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nairboontoday at 11:08 AM3 repliesview on HN

I wonder if the people in 100 years will refer to the current time period (now) the same way as we sometimes do to about ~100 years ago. As in did the scientist and curious minds in the last century really have this golden period to just wander around in all these greenfields, whereas nowadays the fields are not so green anymore. Or is this just a normal phenomena of any time period?


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PaulHouletoday at 12:15 PM

It certainly was easier to get an academic job circa 1960. Things have gotten more difficult in physics because the experimental frontier has moved further away, I mean, you can make whatever theory you want and it is meaningless because we don’t have a machine that can measure the neutrino mass, observe neutrino decay, confirm physics at the GUT or string scale, detect the darkon, etc.

Even something like Mandelbrot’s work was disappointing if you were in grad school in the 1990s because it was not like enough progress was made in fractals post-Mandelbrot that you could get a job working on fractals or chaos.

ontouchstarttoday at 12:12 PM

There is a third type: rabbit. This is a golden age of rabbit holes. A quick rabbit jumps through complicated holes and tunnels to escape from something or chase something.

We can also call someone chasing a rabbit a fox. Like all the ones chasing LLM agents now.

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bpavuktoday at 12:28 PM

the world is in a loop, and that loop repeats itself approximately every 33 years!

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