https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock)[1] was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality.

I mean, there have always been bad games. There were bad games for the NES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games

It’s just that the ones on that list that people remember are the few that someone would still be playing forty years later, the really exceptional ones. Typically, if someone in 2025 is thinking of an older game, they’re thinking about the best of the best from that time period.

I’ve seen arguments that a lot of “the good old days” mindset for many things comes from survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.

Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence as in correlation “proves” causality.

In architecture, for example:

Just as new buildings are being built every day and older structures are constantly torn down, the story of most civil and urban architecture involves a process of constant renewal, renovation, and revolution. Only the most beautiful, useful, and structurally sound buildings survive from one generation to the next. This creates a selection effect where the ugliest and weakest buildings of history have been eradicated (disappearing from public view, leaving the visible impression that all earlier buildings were more beautiful and better built).

business writing

I don’t know if this is still a problem, but I remember reading that some decades back, a number of companies had problems with people writing absolutely unusable emails.

The problem, as I recall it being presented, was that historically the norm had that you’d have a secretary take dictation. That secretary was basically a professional writer, and would clean up all the memos and whatever that went out.

But at some point, companies generally decided that people should just be emailing each other directly. Now you weren’t dictating to a secretary. You were typing an email yourself. The problem is that this meant that there were suddenly a lot of people who had relied on secretaries to clean things up for many years who had had no practice and were suddenly writing their own material…and it was horrendous.

I’d guess that that was probably some twenty years ago now, at least, so maybe the problem has aged out.

The problem with tech literacy is that a lot of it has a limited lifetime. Like, you have N hours to spend on education, and when I look at the material that schools cover, I think that most of it is at least intended to be more “timeless” – that is, you should still be able to make use of it as a retiree.

Also, at least some of those are, I think, really better addressed by technical fixes to existing systems. Like, okay, having smartphone-OS-style sandboxed applications being the norm for a lot of software on the desktop might do a good deal to improve things.

Some of this may have changed, but relative to when I went to school in the US?

Primary education

• I’d remove cursive if it’s still being taught. I’ve read some articles saying that it still was in Canada, don’t know about the US. It has very limited uses – it’s optimized for being faster for writing a lot of text than printing, but if I’m going to be doing a lot of text, I’m going to be typing, not writing it longhand.

  kagis

  https://www.livenowfox.com/news/us-states-require-cursive-handwriting-students

  California and New Hampshire became the most recent states to pass legislation making cursive handwriting instruction mandatory. At least 25 other states require a similar form of instruction in schools, and another five states have legislation pending, according to data tracked by the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.

  Sounds like it’s still in the curriculum.

• On that note, typing. We did have minimal typing, but that is important, and I was still hunting-and-pecking until sometime in secondary education when I forced myself to switch over to touch typing.

• I’d kill arts and crafts. Very few of the things that I actually did were things that were likely to be practical to build on. I’m dubious as to traditional media graphics being a core part of any curriculum – later in life, someone is a lot more likely to be professionally doing graphic arts on a computer.

• Start math earlier. I was in two different school systems, and one pushed math harder and earlier. The kids there did much better on mathematics topics.

• I have no idea what the state of computer application education is today, and I assume that it’s changed. Back when I was in primary school, there were too few computers available to teach the stuff, and we had very brief coverage in secondary education. I would hope that at this point, kids in primary education get some kind of coverage of text editing – I don’t know about word processing, which was kind of tied to paper documents, which are certainly less common these days – spreadsheets (or some kind of functionally-equivalent system), graphic design software, web browser use, and email. I’d assume that many people will learn this at home, but you’d be kind of disadvantaged in a number of fields if you don’t pick it up.

Secondary education

• More statistics. I saw one half-class as an elective at my school. This has been maybe one of the major things that I regret not having spent time picking up earlier and more of, and I’m pretty sure that a number of people don’t get basic statistics, based on the number of times I’ve seen arguments where people don’t believe polls because nobody’s ever introduced them to sampling.

