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Ok, you are tired of Self-Driving, VR, Crypto, AI and other upcoming technologies. Is there anything on the horizon you are interested in / enthusiastic about?

• forgetfreeman 3y ago
  Nothing even tangentally related to the software industry, no. There's some exciting stuff in the biotech pipeline but software has been a dumpster fire of grift, hype, bullshit claims, and labor issues for at least couple decades now.
  • bruce511 3y ago
    You're right. Software peaked in 2003. There's been no useful things added since then. Personally I never use Google Maps to find my way, I never use Uber to commute, I always book hotels and flights through a travel agent, all my computers run XP, I watch all TV from plastic DVDs, I listen to music on more plastic discs, I go into the bank or write checks to do any transactions. Or maybe, I do none of that anymore.
    • forgetfreeman 3y ago
      Would you care to review the social and geopolitical impacts of social media, how walled gardens have destroyed the original promise of the internet, the financial and labor impacts of Amazon's near-monopoly on online sales, crypto's blistering track record at separating dumb from money at the modest cost of the energy consumption of a medium sized industrial nation, VR & AR's notable lack of life/world/job/industry altering implementations, vendor lock-in, the industry's holy war perpetual motion machine on thick vs thin clients, a few hundred waves of clients having their investment cash set on fire by dev shops platforming on tech only truly suitable for a FAANG because "it's the great new thing", FOSS's implosion into a free labor pool for private companies, or the successive waves of failure of software .orgs claiming to improve everything from healthcare workflows to the functioning of municipal governments by adding software? No? You can take your strawman and go.
      • bruce511 3y ago
        >> software has been a dumpster fire of grift, hype, bullshit claims, and labor issues for at least couple decades now I absolutely agree there's a bunch of crap. I argue that there's a bunch of really excellent good things in there too. (I'll add rocket landings to the list because they are so insanely cool.) With regard to crypto; it's just the latest in histories long list of get-rich-quick schemes. I think we can ignore that. (Human greed is human greed). I think most of your list boils down to a mix of shitty humans, the Free market in action, and things playing out to their natural conclusion in an extreme capitalistic society. A lot of the things (not all) are very localised to the US.
        • forgetfreeman 3y ago
          I'd hear an example of really excellent good things. Privatization of space exploration doesn't make the list for a diversity of reasons, not the least of which being kessler syndrome is a thing and handing the keys to orbit material to private industry has -very- predictable outcomes.
• bmitc 3y ago
  You act as though that's everything in the world of technology. And even then, technology is not everything. There's plenty of things going on that have no need for technology, much less over-hyped and over-promised technologies.