Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 03:31:18 JST Andrew (Television Executive)

   I've spent most of my life doing things that are New. I've tried to live on the cutting edge, I've tried to embrace the future.

   Now, I find myself looking to the past more and more.

   What good is a computer?

   • alcinnz repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 05:12:40 JST Andrew (Television Executive)

     in reply to

     I'm thinking about people, and how people are always people.

     People's wants and needs and motivations haven't changed a whole ton in centuries.

     Their contexts have changed, sometimes in small ways and sometimes dramatically.

     Reminding myself of the ways people are still people is a useful way to determine if what I want to do has any hope of success.

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 05:12:41 JST Andrew (Television Executive)

     in reply to

     Whe the current phase of growth, the dying breaths of the industrial revolution, finally subside...

     What will be left?

     alcinnz repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 05:12:41 JST Andrew (Television Executive)

     in reply to

     I'm reading "mysteries of london."

     It's a penny dreadful published weekly starting 1844. It was probably the most widely read piece of literature of the first half of the 1800s.

     It was essentially the must see primetime TV show of its day.

     (The act of telling a story was not new. The printing press, and the boom in literacy rates among the working class allowed telling stories to reach a new context.

     When serial television came around, it was just a further evolution of that context.)

     alcinnz repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 05:12:42 JST Andrew (Television Executive)

     in reply to

     It feels good to connect what you're doing with a tradition that stretches back decades or centuries.

     (It also feels good to do something that feels wholly new and unique, as if no one has ever done it before, but usually this is less about actually doing something new than it is about changing the context in which a thing is done.)

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Nov-2024 05:12:43 JST Andrew (Television Executive)

     in reply to

     I don't mean this in a fashy "return" kind of way.

     I'm not here to say that modernity is itself a problem.

     But I was raised by people who might as well have fallen out of the proverbial coconut tree. I was raised in a world in which we pretended that the world started in the 1970s, and everything before that was Ancient and Unimportant.

     But this modern era is an anomaly. A temporary and unsustainable contrivance. A blip.

     What will matter in 100 years?

   • Embed this notice
     qwazix (qwazix@bananachips.club)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 05:33:07 JST qwazix

     in reply to

     @ajroach42 in a world without perpetually powerful hardware, the software will have to be slimmed down. As such, your 2012 android 4.4 smartphone will be more valuable (not as an antique) than it is today.

     Every past piece of tech that gathered a critical mass of nerd owners has seen improvements and life way longer than the intention of its manufacturer. In a world where hardware is no longer cheap, old, still working devices might reach that critical mass.

     Software distribution will have to value broad compatibility more than anything as it will not be able to reach people if confined to specific devices.

     Old things also have unpatched vulnerabilities so liberating them will be made automated.

     I'd love to do software for that world.