This was me,

but not anymore.

Kill the noise,

Choose life!

-What’s a movie from the past 25 years that hasn’t gotten enough attention in your view? Something that punches way above its weight. 😇

-The spicier question. What’s a movie from that same time period that is very popular, including kind of in your own social circle, that you think is kind of mid or overrated but it’s too awkward to say, but you’ll drop it in a Nostr comment? 😈

Overheard at PubKey:

"This place is like the headquarters of bitcoin. And it's a dive bar, not some corporate office. That's wild."

What do you think the world will be like 50 years from now, in the 2070s?

And specifically, what kind of tech do you think will surprise to the upside by that time, and become pretty dominant or ubiquitous? And what tech do you think will underperform expectations, and not exist at the scale that people now might’ve guessed would be common by then?

Writing a sci fi manuscript, and continuing to fine tune it, made me do a ton of extra research on current trends in AI, biotech, material science, and VR. Like a big refresh.

Not because the text focuses in detail on this tech (it doesn’t), but rather so that I have a general idea of what technologies are likely to come before or after other ones, to create what seems (at least to me) a reasonably coherent future world (with one big unrealistic extra thing I threw in there for fun).

There are a lot of different path dependencies or “alternate timelines” for how the world could look in say 2030, 2040, 2050, and so on. So no sci fi vision can be said to fully predict things. And for example, we don’t fault the movie Blade Runner for not accurately predicting what 2019 would be like in 1982.

But my goal is to be “well-considered.” Plausible. Or at least, plausible in the places where I am intending to be the most plausible.

For example if I read a space opera set 500 years in the future and AI is nowhere to be found, or minimally so, I am distracted by this unless given a plausible explanation. The explanation of “the author didn’t think about it” isn’t good enough, at least for something that big.

What technologies do you expect to surprise to the upside or downside in the next few decades?

Don't ask me for a tutorial on cable management...

MIDDLE OF NOWHERE AMERICAN ROADSIDE BARS. 👌

I’m old enough to remember being taught in science class that the purpose of the scientific method was to try and disprove theories because we could never truly prove anything, only disprove theories along the way in our search for truths.

One time I tripped over a squirrel. Ran in front of me while I was walking on the sidewalk at university.

The #1 thing I learned from 12 years of working in engineering and engineering management was: "keep it simple, stupid".

Somewhat related: this week when going through a 30-year old dusty/mildewy storage locker, I found an old cassette player that works like new. Kind of like how those hold Nintendo systems can basically survive a nuclear apocalypse and keep working.