251–260 of 1001 posts
3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.
The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.
Uh oh, I think I'm about to rant. Scuse me. Given how cheap even powerful general purpose computers are I don't think they ever will be prized beyond availability. Aficionados, internet stores, arm, Linux, market forces, etc. To some part, good riddance. Software engineers and product designers are the reason the PC is effectively broken by design in UX. Because they are inexcusably slow. There is 0 reason anything I…
You do have some merit to the argument, but your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI, and that matters to some people. It didn't do dynamic language processing to figure out if you've made a grammatical error. It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware. It did not have to use a significantly restricted environment to limit damage when some malware did get through. It didn't even support multitasking. My point is that computers today do so much more, but responsive UI is entirely possible for desktop applications, but the development cost is more than most companies/people are willing to pay.
Smartwatches. I was convinced enough to bet two years of my life working on them.
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English is a surprisingly versatile language. You can get your point across with pidgin english just fine, and it's the most spoken language in the world. On the other hand you have people who master the language on a whole new level, like Douglas Adams.
Chinese is #1 according to Wikipedia.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
I thought this was going to be 'The VR Thread.' I still don't entirely understand why virtual reality didn't really catch on. I think there were some very poor business decisions by Facebook which were treating it as a success before it had even launched -- trying to ring-fence a platform, both hardware and software, whose early demographic is going to be entirely high information users seems a very questionable deci…
Spend 10 minutes with an HTC Vibe or an Oculus Rift on your head, and you'll be impressed. