Software is stuff, very much so. Or at least something worth caring about.
The boardgames I used to play as a kid? Replaced by videogames. Mail chess? Chess.com. TV? Streaming. Notebooks for planning, notes, recipes? An app. Physical maps? An app. The Encyclopedia? Replaced by Wikipedia, plus I can for the most part freely access scientific papers as they're published on pubmed, arxiv, etc.
How do I learn things like cooking, sewing, gardening, woodworking, chemistry, or look up information? Used to be a trip to a library, asking around, searching for experts in the phonebook, etc. Now I can google stuff, youtube is full of how tos and instructional videos, and LLMs can spit out semi accurate answers to common problems that are hard to find on google.
People complain how newer appliances are crappier, but the price to income ratio nosedived.
All that said, I agree that we lost things, and that some things got worse. Replacing physical buttons with touch controls in cars springs to mind. Architecture is another common example.
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Software is stuff, very much so. Or at least something worth caring about.
The boardgames I used to play as a kid? Replaced by videogames. Mail chess? Chess.com. TV? Streaming. Notebooks for planning, notes, recipes? An app. Physical maps? An app. The Encyclopedia? Replaced by Wikipedia, plus I can for the most part freely access scientific papers as they're published on pubmed, arxiv, etc.
How do I learn things like cooking, sewing, gardening, woodworking, chemistry, or look up information? Used to be a trip to a library, asking around, searching for experts in the phonebook, etc. Now I can google stuff, youtube is full of how tos and instructional videos, and LLMs can spit out semi accurate answers to common problems that are hard to find on google.
People complain how newer appliances are crappier, but the price to income ratio nosedived.
All that said, I agree that we lost things, and that some things got worse. Replacing physical buttons with touch controls in cars springs to mind. Architecture is another common example.
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