Ya you're just a few years older than me, I remember thinking the same thing in the '80s, but didn't learn what a transputer was until just a few years ago. I

Ya you're just a few years older than me, I remember thinking the same thing in the '80s, but didn't learn what a transputer was until just a few years ago. I truly believe that we could have been on an alternate timeline completely different than what we have today. Basically nothing now is how I would do it. Not hardware, not programming languages, not video cards, not networking, none of it. It's all.. runner-up solutions. Nothing really revolutionary, just evolutionary over enough decades that it approximates what might have been. Had I had any early wins at all in the critical era from 1995 to 2001 before the Dot Bomb and 9/11 sent us down this alternate timeline where one guy has all the money and resources in the world while everyone else makes rent, I would have designed infinitely scalable hardware and written languages to recruit it. Basically we'd all be sharing our neighbors' processing power and bandwidth in a free and secure way, which would feel like BitTorrent compared to dialup. Instead I spent most of those years in college and struggling to survive after everything fell apart, no better off today than I was 25 years ago. I perceive computers as having run about 1000 times slower than they should have in 2010, and about a million times slower today, coming up on a billion by 2030. GPUs are sort of a stopgap to hide the fact that Moore's law died around 2007 when smartphones arrived. I've lost hope that any help will come from the top, just like with political parties. If we want real performance and to get to a Star Trek future with stuff like UBI in our lifetimes, we're going to have to self-organize and do it ourselves. Which basically means that someone who won the internet lottery or actually bought Bitcoin when it was $10 (like I didn't) will have to choose to pay it forward instead of doubling down on whatever all this is. I imagine that people like that exist out there, I've just never met one. Then we get an army of prolific young people and experienced veterans getting real work done outside the profit motive for the benefit of all humankind.