Comment by carom

3 years ago

>What do we have to show for it?

Go, Rust, Chrome, Android, TensorFlow, PyTorch, tensor processing units, free education material, free email, free chat, data center scale computing... Upcoming there is self driving cars, ar/vr, quantum computing...

We actually have quite a lot to show.

4 comments

carom

Reply
papito  3 years ago

Go and Rust - these are just languages. They do not fundamentally change the world in any way.

Free email and chat - come on. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, ICQ, we had all that - without feeling violated from all the aggressive data collection, which leads me to... machine learning libraries. That's what they are used for.

Most of the technological "advances" since 2007 (Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones, big data) have been used to steal and monetize our focus, and hence we have half of our kids on Adderall. That's what we really have to show for it.

And notice that all these names you dropped - layman would have zero idea what those are. They mean nothing to an average person. My point is about the larger culture of innovation across all industries, not just some stuff deep inside the software world.

trasz  3 years ago

Ie rehashed old ideas, but “free”, as in, paid from ads.

  • carom  3 years ago

    Poor refutation.

    Neither of the languages or machine learning frameworks are old ideas or directly ad supported. Tensor processing units and cloud computing are also purchased directly.