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jasongill 6 hours ago

This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have to read the entire thing again. I love it.

PaulHoule 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!

So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.

[1] old issues of Byte magazine are a good bet: try https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05

gwerbin 4 hours ago | parent [-]

As usual, labor saving is only a good idea if the wealth created is distributed throughout society, not redirected to a small group of people.

parineum 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And it almost always is through cheaper products to the end user.

keybored an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Renters are ecstatic as price of commodities are plummeting as house prices go up and up: “distracting myself has never been this cheap”, Anon. says.

People think they can do one-sentence quips to describe how economies work.

PaulHoule 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This chart tells the story pretty well: to get it down to a quip "some things we want got a lot cheaper, things we need got a lot more expensive"

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-3

The story of this decade is that people think the economy is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder but we quit building single family houses and it got harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in some places like the DC suburbs.

parineum 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can tell you that the products that one uses in a home have gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance.

Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.

Something interesting that touches on both of these topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at how much of household income is spent on housing and food combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the inelastic and luxury goods.

keybored 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.

A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself.

I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.

gwerbin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Citation needed. Sometimes? Sure. Almost always? Questionable assertion.

parineum an hour ago | parent [-]

Food, clothing, electronics...

Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply constrained really.

Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the product has become significantly better at a similar price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).

jihadjihad 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed. Don't forget the "Can't send emails farther than 500 miles" one, too [0]:

0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

rationalist 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

More Magic:

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html

nickt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it, and today I realised that was 36 years ago!

kraquepype 2 hours ago | parent [-]

~20 years ago for me... I remember finding it when I first started working as a sysadmin. That and the story of the first "bug" report. That was a fun time.

https://www.doncio.navy.mil/CHIPS/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=547...

riffraff 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

also the story of Mel

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

xeonmc 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not quite tech or sci-fi, but for me it’s https://www.eternal-flame.org/library/oldlibrary/georgebusin...

IAmBroom 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Is that the origin of the Sean Connery dragon movie, Dragonheart?

rouvax 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For more reading, see also: https://web.archive.org/web/20250719141310/https://dbrgn.ch/...

I'm a bit proud of having suggested the author to add the 2019 entry (thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678).

Hopefully there's another repo of Internet stories somewhere else?

sebg 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For those curious -> https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

markus_zhang 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How about this one?

https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...

ggerules 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes! Thanks for posting! This gives the feel of what my career looked like in the 80s and early 90s.

markus_zhang 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Man you should share your story. I got through a few Linux device driver labs but the more I read the less I understand. Even the keyboard driver or the tty driver are thousands of lines long.

I don’t know how people managed to write graphics card drivers back in the day. In the 80d it’s going to be all assembly code too, I think.

They are more black magic than the non-driver kernel components. I can at least understand the concept of kernel components such as VFS/Scheduler and read legacy kernel code without too much trouble, but drivers, even those in Linux 0.12 back in 1991, are crazily hard for me.

b3lvedere 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That was an awesome read. Thanks.

JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Gentle Seduction [1], too.

[1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Stiegler_GentleSeduction.pdf

Toutouxc 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.

derwiki 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?

JKCalhoun 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Probably because actual people died.

cdelsolar 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am guessing because it takes hours to read.

rationalist 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me anymore.

Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.

actionfromafar 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!

rationalist 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Who knows, but there isn't a whole story with details behind it to make someone think is.

A short anonymous joke that may or may not be true is better than a long story that is almost certainly made-up by someone in authority.

CGMthrowaway 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

People will be reading this story for ten trillion years