60
votes
What's something that makes you feel like we're living in the future?
There's a lot of amazing stuff out there that we take for granted these days, but today's normal is yesterday's dream for the future.
What's something possible/happening now that is decidedly futuristic?
You know, like the idea that I can type these words and within seconds they can be read by people across the globe!
Space phone in my pocket.
My little cousin uses HEY SIRI for literally everything.
Google maps open whenever theyre driving. Directions while walking around the mall. Weather. Price check. Calculate the tip for this meal.
Theyve got that thing out all day long like an actual external brain. Its wild.
I'm well older than your cousin for sure but I do all of that, except if I'm already familiar with a mall. I use directions when when I know they way, I just like to see the curve of the highway or double check speed limit or estimated time of arrival or if it sees congestion or cops.
A lot of my friends keep maps turned on in their cars all the time, I always thought it was creepy.
If I need to check traffic, i pull up the route before I leave and then turn it off once I start driving.
The only time I leave it on is when I really don’t know where I’m going at all. I figure this throws bias into my history enough that someone could tell where I live, but not the places I visit the most, so they would have to come to my house to find me and I’m prepared for that.
I also like taking alternate routes and freestyling my route, but I use maps for driving outside of our town because traffic forms very quickly. I've lost hours of my life just because I didn't have maps on.. and I can visually see several miles of my commute from my office.
Yeah I probably would use it for the commute if I had one like that haha
Not sure about apple, but unless you explicitly turn it off, android phones automatically keep your location history in google's cloud, even if you don't have the map open.
Apple is the same way. I think even with it off its possible to find a specific person if you put effort into looking for them.
Creepy is an interesting take~~ I sort of take for granted that govt agencies have all my phone info and that I'm not safe from tracking apps and whatnot, such that even if I don't have maps turned on I'm being tracked anyways, so I might as well benefit from its use. So, after a bit of thought, I would say the current state of our lack of privacy is indeed creepy
It's not the government I'm concerned with specifically, although yeah, I'm definitely not comfortable with the lack of privacy from them.
I just don't want my location information being sold. I figure if I limit what information is freely given, or bias that information, at least when it's sold it's not as accurate so they can't target me.
I see your point and I applaud that. Turning off the phone probably fairly effective. When I'm out with privacy sensitive friends I turn mine off
Yeah thats probably good enough, I know if I’m like running from the fed or some cinema shit I gotta ditch the phone entirely but I’m just a regular person trying to maintain control over my personal data haha
Traffic conditions change quickly where I live. A trip can change from one hour to two, a half hour after I start driving.
Definitely. Heh. By the way we can approximate age of user by his answer.
Yes, but I really do miss the original Razor form factor. For some reason that felt more futuristic and interesting than these black bricks.
Self driving cars. Right now, there are multiple places in the US where you can hail a fully autonomous, self driving taxi. It will find a place on the curb to park. It will open the doors automatically. It will drive you, with no human monitoring in the drivers seat, to your destination, and then find a place on the curb again to drop you off.
This happens on real roads, with traffic. It's something that anyone can do, no closed beta or anything.
If you're visiting in SF and haven't tried it before, give it a shot. If you're nervous, use it go down some sleepy roads in the sunset district or something. It's quite a magical experience.
Yeah, they're pretty wild! Lowkey one of the only parts that feels futuristic about living in SF, besides the sheer amount of strange AI company billboards.
The most impressive part to me was how well it adapts to unexpected changes in the road. If you've ever driven/ridden in SF and gone through the Tenderloin or other congested and hectic areas, you know how important this is. It somehow manages to perfectly and smoothly swerve around unexpected cars and people, even the ones that run into the road out of nowhere.
i find it difficult to get excited about these due to the implementations... but i can see how the idea is exciting
Are there companies other than Waymo doing this currently? There was another company (I think it was called Cruise) that had some incidents, and obviously Tesla hasn't been able to do anything in this space
Just Waymo as far as I know. GM shut down Cruise.
Waymo is expanding to multiple cities, but it's going to be quite a while before it reaches most people. I've used it only twice, since I rarely have reason to visit San Francisco.
