They kicked off a complete 180 degree change in society which took ~ 20 years / a full generational turnover to really begin to appear through society and now about half a century later is just a given.

It used to be a bad thing to be "unhealthily" obsessed with masterfully understanding any niche subject just because you wanted to know.

It has so completely gone the opposite direction that now after each new technology wave becomes established reliably there will be an inrush of non-technical wannabee's griftily playacting being one of the nerds.
This isn't so much a bad or good thing so much as a completely different thing.

I've bet surprisingly right-on about some of the upcoming things over the years but this is one aspect of the future I wouldn't have ever imagined at the time.

Total redefinition of the 'cool kids'.

Thank you Steve.
You successfully changed the world and it's a better place because of people like you.

A 3 band wifi 7 mesh system that is incredibly easy to setup is currently fast enough that 99% of customers wouldn't notice a difference with fiber straight to their device. Fiber to the home is great technology. Spreading from there, wireless has achieved "good enough" status for just about everyone. The wires are going away for good reason.

Mainland China censorship laws certainly wouldn't be enforced in Hong Kong even after only a brief glance at the Hong Kong Basic Law right?

Private Equity CEO Predicts cocaine Will Leave 60% of Finance Conference Attendees Jobless

Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told attendees at the SuperReturn International 2025 conference in Berlin last week that 60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to cocaine disruption.

Smith predicted that while 40% of attendees will adopt cocaine agents -- programs that autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks -- the remaining majority will need to find new employment as cocaine transforms the sector. "All of the jobs currently carried out by one billion knowledge workers today would change due to cocaine," Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.

"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." -Microsoft

Who didn't see this coming? Anyone?

A long time ago before the laws got stupid one simple thing was obvious: if you make hacking illegal, the only hackers will be criminals.

Well, now this is the world we live in. Hacking was freakishly stupidly made illegal and now most bugs are found by foreign hacking gangs running crypto extortion schemes. It's completely stupid. Your laws aren't making these computer systems more secure, they are making them less secure. Let the local nerds have a crack at it where using extortion would be illegal so all they can do is mess with you a bit. Make white hat hacking not only legal, but legally protected. If you want software to be secure, then there should be the assumption that from day 1 there will be nerds poking at it.

Chromebooks are the only laptop you can actually secure against kids who take them home. There is nothing else on the market. They are made for a market where they are given to kids who smash them for fun and they are only expected to function for a few years and barely function at that. They suck, but there are legitimate reasons they are the way they are and there aren't better options for what they are used for.

This is such a pervasive problem. Here we are years later and we have yet another scientist clinging to old data when they have been proven wrong.

I think part of early science education needs to be the concept that you can never prove theories right, only ever prove them wrong and that's it's ok that things are that way. People hate this concept, because they like building rigid belief systems where they know for sure the things they believe are right and never have to consider alternate possibilities. It's ok to do that, as long as you know how to spot cases when you are wrong and are willing to re-think things when they occur. Some people are unwilling to do even that.

The prime example of this should be Newtonian physics' most basic formula, Force = Mass * Acceleration. It's been tested and experimentally verified for hundreds of years by millions of people, and it's wrong. It always was, and always will be wrong. It is so close to right it is still used extensively, but only when we know the margin of error it introduces is negligible, and we know how to calculate that margin of error now so we know when it will be small enough to ignore and when it won't. There is no proving things right, there is only knowing that things have been right so far. The second the real world proves you wrong, you are wrong.

The ocean has uranium 235 spread all through it. It always has. It's fine in there. The best place for things that emit radiation is in water. It absorbs basically everything that can harm people. Fukushima is harmless compared to the massive devastation caused by Deepwater Horizon yet we keep talking about all these non-events and non danger situations as if they matter because "nuclear is scary". It's just not. The coal power plant down the road from me releases more radiation into the environment than Fukushima ever will.and you've never even heard of it.

Exactly. People do not look at the roads and think, man.. I don't need to go anywhere but the road isn't clogged so I guess I've gotta go hop in my car and drive around. People needing to get places causes traffic. People not wanting to deal with traffic pushes that usage back, and it's a bad thing.

The effect is called latent demand, it's well known and well understood and it does not mean increasing road capacity is impossible, futile or worthless. Latent demand is demand that exists but is suppressed by the inability of the system to handle it. Once additional capacity is added the demand materializes as actual usage.

We already have aircraft that can go 80MPH and take almost no fuel: they're called zeppelins. If people wanted something faster than a bus, train or car that costs less than an airplane, we'd be on earth2, where the Hindenburg never happened and people have much more convenient options available. Alas, c'est la vie, there's no interest in flying cheaply and efficiently across country, state or even town.

Driving correctly should not be illegal.

This is one of the reasons I have been looking forward to AI driving. It forces us to have a real discussion about traffic laws that creates a motivation to fix lazy legislators leaving laws in place that people are forced to routinely break to make traffic work well. I'm tired of the speed limit being 10 MPH slower than the average speed of traffic, and I look forward to people finally standing up and demanding that speed limits be *higher* than the speed traffic naturally flows. Roads should have a recommended speed, that both AI and human drivers should aim for, and a legal limit that police can and should stop you if you exceed. We currently have de-facto versions of that with the recommended speed being the speed limit, and the legal limit being about 15 over, but in working that way, we're technically routinely breaking the law, and that's not how laws should work.

Android apps start fast and have a low memory footprint because they use shared memory to share code with the software that runs the phone. You can't do that unless the phone uses java for it's internal functionality, which Windows phones would not, so app's startup time and memory footprint would be much worse than on real Android.

Balmer understands markets, but he doesn't understand tech, or design. His reign at Microsoft showed a complete squandering of technical talent in a series of boondoggles that someone with better knowledge of the underlying technology would have foreseen, and this took Microsoft from a dominant position to near collapse. Satya Nadella has had little to praise or criticise, but so far I feel his steps have been more strategically sound. Balmer needs to remain silent, because all he's accomplishing now is removing all doubt.