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It’s like that ‘What’s a computer?’ ad
Everything is so abstracted nowadays that even the specialists are disconnected from understanding the underlying systems
This was by design.
The more control corporations have the more easily controlled are the consumers.
I’m watching web browsers discouraging users from entering literal web addies so that soon there will be 100% dependence on their search engines and very cool little known bizarre websites like this will be impossible to find: http://dogsdays.com/read.html
What do you mean? He just prays to the machine spirit.
If the oldest zoomers are almost 30 and the youngest are just barely teens, I guess we’ve reached the point where “younger” zoomers could be 18 or 20.
It always depends on where you take the definition from, some say it started in 1996, same say it started in 2004. Saying that it probably depends on the country you reside in as well.
The concept of an emulator isn’t even that old. Like, literally all throughout the 2000s and 2010s. How did this generation grow up so oblivious to everything? “What’s an emulator?” “How do you use a computer?”
Bro, are we talking about 80 year olds or 20 year olds
Smartphones have made tech interaction ridiculously accessible and also into a locked down blackbox kinda thing at the same time. Consider how everything is a website now, and yet many people don’t know how to use a browser, as they install hundreds of apps instead.
As someone who is 25 I get some weird looks when I blankly and automatically tell people I don’t have nor will I use apps for store services. I’ll use a website happily but the busted ass apps can go fuck themselves.
All these stories about zoomers not knowing how to do computer stuff is making me want to write a fantasy world where magic is prevalent but most people do not bother to know how it works or question it beyond its surface applications, despite it being the basis for all military and economic might.
Well I wanted to write that, but then I realized I was talking about FMA: Brotherhood.
onward kinda has this, but practically everyone forgot magic
I wanted to like that movie more, just for the novelty. I got a strong impression that the story wanted to be a book, but it was forced into movie script shapes that didn’t quite work?
That could be the least comprehensible critique I’ve ever written, but I did just wake up. If it doesn’t make sense I’ll try again when my eyes have stopped trying to close.
i got the impression it was meant to be made about 10-15 years earlier with jack black and michael cera instead of chris pratt and tom holland
Haha! That’s already a way better movie tbh.
It’s also basically how the Adeptus Mechanicus operates in 40k. Lots of worshipping the old tech, preserving it, and there’s some limited giant machines that they could never fathom rebuilding or even fixing so they’re very protective of them
To this day, I don’t understand how wired telephones worked.
I mean, I kinda do, since I watched a bunch of YouTube videos explaining it. But then I kinda don’t.
But you understand how mobile phones work?
Ironically, mobile phones being digital makes them easier for many people to understand. The analog circuitry that goes into simply making an analog phone ring is surprisingly complex, let along how they actually function as phones.
Analog audio is a lot less “computer nerds programming things” and a lot more “scrapped together from some resistors that were ripped out of an old TV. We don’t even know how it turns on, let alone how it functions.” You can literally build a basic microphone with nothing but a balloon stretched across an embroidery hoop, some copper wire, a small magnet, and some glue. It wouldn’t sound good, but it would function as a microphone in some capacity, and at least be able to detect loud noises. And the same goes for a speaker; You could build one out of a red Solo cup, a magnet, some wire, and some glue. It wouldn’t sound good, but you could at least get a basic “sound is being emitted from this” level from it. But if you showed that scrapped-together device to someone, they’d have no idea that it was a phone.
Fascinating. I’d say the secret to analog electronics for sound is that sound is waves, electricity is waves, you can translate from one to the other with a resistor and a membrane. The end.
To me it’s much more unclear how sound is first encoded into a digital signal, transmitted as a digital signal through wires and radio waves, and then translated back into sound in a phone. I mean it’s essentially the same physics as the analog electronics, just with a bunch of extra steps added.
But maybe if one of those steps is “computer does thing” people just go like “ah yes, computer, makes sense”.
To me it’s much more unclear how sound is first encoded into a digital signal, transmitted as a digital signal through wires and radio waves, and then translated back into sound in a phone. I mean it’s essentially the same physics as the analog electronics, just with a bunch of extra steps added.
