Peak aesthetics if you ask me.

disclaimer: long ago I was a QNX and Photon user and developer (and fan boi, I suppose)

Is it really necessary to swing to extremes?

Workers can have bargaining power and control over the resource they own (their time), without reverting to state capitalism or worker owned collectives.

Those of us in tech corporations typically have to at least pretend that we're trying to grow our career. That we're ambitious enough to seek greater responsibilities and accomplish more things. I've had bad experiences in telling my boss that I'm happy where I'm at and want to keep doing what I'm doing. Now I have to make up some lies about my long-term plans and hope he forgets before the next review.

It's all an accounting shell game. You can't rent a computer in the cloud for less than it costs to run your own equipment.

Technical part is a straightforward job. Getting everyone to agree to how a desktop GUI is supposed to work is the hard part.

Only two of the UIs you listed interoperate through the Freedesktop.org standards. Android is the odd one out here and probably doesn't belong in the theoretical mix.

Most projects don't measure reliability, so it's difficult to make claims about it. Regardless, software reliability is rarely a business priority. (even if it should be)

If someone is using defensive coding techniques, but there is no automated testing and only ad hoc testing by the developer with a rubber stamp by QA for release. Then I'd argue that reliability is a myth in that scenario. More generously I'd argue that some team members are making a best effort, but it's not part of the process or deliverables so the actual reliability is probably pretty spotty.

My old car had no clock unless I had the GPS screen on. It was the dumbest design. I usually preferred to have it off, especially at night.

Yeah. I have to use a long PIN on my phone plus a biometric (fingerprint or face) because of requirements at my work. Kind of a hassle when all I want to know is if I have time before the next meeting or if I'm going to make the next shuttle.

People (mostly C and asm programmers) used to rip on Ada's bounds checking overhead. Being fast and small and cheap was more important than being more reliable.

I imagine a future where a gig worker would pick up your food, then hire another gig driver to take him to your apartment. A sort of gig-ception

Although 8 monkeys and 2 emu doesn't have the same ring as 12 monkeys.

You could buy a social media company for $44B and then screw around with it until it is worth $9.4B.

But also realize when you're at work you're going to deliver results. And you won't necessarily love everything about what you are paid to work on. You might not like the technical decisions. Or the priorities that management has pushed onto you. Or the way you have to do it. Or who you have to work with. Or the coding style your coworkers decided you must use. But at the end of the day you do the work, get things done, and deliver on time. Only to repeat the cycle every release. That's the job. Maybe you will use AI to write your test suite or code up interfaces for you. If your competitors are making progress doing it, then you'll be doing it too.

When you go home. And once your family is sick of you moping around. You can work on your own projects. On your own schedule. With your own tools. And do it your own way. the RIGHT way.

I always imagined a future were we didn't have to wear complicated clothing that needed to be washed. Self washing robes. Or simple nudity in a climate-controlled environment.

This, on the other hand, seems like one of those old-timey illustrations of a future where men would go to a barbershop filled with robotic arms to get a shave with a straight razor. Or a mail carrier would hand-deliver letters to 10th story windows on his flying motorcycle. Just total retro-future type stuff, and that's what a laundry folding machine is if it were intended to be a product and not simply a technology demonstration.

Maybe a WW1 French tank or early airplane? And at highway speed the steering on a motorcycle seems inverted. (push right, lean right, turn right)

If I had a model of controlling my position of my head by using a handle (joystick knob) attached to the back of my skull. Then to look left I would push right on the knob. Not too weird considering that RC airplane and drone pilots tend to fly by placing themselves in the mind's eye of the aircraft. So these weird, non-intuitive controls end up being perfectly natural if you place yourself under the right model.