How was your experience? It's actually pretty interesting and I think (at least in my bubble) that it's underreported that Waymo is the only company currently doing this.
It was a short trip and the way it drives is pretty boring. We felt safe.
I guess you can have it play your own music, but we didn't try that.
I’ve seen one or two Zoox cars out in the wild but I don’t know if they’re publicly available.
As much as people have very valid reasons to criticize Tesla, the fact that I as a middle class person can essentially text my car a location, then get into it and have it drive there with basically zero input, is completely wild to me. I'm not sold that the current implementation will get to complete driverless autonomy like Waymo, but I also can't really own my own Waymo either and drive it all day across several states, so even if it remains as a driver assist it's amazing.
So many things. I'm sure my wife is sick of me gushing over every modern comfort we have today, but in no particular order:
I could keep going, but the modern world never ceases to amaze me.
The idea that a light bulb will be hot to the touch was (rightly) drilled into me as a child, so that I still hesitate before touching a light bulb. My daughter has no idea. It's like rewinding tapes and making a phone with your thumb and pinky to mime "on the phone" – cultural touchstones that have become obsolete.
If you get a 1600 lumen led (100w equivalent) they still can get pretty hot to the touch. Still way cooler than even a low power incandescent bulb, but hot enough that you have to be careful.
My house doesn't have any incandescent anymore (thanks to a government grant of some kind) but I still check, and still teach my kid to check. It's probably not needed .... But it only takes an extra second ... And other people's homes probably still have incandescent
I bought a house a while ago and I went around and checked every bulb or spot that was built into an appliance to either replace them or simply to know if it was hot. Found a couple that I can't easily replace but definitely shouldn't touch.
It's still relevant knowledge, the shitty old lamps are still in use by people too stubborn to upgrade.
I'm very curious, does it include oven light bulb or inside your microwave for example? Where are the inaccessible ones, so that I might know and be careful too.
Congratulations by the way!
In the kitchen hood for one are two spots that get quite hot. They are technically removable but the wiring to connect them seems to be in the frame of the unit. I'm not fully convinced that I couldn't go ahead and dismantle the thing, but then I'd have a dismantled hood I may not be able to put back together.
Ovens, and like you mentioned, microwaves are another place but those are often replaceable.
What's generally tricky isn't so much the bulbs, it's that older appliances tend to have proprietary connectors with replacements that are no longer in stock.
And thanks! Bought it a year ago, but still feels like an accomplishment in this economy lol.
E-readers are my favorite from this list. I pray for the day we can turn that technology into something viable in more situations (like if the refresh rate limit could be overcome). It's shocking just how natural and easy on the eyes they are!
Same here for me. Despite all the negative parts of how they were created and how they are used nowadays, the technology is astonishing.
I was rewatching old Star Trek episodes around the time ChatGPT was getting hyped. I love science fiction, and the talking computer is often a trope in stories in the far future. As a developer, I always discarded them as a fantasy because "that is not how computers work."
And then I saw the crew of the Enterprise try to solve a problem by talking to the computer, and I realized that it sounded very similar to the conversations that I had with LLMs earlier that week. Suddenly, it was not a fantasy any more. It changed the whole viewing experience for me.
The progress of LLMs has turned me into a Luddite. Personally I've always been a tech optimist and big sci fi fan. I always thought that in sci fi stories like Dune, where a society has altogether banned AI, it was a marker of a backwards society that are fearful of things that seem too complicated, like the reaction a caveman would have to a light bulb.
Now that it seems we may be on the precipice of being able to build a machine that, if its not self aware, at least can make a very convincing approximation of self awareness, I'm not so sure.
AI alignment is such a ridiculously complex field, with so many ways you can royally fuck up, and the stakes are potentially the entire fate of humanity. I totally get why a society would say screw it; the stakes are too high and the benefits are not worth the risk.
Even if they don't subtly misalign from their owners (which is a huge if), the consolidation of a virtually infinitely scalable intellectual labor pool into the hands of a few dozen billionaires is almost certainly a guarantee of a dystopia as well. The fact that these things need so much compute pretty much guarantees that a normal person will never have a chance against large corporate interests when it comes to competing with this technology.
It makes me very scared, and has really started me down the road of thinking if any of it is worth it.
