I wish there was a way to recapture the feeling of magic produced by using the Amiga. From usability to programmability, everything seemed exciting, new, and with unlimited possibility.
It really was like going from a black-and-white world to seeing full color.
I always said that if 1% of the effort (and money) put into overcoming the PC architecture's shortcuts was put into the Amiga, the computing world would be in a very different place.
I'm afraid that the feeling of magic if (was) a phenomenon related to passing the boundary between the "black and white" and "full color" worlds, not the "full color" world itself.
What we have now easily available offers much more unlimited possibilities. 24-bit color, 4K resolution, all the 3D you may care about, all the audio you may care about, gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage, easy programmability from tinker-friendly stuff like pygame or processing.org or löve to world-construction kits like Godot. Or the whole Web thing. All available at a trivial cost or free. Where's the magic though?
I think that much of the "magic" feeling comes from pushing things to the limit, and beyond. This requires a limited possibility. Basically all art is built around some kind of a limitation and playing with it.
(Being young and having time to tinker with hardware just for the joy of the audiovisual effects goes without saying.)
Note to the site author: Using Chrome's translate tool seems to break your UI. Upon first visit, I was prompted to translate from Portuguese to English and accepted. Subsequent visits required I click the "Translate this page" button on the right side of the URL bar. (Edit: Chrome 1490.7827.201 on Windows 10).
When translated, clicking the Solver drop-down (default 3x3x3) displays:
Unexpected error
Something went wrong.
The current screen broke unexpectedly. Please try again or switch routes to reload it.
That was an incredible example and I'm frankly more impressed each time I read it at how well constructed it is. You really capture how sensitive the analogy section is to cultural or domain knowledge, and why the College Board eliminated the question type.
I wonder whether the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider was a net positive or negative for science.
If it continued to completion, it would have had almost 3x the beam energy of even the upgraded LHC in 2030 (20TeV vs. 7TeV). But the questions are fundamentally political, not scientific: Would SSC operations and funding have continued through the US economic challenges of 2001, 2008, and 2020?
I could see a timeline in which the SSC got built and discovered the Higgs boson before LHC came online, causing the LHC to be canceled, delayed, and/or starved of funding -- only for the SSC to be shuttered during the "great recession" of 2008 or during any other US Gov't belt tightening exercise. Today we would have neither the SSC nor the LHC.
Or, perhaps SSC would have accelerated other discoveries by 10 to 15 years (SSC go-live was to be in the late-1990's versus LHC's Higgs discovery in 2012).
Perhaps SSC's cancellation avoided a nightmare scenario where all that energy beyond what was needed to find the Higgs was wasted. And perhaps Science as a whole benefited from diversion of resources away from fundamental particle physics.
Perhaps. I do remember the discussion about whether the SSC consumed so much basic research funding that other areas would have their funding significantly constrained.
Basic research has such a long time horizon it's interesting to think of the fundamental grants that might have been affected. Quantum computing? CRISPR? mRNA?
The days of a scrappy newspaper or local market newscast are over. Reframe your statement from "People in cities tend to be on the left. Journalism majors tend to be on the left" to "People who own media firms tend to be on the right. People who set journalistic standards for their outlet tend to be on the right."
For what it's worth, the most effective propaganda is that which reinforces latent biases.
Humans en masse are selfish, self-serving, and tribal, so it's incredibly easy to believe that there is massive abuse of social services like SNAP/EBT, those delivering services are incompetent, and that we should investment more in fraud reduction.
However, the reality is that the US spends $3.75 for each $1 of fraud discovered. And, "fraud" includes clerical errors made by the government, so the actual ROI of enforcement is even lower.
So much of the propaganda -- "immigrants steal benefits paid for by hardworking US taxpayers, so we should ramp up enforcement spending to make more room for [white] citizens" is designed to simply reinforce our biases because it's just so darned believable to a cynical and tribal people.
In reality, spending more on benefits enforcement just loses taxpayers more money while cutting more US citizens off from benefits they both need and are eligible for. It results in the opposite of its stated goal and this is well known to any policymaker.
So if saving taxpayer money, and punishing those guilty of fraud, isn't the actual objective of all this toxic propaganda, you have to ask yourself what is.
every $$ spent on this "abuse" is a $$ not spent on tax evasion while giving an impression of "finally someone is doing something" and the $$ that could be made in plugging corporate tax evasion by gar outrun the $$ saved on the no income side.
It really was like going from a black-and-white world to seeing full color.
I always said that if 1% of the effort (and money) put into overcoming the PC architecture's shortcuts was put into the Amiga, the computing world would be in a very different place.
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