Category: Technology

In my opinion the United States shows all the signs of a society beginning a descent into postliteracy. One of the biggest signs is the rapidly declining lack of interest in recreational reading:

The share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day has fallen by more than 30 percent since 2004, according to the latest American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In 2004, roughly 28 percent of Americans age 15 and older read for pleasure on a given day. Last year, the figure was about 19 percent.

That steep drop means that aggregate reading time among Americans has fallen, from an average of 23 minutes per person per day in 2004 to 17 minutes per person per day in 2017.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by these results. The idea behind a postliterate society is that multimedia technology has advanced to the point where the ability to read and write is unnecessary. In our age of cheap data storage, data transmission, and devices capable of rendering high-definition sound and video, many of which fit in a pocket, we are less reliant on written information than we once were. Moreover, voice dictation is advancing rapidly. When I first tried voice dictation on a computer I wrote it off as useless because at the time it was. Today my phone’s voice dictation is actually pretty decent. What’s probably more amazing than the improvement of voice dictation software is the fact that it’s not nearly as important as it once was because I can just send the audio clip itself to somebody.

Will literacy go the way of shorthand and cursive? It very well could. The technology is already at a point where literacy isn’t as important as it once was. In a few more years it will probably advance to the point where literacy is almost an entirely unnecessary skill. Once that happens it may take only one or two generations until literacy is a skill held exclusive by a handful of individuals who have an interest in archaic knowledge.

The big news in developer circles this week is that Microsoft acquired GitHub. I admit that the news didn’t fill me with happiness since I’m not a fan of the trend of everything being gobbled up by a handful of big companies. But Microsoft has been making a rather dramatic shift in recent years. The company has becoming far friendlier towards the open source community and has been releasing a lot of terrific developer tools. This shift has made me hopeful that Microsoft will be a good steward for GitHub. Moreover, things could have turned out far worse:

Microsoft was not alone in chasing GitHub, which it agreed to acquire for $7.5 billion on Monday. Representatives from Alphabet’s Google were also talking to the company about an acquisition in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the deal talks.

Not too long ago if you had told me that both Microsoft and Google were looking to acquire GitHub, I’d have hoped for Google. But today I’m happy that of the two companies Microsoft ended up buying GitHub.

The biggest problem I have with Google, besides its business model based on surveilling users, is its habit of abandoning products. Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Health, Google Wave, and more have been discontinued by Google. Some of the products were discontinued shortly after they were released and/or were discontinued with little notice given to users. Microsoft, on the other hand, is well-known for supporting products for a long time and giving reasonable notice when it does decide to discontinue a product. If Google had acquired GitHub, there’s no telling how long it would have been kept around. Since Microsoft acquired GitHub, it’ll probably be around for a long time.

It’s funny how things can change so rapidly. Google was the darling child of the technology industry but now its star is descending. Meanwhile, Microsoft went from the epitome of evil but is now improving its reputation.

Is your application performing poorly? Just throw more hardware at it! This attitude has become mainstream thanks to the widespread availability of cheap hardware and the high cost of developer time. Why pay a team of developers tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve the performance of an application when you can buy a handful of relatively cheap servers and still be able to provide the performance your customers need?

What’s interesting about this equation is that consumers have been mostly shielded from it. However, when this equation does impact consumers, it usually raises some important questions:

Capcom will give Japanese Switch owners a chance to play last year’s Resident Evil 7 on the Switch later this week. But the port will only be playable as an online stream running on Capcom’s own servers, rather than a downloaded version that would run directly on the Switch’s relatively low-powered hardware.

[…]

But such a port would have required time and programming resources that Capcom might not have been willing to spare. With cloud streaming, on the other hand, getting the game onto the Switch is likely just a matter of setting up some servers to run the existing PC version, then writing a simple client to stream inputs and video/audio to and from the Switch. Streaming to the Switch means not having to compromise on graphical detail, but it could lead to stuttering and frame rate issues if the Internet connection isn’t absolutely solid.

Nintendo has been at a disadvantage for the last several console generations. Its consoles have been less powerful than its competitors, which has contributed to developers not porting games to Nintendo’s consoles. When games have been ported, developer time had to be invested in down scaling the game enough to run on the less powerful hardware.

With the widespread availability of high-speed Internet connectivity, an alternative strategy to porting a game directly has become possible. Instead of porting the game itself, the game can be run on more powerful hardware and the video can be streamed to the player. This would theoretically allow any game to run on almost any platform. A user could just as easily stream the game on their Switch as their phone.

But the universe abhors perfection so this strategy naturally has trade offs. The most obvious of these trade offs is latency. If the game is being run on a remote server, every button pressed by the player must be transmitted to that server. Even with a high-speed Internet connection that latency can be noticeable, especially for extremely fast paced games. But the more sinister trade off in my opinion is the fact that players can’t own the game since it exists exclusively on remote servers. At some point Capcom will decide that continuing to operate the Biohazard 7 servers is costing more money than the game is making. When that happens, the servers will be turned off and the players who paid for the game will no longer be able to play it.