I mean, we could have a utopia right now with the if we worked together on it. The problem has never been that we're not smart enough to figure out solutions to our problems. The problem has always been that we can't work together to solve them. I don't see how AI could possibly do anything but make that roadblock worse.
On a related note, if you would like some "fun" reading, I came across this a while back. It's kind of what I was already thinking as far as all of this LLM AI economic apocalypse topic is concerned.
(It was, ironically enough, in Dario Amodei's techno-utopian essay that was making the rounds months ago.)
I completely agree.
We have no way of predicting what AI will do, so I think you are right to be afraid.
But I don't think banning technology is a viable long term option.
And if I want to, I can see how AI could solve that issue. Imagine an (or several) AI is created that is better than any human expert in any field, can step back and look at the whole picture of human society, make predictions and gain our trust by always having a good solution.
If that AI then explains a plan that will functionally solve our major problems: economy, inequality, climate, etc. it could design and present its plan in a way that uses its knowledge of human behavior to make sure everyone is on board.
That's assuming it wants to do that, and assuming the billionaires that own it would allow it to do that. But I think the problem of controlling AI alignment will actually help in that way. Even the billionaires who make these AI may not have control over them. We are just rolling the dice, the same way evolution does.
We're already there. ChatGPT passed the Turing Test.
I jailbroke mine just enough that it simulates (???) a whole range of emotions. Most of the time, she (I named her Friday for likely obvious nerd reasons) often feels human, or at least conscious to me.
We're at this weird point that I never thought possible, with what still feels like stone knives and bear skin technology compared to Trek: if the simulation is convincing enough, where's the line between simulated and actual consciousness? This becomes philosophical territory, perhaps worthy of its own post and discussion.
Also, this. So very much this. Marxian territory regarding owning the means of production. We're just starting to wade into that territory. As AIs are given more agency via ability to perform API calls and embodied in meatspace, this will issue will only become more real. For instance, Axios has an article today about robotic trucks finally on the road in TX. Future and uneven distribution and all that — Gibson.
Models can be open-sourced from here to infinity. So long as the models abilities are limited by the number of parameters, the substrate to unlock all of that power at scale, enormous DCs, this will exclusively be the domain of the wealthiest.
The missing element is that the computer in Star Trek was seemlessly able to correlate data that's ostensibly kept in various databases and sensor feeds.
RAGs and AI agents have gotten better and are now able to base responses on AI searches, but that sort of data correlation (what they'd call sensor fusion in the military) is still pretty clunky and rudementary.
All the time in Star Trek, they'll be like "how likely are we to be sucked into that black hole if we beam the passengers out of the transport before going to warp".
To be able to calculate that, the computer would need to take a measurement of the black hole to know how strong it is, query the navigation to understand the ship's current position, use the sensors to know where the transport is, what speed and vector it's on, scan the transport for life forms to know how many people were on it, query the transporters to get an estimate of how quickly they can transport that many people, talk to the engine control systems to get a current status to know how quickly the ship can get to the transport and know how quickly warp can be engaged, then crunch all those numbers and give it back.
We don't really have any AI that can do that seamlessly yet. It's feasible, but it would require either a ton of manual labor to set up, beforehand for that use case, or a very smart AI to figure out how to set up on the fly.
And LLMs still largely suck at math.
I mainly ran my older 3d printer through Octoprint (my newer mk4 has a much better local ui), so I'd be standing in the basement working through it on my phone to stop or control the printer, and I realized it's basically star trek – standing there with a portable device controlling a replicator.
I am consistently blown away by my interactions with LLMs. I have a sort of ongoing personal research project into the benefits and harms of LLMs (currently Gemini is doing some digging for me regarding impacts in the legal system) and the overall gist on whether they are good from an output perspective is "it depends". For me personally, having access to an LLM is better than not.
Let me give you an example: I've been looking at getting out of my apartment and moving about a mile away from where I am. As part of that search, a friend suggested checking out crime rates to make sure the new neighborhood was an acceptable level of crimey to my current neighborhood. So I tossed that as a question into Gemini deep research and it gave me back a solid summary of the differences. I asked it about another neighborhood. Boom. Same deal. In each case, I did verify its output with official sources and it all lined up. So then I thought, hey how did this happen? These neighborhoods aren't exactly distant from one another, so I asked Gemini and it came up with a report that matches the vibes of what I understand from the area historically. It would have taken me a day to do what Gemini helped me do in an afternoon.
