(untitled)

I have observed this Hari-Seldon-like "law" for the past few years and want you guy's thoughts on it. What I have observed is that a way to make something creative is through limitation. The demoscene exemplifies this. They have to find weird, innovative and creative ways to do soykaf on limited rules (programming under 64 kb, or programming on a 8 bit system like the Atari). Its hard to do stuff creatively in this day and age since computers have seemingly unlimited power, which is why we don't see that much creativity put into video games, websites, and general programming, making most programs take so much processing power with their un-optimized code, cause it doesn't need to be optimized. Are we ever going to hit another point where resources will be limited again?

well yeah earth's resources aren't unlimited we're either gonna smart up and start being a leaver culture instead of a taker one or we're gonna be forced into a leaver culture instead of a taker one. I do see what you mean tho. things stop being creative when they become easy or even habit. I don't think it's impossible to be creative in this time though. it may be harder since there is so much already thought up of but there is room to mess around using things for not their originally intended purpose. perhaps that's how we'll fix the resource issue? I hope so cause damn that's daunting.

I find that real breakthroughs and advancements come from the small and rather specific discoveries. The products of these achievements are just the larger-scale application of them. To give an example or two, the encoding, transfer and decoding of information is a 'simple' and fundamental concept and from that, when it's pushed to an appealing conclusion, when a thing is made which serves the population, we get spotify and youtube. Pushed into the limelight and hailed as wonderful breakthroughs because they are useful platforms that the people can make use of. But it's the constituent parts, made years ago which are the actual insights. Check out the beautiful images of galaxies and star clusters which litter our media and wallpapers. Isn't science amazing? Yes, it is. Astronomy isn't done with 4k cameras though. It's largely done with images which wouldn't even fill your laptop or phone screens, and in monochrome. Discoveries are made by applying very specific principles to very specific observations. The beautiful pictures they share with media come afterwards and are almost always useless to the actual endeavor. As you might notice, I'm not good at getting my point across. Moreover, I think I have addressed discovery rather than creativity which is what you started this thread for. But I wanted to suggest that the things that allow us to do things are based on the small and seemingly (initially at least) insignificant advancements made by those who work with the severely limited and specific. It has always been this way and it hasn't gone away.

Limitation enforces creativity but lack of limitation does not enforce lack of creativity. You can still be creative even if you don't have to worry about resources.

>>17672 limitation tends to produce a more productive kind of creativity among more people because they help eliminate decisions people would otherwise have to make. it's a delicate balance because eliminating most or all of the decisions someone might have to make eliminates the conditions for creativity, but allowing someone total freedom with no fixed points of reference often leads to indecisiveness and shallow wandering between options. a lot of this depends on the person's personality of course--some people are quicker to despair when they have few options to choose from rather than embrace one or the other, and some people are more decisive than average and can handle having a large array of options without getting bogged down in the process of choosing among them. i think this is probably the wisdom behind the advice people give to newbies in any field to "just choose something"--in a lot of complicated areas of study it's hard to get past that initial decision stage, and it's almost always better to just choose, even "suboptimally", than it is to risk never choosing at all.