matter. We, as an industry, have absolutely no idea how to staff or run projects.
ADD: One thing that was quite profound that I discovered late: if you code well, the simple act of programming can tell you something about the way you're reasoning about the problem that you couldn't learn any other way. Programming is by no means a simple one-way street where ideas come out of the head of the programmer and end up as bits on the tech stack. It's very, very much bidirectional. Our programs influence us as coders probably much more than we influence them.
In fact, even during its heyday, the Roman Empire defied defied definitions. Were you Latin? Roman? A citizen? These and other terms all meant different things as the civilization progressed. There was almost a determined effort to keep shifting definitions around such that the Roman Empire never died. In fact, IIRC, there's a 60 Minutes segment where they interview some Greek monks living on an island. The flag they're flying? The flag of the Byzantine Empire, of course. (Also, the word "byzantine" is mostly our own invention. They considered themselves thoroughly Roman)
Having said all of that, it's completely obvious to any outside observer that major changes occurred, many of which had a negative impact on the population. So something happened. Until one starts in with definitions of what exactly constitutes a valid OEM part for our Theseusian ship and what doesn't, folks are free to completely ignore the discussion, no matter how bad things get.
Frankly, the historical record is not encouraging. Usually, when this topic comes up people chime in with easy takeaways like "people have always complained about this, and it rarely amounted to anything", "look at this thing that happened recently that's never happened before. It's proof that we're doing better than any other civilization ever has", or "things have not been going according to my value system, therefore doom is approaching!"
It's possible to cite example-after-example of these phrases coming up when the conversation happens in the historical record. And yet. And yet at times civilizations do die, and there was plenty of warning while it was happening. The problem is that denial and complaceny is tough to fight. When the Emperors took over Rome, it kept the Senate around. They gradually stopped having power, but by keeping them around, it was possible for the illusion of things staying the same to remain. People, with the very smallest prodding, are more than happy to believe that everything is as good as it used to be, plus there's all this new cool stuff we've never seen before!
Hell, ask a few people when the Western Roman Empire ended. Good luck with that. There are folks who will tell you it never did end. If you're that far in denial, how could you ever reason from your current historical position to the long run?
Many times I think conversations like this are much more interesting by the types of responses you get than the actual merits of the case presented.
If our civilization is entering the great 1984/Brave New World Fizzle, I can tell you with certainty that there will be fierce denial that such a thing is occurring. Just like always.