Electing a convicted felon President of the United States.
That one cuts deep. It’s really weird too because if you asked your parents they would say america would never elect a felon. Then they went on to elect a felon.
I sometimes think about trying to reach out to older folks to better understand their views but then I remember the absolute garbage brain rot they believe.
US conservatives calling Russia the good guys and electing a convicted felon as president.
And literal nazis marching in the streets
My math teacher: “You can’t walk around with a calculator in your pocket!”
Well well well, look at me NOW, Mr. York!
I have a calculator in my pocket that I can talk to and it’ll talk back. “Hey Bixby, what’s half of five and three-eighths?”
About 33% of the time the dumb bitch comes back with “Okay, here’s what I found on the internet.”
never opens calculator app
Hah, I suck at math so I use it all the time
I don’t know if I suffer from dyscalculia but, man, is mental arithmetic so hard for some reason. I did well in all my other math classes up to college, wtaf, brain.
Arithmetic was easy for me. It made sense. What didnt make sense was finance and accounting. That shit exists just to muddy waters and hurt people. 5
Satellite navigation. In my early childhood we sometimes played a street racing video game that had an arrow pointing the direction on the screen. My mom would remark that she wished she had such an arrow when she drove a car IRL, by now she definitely got that wish.
GPS is now like mini maps in racing games.
You should have tried the GPS we had when I was training with the PLUGR.
Wait, how old is consumer satnav? I am pretty sure it was available (albeit not too commonplace) when I was a kid in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. I really do take it for granted… As long as my government doesn’t deliberately scramble it for security reasons, which happened a lot in the past year.
Dedicated units were available from brands like TomTom in the early 2000’s, and cell phones started getting it around 2007 or so (I remember very expensive blackberry plans had it around then). Android launched with it in 2008, and iPhones started allowing apps like Google Maps with turn by turn navigation by around the end of 2012 or so.
I don’t remember my first gps, but maybe early 2000’s. It was a Garmin, with no route planning, no maps and the position was coordinates
I think my family at least got it in the early-to-mid 2000s, a few years after that.
Burning a CD while using your computer for something else in the mean time.
That’s come full circle as many modern machines don’t even have disc drives anymore
Back in the 90s part of my job was to change the daily backup tape on a computer when I got there in the morning. It was an 8GB cassette the size of a deck of cards, and I remember marveling that I could carry 8 Gigabytes in my shirt pocket. Now you can get thumb drives for $20 that hold many times more, and thousands of times more than my first hard drive. (which cost about a grand)
Lol, that seems like a pain. God bless robotic tape libraries.
Phones doing a good chunk of what computers can
I mean it’s almost wrong handed to call something like an iPhone or Android device a “phone” because it’s really a pocket computer that, among many other things, can place phone calls.
For that reason, I like how they are called Hand Terminals in the Expanse (books, I dont think they are referred to at all in the show)
In fact the thing that irritates me is how useless a smart phone is without a connection to the internet. You have to put in actual effort to make actual use of its local power.
A good chunk? My watch is far more capable than my first computer, many times the storage, and its screen has more pixels
Combined with the Internet a “phone” - as we still charmingly call it - does what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy could do.
Telling the “computer” to do a thing and it just does. AI has it’s upsides and saves me so much time and energy
For real. Who would have guessed the most realistic prediction from Star Trek was talking directly to the computer. Whereas the least realistic one is that a post-scarcity society would benefit average people.
Directly measuring gravity waves, the first measurement using LIGO was back in 2016 and they’ve observed almost a hundred so far. The observations are being used to create newer generations of gravity wave detectors.
Being single
A battery powered table saw.
Absolutely not a thing in the 1980’s, in stock now at your local Lowe’s.
That one does blow me away - I’ve had a cordless drill for years, but a tablesaw??? - when I realized they even existed I couldn’t believe it.
I mean, when you think about it, it’s just a battery-powered circular saw flipped upside-down. Not too crazy to consider like that.
Battery powered circular saws were also science fiction the day I was born.
Go watch early seasons of The New Yankee Workshop and look for the cordless power drill he uses in the first couple of seasons. It’s got this gigantic permanently attached battery hanging out of the hand grip (the hand grip is like a foot long) and it can just barely turn a wood screw.
By the time I was in high school tiny, underpowered circ saws were available that ran on drill batteries. These things had like 5 inch ultrathin blades. Now look at it.
