{"id":631,"date":"2004-11-07T21:49:29","date_gmt":"2004-11-08T01:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=631"},"modified":"2004-11-07T21:49:29","modified_gmt":"2004-11-08T01:49:29","slug":"stephenson-on-hardware-the-spaceheater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=631","title":{"rendered":"Stephenson on Hardware: The Spaceheater"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor\" href=\"http:\/\/interviews.slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=04\/10\/20\/1518217&amp;tid=192&amp;tid=214&amp;tid=126&amp;tid=11\">Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor<\/a> is a long interview with Neal Stephenson. I love what he has to say about <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware&#8217;s nothing more than a really complicated space heater.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now, one could construct an argument against <a title=\"KurzweilAI.net\" href=\"http:\/\/www.kurzweilai.net\/meme\/frame.html?main=\/meme\/memelist.html?m%3D15\">Raymond Kurzweil<\/a> to the effect that hardware may be getting faster, but the software is just getting hairy (as in hair ball). The inevitability that Kurzweil and others see in the improvements in hardware are a false evolution &#8211; a bit like thinking that humans will be superseded because cars gets faster.<br \/>\nThis link is courtesy of Matt K.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor is a long interview with Neal Stephenson. I love what he has to say about My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=631\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Stephenson on Hardware: The Spaceheater<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-culture-and-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}