icandoitbetter

    To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last 
    couple of years are just that, a recession and slow 
    recovery--they aren't a harbinger to the end of   
    capitalism or conventional labor or employment.

The recession and slow recovery are what we make of them. The future is not already determined. There may or may not be the end of capitalism, but that doesn't say anything about whether that's a goal we should pursue.

Even though Rushkoff believes that automation is killing jobs, he doesn't believe that the alternative he proposes is inevitable. He just invites us to consider it.

   The real problem is that we keep reproducing 
   uncontrolably. The religiously crazed keep pushing having 
   tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM.

That's only the main issue if you're wearing Reddit atheist goggles. Population growth is steadily decreasing in developed countries. On the other hand, automation is becoming increasingly a problem and is partly responsible for the increasing economic inequality we are facing - people with access to the means of production have a lesser need for human labor, resulting in the disempowerment of the middle class.

   If you give your surplus food to an area that supports 5,000
   starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of 
   them will be around in the next generation to starve even 
   more severely.

Not sure how well that applies to human societies. Poorer countries tend to have a higher population growth because poor people have children so that they can put them into labor. In developed societies, the general quality of life is increasing while population growth is decreasing, something that contradicts your assumption.

   so in a world where needs are fulfilled regardless of 
   whether you do anything, I fear people will have little  
   incentive or inspiration to create

That's a typical libertarian argument that borders on sadism (is producing great creations more important than living comfortably?). It can also be easily dismissed: Money is not the only incentive for producing art or science. In fact it's far from the most important incentive. Are you saying that important scientists or artists have produced their works merely in order to fulfill material needs?

I wish I didn't have to care about making enough money to survive so that I would have time to pursue my lofty research ideas.

Greeks work more hours than Germans [1] (in fact they're the 2nd hardest working people in the world according to an 2008 OECD study) and have shorter holidays (23 vs 30 days) [2].

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/12/euro...

[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,763618,00....

I don't see how the author is missing the point because of your claim. If the justice system is already crashing, then massively asking to go to trial would crash it even more.

Don't delude yourself with this Protestant hard-work-is-necessary mentality. Better representations are possible and they can save us a lot of work. It's easier to perform multiplication using Hindu-Arab numerals than it is with Roman numerals. It's easier to program with Python than Assembly. Difficulty is a property of the representation, not of some underlying 'abstract thing' that is being represented.

Using the categories [0] is the best way to navigate the icons on the site for me. But yeah, I agree that searching is problematic.

[0] http://thenounproject.com/category/

Not the same thing at all. Google claimed to represent Mocality - AirBnB did not claim to represent Craigslist.

Why do we need computers? We already have the abacus.

Yeah, it's exactly because of the mentality of "ideas are worthless" that has dominated Silicon Valley that there's such a profound lack of imagination in today's technology world. It's perfectly fine to build things because they're "cool," and it's equally OK to follow the herd with some social analytics bullshit startup or an Instagram meets Path for Video type of thing, but know that when you want to do those things the idea is worthless not because ideas are worthless, but because that idea is worthless - and you can still be successful without a worthy idea.

It took my browser 20 seconds to render the text. I've no idea why he would load static content dynamically.

>Javascript (which is basically just a Lisp with infix syntax ;-))

No, it's not.

Your startup is not part of history. You couldn't find better evidence that SV is an intellectual bubble than this post.

The author doesn't provide a solution. Or his solution is so incoherent that it's simply not one. Listen, we are all frustrated. We're all waiting for the deus ex machina language that will be a direct interface to pure thought. But belittling people just because they stomached their frustration and continued to make progress in the field of "wasteful" programming languages is not the way to go.

You actually get better code density with Clojure, for large enough programs. And a WAY better code density when you try to do multithreading.

The above probability does not hold true.

Did you even read the essay? Visions of the future are critical in shaping the focus of today's research. GUIs, laptops, etc. came almost entirely out of Alan Kay's mind. Visions of the future that just plain suck, such as Microsoft's, then become misguiding.

Yes. His latest tweet:

>There was a section on Waving Hands In The Air interfaces, but I cut it. (Tho I liked the phrase "nut-punch to your proprioceptive senses".)

What Jobs probably meant (not that I agree with it necessarily): Philanthropy is using money to enable others to innovate, in contrast to being an innovator.

If you're going to do this, add the ability to retro-record (i.e. when you press the record button, the recording starts from 30 seconds in the past - meaning that you'd have to record continuously and have the 30 seconds on a cache at any given time).

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Somehow people have this picture of mathematics as this universal body of knowledge, but that couldn't be further from the truth. They are as earthly as anything else we've been doing as a human race. For an interesting perspective on mathematics from a cognitive-scientific point of view, check out George Lakoff's book "Where Mathematics Comes From."

What do you think of Clojure? (if you've checked it out)

Not particularly valuable ones, at least.

>Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do.

You are operating under the assumption that the usual way of dealing with technology is that you have some goal, and then you search for the right tool to achieve that goal. I disagree with that assumption. Most of the times you don't know that you want a specific functionality until the technology comes that implements it. Then you realize that you wanted it 'all along.' You are shaped by your environment more than you shape it.

Your time is indeed better spent doing things other than upgrading, the reason being that the software business just hasn't been able to keep up with the advances in hardware. Even though we have so much computational power available to us, we still haven't learned how to handle complexity and make more interesting, flexible interfaces. There can be innovation in document publishing software, even though we haven't seen any for such a long time. And when that innovation comes, I'm sure you will start wanting features from your word processor that you couldn't even imagine were possible.

There's a surprising amount of belief in historical determinism in the discussion here, which is utterly unjustified. It is easy to believe that the future will fix itself on its own. But such beliefs are mostly the result of not being able to imagine alternative histories in which things don't get to be so rosy.

The truth is that so many things in the history of computing were improbable, and made possible by a select few very strong-willed individuals. Personal computing was improbable. The dominance of open source was improbable. etc.

It's up to us to ensure that the post-PC era won't be the era of walled gardens, which is definitely where it's headed. And that would be perfectly fine, if our walled gardens weren't so darn suboptimal.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3335

Google was the Apple II of AI.

I feel very uncomfortable with the constant comparison between Ritchie's death and Jobs' death. Even Rob Pike ended up doing this. [1] Why are we trying to create conflict and see injustice where there is none? The amount of media coverage a person gets has no correlation with his importance. Can we blame people for not knowing him? Don't give me the tired "everybody is using his software, so everybody should know about him" argument. It's so hypocritical. We use a lot of things whose inventors we don't know.

[1] https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZ...

Obviously hidden in my statement was the assumption that what he's produced so far is not paradigm-shifting stuff. But go ahead, be snarky.