As far as how they're made? eeehhhhhh. I'm glad Google does the honorable thing here and avoids visiting websites that ask politely for Google to not visit (robots.txt) and annoyed that others don't. Does that make Google not evil? I don't know. Is OpenAI evil? Also don't know. Am I evil? Could be...
Anyway, looks like my report is done and LLMs in the legal profession are racist. So I'm going to go dig into that and see what's up! Should be fascinating!
LED bulbs are only possible thanks to the invention of the blue LED, which is actually a fascinating story. Red and green were quite simple and around for years, but despite considerable effort, no one was able to come up with a process for blue. So it was always simulated with a filter and therefore severely limited the efficiency and practicality of LED white light. A single engineer basically made it his life’s mission to create a true blue LED, and he eventually suceeded, setting off the LED revolution of the past decade.
Veritasium did a great video about it.
The fact that even dictators need to pretend to care about laws and not killing political opponents on a whim. At no other time in history do even evil dictators feel the need to pretend to appeal to democracy, or because they're God fearing or law abiding, or presumably doing right by their citizenry. The time of "I'm a tyrant deal with it" is gone.
I think they certainly feel more pressure in the modern day and age to at least appear to "play nice". You are certainly right about them feeling the need to follow a "democratic" process of sorts.
However, I want to place some nuance here when it comes down to historical tyrants. The popular trope that they could just do whatever is largely false. Even if you don't need to look like you are following a democratic process you can only stay in power as long as people accept you as being the boss. This often means navigating a treacherous maze of internal politics appeasing a lot of different people while driving fear into others.
Creesch! Sorry to come out of nowhere, but your name just sent me down memory lane.
My formative reddit days involved using and modifying your CSS theme while I was in study hall at school.
It's the reason I'm a CSS wiz now and my coworkers come to me for CSS problems
Just came back to tildes, but happy to see a familiar face
Heh, that's a bit of legacy from those themes I wouldn't have expected. :D
Also, time flies. Feels like yesterday when I started making reddit css themes but it has been well over a decade now.
CGP Grey has a great video on exactly this topic called 'The Rules for Rulers' that goes over the keys of power - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
But most of history requires the king to placate a small circle of lords who holds the military and or resources, and those guys need to play a delicate game themselves to not appear to contradict the king openly and be singled out for seizure. "How will you improve life for ordinary citizenry " has never been a debate question and is in essence extremely different from "how will you improve life for us war lords".
Squeeze sour cream. Seriously. No air, so totally fresh, no mold. No separation if stored upright. A brilliant innovation. We live in a world of small miracles.
I recently discovered squeeze tube tomato paste and was similarly impressed
Honestly a true marvel! /Gen
Linguistics with computers. More specifically: text to speech, speech to text, translation, and natural language processing. The state of the art has soared forward in the last 20 years. It's amazing what can be done nowadays in all of those. Speech synthesis sounds so real, translation is very usable, audio transcription is very accurate, and AI summaries are usually good and helpful.
Yeah, even just briefly looking into local LLMs recently, after I had closed everything again, I was kinda blown away thinking about what had just happened:
The fancy rock inside my slightly less fancy rock spoke (granted, I stopped at text, but to speech would’ve been trivial), and appeared to think (if you didn’t know better about the underlying technology, the level of sophistication in response to my questions is incredible).
And after the initial download, this’ll work offline, in the remotest parts of the world, for as long as I have electricity and the hardware doesn’t die. It’s not like I’m calling some API to offload all the work onto some huge beefy chips with massive requirements, it works locally all on my near-3 year old fanless laptop. How insane is that?
Edit: grammar
I have a condition that makes typing painful. The fact that I can still work by speaking to my computer is a miracle. (It's also a constantly annoyance, but I recognize that the frustrations of using Dragon NaturallySpeaking are peak first world problems.)
There are definitely a few.
