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Old 02-20-2018, 04:29 PM   #31
Flyndaran
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Default Re: TL8 Computing

We have the opportunity to talk to many different people of different cultures, personalities, and opinions.
But we also have a new opportunity to only talk to others of our exact same niche bigotries and false beliefs that may be uncommon in our immediate vicinity.
Flat earthers finding each other globally, for example.

New technology is never 100% good. It often brings completely novel troubles that may not be at all predictable.
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Old 02-20-2018, 05:22 PM   #32
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Default Re: TL8 Computing

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Complexity is defined as a 10x increase in capabilities for each +1 increase, which is a quantifiable measure. I am suggesting that the progression of computing in TL8 was greater than suggested. My parent's old 286 is an early TL8 computer while my laptop is a late TL8 computer, and the difference is over 10,000x (memory, storage, transistors, etc), suggesting a +4 increase in Complexity since GURPS gave us a quantifiable measure.
Note that your point is storage above does not fit UT, there storage is defined as *1000/TL. Also even UT suggests a *100 progression TL 8 to TL 9, and a 286 is likely not a standard computer of TL 8, it is likely closer to a "slow" TL 8 system.

As Flyundran pointed out there is a really good article "Thinking Machines" in Pyramid 3/37, that re-defines the progression to fit the actual development of later parts of TL 8. It is highly recomended if you want better modern computing rules.
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Old 02-20-2018, 05:39 PM   #33
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Default Re: TL8 Computing

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
Flat earthers finding each other globally
That sentence is a thing to admire.
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Old 02-20-2018, 09:35 PM   #34
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Default Re: TL8 Computing

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You're arguing that the combined effects of ten thousand years and seven TLs are more than the shift from 1 TL. I don't disagree.

The mechanisation of acriculture wasn't one TL of change. Nor was urbanisation. Urbanisation has increased in proportion with TL and the percentage of people who worked in acriculture has fallen steadily since TL3.

The most industrialised societies fell below 50% acricultural workers at late TL5, but some societies haven't reached that yet. There was no one TL shift that took us from an agrarian society to a post-industrial one. Some societies went from effective TL5 to effective TL8 in living memory, but that change, while rapid, isn't a one TL shift.
But the reasons for that were fairly concentrated. It's an error to confuse the long time it takes for sometimes to finish with the time it takes for the initial event that causes it to happen. The specific technological changes that brought about the 50%->1% change unfolded over a very short historical period, no more than 20-30 years.

After that, it took time for the effect of those developments to spread around the world, yes. Horse-drawn farm gear was still being used in the USA as late as the 1960s in some places. But the key technological revolution was much earlier.

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Note also that cheap cell phones and the much less expensive infrastructure required compared to land lines mean that TL8 has brought instananeous communication to huge parts of the world and significant fractions of humanity that have effectively never had access to any such thing.

Not to mention that having daily social contact with people from many different cultures, who live in different parts of the world, has shifted from being a feature for the super-rich elite, who travelled the world easily and could ignore the high costs of transcontinental cables and international phone calls, to being merely for the affluent on the scale of the world as a whole (i.e. anyone in Western countries and many other, richer societies, the luckier in many others), those who can afford a computer/smartphone and connection.
True, but that's a secondary change, compared to the real revolution, the society-shaking shock, which was the advent of effectively instantaneous communication with the telegraph. That turned the world into a zero-size communications zone, the revolution was then. Since then, it's been about more convenience and more people with access.

It's almost impossible for us today to wrap out minds around the emotional, social, economic, and political impact of that time. People who had grown up with the speed of communication being that of a horse, and with a day's message range being no more than a few tens of miles at most, suddenly had the power to send messages across continents. Compared to that, cellular phones are not much in terms of impact.
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Old 02-20-2018, 10:06 PM   #35
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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 View Post
True, but that's a secondary change, compared to the real revolution, the society-shaking shock, which was the advent of effectively instantaneous communication with the telegraph. That turned the world into a zero-size communications zone, the revolution was then. Since then, it's been about more convenience and more people with access.

It's almost impossible for us today to wrap out minds around the emotional, social, economic, and political impact of that time. People who had grown up with the speed of communication being that of a horse, and with a day's message range being no more than a few tens of miles at most, suddenly had the power to send messages across continents. Compared to that, cellular phones are not much in terms of impact.
Eeeeh. The line between 'convenience' and possibility isn't that straightforward, and breadth of access can constitute a vast qualitative change.
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Old 02-21-2018, 12:12 AM   #36
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Default Re: TL8 Computing

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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 View Post
But the reasons for that were fairly concentrated. It's an error to confuse the long time it takes for sometimes to finish with the time it takes for the initial event that causes it to happen. The specific technological changes that brought about the 50%->1% change unfolded over a very short historical period, no more than 20-30 years.

