I Am Obsolete

I Am Obsolete

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I’ve noticed a number of my ruminations are focused around changes. I would say “aging”, or “getting old”, but that’s just the driver for change. The older I get, the faster change comes. Of course, time seems to pass faster the older I get, which is a phenomenon many people have commented on. But I don’t think it’s just that.

When you look back over history, it sometimes seems like there’s this logarithmic scale of progress. Consider how long it took humanity to get off the ground. I phrase it that awkward way, just because I don’t just mean to say “fly”. Getting from standing on the ground to staying somewhere above the ground took a very long time. I believe some early attempts were using a giant kite. How much time went by before the Montgolfier brothers invented the hot-air balloon. So consider, the brothers started experimenting around 1782.

Moving from a balloon to a glider took ~100 years, to the mid 19th century.

But going from glider to powered flight only took another 50ish years.

And how long did it take to go from flying 100 or so feet to traveling to the moon? 60 years. Of course, along the way was the invention of so many things (jets, supersonic flight) that lead to the necessary technologies to get to the moon.

My point is, shit changes faster and faster, and it’s not just because I’m getting older and time passes faster. Thing build upon themselves, and it’s like compounded interest.

But things don’t always go the way you’d expect. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. I guess, upon reflection, the process is almost always generally the same: Things are hard. People have to invest lots and lots and lots of time in figuring out how to do the thing better, faster, whatever. And so you have these people who’ve invested the time to learn the craft, to figure out how to progress, until people start to figure out how to do it for other people, so that now, instead of manufacturing your own nails¹, you can. . . you know, just buy them. They become a commodity.

Pick your topic. It’s always the same. Screws/Nails/fasteners of all kinds. Cars. Airplanes. Buggies. History is littered with people who put their heart and soul into making the best thing they could, only to have “progress” come along and either make their work obsolete (buggy manufacturer) or, worse, commoditized². First you spend your life perfecting your craft, and then some joker comes out it a process or, shudder, technology that can do what you do, only better, in a tiny fraction³ of the time.

The upshot is that technology marches forward, and that which once required lovingly hand-crafted HTML is not available as drag-and-drop Wikidot interface.

Having said that, it matters. My problem with the current “let’s build it for idiots” is that, well… we’re building castles made of sand. Here’s what started the whole diatribe.

The spousal unit likes the idea of photographing nature. So I bought a “Trail Cam”. It’s exceptionally basic, designed for researchers to take photos of videos of creatures as the walk through the forest. You have basically three components:

• A setting for when to trigger the action
• What the action is
• How much to of the action to perform

Yeah, that sounds weird. Basically, you can set the delay between when the camera senses motion, once the delay occurs, you can take a photo or a video, and you can take multiple photos or record video for a specific length of time.

If you want to review the footage⁴ or photos, you pull the SD card and hook it up to your computer.

Now compare that to the devices to take pictures of little birdies as they eat. These are absolutely not targeting researches, professionals, or technologically sophisticated individuals. It’s targeted for people who don’t have geeks for a partner. People who just want to have pretty pictures of little birdies.

So much so that they don’t even have local physical storage. They take the picture, and stream it to the cloud. So of course, you have to somehow configure the device to do that, so we’ll connect the camera device to a phone using Bluetooth, which can then tell the camera device what the Wi-Fi password is, and once it connects to the Wi-Fi it will contact BigCorp’s servers. When it take a picture, it uploads it to BigCorp’s servers. Since we want privacy and all that jazz, we’ll have the person create an account, and associate the device with that account.

The benefits of this are almost self-evident. We can make the process as seamless as possible. Create an app on the phone, have the app create an account, let it communicate with the camera device to do the configuration, and. . . . you know, if they have an account, and we can access the photos, why not throw in a subscription for some sort of AI that can identify the birds. And share the photos/videos with whoever they want? And store the photos/videos “forever”?

The sad reality is this is exactly what the vast majority of people want. The simpler the better. QR codes! Auto-signup! There’s a free option, so we’ll use that! Oh wait, for just $2.99/mo I can have all this extra stuff! Shut up and take my money!

And then a few years down the road. . .well, maybe it didn’t make as much money as the company hoped, these fancy subscriptions. I mean, everyone wants a winner, and barely breaking even is not a winner. Google has shut down more services than you can shake a stick at. I mean, just look at the ones they shut down in 2023!

Most people will just throw out the device if the web services stop, and buy something new. I mean, this whole internet thing is so new, it’s . . . just what you do, right?

Of course, for those geeks who threw their heart and soul into understanding how things actually work see this for what it is: A land-grab. Throws something together, sell it as as some fantastic new thing, and if not enough people buy in (or even if they do!) shut it down. Moreover, we (the geeks) know a better way.

Is recording to an SC card easier? Yes and no. I mean, I don’t have to retrieve the images from the web within any sort of time-period. Sharing photos is easy, I can use other image sharing services. I would prefer not having to create an account just to set up a device (why why why? Oh, right, money). Hell, I’m fine adding the Wi-Fi password using three buttons (I’ve suffered through worse).

And then I don’t have to worry about random devices using my internet bandwidth⁵ to upload files to “the cloud” only for me to download said files to view. I can cull the photos to pick and choose the ones I want to keep, and then I can move them where I want them⁶ without worrying if BigCorp is going to mine my metadata for information the can sell to someone who will then sell me birdseed tailored to the birds I take pictures of. Most importantly (and, really, this is the Big Deal), I am not subject to the whims of “the market” to determine if the thing I bought is still functional⁷.

Anyway, I’m a dinosaur. The comet is coming. It’ll wipe us all out, but don’t worry. Most of you won’t see it coming.