If the kid is bright they'll be bored anyway. This is something you cannot avoid, so teaching them to behave in a boring environment is more productive.
Yup. I was a "smarter than average" kid at this age and though I couldn't read when I started primary school I was still bored with the slow pace of school the vast majority of the time.
This is a good practice to reduce at least some amount of dependency to outside US. Also this is the definition of innovation; making high tech out of low tech.
VS Ramachandran has an interesting talk about mirror neurons, which is a subset of motor neurons. They activate when you perceive anybody else doing something as opposed to only activating during your actions. This is fundamentally a built-in empathy/group learning mechanism, but it also has some other interesting implications too.
For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.
I find it interesting to ponder about crafting something that can withstand 7 centuries, given what we currently craft (as a software engineer) not even lasting 10 years.
Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE satellite after 18 years. I do see the false equivalence here, yet it is nonetheless thought provoking, alongside 100+ year old tea shops in Japan.
One thought that we should not neglect to provoke is that we manufacture things “badly” by choice, in order to reduce cost, in order to make products accessible to more people. Sometimes that sucks and costs more in the long run, but sometimes it’s a rational choice not to overbuild something.
We absolutely could still make a fancy gauntlet that stood a good chance of lasting 700 years, but it would cost enough that only today’s wealthy knights would want to buy it.
Planned Obsolescence is an urban myth - there may be some examples, and if there are that's a tiny slice of the market. The reality is what OP said, price and quality are tradeoffs. Manufacturing things that can last 100+ years of wear and tear means those things would be costly, with very limited use cases.
Isn't this article interesting because it is an outlier (an old preserved gauntlet)? If we want to compare outliers like this to what we build today, it seems impossible to do, since we would need to wait another 700 years to see if any of the things we currently craft last that long.
I do agree with you on principles, but given those gauntlets being a pinnacle of human achievement for that time, our current pinnacles doesn't seem to last that long and the means are lost as well. Probably for the better, but quite can't tell also.
Maybe it is a creeping anxiety about losing knowledge as we stride forward and forgetting the means of recreating the things we end up with. Kind of like the Dark age of technology in WH40K.
Satellites will be up in space, able to be found by "space archeologists" for literally tens of thousands of years. Sure we maybe won't be able to communicate with them anymore, but that's basically the same as how this gauntlet was dug up out of the ground - the knights who might've used it likely weren't able to "communicate" (find) the gauntlet because it was buried underground.
How many gauntlets were not preserved? You are comparing a failure of NASA to the what you are calling the pinnacle of human achievement of the 14th century. Would it then not be fair to compare it to the pinnacle of human achieve of this century, rather than its failures? Also, what have we lost by not being able to recreate multi-century lasting gauntlets? Why is something lasting hundreds of years longer than necessary a quality worth preserving, rather than, something fit for purpose?
You know what's funny? Those tungsten cubes that were a fad recently will be among the most enduring relics of our time, because tungsten is extremely hard and corrosion-resistant. I imagine some archaeologist digging one of those up in a thousand years' time, thinking, "What the hell did they make this thing for?"
In the same vein, I find it funny to think about the future archaeologists pondering the relation of the Eiffel towers around the world the same way we do about pyramids.
NASA part was for an exaggerated example, and it was not a failing of them also. It was the nature of the business, decommissioning the C&C of their old satellites, presuming it to be dead after its planned obsolescence. Enthusiasts were there to re-establish contact luckily, but that is beside the point.
But for more mundane stuff, even phasing out media storage technology periodically causes a giant loss of knowledge and means even with the help of archiving groups.
I also stated that I'm ambivalent about the worth of such knowledge preservation, whether it is a form of stamp collecting or something more foundational. All I have to compare is the fact that we have an estimated %1 of Ancient Roman literature surviving and I'd prefer to have at least a bit more of it.
I do admit I didn't have a point to make really, or to assign worth to an ancient gauntlet. Rather it was a reflection on losing stuff while finding stuff and the permanence of marks we leave on this world.
The pinnacle of human achievement in our time is harnessing fossil fuels to replace biomass and whale oil as primary energy sources, enabling massive fertilizer synthesis (cheaper and more plentiful food), cheap concrete and steel production, and plastics. I'm pretty sure those plastics, and maybe even a PowerGlove, will still be around in landfills to be dug up in centuries to come.