After that, it took time for the effect of those developments to spread around the world, yes. Horse-drawn farm gear was still being used in the USA as late as the 1960s in some places. But the key technological revolution was much earlier.



True, but that's a secondary change, compared to the real revolution, the society-shaking shock, which was the advent of effectively instantaneous communication with the telegraph. That turned the world into a zero-size communications zone, the revolution was then. Since then, it's been about more convenience and more people with access.

It's almost impossible for us today to wrap out minds around the emotional, social, economic, and political impact of that time. People who had grown up with the speed of communication being that of a horse, and with a day's message range being no more than a few tens of miles at most, suddenly had the power to send messages across continents. Compared to that, cellular phones are not much in terms of impact.
Tech Levels are about widely adopted and available technologies.

The telegraph had many effects, but it wasn't adopted so widely that the average person had one in their pocket, usable not only for short messages of vital import, but with enough connectivity to make chatting with friends worldwide as trivial as if they were right next to you.

One technology provides an astronomically expensive way to send a few words over distance. The second technological revolution renders distance meaningless in the context of social interaction. Not only that, but every revolution from now on shall be televised. Tweeted, streamed, liveblogged and Snapchatted too, it appears.
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Old 02-21-2018, 01:29 AM   #37
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Eeeeh. The line between 'convenience' and possibility isn't that straightforward, and breadth of access can constitute a vast qualitative change.
No doubt. The mobile convenience, access to information as needed, and other advantages of cell phones, together with the loss of privacy and various social downsides, all add up to a major thing.

But it's not a big deal in comparison to the orders of magnitude improvement in capability in communications seen in the 19C. In the course of a handful of years, the norm of life that had endured throughout known history was suddenly replaced by the potential for the entire world to be a single place in communications terms, as close as your next-door neighbor. In a historical blink of an eye, the world shrank from being a year across or more in communications terms to the size of a neighborhood, or smaller, a change that overthrew thousands of years of familiar experience.

That was the communications revolution. What has happened since is secondary effects, of broadly decreasing significance. After the telegraph, the telephone enabled direct conversation across global distances, radio removed the necessity for the clumsy physical wiring, adding mobility to instantaneous communication. Both of those developments are more significant than smartphones, in fact, smartphones are a merger of phone and radio and PDA.
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Old 02-21-2018, 05:54 AM   #38
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The telegraph and steam engine changed human history during the late 19th century because they made rapid communication and transportation possible. You reduced the communication times to 1/100th of what it was during the early 19th century and transportation times to 1/10th of what it was during the early 19th century. If neither of those inventions had occurred, the majority of us would likely still be working on the farm, and the population of humanity would likely be less than 2 billion rather than approaching 8 billion.

What have computers done by comparison? They have reduced the number of humans needed in the system, forcing people away from industrial jobs to service jobs. In the USA, the average person works longer hours than their grandparents did 50 years ago and, when adjusted for inflation, for less money per hour. Instead of creating a leisure society, the automation and the international trade facilitated by computers creates an improvised society because the quality and the quantity of jobs is reduced (which is why the midde class is shrinking and why workforce participation rates have declined). I am not saying that computers are bad, but I think that they should have been reserved for entertainment and scientific research, as they have not provided the benefits that we experienced from the previous technological revolutions.
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Old 02-21-2018, 06:02 AM   #39
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Default Re: TL8 Computing

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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 View Post
No doubt. The mobile convenience, access to information as needed, and other advantages of cell phones, together with the loss of privacy and various social downsides, all add up to a major thing.

But it's not a big deal in comparison to the orders of magnitude improvement in capability in communications seen in the 19C. In the course of a handful of years, the norm of life that had endured throughout known history was suddenly replaced by the potential for the entire world to be a single place in communications terms, as close as your next-door neighbor. In a historical blink of an eye, the world shrank from being a year across or more in communications terms to the size of a neighborhood, or smaller, a change that overthrew thousands of years of familiar experience.

That was the communications revolution. What has happened since is secondary effects, of broadly decreasing significance. After the telegraph, the telephone enabled direct conversation across global distances, radio removed the necessity for the clumsy physical wiring, adding mobility to instantaneous communication. Both of those developments are more significant than smartphones, in fact, smartphones are a merger of phone and radio and PDA.
You're overstaing the effects of transatlantic cables to the vast majority of people. Anyone outside of the 1% of the richest of the world population essentially had zero chance of making use of them.

