Respecting people from the 20th century

2:28 AM (of Wednesday, June 28th 2023)

Today is Tuesday, June 27th 2023. I woke up today and did the same exact routine I've been doing the past week, wake up, use the bathroom, walk on the treadmill for half an hour, wash the dishes, and I think I did some strength exercises today, barely any though. Oh no, not much at all, I did like 5 pull ups, and that was it today I think. I don't recall doing any push ups or anything else, though I can do 10 fist push ups with a 25 pound weight on my back now. Wahl can do 10 reps of these for 4 sets with a 40 pound weight on her back. I'd also only do one set, because I wouldn't feel like doing anymore, even though I could, I suck tbh.

Anyway I think the people from the 1900s are smarter / better than those of us living pass the 2010s. It's just that they don't have access to social media or the Internet, and they are able to spend more time in their studies and practice their skills. I think future generations are going to be dumber / worse because of social media and also due to culture and society. People tend to follow loud and attractive voices and opinions, not necessarily the correct ones. The more followers a dumb person has, the more influence they have on people and wielding that sort of power they can influence society negatively.

It takes time and effort to come up with something worthwhile, as they say Rome wasn't built in a day. With social media being about instant gratification and filled with endless distractions, how are future generations going to be able to learn and focus on things enough so that they can build something like Rome? Even me, like I've done some okay things. Oh gosh I don't want to list my "accomplishments" all over again, but they can be found like a few entries back. I post them often because I like to use those as evidence that I can succeed more in the future as well. Anyway, even I have trouble putting in work, time, effort, into something meaningful now. Technically I can also opt out of social media, but that does take effort.

I think the people in the Manhattan Project are really interesting to learn and read about; Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, etc, all crazy geniuses. Richard Feynman is very interesting because he's not only a nerd that understands all the crazy and difficult physics equations, he's even pioneered a lot of stuff himself such as the Feynman Diagrams, but he's also extremely social and he's good at art and music. He's an extremely good teacher, a truly remarkable person, and we will never have anyone else like him. He also theorized microprocessors before they were a thing, and talked about how wires should be a nanometer in length, and that processors should be smaller and smaller so they can due faster calculations, this was when computers were the size of rooms. He really knew about a broad range of topics.

Another genius from the 20th century that we will never have again is Claude Shannon. I mean obviously there's also the famous geniuses like Einstein, Tesla, Edison, Hawking, Ford, Jobs, Gates, Turing, etc, that everyone knows about. I'm talking about greats like Claude Shannon who at 21 theorized devices being able to compute anything using Boolean true/false logic, and from his papers, people created the first computers (the true/false being 1s and 0s, everything that happens on a computer can be broken down into 1s and 0s). Can you imagine reading a research paper like his, and then making the first computers based on that paper? I am someone from the 21st century, and even I probably wouldn't be able to make a computer after reading his paper, but people were able to. Also Shannon wrote even more papers, he wrote about chess AI for example, he wrote math equations on how chess AI would work and beat humans, before the concept of AI even existed. This was before programming languages, so people had to write math equations for how a computer would function. He did this without even having access to a computer, and I'm sure he's done a lot more incredibly stuff.

Just reading about random other genius people from the 90s brings a whole load of accomplishments. Ramanujan for example has many crazy math discoveries credited to him. John Von Neumann also had a lot of crazy things attributed to him, he's mainly known for working with the Manhattan Project and coming up with a bunch of stuff for that, but he also worked with computers and AI, and I think a lot of his concepts are used today in computer processors and file storage. I can't believe he came up with file storage concepts and such, how data, bits of 1s and 0s, would be stored and read in a computer, when everything was just a concept at a time. Isn't that crazy? That's insane to me. Storing and accessing digital information is really complicated, here's a guy who's specialty wasn't even computers, who conceptualized a really good way to do that, that it's used everywhere on every computer device today.

With the advent of AI as well, I just don't think future generations will be able to compete. I mean I'm alive like 600 years after Leonardo Da Vinci, but I am not any smarter than him. Same with Einstein, Isaac Newton, etc. Like Isaac Newton came up with calculus, I think when he was in his late teens or early 20s. He just really liked math and was like, how would I calculate whatever he was looking at that he wanted to calculate, and he came up with calculus by just writing down numbers on pieces of paper and yeah. Isn't that insane?

I mean there's so many geniuses from the 20th century. I know Isaac Newton wasn't from that time period, but still. I think the 20th century is the peak of human society. I don't think we can match its works from any fields. Well, I think Andy Warhol's artwork sucked, but Picasso's was revolutionary. Also in sports, the shoes that people ran in back in the day are hugely inferior to the shoes we have now. Their shoes were stiff, made of animal skin, broke apart easily, they were basically dress shoes and if you saw pictures of them you'd wonder how they were able to run in those at all, yet they did amazing feats with those shoes that even I can't do today, born in the future. It is not true that future generations are smarter and superior. We have more access to knowledge today, so we can take advantage of that more easily, but we're not as innovative or creative or skilled as people from back then. That's what I think anyway.

Anyway I'm sleepy. time to go to sleep.I did nothing great importance today. Well, there were some things that happened today, I am way too sleepy to write about them now though.