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by codingdave
722 days ago
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I have the opposite perspective from my 40 years - not about learning to learn - that is 100% correct. But change is not as constant as it seems. The surface levels churns and change, but the fundamentals change very slowly. Hardware, networking, and those low layers of the OSI stack are not exactly the same as back then... but close enough. If you understood it then, you understand it now even if some details have evolved. Likewise, the UX of OSes has changed, as have the details of the internals, but not the concept of file systems and command lines. Picking up new details is easier than evolving your understanding to a completely new paradigm, so if someone wants to learn something today and have it be relevant in 10 years, just work lower and lower in the OSI model. |
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And both of you seem correct.
Looking at short enough time window, and especially if you don't know those lower/deeper levels (concepts) - even more so if you focus on buzzword/trends - it does seem to change a lot.
With deeper and longer term context, and focus on concepts - IT is seemingly doing circles. From mainframes and thin clients to fat clients to big servers, to "serverless".
Last time I checked "serverless" it went from it's initial "So it's basically like CGI scripts - each request executes a program from scratch" to "And now it's faster with persistence" (so like FastCGI/Plack/etc).
Of course with orders of magnitudes improvements in memory size, execution & computation speed and bandwith/latency...
Every now and then, some things which were impractical/gimmicky and maybe even not possible (e.g. text to speech, sound/image to text, 3D/VR/raytracing, ML/AI ...) finally become possible.
And on occasion the sum of those "new but theoretically/conceptually old" things unlock something that's really kind of new - like video deepfakes.
To me personally - ChatGPT and similar still seem like just much less (but still a bit) gimmicky variant of those end of 1990s IRC and early 2000s phpBB chat bots.