I hate that I have to put the disclaimer here that there are obviously costs to the planet and us for this achievement, but it is undoubtedly what characterizes the age we live in (late-19th century forward) in a way that is arguably (if not self-evidently) heretofore unseen in all of human history.
Part of the reason for the long lasting aspect is the over engineering of the products back then. See also Roman aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons also probably contributed to this.
Today we have much tighter engineering tolerances for cost reasons.
This may be survivorship bias. If you look back say to 1970. Pick any car of that era would you drive it today? Not much. It is not nearly as good or even that well built. But some of the cars of that era are very well preserved and taken care of and maybe even in better shape than when they left the factory floor.
Sometimes things are built well or kept around for whatever reason. But most of the time people slap it together and call it good enough. Then when they are done with that item it is discarded.
You can say 'look at all the stuff from the roman era that survived'. You can also say what about all the stuff that didnt? Probably most of it. But you do not see it because it is no longer there.
> See also Roman aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons also probably contributed to this.
Surviving Roman infrastructure didn't just sit around for two thousand years, it has actively been maintained in that time.
You'll find that you can keep a lot of grandfather's axes around for as long as you want, as long as you keep them clean, and replace the handle and the blade regularly.
Well I for one, bet my ass that, if we are still using mainframes in 700 years, those will still be running legacy COBOL, they will still publish the mandatory, by-annual "COBOL developer shortage" article iteration on HN.
We have been "making" nuclear waste that will "last" for eons, though.
Hopefully the constructions (both technical and social) where we store it, in the hope of a future generation that can rid of it, will last centuries too.
I'm convinced everything surrounding nuclear waste is where humans are putting the most effort in thinking and planning for ages. Or, I hope it is.
That said, someone once told me that e.g. castles "back then" where built for centuries, not decades. People thought much more in family-lines, generations and long lasting tribes, than individual, or families' lives.
And there too, nuclear waste is where current society had to think of the grandchildren of the grandchildren, rather than 'before I die'.
Posssible, but unlikely. It is rather likely, that AI will become a increasing useful tool for human engineering. But replacing would require something fundamentally better.
Software is like plants in a garden. Maybe the garden lasts, but the plants are born, live and die, and have to be tended to regularly to survive. It won’t be the same garden eventually.
I think the idiosyncratic command names are rooted in the fact that git is designed as a peer to peer distributed system as opposed to how it is generally used right now, the server/client workflow. Github even follows and adds to this tradition with the always weird sounding "pull request", since the pull request is normally a mail to a mailgroup with the description of the changes and an actual request to pull that person's changes to the maintainers local repositories.
I'm not sure what is currently being done at developing git, but adapting/creating some porcelain commands accommodating a more centralized workflow even mainly on a semantic level could help with the UX friction.
Also, the obligatory joke "git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space"
> Also, the obligatory joke "git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space"
The scary thing about that one is that I still don't know whether it's just a joke, or if it's the "it's funny because it's true" kind of joke.
My motto is "Follow the Dread". If I dread public speaking I should do it, if I dread setting up IPsec VPNs I should do more of it, if I dread working with money and run a business as opposed to working solely as a technical person I should do it, so on and so forth.
"The Dread" is a good north star for discovering what to improve next, since most Dreads are somewhat common/shared among peers, communities and colleagues. Being able to do something nobody likes to do is a good edge against the world.
This aligns with my motto of “10% beyond comfort” where you push yourself out of your comfort zone 10% (or more) and learn. You get the dread. You get the “I’m not qualified” vibe. You get the experience. Next time won’t be nearly as bad and a few times more and you’ll be comfortable. A dozen more and you might become an expert. You may actually find you love it.
To the articles point though is that you can be offended and feel anxiety and dread without having to completely shut down the entire discussion. This being in your 10% beyond comfort zone, this is where you - in your offended state - should actually be the most open to learning. Why did they say that? Why do they think that way? Is there reasoning or is it impulsive? How to I articulate an argument for my side when they behave this way?
This is how adults handle being offended during a discussion. You can even voice that you are offended by the remarks. What you don’t have is carte blanche to sling assaults and prevent freedom of speech.
A personal anecdote: I don't like public speaking, but I do it frequently to large audiences. I became much better at it and I feel much less uncomfortable now than before.
...But the dread is still there. I still regret it every time I have to do it. It's just less stressful now.
Exactly my experience. After 15 years, I became an apple fanboy in 15 days. I still do hate losing my muscle memory on some bash shortcuts, but I'd say it was very much worth it.
