Apocryphon

There are attempts to make stylized "coolness" in tech. That's how you get the Cybertruck, or RGB lights everywhere in custom desktops. Be careful of what you wish for.

Those aesthetics are only "cool" in the sense that stylized comic book / military sci-fi conceptions of tech are cool. Also '80s nostalgia, and satire. In reality, none of that could exist practically in the modern day. Real-world high-tech is either consumer-oriented family friendly or hopelessly enterprise beige and gray. LA NIMBYs are not going to let you build a corporate pyramid. The closest we have in reality is the Memphis Bass Pro Shop.

More of a John Brunner future, really.

I only read the "Do this instead" section and it sounds eminently reasonable, if not common sense.

It's fascinating history and theorizing but didn't Jobs kill many, many moribund product lines upon his return?

Well, at the extreme end of free market, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert drew from Objectivism and had his company's divisions internally compete with one another:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inte...

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-h...

Presumably those who eat it find the form factor the opposite of wasting time, given how quick it is to consume it.

Also didn't pretty much every tech guru from that time (if not from all time) drop acid? Gates certainly did, and more than once.

But people are working harder- they’re simply working harder at their jobs.

It should also be noted that the birth rates in China are not increasing, either, despite the end of the One Child Policy. Partly it is also because the younger generation feels immiseration from higher costs of living and fewer opportunities- see the concept of involution.

Finally, during the Great Depression, fertility rates in the U.S. dropped to all-time lows. Not unlike the Great Recession, which has triggered a nonstop decline. We all live in the shadow of 2008.

Maybe he didn’t know that you knew how to get onto the motorway, or that it’s straightforward to do so. Try driving I-80 in San Francisco during rush hour and make the 4th Street exit without getting forced onto the Bay Bridge, without either having done it before or without some sort of guidance- digital or otherwise. Getting on and off a freeway is not always simple.

Not to mention, even long road trips sometimes require a few highway transitions.

Technology becomes a way to hedge bets. Maybe the demand for egg freezing, IVF, surrogacy will rise, and associated costs will drop.

The difference likely there is in the ‘40s you were seeing improvement after the Great Depression and employment during WWII, followed by the postwar boom. Whereas the past two generations have seen precarity increase while living standards falter if not drop compared to their parents’ generation. So they are striving to recreate what they once experienced in their childhood, yet may never return.

Also the entirety of society including their families emphasizing the importance of higher education, good careers, etc. even as the latter is harder to achieve and the former becomes increasingly devalued, yet pricy.

Easy to prescribe, hard to implement for the last two generations or so

Presumably for some who are under specific exercise or diet regimens, it makes tracking macros more easy.

It still belongs in a library! At least a digital one.

His last major work was on Epic Mickey, over a dozen years ago. I figured Spector was de facto retired like many ‘90s game designer icons.

There’s also a Beta Decay.

So it turns out your organization didn’t need so many donated books. The ideal outcome for your discards should still be sent somewhere to someone who wants to read or possess them, or barring that, to be scanned so their contents are at least preserved somewhere. It belongs in a library, even if incorporeal.

This is about optimizing a commute with realtime info. There are other cognitive training methods beyond being Jamie Foxx in Collateral.

And you know this how

Okay, that’s fine for yourself, but as seen in this subthread, other people have different tastes, and needs.

How do you know those routes have a roughly equal amounts of traffic? Or that there’s only two routes? I usually see at least three possible routes with my commute (with some forking), and at least one shortcut. During heavy traffic one optimized route can at least save 10-15 minutes than the slower one(s).

The response is to “it didn't occur to me that people might not remember how to get places in real life”, which is a rather limited understanding of why people might use navigation. I am not here to preach to you the benefits of this technology, simply clarifying an additional use case. There’s no need to conflate your own needs or tastes with the rest of the driving populace, either.

Also, those notifications can likely be conveyed using audio-only warnings, anyway. Making all of this discussion a bit moot.

Finally the entire benefit of live navigation is to find alternate routes with less traffic! That is something you could literally do about.

Again, it's also helpful for warning realtime issues like poor traffic conditions, road obstacles, speed traps, etc.

If 23andMe's genetic records were acquired (along with the company itself) by a different entity, why wouldn't this data as well?

It used to be breathless startup hype and gossip, which it might still be in some capacity.

Perhaps this is a use case that's worth investigating, to invent better, less-destructive scanning processes! Or some way to rebind them afterwards.

Open a restaurant?

You could donate that to the church archives of his denomination or the religious studies department of a university or at least some sort of local historical society.

Okay, then it should be acknowledged if a work was AI-edited-written, or AI-ghostwritten.