Yeah, this is where sample rate and bit depth come into play. In case you’re curious, digital audio is possible due to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. The TL;DR is that you don’t record a continuous stream of audio data; You just sample the wave at regular intervals by recording the current amplitude. And then you can recreate it on the other end. The theorem states that an analog wave can be perfectly recorded and replicated, as long as you have a sufficiently high sample rate and bit depth. Since human hearing generally tops out at 20kHz, we need to sample the audio signal at least 40k times per second; Most consumer-grade audio equipment uses 44.1 or 48kHz. Phones actually use a much lower sample rate for calls, but more on that later.
Again, as long as your sample rate is at least 2x the rate of the highest frequency being recorded, you’re able to perfectly recreate the wave. For an example, here’s a gif:
The image on the left shows the wave being recorded, and the dots are samples. As you add more samples, the reproduced wave gets more accurate. By the time you have 2x the fastest frequency, there is only one possible wave that will fit every sample. Again, human hearing tops out around 20kHz, so we use a sample rate just above 40kHz.
Phone calls will often put a filter on the high and low ends, and only capture the mid-range. It gives that distinct “this is shitty phone call quality” sound, but means they can use a much lower sample rate; Since they’re lopping off most of the high end with that filter, they may only need a sample rate closer to 15 or 20kHz. Because fewer samples means less data. The intelligibility happens in the mid-range, so that’s what the phone makers (and telecom companies) focus on. This low sample rate is also why hold music sounds so fucking awful. It’s essentially being passed through a “make this sound as shitty as possible while still being intelligible” filter.
And then bit depth simply determines how detailed each sample is. If you use 8 bits per sample, that gives you 256 potential values per sample. 12 bits gives you 4096. The trade-off is that a higher bit depth means each sample takes exponentially more data; Audiophiles will generally push for higher bit depths, so each sample is more accurate. In contrast, phone calls often use lower bit depths, (again, to save data).
As for how it actually transmits the data, that’s just 1’s and 0’s. It’s a little more complicated than that, (packets, for example) but in the digital realm, as long as the 1’s and 0’s get to where they need to be, you’re good to go.
Holy shit, so I’m not just uniquely terrible at understanding people on the phone? I’ve searched so long for a phone that does high-quality phone calls, and I can’t believe I never figured that it was a problem with both the phones and the carriers.
I studied electronics and GSM was a big part of the telecommunications subject. I visited the HQ of a mobile provider, was shown around and met the cartel boss (in hindsight, I wonder how much a Luigi moment would have affected the triopoly). I also visited a museum of technology and used an early touch-click model (pre-DTMF so not touch-tone, and no buffer so you had to wait for the simulated dial to stop clicking).
But still, I don’t know the basics of wired phones cuz I’ve never relly used them. How does voice travel both ways on a single twisted pair? How can Inspector Clouseau the telephone engineer in The Pink Panther (1978) hear a conversation from other phones in the house? How does the exchange know I’ve dialed the last digit? Can I use voice services on rotary phones, and what if I need to press * or #? All these would be obvious to 1980s kids…
In sci-fi proper that is also a plot point of Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation. The giant galactic empire collapses and all the scholars are holed up on a planet to preserve knowledge. They then go out to other planets and give technology, but everyone is so ignorant that it seems like magic and the scholars kind of roll with it.
I feel like the Empire in warhammer 40k operates on a similar premise, all there machune rituals and what not are just maintanance, but nobody understands the machines, so they’ll just reenact what was shown to someone eons ago or what have seemed to cause some effect.
just like me blowing into NES Cartridges when a game would not start :D.
Smearing computers with weird oils and burning sage in a server room sounds crazy now, but rather that than try your luck with a customer service LLM.
You mean an Abominable Intelligence
Lmaoo thank you for this.
This is why all my stuff is painted red. It goes faster!
Don’t forget to add some Speed Holes!
Don’t forget your purity seals!
One of my favorite examples of an Ork model was a Mekboy with some Killa Kans covered in purify seals
“So, like, you can just conjure up a gun out of a brick?”
“It’s more complicated than that! You have to do a bunch of math and science and draw a circle and stuff”
“Okay, sure… but then you can just create a gun. Or you can science water into wine. Or any dirty liquid into clean water. Or medicine? You can turn dust into medicine. Using nothing but your brain and a stick of chalk.”
“Well, yes! Isn’t it cool!”
“And what did you say your title was, again?”
“The big fucking gun alchemist, why?”