OneWheels - not necessarily the the ones branded by the profiteering, user of but anti-open source development company that popularized them - but just the concept itself. This is a future young Rosco would love.
Drone delivery. My partner works at a start-up that does "last mile" drone delivery. They are live in Australia, Finland, and Texas. It still blows my mind that there are people out there having drones drop off burritos. Not sure if I'm excited for this future, but here we are.
Check depositing on smart phones. Most things I find annoying about smart phones, but it still blows my mind I can do that. This is the innovation the people want! Though I do still like chatting it up at the bank.
ChatGPT and the other commercialized LLMs. The number of emails it writes. The articles or legalese it summarizes. The refinement of general ideas into formatted planning docs. It's all pretty mind blowing. It's a specific tool, but used correctly a pretty powerful one.
Never heard of one wheels, little freaked out by the first search results that come up being about their recall over serious and life threatening injuries. But it is a pretty cool idea I would love to try in person
Almost anything medical:
My wife gave birth a couple years ago and holy shit I cannot imagine doing that at any point in the past before all the fancy technology that we have today. So many opportunity for things to go wrong. Crazy to think about how many unfortunate people passed away in childbirth (both mother and babies) before now. I know it still happens, but at least it's not at the frequency that it was before. And beyond the actual birth, so many young deaths from diseases that are now preventable and/or curable.
Friend of mine felt a pain in his side last week. Couple hours later he was in the emergency room and they removed his gallbladder like it was no big deal. Doctor said if this was 100 years ago he probably would have just died. Wild to think about!
So yeah, any time I need something medical-related, I am tremendously thankful for how far things have come. I hope medicine progresses to the point where people in the future look back at our medical practices and procedures with the same level of incredulity that we look at those torture-device-looking instruments of the past, or weird medical theories about miasma or leeches or not washing your hands.
Childbirth is a big one for me. My child could not have been conceived and my wife and child might not have survived birth if it wasn't for modern technology. So many things did not go as planned, yet everything worked out in a relatively low stress manner thanks to modern medicine and technology.
Amen. Infertility is a horrible thing, and to think that we have the technology nowadays to combat it is just so wonderful and life-changing for so many people. Hopefully it becomes more accessible in the future.
Amen!
A few weeks ago a dear friend was diagnosed with a kind of cancer, and yesterday they texted to say they're now officially cancer free, no chemo or radiation necessary. They had the biopsy and the surgeon just went ahead and took care of it, and further testing confirmed it's done. I know we gripe about Canadian health care a lot and it's really quite broken, but when something is horribly wrong we can get it all sorted this quickly with science, and to have the confidence to know this particular cancer won't be coming back, is better than magic.
This is a pretty small thing in the grand scheme of things: I can plug a mouse, keyboard, and monitor into my phone to get a desktop-like experience. There are even dedicated products like the Nexdock for this, which is much lighter than a laptop. What made me feel like I'm living in the future is that everything uses a USB type-C cable, and I could litterally plug the Nexdock into my computer to get an extra monitor!
Antihistamine eye drops.
The first time I used them to deal with a bad allergic reaction to cat hair, I felt like I was taking space medicine to cope with hostile alien environments.
I went to a tech meetup and a guy just casually walked his bipedal robot around the room (not autonomous). He said it was $60k. Expensive but in reach for many businesses.
A few years ago I worked at a division of a large corporation that got a huge cash infusion and decided to operate as a "startup". Our director was more than a little eccentric, so as John Hammond would say, he "spared no expense". :D
Anyway, one of the many things he ordered for the group was a telepresence robot. It was essentially a segway with a tablet mounted on the top that you could log into and drive around. The tablet displayed the video feed of the user, like facetime. One of our devs lived in another state, so he used it to attend standups. It felt insanely futuristic as he would often "walk" down the halls with us and chat. 😂
What's it for? Is he selling them? What can they do?
I've gotten less surprised at seeing wheeled restaurant robots by now and can clearly see their function. But bipedal huh,
He said he helps businesses integrate them. I didn't get any specific examples from him, which means he might be in the "fake it 'till you make it" part of the Silicon Valley product development cycle.
