[HN Gopher] Silicon Valley hasn't innovated since 1978
___________________________________________________________________
Silicon Valley hasn't innovated since 1978
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 11 points
Date : 2021-01-28 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lord-enki.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lord-enki.net)
| rektide wrote:
| John Ohno is a treasure. Very few people out there with well
| calibrated macroscopes like John.
|
| There's some hand waving (a lot) here, but we've lived under 20
| years of de-empowerment: simplifying consumerizing, cloudifying.
| We used to try to make computing itself better. That innovation
| has been quelled.
| RGamma wrote:
| And how sterile and boring computing culture has become... it's
| really a shame how overpowering the business aspect is to CS
| teaching and employment. We're losing something important...
| Someone wrote:
| Title of this HN post is correct in the sense that it's the title
| of the referenced article, but that title is wrong for the
| article's content.
|
| The article claims computer science hasn't moved forward (much)
| since 1978, claiming that the changes in the 40 years between
| 1940 and 1980 were much larger than those between the next 40
| years (1980 and 2020)
|
| I think a simple model could explain that. Let's say computing
| went from '1' to '41' in those first forty years, an improvement
| of about a factor of 40. Keeping the same speed, it would have
| gone from '41' to '81' in the second 40 years, an improvement of
| about a factor of 2. That's an order of magnitude less than that
| factor of 40.
|
| You can change those numbers to get any difference you want.
| Point is that, if progress is more or less linear and
| improvements are measured as relative size differences,
| improvement rate always will slow down over time.
|
| Now, whether that model or something like it holds, I'm not sure
| about, but I think it might hold for many new fields (what
| happened after the invention of the alphabet, for example? A few
| thousand new glyphs, emoji, etc. were added, but there's not much
| really new there)
| stephenr wrote:
| What 1970s technology is the smartphone a mere "incremental
| improvement" from?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| A smartphone is not different from any other computer. It's
| simply smaller. Can't get more incremental then a reduction in
| size.
| krallja wrote:
| It's simply smaller *
|
| * also, an integrated touchscreen, inertial measurement
| sensors, a half dozen wireless protocols, two to four
| cameras, an array of microphones, speakers, LIDAR, OLED, a
| rechargeable battery....
| Aeronwen wrote:
| All made possible by shrinking technology available in
| 1978.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| > an integrated touchscreen
|
| Invented in 1965 [1].
|
| > inertial measurement sensor
|
| Commercially available since 1949 [2].
|
| > a half dozen wireless protocols
|
| This doesn't mean anything. Wireless data transmission was
| invented long before 1970.
|
| > two to four cameras, an array of microphones, speakers,
| LIDAR, OLED, a rechargeable battery
|
| All of these can be done precisely because there has been a
| reduction in size. None of this completely new tech. It's
| incremental reduction in size.
|
| [1] https://digital-
| library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/....
|
| [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294669755_The_
| histo...
| jfengel wrote:
| And costs five orders of magnitude less to do five orders
| of magnitude more than in the 1970s.
| jfengel wrote:
| Why, it's nothing more than a waffle iron with a phone
| attached.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701148/characters/nm0810379
| guidovranken wrote:
| What a terribly dogmatic way of looking at things. Some things
| don't change because they work fine, like core network protocols.
| Other things have improved so dramatically that they're
| indistinguishable from magic to anyone who lived a century ago
| (real-time HD video conferencing, deep fakes, VR, speech
| assistants like Siri), but according to the author these are
| merely "incremental improvements".
|
| Computing is _the_ area that has seen the most innovation since
| the seventies. This is the point Peter Thiel often makes;
| computing has gone through a Cambrian explosion while other
| fields like medicine have been comparatively stagnant (cancer
| still isn 't cured).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-28 23:03 UTC)