• Less calculus. The concepts are important; doing manual integration of symbolic equations is not, and that’s what I spent a lot of time in calculus on. When I went through, calculus was kind of the standard “mainline” math class if one wanted to take more math. I think in total I took three or four calculus classes in secondary and tertiary education, which is just excessive for nearly all fields, and a lot of what I was doing was not a great use of time in terms of even learning calculus. I remember that being absolutely driven home when I stopped by the office of the husband of the of one of my calculus professors once with a question about a project I was doing – he was also a mathematics professor – and watched him pull out Mathematica to do a simple integration. I asked him about it – I mean, the guy was married to a calculus professor, had a PhD in math – and he said “nobody has time to waste doing manual integration”. I can run the open-source Maxima package on my phone and desktop today, and it can do symbolic integration. There is no reason to have blown all the time I did manually doing calculus problems.

  Sorry, bit of a pet peeve.

• Personal finance should be included.

• I did not like the history curriculum in my secondary education at all. It was overwhelmingly rote memorization. The textbook was pretty decent – though we only covered a fraction of it, but I read through the rest and liked it. It wasn’t until I got to tertiary education that I had what I’d call a good history class – there was little memorization, and one mostly read content, discussed it, and wrote papers on it. Granted, that takes longer to grade, but there has to be some kind of way to improve on memorization. Today, I really enjoy a lot of history.

• My home economics class was, as I recall, mostly cooking, sewing, and arts and crafts. The cooking was useful, the clothing repair was minimally useful, and the arts and crafts were a waste of time.

• I don’t know how to fix it, but I think that literature was horrible. I read some of the books that were covered in literature classes prior to those classes and enjoyed them. Reading the same books later for school was a miserable experience.

• I took a speech class that had a segment on propaganda techniques, to try to make people aware of them in their environment. I think was a good idea. I would guess that this isn’t widely available.

• I’d like to see at least some form of basic economics at the secondary level. When I went through, economics was something that one only saw during tertiary education, not secondary.

• I personally felt a bit overwhelmed when I hit formal proofs in tertiary education, as I hadn’t had much coverage in secondary education – IIRC, that was basically a portion of eighth-grade geometry. A friend had gone to a high school that provided much better coverage. Not all fields of study are going to require it, but I wish that I’d had more coverage in secondary education.

• My secondary education did not offer coverage in some of the physics material, like electromagnetism, that I know that some schools do, which I regretted not having available.

In general, I feel like I learned more in tertiary education than I did in secondary education per hour spent. On the other hand, I think that some of that was because the tertiary education curriculum was more self-driven and harder to grade. If you want to do that, that is going to add cost. Looking back, I kind of wish that my secondary education was generally closer to tertiary – more self-driven projects and such.

Tertiary education

My guess is that this differs a lot from person to person. I think that it’s harder to make recommendations that would apply to many people. I also think that in general, my tertiary education made better use of time than my primary or secondary education did – less that I’d change.

• To fill an apparently-unrelated prerequisite, I took a class that covered some law, though I didn’t formally study law, and found that I picked up a lot of stuff that helped me understand what was going on later in life. I think that a lot of people would benefit from a low-level law course or two. It is not something that I would have planned for myself, but if I could go back in time, I think I would have told young me to go for it.

  I’d also add that the criminal law textbook we used was one of my favorite textbooks – it was dense from an information standpoint, and easy to understand.

Overall

• I have found that the wiki-style hypertext format plus having a browser with search engine available to work very well for learning material. I much prefer it to doing a linear run through a textbook. I think that it’s far preferable to listening to lectures, which run at real time (so you can’t easily slow if something’s confusing, and can’t zip through things that you already understand). I wish that tons of material had been available in that format when I was a kid, and think that more emphasis should be given it in education, if that isn’t already the case today.

• Generally-speaking, I think that listening to lectures, especially in tertiary education, was a waste of time. I can get the same material more-quickly reading on my own than listening to someone do an ad-hoc presentation. Just assign the reading and have some kind of forum for taking questions.

I had some vague interest some time back in some of this some time back, the idea of a “zero-admin” network where you could just have random people plug in more infrastructure, install some software package on nodes, and routing and all would just work. No human involvement beyond plugging physical transport in.

Some things to consider:

• People will, given the opportunity, use network infrastructure as a DDoS vector. You need to be strong against that.

• It’s a good bet that not everyone in the system can be trusted.

• Not only that, but bad actors can collude.

• Because transport of data has value, if this is free, you have to worry about someone else who provides transport for existing data just routing stuff over your free system and flooding it.

