Betteridge's law of headlines says "no".

This. I do not understand this behavior. Especially when they move their horizontal phone between their mouth and ear, so they can hear the call better.

Why don't people use their phone as it was originally designed? You know, with putting the better speaker right up to their ear? Are people really that stupid?

And Hiro's motorcycle.

Are we sure that the 42M records now on the blockchain are accurate? Because if they are not, and people start trusting that ledger, things could get ugly.

I have aphantasia. Like others, I can visualize something only fleetingly, if at all. The whole concept of a "memory palace" as a way to memorize things always puzzled me: I make up a "room" in my mind and put something to remember in it. Fine. Now I have to remember *two* things. Learning about aphantasia was honestly a relief.

It's a Klemplerer rosette. We're seeing the Puppeteer's worlds, edge-on.

I bit the bullet and went with Kagi. Yes, I'm actually paying for search. I tried it out during a testing period and honestly, the results are great. I like the per-site options, the "lenses" that let you focus search, retrieval speed, and most of all, the results don't seem to suck.

Did you see how old those comments were? And that the review was against Julia v0.4 or 0.5? They've made quite a bit of progress since then.

I agree that extending a prison sentence seems a little barbaric. But what about looking at this from a pure cost-saving viewpoint? Instead of sentencing a prisoner to 10 years (or whatever is normal for their offense) and keeping them in prison that long, use the drug and keep them in prison for only one year but make them feel like 10 years have passed. Huge cost savings to the public, right there.

This isn't limited to the high-tech stuff we all love and know. Witness the asinine bans on e-cigarettes being instituted around the country. They seem to be based on the idea that "it looks like smoking analog cigarettes, so it must be just as bad for you and everyone else." Or, "some e-cigarettes have candy flavors, therefore they are being marketed to children" which completely ignores the fact that some adults like those flavors, too. No e-cigarette bans are based on science, or evidence.

I worked for Apple in the early 90's, when they were opening their first sites in Austin. Our group was eventually moved there (and I'm still there, in a suburb) from Campbell, CA. Anyway, at the time there was a lot of internal marketing around "why you would want to move to Austin."

With perfect timing, the local San Jose newspaper ran a political cartoon captioned "There Are Problems Everywhere" or something like that. It had a drawing of the entire United States, with descriptions of the local problems. California was titled with "Earthquakes" and a little arrow. Florida had "Hurricanes."

The state of Texas was decorated with the word "Texans" right in the center, with little arrows pointing all around.

This is still very true today. I wish I had saved that cartoon.

New technology typically goes through a phase where it is really expensive when it is first released, and then it gets less expensive, right? The Jigsaw Man is set in that initial timeframe. Breakthroughs in the medical science gave doctors the ability to transplant every organ except the brain and spinal column, but the cost was still very high and only a few could really afford it.

Niven does explore the next phase, where the cost comes down (or the technology is replaced by something less expensive), in his novel A Gift From Earth. I think the novel was written before the story, in fact.

A number of Larry Niven's short stories would be excellent examples of futurism:

The Jigsaw Man really stands out as a commentary on how power would be abused when organ transfers became nearly 100% successful (yet very expensive).

The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club talks about flash crowds.

Cloak of Anarchy deals with, strangely enough, anarchy.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

- Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

Technology that Woz describes is essentially invisible, because the user can focus on the task and not the tool. As tech people, creating such technology should be our goal. I imagine that the vast majority of us want to do that, anyway. What we need to do is convince the people in charge of the money to let us.

The actual paper, in PDF format, can be found here.