The first battery powered drills were pretty horrible. Batteries have come a long way
I don’t know if people were really talking much about this kinda stuff back then, but a PC like device that wasn’t a laptop that allowed you to play full-on PC titles at home, either hooked to a TV or on its own, or on the move. Especially a device that also allows you to do normal computer things outside of playing games.
Again, not including laptop since I personally don’t know any people who actually used their laptops for playing games while in a moving vehicle. There probably are plenty of people who did it or do it, but I don’t know any.
A computer program winning a Go tournament.
In chess, human grandmasters routinely beat the best computers, but changing that was simply a matter of faster processors and larger memory, problems solvable by the application of sufficient quantities of money. In principle the game was already solved, and within a few decades, would be solved in practice as well.
Go was considered a much harder problem. Programs of similar complexity to a decent chess program couldn’t even look at a finished game between go pros and reliably say who won, let alone get there itself. Well, guess what?
Child me is just dying to have the dancing and gaming skills I have!
Child me wishes he had the basic communication skills and treatments for his mental illness.
Self driving cars.
We are on the early stages currently; ignore what Tesla/musk says; in 10 - 20 years full level 5 autonomy will be common place.
In the 80’s the Cray 1 supercomputer was made, now I have so much more computer power in my pocket its frankly ridiculous. And it’s runs on milliwatts rather than kilowatts.
Honestly not convinced, we’ve been promised self driving cars for almost a decade and we unearthed way more problems than ways of getting closer. And honestly, there are soo many situations where even I’m not sure what the correct course of action would be, so I’m not holding my breath for an AI sourcing from our collective actions.
That may not be the way.
But don’t forget, all advances are cumulative.
I’m super curious how they will handle inclement weather where lanes cease to exist. And drive thrus. How will it handle a drive thru fully autonomously?
Real answer…
GPS accurate enough to tell the car where the lanes are.
Drive thru wouldn’t be too bad, it’s essentially stop and go traffic. Plus, when full autonomy happens, drive thrus will become less common. You can just pre-order your food while the car is driving you to the restaurant. The restaurant will tell the car how long the food will take, and what parking spot to use. Then your car will tell the restaurant your ETA, and notify them exactly when you arrive. Food is waiting, so you just grab the bag and go.
Yeah the issue with predictions around things like autonomous vehicles is it assumes tech advancements will flow in one direction/domain. There are still serious limitations of current AI systems in regards to autonomous vehicles and the next breakthrough may not be one relevant to that domain.
Its certainly possible, but we’ve basically been on the current autonomous vehicle hype for about 10 years already.
The same way we do.
Slow down; drive by feel; look to the sides for trees, sign posts, other markers, knowing the roads.
I work in the automotive industry. I believe we could be there in 10 to 20 years, but I’m not convinced we will be there.
Specifically, because vehicle autonomy has been a big buzz word in the industry for a decade or so, and it’s starting to lose its zing. And when buzzwords lose their zing, the money dries up and the industry moves on.
Things like speed-adjusting cruise control and lane-keeping assistance, for example, are trivial to implement from a technological standpoint and don’t cost much to add. But they don’t show up in too many vehicles, because consumers stopped caring. I worked on a trailer backup assistance feature in a 2015 pickup that added zero production cost, but very few vehicles implement anything like that. Not because they’re not valuable features, but because the industry loses interest and moves on.
The automotive feature that boggles me most is 4-wheel steering (where the rear wheels can move about 10 degrees or so). I’ve driven a vehicle with this feature, and it’s an absolute game-changer. And it doesn’t cost that much to implement either. Too bad the big OEMs don’t care, because once you’ve driven one, you want it on every vehicle ever. Sigh.
End rant.
Besides parking, what other benefit is there for 4-wheel steering?
General maneuverability is the main benefit. The back wheels more closely follow the front wheels, so for situations like a curved drive-through (curbs on both sides) or even just making turns on roads with narrow lanes, it’s easier to not clip the curb (or other vehicles) on the inside of your turn. And at high speeds, you can implement “crab walk” to make lane changes easier. It makes a big difference with towing as well.
There is a massive profit motive, especially for trucking companies.
When there is enough money tho be made, it will be implemented.
I agree the logistics industry wants it. Though I think there may be problems to be solved for autonomous deliveries outside of the driving aspect (that is, the driver does a lot more than just drive). So I wonder if it’ll pick up more if some of the other roadblocks for that are resolved…
Achieving a world record in this day and age, which I have at least one of.
