I’m generally highly suspicious of any picture of a piece of paper with writing on it posted on social media.

Once I worked at a place that had its own in-house project management software. It actually worked rather well. Part of the problem is that every company has its own process and Jira and the like try to accommodate all of them and it ends up being a jumbled mess that doesn’t fit anyone’s actual process. It’s like trying to fit a tesseract-shaped peg into a round hole. But companies don’t like to spend money on developing their own software so that’s what we end up with.

Obviously, solar energy is going to continue to grow. Less obviously, this will have a pretty significant effect on global economics. Countries that previously lacked domestic energy production now will suddenly have it. Countries highly reliant on fossil fuel exports will suddenly be less important. I think this will probably be the most significant change and it’ll be for the better. Obviously global warming problems are on the horizon but over 5-10 years from now it’ll still be comparatively small.

I personally don’t see AI getting much better than it is now because it’s starting to run out of how much it can do with existing data. It’ll continue to be a useful tool for autocomplete and generating low-effort content, but otherwise won’t rearrange society or build us dyson spheres or anything like some seem to expect. I don’t see software technology doing anything especially great for a while and its role in the economy may shrink for the first time really since it started.

More speculatively, I’d guess we’ll see more advancements in DNA and RNA technology that will make medicine more resemble programming rather than throwing stuff at the body and hoping it works. This will progress slowly, but in 5-10 years I think we’ll be looking at some vaguely significant impact on common health problems. Other medical tech will be significant too - knowing someone who takes GLP-1s I think we’ve kind of missed celebrating how big a deal that is for some people.

Society as a whole - who knows, that’s especially hard to predict. I tend to be optimistic that the current reactionary period will fade, having already used up its credibility. I worry though that we’re getting better at exploiting human emotions and that can be used by the powerful to control masses. But when has that ever not been a factor? We’ve only relatively recently emerged from the era of divinely ordained kings, and mass literacy is still quite new in the grand scheme of things. Our society will continue to evolve, a bit inconsistently.

Yeah but first boyfriend/girlfriend drives me crazy because then I’m going back through my various early relationships trying to figure out who counts as a “girlfriend”. I’d say Sherry was the first but she always said we were never really together. Well now you’re a security question answer so you can’t deny it anymore Sherry.

Can’t get no respect I tell ya

No. I mean look, I’ll put up with this whole social delusion of unconditional love if it’s not too crazy, but at some point fuck it.

Sleep outside, if you have a space. Get a deck umbrella, a mosquito net and a cot and a sleeping bag (actually on super hot days I used to just sleep on a towel). It’s so much cooler than trying to get by indoors with no AC, even with fans. And it’s rather pleasant.

I think generally speaking, we’ve been in a computer tech boom for decades, driven by the growth of computers going back to the 80s. The internet and smartphones just grew out of that.

Unfortunately I think we’re running out of new stuff to compute and newer technologies seem to be a bit week on the “problem being solved” end of things. Most likely what we’ve come to think of as tech will take a back seat to technologies with more room to grow, I’m guessing biotech in particular will be the next big thing.

Left my iron plugged in for a week without realizing it.

Accidentally caused massive heat wave. Sorry folks, but I unplugged it so temps should start to go down now.

The paradox of tolerance relies on a lot of assumptions that don’t really work in reality. We don’t tend to see more open societies have more intolerance, quite the opposite. Part of the problem is that “the intolerant” is not a single group, but many groups that hate each other. And those who are intolerant towards the intolerant are themselves part of the intolerant.

For a less-political example, let’s imagine hypothetically that Lemmy is very pro-linux. However, some people who absolutely hate linux show up and start posting anti-linux memes. These people get insulted, downvoted, and eventually banned by others on Lemmy, because they’re showing intolerance towards linux.

But then what happens to those anti-linux people? They go off and created their own forums, and talk about how intolerant lemmy is to people who don’t use linux. So whenever a linux user shows up on those forums, they’re inevitably banned. The result of intolerance of the intolerant is that they remain intolerant, and now the tolerant have become hard to distinguish from them, and there’s no way for pro-linux forces to be part of the conversation anti-linux people are having - allowing them to create their own culty filter bubble.

Now imagine an alternative - instead of banning the anti-linux people, pro-linux lemmy users decide to engage with them and correct misconceptions about linux. After all, linux, like many other topics, can get kind of complicated, and linux users need to remember that not everyone has the same background knowledge that they do about the topic. Sure, some linux haters would be persistent, but maybe others would be like “hey, these linux folks are actually kind of cool and helpful, I want to be more like them.” That may sound idealistic, but I think that’s a lot closer to what we see in reality - intolerance thrives in closed off spaces, and dies in open ones.

Sure. My parents had different religions and being an atheist I don’t really have a duty to care about other people’s religions.

Of course it helped that my parents weren’t too seriously religious. And I’ve rejected religious people for having religion-tied views I find appalling. But the religion itself isn’t the issue, just the things that sometimes result from it are.

Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it “everything becoming facebook”.

Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself “I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet” JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it’s the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that’s not how email would work at all - you’d need a google account to both send and receive emails. That’s why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it’s like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it’s just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that’s how it should be.

I think genetic engineering is the most high-potential tech right now. They’re already using it to cure sickle cell, and my (total non-expert, probably way too hopeful) pipe dream is that we could basically treat it like we can open a terminal on the body some day and change whatever we want.

Edit: I just want to point out that I’m imagining curing cancer, reversing aging, etc. Not like, additional orifices or anything.

It’s a form of communication that reaches us more fundamentally than words. I imagine it’s like animal sounds - what does a dog’s bark mean to another dog? Probably the same thing as when you tell someone “Stop!” or “Hey!” really loud. It don’t carry a concrete meaning, but feeling. Music is taking that and turning it into language. It can have many different meanings and tell many different stories, even without lyrics. Although it’ll never be as exact as written words, we can still enjoy the story.

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jeans and a t shirt pretty much daily

Not great but acceptable gym garb.

I feel like I could do all of that at home.

You could do it at home with light weights. But heavier weights and equipment are really expensive and otherwise problematic to keep at home. Also, I find that there’s something about being at the gym that makes it easier for me to work out. I did home workouts during covid but it just wasn’t the same and I didn’t get as good of a workout.

Also gym membership prices vary widely. Planet Fitness if you have one near you at least used to be as cheap as $10/month. Ignore anyone who says it’s not a real gym, it’s good enough for like 99% of people.YMCAs and other community centers tend to be on the cheaper side.

For me WFH has helped me have a community. The office was never a real community, and the fact that we all worked together got in the way of being actual friends. Instead with the added time from WFH I was able to prioritize my social life and go to more events and meet people I actually have stuff in common with. Additionally my in-office job forced me to live in a dead suburb, WFH allowed me to move to a city with a lot more social opportunities.

Of course probably not everyone prioritized that. The office might be good for some people, but for people like me who don’t necessarily socialize at the office very easily WFH is much better for community.

Being secretly not updating because it thinks it’s disconnected, so I have to notice that little icon by the inbox to know it’s just not telling me about meetings being scheduled and such

Let’s count the problems:

1. Up front cost
2. Maintenance cost
3. Varied problems like different types of stairs, tripping hazards, etc.
4. People attacking or stealing robots and their packages.
5. Safety issues with 100+ pound metal robots falling on pets and children

Any others?

Let’s be real - we always assumed that we could hear our parents walking in but there’s no way they didn’t sneak up and check what we were watching once in a while