291–300 of 362 posts
I think voice controlled apps (google home, Siri, Alexa, etc will be the next big thing)
I can imagine using voice when driving perhaps; but it's not really usable when other people are around, since voice commands would disturb them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one of the under reported aspects of self driving cars is what it might do for urban income inequality. The prices of cars and housing are two big things that keep poor people poor. If you can't afford the upfront or ongoing costs of a car, you need to live along mass transit lines to get to your job or endure a much longer commute which costs extra time and money. Housing along mass transit lines can be much…
I think self-driving cars might not change anything here unfortunately :( If we take silicon valley as an example, the wages going up has just driven rents and housing costs up. Essentially housing is a good with inelastic demand, so it gets priced more like a tax at "x% of income". Same seems to be true for restaurants, grocery stores - they just raise the prices to match the income level of an area.
better search, always Find me: - an aggregation of everything I have to know to run a porcelain store in my country (taxes, suppliers, how to find staff or better yet: showing candidates directly, best location in my town, etc.) - Fuzzy stuff like: the pic of that tree I took when I was on hollidays in XY a few years ago; or the note I took a few days ago about that band with some greek name - a ready to paste, non-a…
Would you need above info instantly or would you be fine waiting like 10mins for the results to arrive? Also, would you be willing to pay for it ?
The 10 minute wait is only ok if the result is really really good. If I use google I do maybe 15 searches to crack a mildly hard nut, if each search would take more than 10 seconds I'd be too annoyed.
I would pay, but again it would depend on the quality and I would probably use it just once a week. If I could do it myself with google in 20min, I would not pay more than 2 bucks. If you can do the china-shop thing, I might pay 15 or even 40 if I knew it was good.
When I search for myself I get a feeling for whether there is more information out there or not. I'd have to trust the service to be good enough not to miss much.
New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean boring , old industries. There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is. For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator…
If the government had provided an API, the same task could be accomplished in a matter of minutes.
Likewise, most law offices have FileStore's or DMS's (Document Management System). These technologies are old and slow. If they used something like Algolia or Apache Lucene on a beefy server, the productivity would increase multiple-folds.
Another thing I want to mention is automated translation software. Most contracts we write are in dual languages. People usually slightly modify terms from earlier contracts. If there were a software that could identify identical/similar blocks and find their translation, the productivity increase would be substantial.
I wonder why these firms do not invest in IT. Being a corporate lawyer in 21st century is not that far away from being a coder. You primarily work with your computer, only instead of writing computer code, you write rules in natural languages. Programmers have IDEs, Lawyers still use MS Office products with lots of add-ons.
New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean boring , old industries. There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is. For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator…
I'm interning at a law firm, two days ago I spent 4+ hours searching through public announcements on a government website. Me and a my colleague searched through the announcements of 500+ companies in the last 3 years. We ctrl+f'ed certain words, if they were present we noted the decision date, it was that simple. But the government website had a flashy UI with Ajax that required multiple clicks to get a list of anno…
Mass adoption of electric vehicles. Battery prices are plummeting and the advantages of EV are so great that the moment they break that $20k barrier with zero subsidies (which should be within the next five years) the switch will be rapid. I suspect at least 1 in 3 personal vehicles in use in major metro areas will be an EV by 2025.
Traffic jammed highways will still be traffic jammed highways with EVs.
Crystal & Julia 1.0. Crystal because it's a blazing fast, compiled and statically typed version of Ruby (or 80% anyway), and it's web server is awesome. Now it just needs full concurrency. Julia because it offers a nice, performant alternative to Python & R in data science, while avoiding Java & C++. It has some really nice features like multiple dispatch and the ability to run R, Python, Fortran and C code inside of…
I can't wait to never use MATLAB again.
The core matrix-y stuff can pretty much all be ported to Python with similar or better perfomance, especially using Numba.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ubiquity and accessibility. Sure, giant corporations like Ikea and Yelp made AR apps, now every iOS developer can too and there'll be buckets of documentation and tutorials to help them along the way.
layar was an api anyone could have built ar apps with
New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean boring , old industries. There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is. For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator…
I'm interning at a law firm, two days ago I spent 4+ hours searching through public announcements on a government website. Me and a my colleague searched through the announcements of 500+ companies in the last 3 years. We ctrl+f'ed certain words, if they were present we noted the decision date, it was that simple. But the government website had a flashy UI with Ajax that required multiple clicks to get a list of anno…
That's, unfortunately, the counterproductive effect of current tech fads - UX designed around "engagement" (i.e. sucking money or attention out of people) and not around effectiveness. I believe it's important for responsible engineers to work to counter that thread.
Much of what people have mentioned here will be really great. I think self-driving cars have the most potential to impact people lives day to day, followed by AR. I guess infinite, cheap, clean energy could also spark another industrial revolution. But all these things aren't likely to impact the happiness and life satisfaction of those living in the developed world. The internet has been huge, but it really hasn't m…
>but it really hasn't made us happier as a whole. Serious question. Has any technology done this? We don't appear to be happier than any other animal. Even in the developed world plenty of people are downright miserable. Unless primitive humans were just far sadder than the average animal, I can't see how technological advancement has made us happier as a whole, because we're not all that happy. If antibiotics, elect…