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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • withabeard@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzCFCs
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    8 months ago

    Depends on the “they”…

    But generally, back in the day data storage, memory and processing power were expensive. Multiple factors more expensive than they are now. Storing a year with two digits instead of four was a saving worth making. Over time, some people just kept doing what they had been doing. Some people just learned from mentors to do it that way, and kept doing it.

    It was somewhat expected that systems would improve and over time that saving wouldn’t be needed. Which was true. By the year 2000 “modern” systems didn’t need to make that saving. But there was a lot of old code and systems that were still running just fine, that hadn’t been updated to modern code/hardware. it became a bit of a rush job at the end to make the same upgrade.

    There is a similar issue coming up in the year 2038. A lot of computing platforms store dates as the number of seconds since the beginning of 1970-01-01 UTC. As I type this comment there have been 1,710,757,161 seconds since that date. It’s a simple way to store time/date in a way that can be converted back to a human readable format quite easily. I’ve written a lot of code which does exactly this. I’ve also written lot of code and data storage systems that store this number as a 32bit integer. Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296. That means at 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, some of my old code will break, because it wont be able to properly store the dates.

    I no longer work for that employer, I no longer maintain that code. Back when I wrote that code, a 32bit integer made sense. If I wrote new code now, I would use a different data type that would last longer. If my old code is still in use then someone is going to have to update it. Because of the way business, software and humans work. I don’t expect anyone will patch that code until sometime around the year 2037.


  • Lots of people are talking about this in terms of money… And we do live in a strongly capitalist society.

    UBI or similar could be useful.

    But… Money was created to find a way to compare one workers “value” to real world goods. When the worker doesn’t need goods (no AI needs 4 chickens and a bushel of grain a week) the workers value doesn’t need to be compared. There is less foundational value in money.

    We could move away from net worth measured in hoarding money, and start taking about attending currencies such as social worth. Someones worth could be earned in being useful/helpful to society and we as a society could choose to give more resource to that person. Just an example, but a line of thought to go down

    A totally separate area for discussion. I believe (most) people have a general need for purpose. Without “work” as we know it, lots of people could find themselves devoid of purpose. I have a feeling some of the ills of today’s world are because people are not finding social purpose in the work we do. Who really deeply cares about being the middle manager of a packaging company? I believe some of today’s mental health plagues are linked to this.

    Remove even more “work” and do people find purpose in other things? Does that help or hinder?

    Lots of people think with UBI we’ll all turn to art and culture. But frankly there’s only so much art each one of us can look at in a lifetime. What happens when too many people are sitting making boobs in clay? Do sculptures loose their artistic and cultural value? Is art and culture alone, enough to provide the whole of society with purpose?

    Which is the greater of two evils? People being required to slog through monotonous work, or people having nothing to do at all?



  • I’ll bite …

    crushing the productivity of these workers

    What “crushing” of productivity are you delusionally on about?

    https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcXp-6EsuSBkSyHpSbm0.png https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/

    I can find any number of sources showing that productivity has been on the rise for decades, and has continued to rise as Millenials and younger entered the job market. There is no “crushing the productivity”.

    The rise of the internet and social media has led to a culture of instant gratification … This sense of entitlement

    Millenials and younger have gone through their entire school life being told “you need to do well this year at school, to get into the top set next year, to get into a good university to get a good job”. We/they have been told this by every generation above them, for their entire lives. The have followed this, listened to their elders, worked hard through school, sat meaningless exams, gotten good meaningless grades, they have gone to university. They have worked hard their entire lives …

    Just to be told, “culture of instant gratification” “you’re entitled” “you’ve not done the grunt work”. It’s selfish of the previous generations to not recognise this.

    Your entire comment rings as “needs evidence” to me. To the point I’m not sure if it’s satire or not. You’ve failed to put in any grunt work, evidence anything or source it as anything more than conjecture.

    They expect to be rewarded simply for showing up, rather than for producing quality work.

    This is the opposite of how I see the world, as it stands. Look at the people calling for maintaining or increasing working hours. Look at the people calling to work in office. It’s the previous generations expecting people to turn up, in office and sit there for hours so they can be paid. They are expecting people to be rewarded simply for showing up.

    Look at the people calling for unlimited holiday and reduced workhours, where failure to deliver is a disciplinary issue. Look at the people calling to work from home, and have the quality of their work assessed, not their dress sense or punctuality. Look at the people driving quick delivery, rapid review and peer appraisal of work. These are the people who are focussed on delivering quality, and not getting paid simply for showing up.











  • Microsoft did this with browsers.

    HTML was a thing, that was implemented by other browsers at the time. Netscape Navigator (the precursor to Firefox) was a thing that already did HTML well. It could access the world wide web, and was the defacto standard.

    Microsoft introduced internet explorer, bundled with Windows. At first, internet explorer was not as good/complete/compatible as Netscape Navigator. Over time, it got better almost to parity. But it also added new features, features not in the HTML specification. They were not added to the specification, and how IE would use those features was not made public. So Netscape could not implement them.

    Users started to expect those features.

    Over time, more webpages would break on Netscape than on IE. Web designers wanted the fancy new features of ie. So users moved away from Netscape.

    If only a number of technical users care about something, that the “mainstream” (for want of a better word) doesn’t care about. Then things work less and less for the techies.

    Meta could do the same with the Fediverse. As they already have market domination in other markets, they can introduce a lot of users to our “safe space”. But be real if posts stop working and you as a techie knows it’s because Meta have done something funky, Grandbob Jim isn’t likely to care. Grandbob Jim will continue to use what “works”. And some of the less techie of us will be forced to move to the MetaFediVerse to talk to our Grandbobs.