I’ve lamented about the fact that consumers own fewer of the products they “buy.” The idea that paying a producer money for a product resulted in exclusive ownership has been replaced by the idea of licensing. You don’t purchase a tractor, you pay to license the software that runs on it and John Deere just happens to throw in the hardware for free. In the case of Biohazard 7, gamers aren’t buying the game, they’re paying for the privilege to stream the game for as long as Capcom allows.

Some schools in the United Kingdom have announced that they’re removing analog clocks because students are unable to read them:

Some U.K. schools are ditching analog clocks from test rooms because a generation of kids raised on digital clocks can’t read them and are getting stressed about time running out during tests, London’s Telegraph reports.

“The current generation aren’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations,” Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary of the U.K.’s Association of School and College Leaders, told The Telegraph.

I, along with many other people, initially scoffed at this announcement. Teaching somebody how to read an analog clock takes a matter of minutes. On the other hand, as a few friends pointed out to me, the skill is almost entirely unnecessary today. Most of us carry a pocket computer that displays the current time. Those pocket computers usually display the time in the friendlier digital format. Since most people carry around a time telling device, public clocks are less important than they were. People who have a pocket computer that displays the time in a digital format don’t need to know how to read an analog clock.

This is just another subtle, albeit major, way that technology is shaping our lives. Another example is cursive writing. I learned how to write in cursive around second or third grade and continue the practice today because it’s faster than writing block letters. However, cursive is indecipherable to many younger individuals. Why? Because the ability to write quickly is less important in a world where computers are prevalent. It’s rare for me to be in a situation where I have to write something. Usually I can type it out on a computer or tap it into my phone. The generation that came after mine never knew a world where computers weren’t prevalent and the current generation is growing up with touchscreen devices (a technology I once saw in my youth, although in a very rudimentary form, and thought it was the coolest thing ever) that fit in their pockets and can automatically transform their spoken words into typed text or transmit it directly.

When I was in school, pocket calculators were already prevalent, which caused us students to ask our math teachers why we had to memorize so many mathematical operations. Our teachers responded that we wouldn’t always have a calculator with us. I can’t say that they were wrong. At the time I rarely carried a calculator with me. Pocket space was at a premium and I couldn’t carry every with me. Fast forward to today. I always have a calculator with me because it’s an app on my phone. My teachers’ response to my question, although true back then, is no longer true.

Remember paper maps and compasses? I do because I used to have to use them to navigate in unfamiliar areas. If I was in an unfamiliar city and needed to get somewhere, I had to either get out of my car and ask somebody for direction (which may or may not result in receiving good directions) or pull out a paper map to determine my current location, the location of my destination, and the best route to get there. I then used a compass to keep myself going in the right direction. Now I type my destination into my phone and let it guide me to my destination. In addition to being faster because it already knows where everything is, it can also provide me a better route because it also knows the current traffic conditions. Navigating with a map and compass is another skill that is largely irrelevant in a world of ubiquitous smartphones and cellular coverage.

Many of the skills that I learned were important at one time but are of little importance today. When I sit down to think about it, it’s fascinating how technology has changed my world in so many subtle ways. My skills of reading an analog clock, cursive writing, performing math in my head, and navigating with a map and compass are pretty much irrelevant. I wonder what other skills that I learned will be made less relevant by technology in the coming years.

The philosophy modern hardware manufacturers seem to predominantly follow is that any product can be improved by putting a chip in it. While it may be convenient to have speakers that can wirelessly connect to you phone and stream music from it, there is a significant downside to such a convenience, near future obsolesce:

But more important to me, the Nocs app — which you need to configure to use Wi-Fi networking and update firmware — hasn’t been updated since October 2014, meaning that the iOS app doesn’t work at all anymore, since Nocs never updated it with a 64-bit version. (There’s apparently an Android app, but reviews indicate that it seems to crash more often than not, so that probably isn’t a great solution, either.)

This would all be less of a problem if I had another way to use the speakers, but since I don’t have the Bluetooth model, I’m stuck with either Airplay or a 3.5mm cable (which isn’t super convenient to access, since they’re on a bookshelf). Plus, Airplay itself as a standard is on its way out, so even if the NS2 pair that I have work without any problems, they’ll be obsolete and incompatible with the new wave of speakers that will be out whenever Apple decides to finally release Airplay 2.

In this case the author has the fortune of being able to fallback to a standard 3.5mm headphone jack but many “smart” devices don’t include legacy support.

Dumb devices tend to have a longer shelf life than their smart brethren. This is because dumb device tend to operate on standards that have been around for decades. Speakers that attach to receivers using two copper cables have been around for decades and will likely be around for decades to come. What makes dumb speakers even better is that they’re modular. If a smart speaker becomes obsolete, you have to replace the whole speaker. If the receiver you plug your dumb speakers into becomes obsolete, you can replace the receiver while keeping your bitchin’ speakers.

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to add a chip to old products but there is also a trade off. In many cases, at least in my opinion, dumb devices enjoy enough advantages in shelf life that they remain superior to their smart brethren.