Could be worse - how much fun will Perl be, I wonder?
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That punch card along with the discussion of coding via voice reminds me of Batman’s most ingenious escape, where he and Robin survived passing through a giant piano-roll-punching machine by singing the exact notes needed such that it punched out their outlines in the sheet music while missing their bodies.
So you never know, voice-based coding could save your life!
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I did not know that Liberace was a Batman villain and this world just got a tiny bit weirder and more wonderful.
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Yeah, sometimes, but mostly, it’s just too woke.
Also, can I say that, joking aside, a key aspect of Star Trek wasn’t just the technology, but the humanity of the show’s premise. That we can have a well-ordered society, built by strong public institutions, technology and gadgets, but they aren’t the point. The point is that everyone is given the tools for a good life and the freedom to pursue that good life, without the oppressive control by for-profit corporations. It undermines the libertarian argument by having such a strong focus on people being the center of everything, with technology as our servants. It’s deeply anti-racist in it’s presentation, and it’s hard to dismiss, because you have people from all over the planet (and all over the federation) working and playing together quite happily. The messaging on that front is so strong, that you can’t miss it. Say what you will about Roddenberry, he wanted to make sure that the audience got it. Because it’s not technology for it’s own sake, but technology in the service of human freedom, the techdudebros are not as interested in it.
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Even better: he was two Batman Villains. (Chandell and his twin brother, Harry.)
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I know I’m a bitter GenX person, so maybe this is me entering my yelling at clouds stage of my life, but I just spent a large part of my morning writing PowerShell and batch scripts to take care of some of our network tasks for our new computers. They can claim DOS is no more, but a quick peek under the hood disproves that. (“That’s not DOS, that’s Cmd!” Right. Keep saying that sport, maybe you’ll start to believe it yourself.)
Voice interaction will certainly improve and that’s good, but claiming keyboards are going to go away? That’ll be as likely as the paperless office that’s just around the corner. I love that this is in PC Gamer which is a nice recursive rebuttal to why this just isn’t going to happen.
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Apparently EBCDIC and other encodings intended to be used with punched cards had a design constraint: a single character couldn’t have too many binary 1s… so that the cards wouldn’t fall apart.
Some clever engineer today might wonder why punch cards didn’t just use a binary encoding—after all, with 12 rows, you could encode over 4000 characters. The Hollerith code was used instead because it ensured that no more than three holes ever appeared in a single column. This preserved the structural integrity of the card. A binary encoding would have entailed so many holes that the card would have fallen apart.
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Our whole generation…
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During WW II in occupied Scandinavia paperclips were worn on lapels as a non-violent symbol of resistance.
Depending on who you ask1) it either started in Denmark or in Norway, and the discussion then usually devolves towards who actually invented the paperclip in the first place.
1) If you ask me I’m gonna say Norway.
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I like the cat and it’s cool and all but I don’t believe that banding together as consumers is going to work. Not unless it involves mass boycotts and civil disobedience which are… difficult in the current environment.
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Ah yeah, I agree. There’s a followup where he talks about ‘slacktivism’ and how people who are actually in the chain of making the bad things happen and making decisions might care, but might not say anything or do anything because they don’t think that the boss will care or others will back them up and so on.
So his idea is to get people on the inside to realize that there are other people who would agree and support them if they say “no, let’s not do that” so they’ll feel ok speaking up and doing something to try to stop it.
Still mostly just thought it was funny how Clippy, a much hated bit of software back in the day, is now a symbol of how things used to be better.
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He mentions that in the clip (fnarr!) there too. And I guess, maybe? But surely enshittification is in part driven by utter contempt for your employees. It’s both inspiration and a desired outcome of enshittification. At the top they believe that, morally, they have no choice as they are bound by the moral duty of line go up (“shareholder value”) as if that is actually the case. It isn’t by the way. That’s a lie they told themselves in order to do dreadful things to get toys/money/success aura before they die an empty husk of what could have been a human being.
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Who are these morons who imagine everyone wants to interact with their computers by talking to them? It’s not efficient nor desirable and it would become an instant nightmare in any environment where you’re not completely alone and sealed in a soundproof room.
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How could anyone at Microsoft possibly think that would be a compelling idea? Hasn’t people’s reluctance to use the voice-to-text interfaces that we’ve all had available for years now taught them anything? Normal people hate dictating to their phones and computers. I’ve got a cheap, years-old no-name Chinese phone and could be using the voice dictation to type out this post for me. But I don’t have any interest in doing that because I’m not (that particular type of) weirdo.
I literally only know one guy who regularly used the Siri voice interface on his phone and everyone always gives him a little side-eye when he does it.
The main tech companies truly seem to have run out of any good ideas years ago.
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