Discworld’s magic system is like this. The wizards often don’t know why certain parts of a ritual or spell are in place, but it works so they don’t touch it
Half of the plots of the Wizard books are about what happens when someone ignores that advice and does start poking at things better left alone. Wizards are only human after all, and the magical equivalent of a “don’t touch; wet paint” sign leaves them so very tempted.
Basically every day I look at weird code as a programmer
Hello, can I suggest the package code for LXML? I once wondered why the fuck etree.tostring() returned a bytes object instead of a fucking string and made the mistake of diving into the function. Never again. That library is cursed script condensed from the haunted cries of forgotten pharaohs and inscribed in the blood of a newborn foal onto an ancient ash tree under Venus’ vexatious gaze.
Ridcully would see a wet paint sign, take it down, touch the paint, then demand the Bursar to do something about “all the messes they keep leaving around here.”
I got the impression that most Discworld wizards actually avoid doing magic altogether, because the way things work traditionally is way too risky.
Meanwhile a research such as Miss Level asks, and keeps a log of, what subspecies of henbane works best and does it work better if collected at midnight under the full moon?
While Esmé Weatherwax eschews most magic mostly, preferring Hard Work and Headology, even against Death. Unless magic is really required, when she digs deep into the strongest magic imaginable.
What fantasy world can you think of where most people bother to learn how magic works?
Harry potter, they all go to wizarding school (not that HP should be used as a reference for world building…).
That’s a series where people learn how to use magic, not a thing about “how it works”. The series is very careful to never explain anything about the mechanics of magic, other than “incantations are a thing unless they aren’t, willpower maybe matters, and quality of the magic wand is relevant except when it isn’t”.
The Infernal City, Greg Keyes. It’s set in the elder scrolls, where knowing a spell or two is the norm.
Ive seen at least one other anime that was like that, cant remember the title but the magic system was surprisingly fleshed out for a 12 episode anime
Edit: Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor
This was one of my biggest gripes with the JK Rowling Wizarding World before Rowling herself gave me other reasons to dislike it
As a worldbuilding enthusiast who cares a lot about making it all hang together as a rich tapestry and all (come check us out at https://lemmy.world/c/worldbuilding btw) it really does chafe to see someone become a billionaire by literally only making their worldbuilding serve the plot and the tone, with no effort to make it internally consistent or even coherent outside of the main narrative.
This is something I think about a lot, and has been done well in fiction plenty already. My adhd wouldn’t just go away in a fantasy world. Sure I might have a burst of motivation for a while, but I probably wouldn’t magically be interested in studying and research just because I might be able to do some basic magic.
Disability in fiction is always going to be fertile soil imo because it’s such a genuine aspect of the human experience. Even when fictional devices have answers for some things (a focus spell would be nice), there are still always personal struggles that are worth exploring.
[Conjure Caffeine]
You fool, I CAST:
TASHA’S HIDEOUS DOPAMINE
You would enjoy the nightlord series. First book is a bit rough though
I’ve tried to get into more 40k books, but my first ones were the Eisenhorn and Ravenor series, and then Ciaphas Cain. Kind of hard to top that.
It’s not 40k! It’s a physics professor who gets turned into a vampire, learns magic, and get isekai’d. Every book is a hard left turn from the one before, so I can’t tell you a ton about them without major spoilers, but they’re really really great. Specifically topical is magicians are different from wizards. Magicians learn spells by rote and are like phd engineers, they might only make one new spell every few years but it’s gonna be damn efficient and effective. Wizards are the magical garage tinkerers, rarely learning spells academically like magicians do but cobbling together what they need on the fly. It’s a fascinating setting because it is sort of magically learning stagnant, with the people capable of the highest feats of magic incredibly specialized in a domain not develping much new, while the innovators are the ones who are weaker and more downtrodden. I cannot recommend it enough.
Ok ok we’re talking the Garon Whited books? I’ll take a look, thanks!
Yep! Just edited my comment with a bit more info. The main series is 8 books, 40 hours in audiobook form, with an extra half length book about a side character after 7. It’s still being written.
Kind of the inverse, but you may enjoy Gene Wolfe’s book of the new sun, and the Numenera TTRPG.
I guess Vance’s Dying Earth series, that inspired how spells work in D&D, also would fit there, though I’m not personally familiar
I read the Dying Earth stuff. It’s writen between 1950 and the 1980is, I think. And you can fucking tell. It has rape scenes that are handed so utterly casual as if they said “and then the character got on a bus.” Got a lot of other problems along those lines too.
