It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others.

Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES.

For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one.

I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory.

Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does.

Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better.

I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

---

I love this scene because it so perfectly captures what it's like to be young and given advice, however well-meaning, by an older generation living in a world that no longer exists for the young. And it's ambiguous and trite enough to be essentially useless even if the underlying idea isn't terrible.

The gist was I could do an encrypted (int)x + (int)y = (int)z computation, I could encrypt the inputs and then get a result back that was correct, secure, and decryptable, but was like 1MB in size.

So, for someone whose knowledge is 20 years outdated and is about Pallier crypto, has that major breakthrough happened?

And I also realize that this is more than a thought experiment for many people living right now.

And now it's just another instrument and has whole genres of music dedicated to it. C64 SID chips are sought after for 8-bit music creation because it has a unique aesthetic. Same with TR-808 drum machines.

The AI complaints feel a lot like that.

I'm betting in about 15-20 years there's going to be a revival of terrible AI images and videos because people are nostalgic for 2024 when AI images were obvious and sit firmly in an uncanny valley.

And I think AI will inspire a massive artistic revolution, both because it becomes just another tool in the toolbox that makes creation easier like drum machines and synths, AND it takes over the pop-music space previously occupied by boy bands and pop queens - generic rehashes of inoffensive crap that so saturates the market entire counter-cultures develop. But someone will use it to make something uniquely creative and new. Rap and hip-hop wouldn't exist without cheap drum machines.

In other words, you're old enough to start disliking new stuff, but not old enough to have seen this happen multiple times and realize that this is just another generational cycle. The younger generations will absorb AI tools and continue to do what humans have always done, which is be creative with the tools at their disposal.

The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.

A much better idea was a .kids domain where the content was vetted, and you could allow-list your child's device to that. Much easier than trying to migrate everyone over to specific TLDs, especially when that ship has sailed already. But that never got traction either.

Edit to add: I used to work on "family safety" software. Blocking bad content doesn't work - it's too difficult of a problem. Walled gardens do work, however. The fact that there's not a push for the equivalent of an Apple App Store for kids is probably evidence of ulterior motives on behalf of regulators.

Then in the draw phase you could choose which deck to draw from, eliminating the mana flood/drought possibility that ruins games.

Maybe some additional rules to limit how many lands you're allowed to draw in the initial draw to one or two, I dunno.

But now Big Bird is making a whole lot more sense.

Or produce the necessary items on your own. Growing things isn't difficult.

We experience reality filtered through our senses and our own concept of "self," which is an incredibly limited view of the world. Imagine being able to see/experience a less filtered version of reality, if only for a short period of time.

Or imagine expanding the frequencies of visible light you can see. That alone could certainly be a catalyst to change your perspective on many things.

It's not so much "losing control" as it is "losing unconscious bias." Loss of control is not the goal.

It's also one of those things that you have to experience to understand, and even then, sober you won't completely understand.

But done right, these experiences can be incredibly important to people. If it's not for you, fine, but it's funny how many people with zero experience with these substances think there can't be anything worthwhile there.

There is an appropriate amount of architecture and design that should go into systems. One aspect of that is how much effort you put into scalable design. Building and maintaining scalable systems isn't free, so the "right amount" is pretty much somewhere between "none" and "we are AWS."

Knowing when adding complexity is worth doing takes experience, humility, and maturity, the exact qualities that are sorely lacking in many egomaniac software developers.

It's why we get ridiculous fads and pendulum swings where people get fed up with bad design and then go do the opposite thing, having learned nothing.

Approve the PR when there's a bug/task filed to fix the thing later and then prioritize that work as necessary.

Just as bad as never fixing things later is never releasing anything until it's perfect, which it never is.

Opt out? You get the most annoying ones.

Now imagine if it were possible to instantly and cheaply travel to Paris this way. Many people would likely be just fine with doing this.

Now imagine that one day, the transporter doesn't destroy the original you and now two copies of you exist. From that moment on, the individual experiences diverge but each copy believes it's the original.

If ten days after that a technician came and said "ok, time to disintegrate you, don't worry, your copy in Paris is A-OK" I think that most people wouldn't agree to be disintegrated just because another mostly identical consciousness is alive.

And yet, if it were to happen flawlessly and instantaneously, likely that same existential fear doesn't exist. Most people think the star trek transporter is pretty cool.

But why? We have to realize that our consciousness is really an evolutionary trick that's expedient for our continued survival. The idea that the survival of my own ego and continuous conscious experience is pretty much the basest mechanism I have that makes me value staying alive.

But there's a paradox in the case of my exact copy. Logically, I shouldn't care of the star trek transporter works instantaneously or not. Let's say that it makes a copy that exists for twenty minutes before disintegrating me, but I have no way of knowing that and instead just sit in a room bored for twenty minutes until disintegration. Functionally that's a nearly identical experience to instant transport, but also seems a lot more like the broken transporter scenario.

But let's say this is the future of travel and everyone accepts the fact that my continued conscious experience is what's really important, so I'm willing to be disintegrated painlessly as long as a copy of me exists somewhere else in the universe.

That's not too big a leap to make, but it seems strange, right? Why am I not then just fine being disintegrated as long as any consciousness continues to exist?

My answer to that question is that it's an evolutionary advantage to want to live, therefore we want to live. A bit of circular reasoning. It's also our species' biggest unquestioned assumption too - that consciousness and self-awareness is better than the alternative. But "better" might just be "important to the survival of the human species."

I think the article touches on that.

If you're doing this at such a scale that encoding speed matters (like if you're Instagram) the major concern would likely be cost, which you're going to save in bandwidth every time an image is viewed.

More of a "whoops, woah cool" than a "let there be light"

Very much unlike of the Christian conception of God.

I'm not describing this well, because I can't describe it well. But I can't imagine anyone experiencing something similar would be a jerk about it. See the universe unfiltered though the mind's perception and it just...is. Timeless and meaningless.

Consciousness and ego create their own meaning.

Have you ever wanted to write a command line executable and gotten hung up on I/o and parameter parsing?

With PowerShell you can write a cmdlet in C# as a PowerShell module and have strongly typed input and output parameters for free. It's a revelation.

As as scripting language, it's fine but for me the killer feature is being able to easily extend it in a non-scripting language.

Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids.

Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since.

The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.

Them: hi

Me: Hello, how can I help you?

[Two minute wait]

Them: How are you?

Me: Great, what do you need?

[Ten minutes later]

Them: Do you have a few minutes?

Me: Am I on candid camera or something?