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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we've fully appreciated yet that "phones" are really the true embodiment of the original Personal Digital Assistant, i.e. an external brain that will augment yours in any circumstance.

Any portable device has been (or will soon be) replaced by "phones".

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Really? I think the whole world already gets this, and even the conversation seems somewhat quaint at this point.

Yes, I'm constantly referring to my "phone" as my "brain's third hemisphere". It makes people chuckle but no one stops at that joke. It's completely "in the culture".

My metacortex

My late friend Hugh Daniel used to refer to his Bihn's backpack as his "LSD", for "Life Support Device". Like when we were leaving the house he'd shout "Oh no, I forgot my LSD! I'll be right back!" then run back in and fetch his backpack.

But now my smartphone is my LSD.

I can't wait for the iGlock

why would you get an iGlock, when there's the iLaser?

Apple is working on that, relentlessly thinning and sharpening their phones :)

then the iSwitch

And the enterprise equivalent: Amazon Orbital Bombardment (with MongoDB compatibility)

> with MongoDB compatibility

Does that mean no encryption and no authentication by default?

I wonder how many people will accidently nuke themselves with that, because they forget to set up their geofencing or whatever before activating it.

You'll read it on HN first!

But it's okay, because of their multiple-tenancy practices, they only nuked the US offices, and a remote engineer noticed that the CI servers were down. He then drove halfway through the country to crawl through radioactive waste, just so he could plug back in the ethernet cable.

Sounds like great material for a "Doing XY: What we've learned"-corporate blog post! Looking forward to that!

I'm inclined to wait for the fly.io guys to weaponize their platform; the blog posts they produce are just so much higher quality.

They're working on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXh3EfX_CqA

They're waterproof and they have vigorous haptic feedback now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJZtMDM6uVc

Do we still use phones if Meta is right and life shifts into VR? Devices don't have to be portable if people rarely leave home.

thank god meta is not right

All these VR efforts are anticipating hardware advancements that make AR/VR glasses that are similar in size and form to sunglasses. I can't believe any of these companies (Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, Facebook, et c.) genuinely think that AR on a phone/handheld or big ol' VR goggles are going to take off, especially since both aren't exactly new and both remain very niche—but solve that hardware problem, and those glasses will, 100% for-sure, be the next "smartphone" in terms of changing the role of computing in our lives, and any company not ready for it risks being left behind.

Or maybe it's the other way around - the less people leave home, the more uncomfortable they'll feel outside of it, and the more they'll want some piece of tech to assist them. If you're spending most of your time in a virtual reality where, say, a map can be conjured with a simple gesture, you'd want something approximating that IRL, no?

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