That said, it does give an interesting idea of how D&D Magic might look if you translate the game mechanics of spell slots etc. into how that would work and feel in a practical sense and what implications it would have for the world it is set in, in general.
But read it as a historical document, it you do so. It helps that the main protagonist is a fucking unlikeable brick.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were wild like that too. Main character has leprosy and bitches about it making him a worthless person the entire book then raped a woman that helps him and more or less shrugs it off because he thinks the fantasy world is a delusion.
I only read the first book because yikes.
Fans will still foam at the mouth about the moral complexity but those fans are always weird edgelord incels for some reason. It is meant to be a deconstruction, but it’s one written by someone that’s definitely a rapist, and in the end it’s still just an absurd power fantasy with cynicism and casual 70’s misogyny.
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Yeah, I can imagine it’s kind of in the Lovecraft category, as in, clearly influential, but, uhhh, yikes.
I love the Numenara RPG concept - haven’t had a chance to play it, but I’ve workshopped ideas with a friend who likes to write stuff in it. I’ll put that book on my radar, another lemming got me going on Glen Cook’s Black Company series currently.
It’s actually a collection of four books, which I think these days are sold in sets of two.
It’s got some fun stuff, like an author who’s convinced of his own infallibility, and fantasy-like vocabulary, except none of the words are really made up, it’s just applications of somewhat obscure latin and greek words. I’d also kind of encourage going into it blind, since there are some bits of it that are more fun to figure out as you go along.
Bonus for /c/[email protected] players: it has Ascians.
Someone call Brandon Sanderson!
I mean, it’s kind of a major point of Elantris, albeit inverted: Nobody knows why magic stopped working because they don’t know why it worked in the first place.
It was inevitable. Long ago you had to know a lot about cars and engines to own a car. Now only enthusiasts know that kind of stuff.
Eh, there’s a curiosity aspect as well. I can’t do work on my car, but I can change the oil, tires, brake pads, and such. I understand the principle of how an IC engine works. I’m a computer programmer but I think it’s because I’m a curious person who likes knowing how things work, and computers offer more chances to learn than anything else on the planet.
It isn’t ignorance that has ever bothered me about boomers, zoomers, or anyone else. It’s that 99% of people you meet are fundamentally incurious. They don’t care how things work, they don’t care if they could work differently.
This so much, all the information in the world one click away online and most people just doom scroll nonsense. If money wasn’t an issue I’d be a perpetual student, just learning things for the heck of it.
Curiosity was always rare, and not always encouraged. We’re the “make the same hand axes for hundreds of millennia” people, after all.
Great point, and well said.
That’s how i think of it. My dad can tear a car apart. I can’t wrap my head around changing the brakes. But i know how computers work, because i grew up needing to know.
I always found it fascinating to learn about the things I used in my life worked, because as a kid I loved learning to take things apart, mod, and put them back together. But there never seems to be enough time to study and understand everything, because most devices we use are over-engineered (read: repair hostile), so I can’t ever think about becoming a jack of all trades like my family members are.
Electronics, yes. Mechanical, no. I have to pay someone else to help me.
Same on the computer thing, but I feel that knowing how to tear a computer (or anything, really) apart reduces the “I don’t think I can do this” threshold a bit. Not having a choice also helps, as in “Oh, the turbo died and all the shops say it’ll cost more than the car is worth to replace? Guess I’m learning how to swap a turbo.”
I’m not trying to be negative about blaming people who are in bad financial situations but idk why more people don’t realize that you can get things that you wouldn’t normally be able to afford if you’re willing to learn about them and do some work. Technicians/mechanics aren’t usually geniuses, they’ve just read the manual.
I spent a lot of time having a very tight budget. I realized that the only way to afford my first car was to buy a busted one and fix it myself. I couldn’t afford a mechanic but I could afford a repair manual.
But, I’m also confused by people who simply aren’t curious. They don’t want to know. They’re totally content just not understanding how all of this technology around them works. Like, how are they OK with that?
Exactly. I figure changing the sound card is like changing the transmission.
Reminds me about that line in World War Z (Max Brooks)
(Paraphrasing) "Some survivors were frustrated with the assignments they were given. A lady who was a former TV exec was furious that she was assigned to a janitorial unit, led by someone who’s lifetime salary she made in a month!
