60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life. Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.
> 60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life.
Absolutely. I am in full-time work, and expect to be for another decade. I have worked my entire career in IT, doing tech support, training, systems design and implementation, tech journalism, and tech writing (i.e. documentation).
I will be 60 in less than 18 months.
> Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.
You did say "at least", but still... longer than that.
I started work in 1988 and they were already ubiquitous in my world. Richer companies had the fairly newfangled IBM compatibles, which were still big and expensive. The cheap Amstrad PCs were just starting to appear.
Older hands had multiuser boxes with SCO Xenix or DR Concurrent CP/M or Concurrent DOS and a bunch of dumb terminals. My company had switched to these from Alpha Micro systems running AMOS -- and again, dumb terminals. One of my clients had a DEC PDP-11.
The real old hands had 8-bit kit: some CP/M, and a few BBC Micros.
The first big migrations I saw were from standalone (or multiuser) PCs to LANs, and from pre-PC systems to PCs and Macs.
That would be "60 year olds who have been office workers most of their working life"
60-year-olds who worked blue-collar for a significant part of their life, this is not so obviously true for.
Also probably not true for 60-year-olds who worked in other non-office jobs, like acting or sports.
There have been a variety of well-paid jobs that didn't use computers that a 60-year-old might have done over their life, meaning that this can't even be broken up along class/income lines.
It's worth pointing out that Crichton coined that term during a period in his life where he was rapidly descending into conspiracy and iconoclastic thought, and this is of a piece with that.
Gell-Mann's observation was a sincere and thoughtful caution about the way we transmit information about complicated ideas. Crichton's "amnesia effect" is an excuse to ignore media you dislike.
I have it on a long timer so that I have to pause for a while before the auto-complete prompt appears. I've found I tend to deliberately set things up for it to attempt when I know I'm going to have to type a bunch of boiler plate or some code that's logically straightforward but syntactically fiddly ie. I write a quick comment describing what the next few lines should do and then wait a seconds for it to make the suggestion
What really puzzles me is how years of woke insanity are forgotten / forgiven, but a nazi salute is not. Remember how Microslop employees used to start their presentations with a list of Native American tribes who owned the land their office was at? Maybe people don't read Orwell anymore... that stuff was straight out of 1984.
I see being downvoted on my question already - can people who hate Musk not see the difference between asking and supporting?
What microsoft employees do in the privacy of their own meeting rooms has basically no effect on me. When Elon Musk appears along side Tommy Robinson in my city, espousing racist "great replacement" to a crowd of drunken thugs and suggesting my neighbours and friends are problem to be expunged from society, well frankly he can fuck right off.
https://youtu.be/PraEcNDGSqY?t=310 privacy of their own meeting rooms? Let's not forget about her stating for the audience her race, sex, and skin color. Those are very important things in the context of a programming conference :) There is no baked in reverse racism here at all. Only those awful right wingers do racism.
>We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.
This feels lovely! The fact that it reacts to the pressure on my Wacom tablet puts it above many desktop tools and streets ahead of most stuff on the web. Fantastic work.
Yes. Also there's a weird thing going on where the claims are simultaneously that these tools are super easy to use and everyone and their dog is going to be using them to create awesome software and that it's only going to get easier to do so BUT ALSO that you have to immediately start using them or you'll get left behind. Why should we start now if they're going to be more powerful and more accesible in a years time? seems like the effort working with the imperfect exising version will be wasted.
It is just so that the CEO can claim they are an "AI first" company and the shareholders might believe that the company is not being eaten by AI but profits from it. Check the claims of the software vendors whose stocks have fallen by some 30% in the last few months, without any reason in the fundamentals.
for the same reason people had to start using microsoft excel when windows 95 came out
yes you could wait a few years as an accountant until quickbooks/intuit/whatever was built out, but arguably being good at spreadsheets+basic VBA between 1995 and 2010 paid about as well as being a python dev these days
Yeah, this matches my experience, line by line I can probably write code quicker but producing lines of code has never really been the bottle neck, nor infact the point, in software development.
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