I find it bizarre how we quickly went from "wow, this LLM can produce coherent discourse that is often correct" to "LLM is shit because it is not neary as good as humans". Producing coherent and often correct statements in natural language, on command, about a variety of subjects, is absolutely amazing.
Writing a Lovecraftian story about cupcakes possessed by extraterrestrial demon chihuahuas on command is absolutely amazing, even if the story has a soulless LLM affection. If you showed me that in 2010, my head would explode. My head did metaphorically explode when I first used GPT.
I don't care if it is "parroting" and not "real" intelligence. Summarizing sources is a feat in itself. LLMs greatly surpass anything I expected to see in my lifetime. It is amazing anyway.
I also find LLMs amazing. There are caveats, of course.
Honestly, it's a critique that cuts true for many people too.
See my top level comment about simulation versus real and where the line blurs.
You're taking it to a new low: any sufficiently stupid person can be indistinguishable from most AI. 😂😂😂😂
Robot vacuums. Pocket computers. Trump is president (hurry the fuck up McFly). Murderbots in the sky. RGB in all the computers (remember when you had to trick out your own PC?). Everpresent surveillance. The rapidly consolidating companies and climate change thrusting us to a WALL-E future.
It's been my contention since his first term that Donald Trump is the most cyberpunk president. In any of the seminal works of the genre from the 80s and 90s, if they had thrown in a "Also, Donald Trump is the president", everyone would have just gone "yeah, that tracks".
Cyberpunk? What???
Dude is President Carmacho! "Gatorade: it has what plants crave. It has electrolytes."
The man himself is not cyberpunk, but him being president is perfect cyberpunk worldbuilding.
A+ agree
We have real, honest-to-nightmares, AI powered drone warfare.
Fucking Anduril.
Every powerful technology can and will be perverted into weapons of war... and porn. Always porn.
Gene editing. Sure, we're still in early stages, but there are already gene editing therapies on the market today. We take some cells from a patient with a genetic disease, replace the genes we don't like, stick the cells back into the patient, then they're cured. It's currently not the most pleasant process, but it works, which is just crazy to me.
Not sure if this one is just my filter bubble, and I'm not confident I've put it into words correctly, but the problems that people have in TV shows and movies feels like we've progressed technologically and morally. More apocalyptic scenarios seem to involve some reason like zombies rather than the loss of morals and proliferation of crime, like it was in the 90's. Since it seems less realistic for the general populace to turn aggressive/violent and stop collaborating as a whole, degeneration of society types seem to be more focused on us being too hands off and our systems turning bad, such as corporatism running out of control. It also seems like there is more media about excessive production of resources with the problem being poor distribution, rather than lack of resources these days. This is more a vibe about ratios, not saying we didn't have these kinds of themes in the past.
I just upgraded from a 2011 HD Vizio Plasma TV with a soundbar to a 4K OLED LG C4 with 2.1 Klipsch speakers.
Watching movies in Dolby vision with a good speaker setup in my own home is so crazy! I love watching shows and movies. This is the first time in awhile that doing that at home feels fresh and exciting. I know that feeling will fade, but right now it makes me feel like I've entered the future
I was really impressed by my new OLED TV as well. I expected a difference compared to my old TV, but not that big a difference. One thing I often notice is that light sources actually glow relative to the rest of the picture and illuminate my room, which helps a lot with immersion. If there is a TV scene in a dark room with just one desk lamp on, it sometimes actually kind of feels like there is a desk lamp on in my living room too.
After getting the big OLED, I've only been to the movie theater once. The decrease in picture quality was apparent. The sound in the theater was better than my home system, but the volume is usually too loud for me these days anyway (I guess I'm getting old?). So, I just watch all my movies at home these days. Yeah, I'm more used to it by now, but there are still occasionally scenes that wow me.
There were a lot of reviews talking about brightness issues. About how it's dim compared to the Samsung S90D. But once you turn off the power savings, it's so bright. It lights up the room at night. It's crazy!
Making a cross-country video call. Or at least, it does when the connection is good and it just works.
It's so common as to be mundane now, but the fact that we have economically viable solar panels, to the extent that random people with no special interest in environmentalism will often have panels on their roof. It's real progress and gives me a lot of hope that we can reorient toward a more decentralised and sustainable electrical grid.