For people like her, you didn’t have to worry about fixing a plumbing issue or cleaning your home. She just hired someone else to do it, because she made money talking on the phone, and the more people she hired, the more time she could spend talking on the phone. After the Great Panic, nobody bothered to use phones anymore. There were no TV contracts that needed to be made, but there were toilets that needed work, and floors to clean. In a strange way, the blue collar workers outranked their “superiors” in importance to the community. We needed mechanics, engineers, HVAC workers, plumbers. We had those people of course, but there was never enough of them."
Reminds me of the story of Golgafrincham from the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy books:
The planet Golgafrincham creatively solved the problem of middle managers: it blasted them in to space.
Golgafrinchan Telephone Sanitisers, Management Consultants and Marketing executives were persuaded that the planet was under threat from an enormous mutant star goat. The useless third of their population was then packed in Ark spaceships and sent to an insignificant planet.
That planet turned out to be Earth.
Didn’t they all perish shortly thereafter from a disease spread via unsanitary telephones?
Yes
And it was a good plan, for a while. Shame about that plague, though.
on the other hand there’s bikes, which are basically unchanged and simple enough that most people can figure out how to do all the regular maintenance with some youtube videos and a couple hours.
Have you encountered modern shifters? They’re fairly involved.
Electronic shifting, hydraulic brakes, liberal use of sealed cartridge bearings, carbon fiber parts requiring strict torque specs…these are definitely different than 70’s friction shift ten-speed bikes.
You’re thinking of high performance sports bicycles.
When bicycles are just basic transport to get around town, where reliability and easy maintenance are a priority, they are very much like they were in the 70’s.i have never seen those on a bicycle actually used in real life, it’s either regular-ass derailleur or it’s hub gears, both of which are pretty darn simple on the level you’re going to interact with them (no one disassembles internal hubs and they don’t really break)
So like, how did she get an emulator working on iOS without knowing how?
I don’t think it was even an emulator, it was probably the official Nintendo port called ‘Super Mario Run’.
You can just download one from the App Store as of a year or so ago.
A lot of emulators are just apps, but the iso itself is a bigger mystery. My guess is an older sibling or even parent helped set that up. Nobody in their right mind would bundle a licensed game with an emulator on the app store.
I would assume she has a nerdy family member or friend that assisted.
In the past, it could have been an emulator included in an app in secret.
Probably just Afterplay
What’s the cutoff year for this mindset? Granted, I’m an electrical engineer, but I was born in the early 2000s, and my friends had a solid grasp of computer software and hardware fundamentals.
It’s not an age thing so much as an “amount of interest” thing. The barriers to entry are constantly being lowered, so it takes less skill and investment to get involved in things.
It’s one thing to download a free trial of something like photoshop, it’s another thing to spend years using it to the point where you understand the full capabilities of what you can do with it.
As you get older you’ll see things that used to require a lot of effort to get into become easier and easier to access. It’s the march of technological progress, and it might make you feel like it’s devaluing the things you used to value. And then you’ll understand why your grandparents were always going on about “Back in my day…”
part of it is down to exposure as well, if you grow up in a place where you can’t just buy the latest iphone every year it’s a lot more likely that you’ll end up fiddling around with stuff and learn how it works.
like india has a lot of this, people can’t afford a new device but it’s not that difficult to get some “e-waste” which is still perfectly functional (if slow), so kids are way more likely to end up fiddling around and learning.
I had restrictive parents who wanted to investigate and limit every part of my digital life, so most of my motivation came from getting the most out of the devices I could access. Usually that involved manipulating software to break parental digital locks, or to install more featured homebrew to access websites (and emulators).
Financially, my folks could have gotten me what I wanted out of my tech, but tried to hold me back because of their personal views. That was what drove me to get creative and understand more about all my devices.
If were to have kids my plan is to start by locking down my kid’s devices in increasingly stronger ways as they learn new workarounds. Just for this reason.
It’s a dangerous bet - there were times where I was at the “despair resulting from failed desperation” point.
Yeah, I would wager that this is not really a generational thing (or at least, not a cutoff between millennials and gen z).
I’m a millennial and I guarantee there are plenty of people my age who would have no idea what op’s question means…
