I think the "loop" is indeed moving on. The last real mini-revolution this side of the line probably were torrents. The whole social web is just wrong. It's centralized. It's not the web - it is a corruption of it. It is like the great minds who could design truly de-centralized, robust, reliable and truly social structures have all just vanished. There are so many difficult and important problems around but no one wants to solve them just because there is a huge ??? before the profit step. It is indeed a bit sad.

But there is some real fascinating stuff happening in hardware. We have freaking humanoid robots and private rockets. And nothing excites me more about the future than 3d printers. And there is a real and true to the soul open source like effort going on in there. Reprap, makerbot and that awesome 75k inr 3d printer from china... printers that can print themselves! Hardware specs that are shared and re-shared. Ideas and insights shared with gay abandon. No major patent threats anywhere in sight so far. It is the free world.