GitHub is the largest host of source code in the world. It’s hard to tell but probably any type of software you’ve been using on your computer (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, it doesn’t matter) in the past decade has some of its source code hosted there.
As of now, this represents about 40 million coders and 100+ million directories (called repositories). This represents an absurd amount of work.
Well, they put all that in a “zip file” and the actual size of all this work, those billions of hours of people coding is 21 terabytes.
Today you can buy a 16 terabytes hard drive for $400. Yes, for $800 you have more space than ALL THAT WORK COMBINED.
Let me rephrase that: for $800 you have enough space on your computer to store all the work that most of the developers in the world have done for the past 12 years, and still have room for hundreds, thousands of games.
Do you understand how ludicrous that is?
What that means is that we’ve reached for real the point of no-need-for-new-tech-at-all. 8K? That’s stupid. No one cares about 4K and 1080p looks great on most screens. Also our vision is NEVER getting better, it goes down, irremediably, after you hit 20.
For photos, even in high res (12MP+) a 16 terabytes drive will probably be enough for your entire life, even if you take a lot of pictures. Which to be honest, don’t need to be high res: we look at them in 1200px viewports on social media anyway. I realized that with my pictures: the picture is a memory, as long as the picture is cool, it truly doesn’t matter if I have the high res version or the smaller version. Do you really spend your time zooming in and out high res photos, in awe of the details? I sure don’t. Our eyes are fabulous machines that can focus on a detail within a larger picture.
It’s the same paradigm for every corner of computers.
Faster I/O? What for? We already have absurd speeds that we basically never really need. My 8 year old laptop with a SSD is more snappy than any newer computer with a hard drive.
Better input? We have all of them and the best to get shit done to this day? Keyboard shortcuts and mouse. Those two will make you more productive than pretty much anything. They’re from the late 70s.
After 40 years of constant improvement, digital technology is maxing out our human senses.
What that means is that we need to maintain and recycle our machines as much as we can. All electronics use a lot of minerals and you know how it works: we drill those countries, we screw them over politically forever and we go back home, laughing with our loot. Enough of this shit.
What that means is that we need to seriously chill. Never buy a new, new phone ever. Not because you’re anti-something. But because you understand that it’s the right thing to do. It’s that simple.