Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

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You know, I feel the opposite.

When I was younger, I wanted the same thing. To be kind of like Tony Stark in Iron Man, with all the convenience and power that future technology seems to promise.

But now that I'm old and boring, I'm perfectly happy with my non-futuristic life. We still have an iPhone 3G which we use as an iPod around the house (which we plug into our speakers the old fashioned way, by plugging one end of a headset cord into the iPhone and the other into the speaker's AUX jack), and we have our laptop computer which we use for facebook and reddit.

And that's the most "futuristic" technology I care to have. I don't plan to buy a VR headset. I take notes with a pen and paper when I'm not at my computer. We still write our grocery lists down that way and mark them off in the store with a pen.

It may be boring and un-futuristic, but it gets the job done just fine, and I really don't have any complaints. I'm probably in a tiny minority on HN though.

I have a similar view but for different reasons (though I do own an S7 - but for different reasons[0]).

I still want to be like Tony Stark, or captain Picard. I want the cool future stuff. But I came to two realizations - a) it's always cooler in the movies than in real life, but b) even taking that into account, our future sucks compared to theirs. In the movies I like, technology was about empowering people. They were tools. Today, more and more the products are nice looking but barely functional, and sport the minimum subset of features that can be sold to the lowest common denominator.

So take Google Now. Does it recognize voice? Yes, quite well I'd say. Would it be a problem for Google to let you hook up your own actions and data sources to the system, so that you could make yourself a Star Trek environment with a spare tablet attached to a wall? No, it wouldn't. It's an obvious feature. A feature which they - and pretty much everyone else - refuses to provide. Why? Because fuck useful. Lowest common denominator doesn't need that.

[0] - I'm tired of buying shitty hardware. When I change the phone, I prefer to shell out for a top-of-the-line model to be 100% sure it will work fast and stay ahead of the bloat. I learned it the hard way with my first smartphone, which was barely powerful enough to lift its own OS - and trying to connect it to Internet always ended up with having to pull out the battery. I was stuck with it for a couple of years. A smartphone is something I use quite a lot every day, and even little frustrations accumulate.

I love the dissonance between "I have S7" and "model to be 100% sure it will work fast and stay ahead of the bloat" ;-)

Is there? It does work blazingly fast and does not hang on anything I can throw at it :).

Not so much as you might think, I'm pretty much the same as are most of the programmers I know my age IRL, been programming since I was 7 so nearly 30 years, have no intention of buying VR unless it's useful for work, I'm past the point of buying tech because it's new, I want genuinely useful and less hassle than the alternative.

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