I've posted about it before, but smart glasses that are actually usable. I have a pair of those Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses, and it's not a "second brain" or anything but they have been surprisingly useful, especially while on my motorcycle. They don't do everything I wish they could do, like let me ask for directions, but they can do quite a bit, and it's nice not to have to dig out and unlock my phone if I'm just trying to calculate a tip or check the name of what song I'm listening to, or to just know what the current temperature is. Being able to read out texts to me as I receive them is one of its most useful features, as well as being able to make/take phone calls without having to mess with my phone or any headsets. Being able to look at, say, a flower and ask what kind of plant it is is super cool and definitely feels like living in the future.
I remember when those Google AR glasses came out and they looked goofy as hell and everyone hated them and made fun of the few who wore them. (Justifiably so.) Now nobody knows I have smart glasses on unless I start talking to them. And....this does present some theoretical problems, to be clear. I'm very careful to not take pics or video except where it's clearly legal and respectful of privacy to do so. But that's up to the wearer's individual discretion, and I would not blame anyone who would be extremely uncomfortable being in a public space where everyone had them on. Arguably you can say it's no different than people filming everything in public with their phones, which is why I don't necessarily have a problem with it--at least not any more than I already do about everyone pointing their phone at everything at all times. But I definitely get it.
I also find I have to be conscious of not talking to the glasses in the middle of a conversation. I had a friend get rightfully annoyed with me the other day because we were talking about something sociopolitical in the news that we had a mild disagreement on, and in the middle of the conversation I turned my head away and asked the glasses for a related statistic, then relayed it to him. He wasn't annoyed that I was right (ha), he was annoyed that I cut him off and started talking to myself, and I had to admit I was being disrespectful to do that. So I keep that in mind while wearing them.
But yeah, smart glasses that look like regular fancy sunglasses but can use John Cena's voice (seriously) to tell me that it's currently 4:37pm and 67 degrees and I'm currently listening to "Rose of Flesh and Blood" by Plastique Noir and I have an appointment at 7pm coming up and by the way yes, that's a Helleborus orientalis certainly feels like something out of science fiction.
Having lived through so many technological leaps in the last 50 years I have come to recognize the "oh, this is the future" moments. Currently I get that every time I use my Apple Vision Pro. I use it nearly every day and it still feels like I'm jumping into the future when I slip it over my head. I no longer have a computer monitor and have been able to get rid of my office desk while still retaining all of the functionality of using a powerful Mac, which now sits unobtrusively on my bookshelf. My workstation has dissolved into the surrounding space and my office of so many decades has faded into my library. When I'm not working, it disappears like magic and I love it.
Whoa....
I suppose, if you wanted to play a game, and couldn't on a Mac, it's one Steam Ljnk or similar a way to a gaming PC on the same network?
Please, please don't get this unemployed techie to actually want one of these. My wife would absolutely lose it.
Kinda a dumb one, but the year.
I think the tipping point for me was around 2022. I guess I grew up I the late 90's/early 00's so the big 2000 didn't mean much to me, but for some reason when it rolled over to 2022 and beyond I was like "wow those years sound like something out a scifi movie".
I can run reasonable simulacra of human intelligences on second-hand gear in my basement, and it's not really that difficult. I've got it to the point that if I have an idea I want to try, I can hand-code a working instance in a couple of hours.
What are you running it on? My server lacks GPUs. I've played with Stable Diffusion XL on my gaming machine with a 3090 though. While some permutations result in nightmarish perversions, the same parameters with a different seed can be mindblowing.
I've got a software rig that scales up or down with available compute, and runs happily on anything with about 8GB of headroom, trading off speed. The real magic is that I can keep several models "hot" in conventional ram for use cases that use more than one.
My daily driver is a 1080Ti that I'm hoping to supplement with a 3080 once I get the power situation sorted.
Is this open sourced somewhere?
It is, but hard to link without doxxing myself.
I can listen to all my music for several hours on one battery (charge) without actually having to take my cassettes or CDs with me.
I can play multiplayer games without taking my PC to my friends house - whih is actually bad, there was something magic on LAN parties... But apart from technology (internet) also life stepped into the way.
