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ThrowawayR2 2 hours ago

That list cherry picks all the successful cases where the technology improved while ignoring the many, many others where it didn't and the technology improved no further. That's dishonest.

It isn't even a good job of cherry picking: we never got mainstream supersonic passenger aircraft after the Concorde because aerospace technology hasn't advanced far enough to make it economically viable and the decrease in progress and massively increasing costs in semiconductors for cutting edge processes is very well known.

csallen an hour ago | parent [-]

You're not factoring in the list of constraints I provided.

There's no broad social acceptance of supersonic flight because it creates incredibly loud sonic booms that the public doesn't want to deal with. And despite that, it's still a bad counterexample, as companies continue to innovate in this area e.g. Boom Supersonic.

At best you can say, "It's taking longer than expected," but my point was never that it will happen on any specific schedule. It took 400 years for guns to advance from the primitive fire lances in China to weapons with lock mechanisms in the 1400s. Those long time frames only prove my point even more strongly. Progress WILL happen, when there is appetite and acceptance and incentive and room to grow, and time is no obstacle. It's one of the more certain things in human history, and the forces behind it have been well studies.

Just as certain: the people and jobs who are obsoleted by these new technologies often remain in denial until they are forgotten.

vlovich123 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

If code quality only stops mattering in 400 years (whatever that definition happens to be) then the prediction that it makes is worthless in terms of what you should do today. You use it to argue it’s unimportant deal with it, but if it’s a 400 year payoff you’ve made the wrong bet.