The fall of America.
Well that was just hubris.
“Work from home” for so many jobs.
Which is only possible because of this magic technology to let you see and talk in near real time to anyone, anywhere. Used to be that if your sibling / parent / other family member wasn’t in town, you couldn’t see them in real time at any time, usually just a single / couple times a year at holidays.
Sure calling was a thing, but it’s just different when you can see someone.
Working from my bedroom in the US while seeing and speaking to a fellow developer living in Pakistan is really quite awesome.
A cure for AIDS
In my pocket I carry a library of Alexandria, an infinite Walk-man, a camera and a camcorder with effectively infinite film, a personal navigator… You get the idea, the list goes on. 80s me would have thought this was impossible, even if I am a bit disappointed about the flying car and hoverboard situation.
Electing a convicted felon President of the United States.
That one cuts deep. It’s really weird too because if you asked your parents they would say america would never elect a felon. Then they went on to elect a felon.
I sometimes think about trying to reach out to older folks to better understand their views but then I remember the absolute garbage brain rot they believe.
Not to steal the other comment but yeah a swiss army knife of a device that pays for things, browses the internet without running up the phone bill (and I can browse AND talk on the phone at the same time), has games and music, is a flashlight, etc.
But most importantly a name change. I thought it was impossible or extremely hard but it wasn’t. Just write, pay $65, pay $12, send the documents to wherever, and that’s it.
The mortality of my parents. My mind is often stuck in the future of what ifs; but this is an inevitable event that will come sooner or later and it terrifies me. I do my best to cherish the time I’m fortunate to have with them while channeling energy into my own kids. I know it’s the natural cycle of things, but still… Life is hard man.
watching the decline is hard. I thought my dad would live forever. He’s been gone just over a year. My mom probably won’t be around much longer either. Let them tell you as many boring stories as they can.
I’m sorry, friend. Hope you’re doing well.
Yeah I honestly love the stories. Heard them all a thousand times, of course, but they never get old — especially knowing…
Anyways I can weather a lot of pain, but when it comes to my loved ones I’m a wreck.
US conservatives calling Russia the good guys and electing a convicted felon as president.
My math teacher: “You can’t walk around with a calculator in your pocket!”
Well well well, look at me NOW, Mr. York!
never opens calculator app
Hah, I suck at math so I use it all the time
I don’t know if I suffer from dyscalculia but, man, is mental arithmetic so hard for some reason. I did well in all my other math classes up to college, wtaf, brain.
Arithmetic was easy for me. It made sense. What didnt make sense was finance and accounting. That shit exists just to muddy waters and hurt people. 5
I have a calculator in my pocket that I can talk to and it’ll talk back. “Hey Bixby, what’s half of five and three-eighths?”
About 33% of the time the dumb bitch comes back with “Okay, here’s what I found on the internet.”
Burning a CD while using your computer for something else in the mean time.
That’s come full circle as many modern machines don’t even have disc drives anymore
Back in the 90s part of my job was to change the daily backup tape on a computer when I got there in the morning. It was an 8GB cassette the size of a deck of cards, and I remember marveling that I could carry 8 Gigabytes in my shirt pocket. Now you can get thumb drives for $20 that hold many times more, and thousands of times more than my first hard drive. (which cost about a grand)
Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.
Phones doing a good chunk of what computers can
I mean it’s almost wrong handed to call something like an iPhone or Android device a “phone” because it’s really a pocket computer that, among many other things, can place phone calls.
For that reason, I like how they are called Hand Terminals in the Expanse (books, I dont think they are referred to at all in the show)
In fact the thing that irritates me is how useless a smart phone is without a connection to the internet. You have to put in actual effort to make actual use of its local power.
Combined with the Internet a “phone” - as we still charmingly call it - does what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy could do.
A good chunk? My watch is far more capable than my first computer, many times the storage, and its screen has more pixels
Protein folding
Directly measuring gravity waves, the first measurement using LIGO was back in 2016 and they’ve observed almost a hundred so far. The observations are being used to create newer generations of gravity wave detectors.
A battery powered table saw.
Absolutely not a thing in the 1980’s, in stock now at your local Lowe’s.
That one does blow me away - I’ve had a cordless drill for years, but a tablesaw??? - when I realized they even existed I couldn’t believe it.
I mean, when you think about it, it’s just a battery-powered circular saw flipped upside-down. Not too crazy to consider like that.
Battery powered circular saws were also science fiction the day I was born.
Go watch early seasons of The New Yankee Workshop and look for the cordless power drill he uses in the first couple of seasons. It’s got this gigantic permanently attached battery hanging out of the hand grip (the hand grip is like a foot long) and it can just barely turn a wood screw.
By the time I was in high school tiny, underpowered circ saws were available that ran on drill batteries. These things had like 5 inch ultrathin blades. Now look at it.
The first battery powered drills were pretty horrible. Batteries have come a long way