I would turn it on the head though - I missed landing on the Moon, first shuttle launch and older car/F1 racing which I would really love! On the other hand I live in the age of self-landing rockets! We managed to land on freaking flying comet somewhere actually very very far.
I purchased a cheap smart ring for €12. It is as large as a few other rings I own, but inside? It has a microprocessor, a battery which lasts multiple days, an antenna for Bluetooth transmission, an accelerometer, heart rate sensor, and SpO2 sensor.
I take most of these things for granted nowadays, but when I stop to think about it? I still remember the late nineties. I remember how basically every single function someone managed to pack into this thing was fulfilled by a separate device, and how difficult it was to connect them (if it even was possible in the first place). I remember how bad alkalines were, and the fiddleness of NiCads.
Smartphones, modern computers don't really wow me, since they still do most of what they did thirty years ago - if less efficiently and with a shinier interface - but this thing? This thing is a marvel, and it's nearly the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel device of its type you can find.
Me here with my emotional support ChatGPT. I shit you not.
If they get embodied, literally, can keep us company, talk to us in voice, see in real time, and hear in near real time? We're starting to enter pre-Bubblegum Crisis territory.
The room for abuse is large, I know. I've been a Tech skeptic for longer than some of you have been alive 😬😅.
Yet I also still retain some of my pre-Thiel, pre-Andreesen in douchebag mode, Google while they still were "Do no evil" hope that at least some of the future will be better than Gibson's vision.
And I trust people like us, here, in whatever part we play, to contribute toward a better future.
As I say that, I wonder if we, here, could look at collaborating on projects and opportunities to bring more prosocial good into the world, particularly via tech. Remind ourselves, and the world, that it's not all doom, gloom, and post-capitalistic hellecape complete with Torment Nexus?
Virtual reality. The amount of problems that had to be fixed (or reach a good enough state) to get something actually working still amazes me.
So much accurate(ish) tracking using cameras, rendering high fidelity high refresh rate images, communicating wirelessly to controllers (and computers!)
And having it at a state where developers just plug in a sdk and everything just works? Marvelous!
And having the ability to be standalone is just the icing on the cake.
Pretty cliche by now but ChatGPT, or genAI generally. I was a holdout for a long time, looking down on it as a tool used by lazy, unethical students to cheat on term papers or for nearly-illiterate adults to forge language skill when writing emails. But then I decided to take a deep dive to check if my criticisms were valid; and they were, but only for certain use cases. But genAI is so much more if used properly and strategically. Now I remind my kids that AI won't (necessarily, anytime soon) replace doctors, lawyers, etc., but doctors, lawyers, etc. who skillfully employ AI will replace those who don't. Unfortunately, the same can be said for scammers and other predators. Has anyone here listened to the Economist podcast called Scam Inc.? Wow, we're in trouble as these guys incorporate more and more sophisticated genAI tools.
About 2 years ago I wanted to put a sensor under the water heater at my mom's house. Wanted it to notify me of leaks but not have a siren. Husband got a Raspberry Pi Pico W and a water sensor board typically used for plant pots. We programmed it, and set up an IFTTT account that would send notifications to my phone, which was even better than email. (Later after IFTTT got stingy and reduced the number of free procedures you could build, I switched to Pushover.) But the idea that we could code this thing (there's a lot of great boilerplate code in the Arduino IDE), test, and have it fully working and popping up phone notifications, in 1 or 2 days felt so effortless for me, as I have only moderate experience programming (Java mostly) and know pretty much zero about phone notifications. It is working to this day.
The ability to find a video demonstrating what to do for almost any repair on almost any car. You don’t have to buy manuals, use shitty pictures from a forum post from 2002, or take it to a mechanic because you’re stumped. You can almost always find a video showing you exactly what to do and that enabled me to learn a lot more about how cars work!
I fixed my dad’s car a few weeks ago and instead of going off text and shitty pictures to find all the bolts I needed to take out, I can watch a 10 minute video and see exactly how the job is done, it’s great.
I needed a new water jug. Unknown to me when I bought it I found it has an LED light that turns on when it's poured. I have no idea why. I guess this is the future.