Comments on: The perfect geek age?

By: Liberation Ideology » Blog Archive » A Golden Age of Geekdom?

Liberation Ideology » Blog Archive » A Golden Age of Geekdom? — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:22:10 +0000

[...] The rest of the article is worth a read. [...]

By: That’s how I felt too! - IANP.ORG

That’s how I felt too! - IANP.ORG — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:54:47 +0000

[...] And feel like I had inside baseball knowledge during the D&D scene in E.T. [...]

By: Ola Fosheim Grøstad

Ola Fosheim Grøstad — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:49:03 +0000

@Steve Knight: I don’t know why you think knowing Pascal and 68000 is wasted knowledge. Pascal is a good entrypoint for any imperative programming language and 68000 has one of the cleanest CISC instruction sets which allows you to write pretty and readable assembly programs (x86 is damn ugly in comparison). Programmers that don’t know assembly don’t really know what they are doing when they write high-level programs whether they write for the CPU or the GPU, IMHO. On the other hand, there is little motivation for hacker-kids to learn assembly today so I think they are worse off in terms of actually gaining a thorough understanding of how and why computers work. The older geeks were motivated to write programs “close to the hardware” out of necessity.

Today I sometimes read manuals for new CPU architectures (for fun and to gain technological insight), but those manuals assume you know what the “early” geeks acquired by self-study… So I feel sorry for the young geeks and the steep learning-curve they face.

By: Who dunnit

Who dunnit — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:16:26 +0000

I’m getting it now. They misunderstood. He didn’t say “meek”, he said “the geek shall inherit the earth”.

By: len

len — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:55:53 +0000

Before we die, we’ll be working very hard to ensure the right people realize the concept of the singularity is of the same ilk as the Second Coming in the year 1000 and Eugenics in the 1930s. Infinite perfectability has the same problems as other abstract infinities: it only works on paper. A machine or a cow are too smart to buy into it.

Oops.

By: rkjs

rkjs — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:49:45 +0000

Not wrong. But then, I’m biased, being the perfect geek age.

By: Yukon Sam

Yukon Sam — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:47:37 +0000

And you will be dead

We have a secret plan to transfer our geeky genetic matrices into willing hosts, producing organisms that are not clones, but an admixture of genetic traits of both host and donor. We will then attempt to incalculate into these organisms our values and aspirations, enabling elements of both our biological and philosophical essence to travel forward in the timestream long beyond our own short lifespans.

Shhhhh. Don’t tell anybody. It’s a secret.

By: Will

Will — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:31:06 +0000

Ok- 1986 here. I’m going to come out and say that I was poised as one of the good geek years.

1) Cross-cultural transfer with Japan brought both giant robots and ninjas to popular culture
2) I may not have been around for the early days of the internet, but I was there when it went huge
3) Two years past the dystopian future
4) Mario has always been there for me
5) Portable gaming has been a facet of my life since elementary
6) I’ll statistically live to see cooler things in the future than people born before me

As a younger geek who is the son of a geek from the 60′s, I say we embrace each other in the spirit of friendship and electronics!

By: Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:04:40 +0000

And you will be dead before the singularity. Opps.. Sucks to be you!

By: Steve Knight

Steve Knight — Tue, 19 May 2009 06:10:13 +0000

1972, and I’m not so sure. If you think of all the useless knowledge we’ve built up in addition to the good stuff then perhaps kids of today are getting an advantage. I’m thinking: COBOL/CORBA/Pascal/Delphi/OWL/COM/68000 for example.

BTW, I know it’s useless because kids have no idea what we’re talking about. Maybe we should stop sentimentalizing about how great we are and teach the kids what they really need to know. Lisp of course!