• If the system requires encryption to mitigate some of the above issues (so, for example, one sort of mechanism might be a credit-based system where one entity can prove that it has routed some amount of data from A to B in exchange for someone else routing some amount of data from C to D – Mojo Nation, the project Bram Cohen did before BitTorrent, used such a system to “pay” for bandwidth), that’s going to add overhead.

• If you want your network to extend to routing data onto the Internet, that’s going to consume Internet resources. Even if you can figure out a way to set up a neighborhood network, the people who, for example, run and maintain submarine cables are not going to want to do that gratis. And yeah, to some degree, you can just unload costs onto other users, the way that it’s common for heavy BitTorrent users to pay the same monthly rate as that little old lady who just checks her email, even though said heavy users are tying up a lot more time on the line. But if you are successful, at some point, this stops flying below the radar and ISPs start noticing that User X is incurring a greatly disproportionate degree of resource usage. I should note that there are probably valid use cases that don’t extend to routing data onto the Internet, but if you don’t permit for that, that’s a very substantial constraint.

If anyone has to do something that they don’t want to do (e.g. run line from saturated point A to saturated point B), then you’re potentially looking at having to pay someone to do something, and then you’re just back to the existing commercial Internet system…which for most people, isn’t that expensive and does a reasonable job of moving data from Point A to Point B.

From a physical standpoint, while different parts of the network can probably use different types of infrastructure, if you want sparse, cheap-to-deploy infrastructure over an area, my guess is that in many cases line-of-sight laser networks are probably your best bet, especially in cities. You can move data from point A to point B quickly through other people’s airspace without paying for it, today. Laser links come with some drawbacks: weather and such will disrupt them to some degree, so you have to be willing to accept that.

The main application that I could think of for regional-only transport, avoiding routing onto the Internet, was some kind of distributed backup system. A lot of people have unused storage capacity. You can use redundant distributed data storage, the way Hyphanet does. You can make systems that permit one user to prove that they are storing a certain amount of data to let them build credibility by requesting hashes of data that they say that they’re storing. It won’t deal with, say, a fire burning down the whole area, but for a lot of people, basically having some kind of “I store your offsite data using my unused storage capacity in exchange for you doing the same for me, and we can both benefit enough to want to continue use of the system” system might be worthwhile. That’s also likely to permit for higher-latency stuff involving encryption and dealing with redundancy. I think that “Internet service for free” off such a system is going to be a lot harder.

There’s Diet Dr. Pepper if it’s the calories at issue.

If the central heater is a heat pump or natural gas or something other than electrical resistance, it may be net savings to actually get it fixed, as per unit of heat, it’ll probably be cheaper to operate than the space heaters. Though if you’re just heating part of the house with those space heaters, that might make up for it.

The term that Doctrow coined, “enshittification”, doesn’t mean “something I don’t like”. It’s not a synonym for “bad”. It specifically referred to online service companies transitioning from a growth phase to a monetization phase.

Many of these companies have relatively high fixed costs, like paying engineers, and relatively low variable costs, like server time. It doesn’t matter how many customers using your online service there are – you still have to pay the engineers to go write the software behind the thing. But each additional customer likely uses only a tiny amount of server resources. The result is that it’s really, really bad for one of these companies to have a small customer count. They want to grow as quickly as possible, to get out of the period where they don’t have many customers. So the norm is for them to offer as favorable terms as possible, accept losing money, to try to grow their customer base as quickly as possible. When they get it to be fairly large, then they worry about being profitable; that’ll normally be doing something that makes them less-desirable to users than they had been, since they’re less-worried about attracting users at that point. That transition, when they become less-desirable, is what Doctrow was talking about.

So, for example, when interest rates went up a while back and capital became more expensive for many companies at the same time, losing money for extended periods of time became a problem, and many had to shift to a monetization phase at about the same time.

But the term doesn’t refer to just anything being undesirable.

Most companies don’t do the kind of degree of growth-phase-to-monetization-phase shift that online companies do, because they don’t have as much weight on fixed costs. There are some economies of scale to restaurants – McDonalds can more-easily afford to do R&D relative to a mom-and-pop – but a lot of their costs are tied to the amount of product they’re selling. Ingredients, labor of people at the restaurant, buildings.