Monday, December 19, 2011

Computers' Suck

Disclaimer: Its just cussing, alright?

I was having this chat with J yesterday and we started talking about what amazing piece of machine the television was in the 80s, when they had a wooden shutter, hard knobs to change 10 available channels out of which 9 show static. Then we went on to cameras in which you have to buy a film roll and how your dad will be angry at you if you take a bad picture because you ruined one film. That made us thinking, after all those advancements, what has been happening after that? Nothing but computers.

And that led to some severe cussing. Don't you think computers has dumbed us down a lot? You know, when I was a kid, I dreamt of a future in which we will see flying cars, or fast elevators, or rooms in top of towers like in the jetsons or cancer and aids being cured.

If we see around us, whether you are living in the US or in Sri Lanka, we wake up in the morning, still doing the same thing you would do 20 years ago, brush your teeth, take a dump, take a shower, get dressed and then reach your office through a tiring crazy traffic to do work. What next? Come back home, watch tv, eat dinner and go to sleep. We are still guzzling petroleum same as 20 years ago, but we wanna process 40GBs of earth terrain data on a 1GB memory GPU card. Women still feel pain while giving birth to a baby and men still feel pain when kicked in the nuts, instead of solving these problems, probably simulating a 1000x1000x1000 voxels explosion seems more important.

What I mean is, all we have been doing since 2 decades is computers. What about some invention to brush my teeth? Or take me to office really fast on some intelligent transport system? Or may be some nice real entertainment in a good channel instead of advertisements about internet services and 5 minutes of a movie in between. Or if someone met an accident, then reproduce liters of blood in the lab to give it to him, hell, replace his broken limb with a brand new one.

I think computers has really held humans back on the innovation level. People have gone lazy and computers is all they want. No kid wants to be a chemical engineer to make a re-creational LSD in a meth lab, all they want to do is learn how to use computers.

You know if computers were not there, people would have gone out of home and solve real problems, like making a microwave oven of some kind which can instead of just heating food can make you a food item. Say I tell the oven, make me a sandwich, and bam, it does that! I don't wanna voice control that thing with some siri bh talking to me. I am fine with turning 3 knobs, sliding 2 sliders and pressing 4 buttons.

All computers have done is process data. All computers have done is create more data for it to process, think about it, otherwise they wouldn't exist. Your computer goes faster, but your operating system goes more memory hungry, so you need an even faster system. And this never ends. A typical operating system today contains easily 7 layers of abstraction eating up your processor cycles and guzzling up GBs of memory so that you can create a word document as you were creating 10 years ago. Computers only create problems for itself and we solve problems so that the computers can compute more of its own shit. All the computer is doing is being a virus and growing on its own feeding on our life forces.

This doesn't end here. It started with punched cards, then assembly language, and then C. Things seemed fine till then. But they wanted to make it look fancy, so some idiot came up with C++, lets write 4 classes, 2 virtual classes and 1 static class so that we can cross product two vectors... in a clean way. *cough cough bullshit cough cough*. They did not stop here, they made perl, php and python so that every thing can be done being lazy all the time, no need to write that amazing hash data structure or no need to write the string replacement code. No sir! we are a developing race, we have left such things behind.

4 cores of intel processors, 8 cores, 16, 1 GB of memory, 4 GB of memory, oooh ooooh bluray and SSD and omg this is like orgasm, SHUTUP man. You know, if instead all the geeks went ahead and made 1000 story buildings or time warp machines, or explore another planet, then it would have looked like we have advanced as a human race, damn, may be chicks would like geeks then, but nothing has happened. Just everything has gone digital and we have this internet containing videos of kittens and angry nerds like me cussing on a blog. If you really see, digital age has done nothing but replace dials with digital displays.

And yet I cannot live without computers, internet, C++ and python.

Get out from your couch and invent some real shit!