You ever look at something and in that moment realize that the
world has completely changed and that "something" you are looking
at will no longer ever have its place in the world again?
As an elder millenial and xennial, I've had that moment plenty of
times for all manner of technologies. Some things you might miss
and have a nostalgia for, but other things you say good riddance
and welcome your new technology overlord.
I had another one of those moments when I was at my local thriftstore
the other day. I was browsing the book section and saw an entire
shelf full of O'reilly technical books that someone had donated.
Many of them were 1st or 2nd editions from the 90s to early 2000s.
I instantly flashed back to my earliest days working as a junior
engineer in the early 2000s. I remember pouring over books like
"Programming Perl" or "Unix Power Tools" among others. For my entire
early career, O'reilly books were always on my bookshelf and believe
it or not, we actually read those things. When we didn't know
something, we would actually grab a book and crack it open to the
index and look it up. Crazy right?
And then just like the meme video, you realize that one day was
the last day you ever opened those books. On the shelf at the
thriftstore was an O'reilly book about awk/sed that I remember
having read 20 years ago but gave away to a long forgotten co-op
of mine. I took the book in hand and thought to myself that maybe
it would be nice to buy it again in case I needed to look up some
arcane regexp again.
And then the moment happened like a lightning bolt. I stared at
the book and realized that I could literally just type in any
question I ever had about awk/sed into a Generative AI website and
I would have detailed explanations and examples. GenAI could solve
my exact problem or question in a way that an O'reilly book or even
Stack Overflow could never do.
It's hard to describe what I was feeling at the time to be honest.
It wasn't a longing or a desire to go back to the early 2000s and
make everyone buy and use O'reilly books again. But it was kind of
a sadness or a sense of loss about the world in which these O'reilly
books really meant something to people.
It's a feeling that I never had about old versions of Operating
systems, game consoles, or even retro-computing. I don't know why
I felt so strongly about these particular books. I'm guessing it's
probably some unconcious angst about the reality that GenAI honestly
could do everything I did as a junior engineer. GenAI has more
knowledge than I could ever possess but more importantly, GenAI
can actually synthesize that knowledge and interpret it and spit
it out to other people in the way that used to require humans to
do.
I never did end up buying the awk/sed book...but maybe I should
just to remind myself of that bygone era.
