Being single
My math teacher: “You can’t walk around with a calculator in your pocket!”
Well well well, look at me NOW, Mr. York!
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 removed comes back with “Okay, here’s what I found on the internet.”
never opens calculator app
Hah, I suck at math so I use it all the time
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.
US conservatives calling Russia the good guys and electing a convicted felon as president.
Telling the “computer” to do a thing and it just does. AI has it’s upsides and saves me so much time and energy
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.
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.
Child me is just dying to have the dancing and gaming skills I have!
Child me wishes he had the basic communication skills and treatments for his mental illness.
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.
Combined with the Internet a “phone” - as we still charmingly call it - does what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy could do.
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)
Lol, that seems like a pain. God bless robotic tape libraries.
Satellite navigation. In my early childhood we sometimes played a street racing video game that had an arrow pointing the direction on the screen. My mom would remark that she wished she had such an arrow when she drove a car IRL, by now she definitely got that wish.
Wait, how old is consumer satnav? I am pretty sure it was available (albeit not too commonplace) when I was a kid in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. I really do take it for granted… As long as my government doesn’t deliberately scramble it for security reasons, which happened a lot in the past year.
I think my family at least got it in the early-to-mid 2000s, a few years after that.
Dedicated units were available from brands like TomTom in the early 2000’s, and cell phones started getting it around 2007 or so (I remember very expensive blackberry plans had it around then). Android launched with it in 2008, and iPhones started allowing apps like Google Maps with turn by turn navigation by around the end of 2012 or so.
GPS is now like mini maps in racing games.
“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.
The fall of America.
Well that was just hubris.
A cure for AIDS
I’m out of the loop, is that a thing? Best I know is that it’s highly manageable with treatment, not cured.
5th person confirmed cured of HIV. Stem cell transplant, apparently. Happened in Düsseldorf if your .de means anything.
Fascinating!
Nah, my .de means nothing, it was just an arbitrary choice of instance for me.
I was laughed at on the playground when I got the idea for wireless charging back in the 90s.
Nikola Tesla was working on proof of concept from 1900 until JP Morgan pulled project funding in 1917.
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