Yes, they were accessible to the middle class in the Imperial capital of London and a few other enclaves of the ultra-rich. But they had no direct impact on the lives of ordinary Africans, Asians, South Americans, Central Americans or even the vast majority of North Americans and Europeans.

Technology existing, in theory, but being unavailable to the masses, is usually less important to GURPS TL than what technology the 'average' person relies on in their daily lives.

Transatlantic cables appeared at early TL5, but they had zero impact on the lives of any of my ancestors until late TL6. By which time phones also existed, but, importantly, none of my ancestors could afford calling or sending cables over the Atlantic. They wrote letters, even if they knew that the ultra-rich Americans and British had other options.

Even in the 1980s and early 1990s, intercontinental communications were expensive enough so that an average home couldn't sustain using them all day merely to get to know ordinary people in other countries. And while it may have been possible to connect a computer remotely to a source of information, physically travelling to a library was still how an average person looked for specific information.

That's the sea change. Now, ordinary people have acess to constant social interaction with others, literally without their physical location being relevant. Nearly any information they want to access requires nothing more than hitting buttons on something they will carry all day anyway.

The precursor technologies had all appeared before, but the widespread adoption is what constitutes clear evidence of a TL shift in GURPS terms. And what a TL shift it is.

Consider how many daily tasks are performed in the same way today as they were in 1990. How many jobs are unchanged.

I'm a lawyer. It's a field generally considered conservative, so much so that it's a source of jokes. But the social and technological changes that have occured over the decades that lie on each side of the year 2000 are such that there is basically nothing we do today that is done in the same way as my father used to do his work in 1990.

I used to visit him at work then and today we are both partners at the same firm. And if I were statting things out in GURPS terms, it's clear to me that he learned do work as a lawyer and use all the technological tools at TL8 (he was at law school in the 80s, started practice just before 1990). Cell phones weren't a thing you used for work, as even a car phone wasn't much useful in Iceland, given the lack of a cellular net here. There were computers, but apart from word processing, they weren't good for much. Certainly no searchable databases in Icelandic. And there was still plenty for a secretary to do around a law office.

I attended law school after 2000. What I learned and what he learned are not the same TL. Basically, he had to re-learn everything he knew to be able to function at our new TL and not be stuck at TL8 (1980s and 1990s).

And this is probably the job which has changed the least. For any kind of adventurer, investigator or typical PC profession, I'd think that this kind of change is the minimum. Hell, the younger beat cops use various smartphone apps for preliminary forensics, because the officially issued gear (often 10-20 years old) is so far behind that it is essentially useless.

Try running any kind of game at TL8, setting it between 1985-1995, with painstaking attention to what equipment actually was available. Then compare it with the same scenario run in our year, again, with any equipment that is available in the real world statted up in GURPS terms.

Do you get the feeling that the PCs are picking similar equipment for the two periods? That the way they accomplish tasks is through the same methods?

From having run games in 1988 and 1990, I'm pretty confident that if that's legitimately TL8, then we are not living at TL8.

The effects on equipment lists and how most daily tasks are performed are much, much greater than between a TL6 (1920s) game and a TL7 (1950s) game.
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Old 02-21-2018, 06:30 AM   #40
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You are (in my judgment) misunderstanding "capability" to be the same as "numerical measurement of technical capacity".

I'm with Rupert in saying that my computer of 2018 isn't even 10x as useful as the first one I had in 1998.
While I agree that “capability” was probably intended to be more ephemeral, I disagree with your latter paragraph. I own a couple computers from the 90’s, and fondly remember my 8086 from before. My laptop from 2015 has capabilities those computers do not have, including the ability to run multiple programs at once* (and definitely without modifying the OS to change available RAM). This shouldn’t be taken lightly; the GPUs in your average gaming machine today have so many compute cores that scientists are using them for embarrasingly parallelizable algorithms to great effect (genome research, SETI signal processing, bitcoin mining). Just your GPU is more useful than your 1998 computer, but you just don’t happen to use it to its full capabilities, just like someone from TL11 with a wrist-thingy with fully integrated AI might only use it for games or to surf the ubernet.

*Windows 95 and 98 might have made you think they were running more than one program at a time, but with 1 CPU core, what was really happening was a scene of the Grey Sisters from Greek myth, but with a lot more sisters (programs), and still only one eye(cpu). Nothing ran concurrently. I remember using my first dual CPU workstation in 1999. Amazing step up, and I hadn’t even learned the power of fork() yet.
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