<story><title>Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point?</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/09/have-i-reached-the-douglas-adams-inflection-point-or-is-modern-tech-just-a-bit-rubbish/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ouid</author><text>The main problem with technology in the past (~2) decades, aka modern technology, is that it has been virtually all developed under the business model of advertising. I don&amp;#x27;t care how much of your income comes from advertising, you should be alarmed that so much of the world runs on the ability to &lt;i&gt;efficiently and effectively manipulate people for money&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Advertising, and especially the technological improvements to advertising, are a threat. If you are of reasonable intelligence, trying to ignore this threat, or write it off as funding &amp;quot;a lot of good things&amp;quot;, will cause cognitive dissonance and you will find yourself feeling &amp;quot;like a crotchety old man&amp;quot; in the face of new technology, even if you are not honest with yourself as to why.&lt;p&gt;I think Doug was reasonably self-aware, and would probably write, today, about how his wisdom about technophobia did not age well.</text></comment>
<story><title>Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point?</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/09/have-i-reached-the-douglas-adams-inflection-point-or-is-modern-tech-just-a-bit-rubbish/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>joshe</author><text>I think for all the tech he&amp;#x27;s bored of, he&amp;#x27;s reading cynical media accounts instead experiencing them himself. And this is how you age into old man shouts at cloud.&lt;p&gt;Why his boring stuff is actually cool:&lt;p&gt;Block chain is cool, I agree that we haven&amp;#x27;t figured out what to do with it. In the papers you read about NFTs and using too much energy. But if you listen to interviews with Vitalik Buterin instead you can realize that there are smart people trying to figure out what to do with this cool new thing. (I hold no crypto btw).&lt;p&gt;I remember the first VR too. They&amp;#x27;ve fixed a lot of the problems. I&amp;#x27;ve had amazing artistic experiences just sitting in a little tiny apartment in Hong Kong. Beat Saber is fun, and different from other video games. Flight simulator is much better with it. I don&amp;#x27;t get the Meta&amp;#x2F;Zuckerberg media push, but if you avoid taking journalists seriously then it is a cool new thing. Also I&amp;#x27;m more excited about AR than VR, will love to have the world annotated.&lt;p&gt;Self driving cars are amazing. After about 15 minutes using a Tesla on the Highway, you realize you don&amp;#x27;t have to monitor it. You get to relax and be a passenger. It works pretty well in towns too, but you have to monitor it. Again don&amp;#x27;t listen to journalists and it seems like a miracle.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t like voice assistants either, but it&amp;#x27;s cool that they kinda work. Five year old kids can play songs they like.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand 5G in phones either. But! It turns out that it&amp;#x27;s a great way to get internet service in your house. Now you have a competitor to your awful cable company. Even if you never use it, your price for high speed internet will go down. When sonic fiber optic came to my neighborhood in SF, I couldn&amp;#x27;t get it. But my cable internet bill came down $25 per month and they upgraded the speed.&lt;p&gt;Anyway stop reading dumb cynical journalists, experience things for yourself and you will age gracefully.</text></comment>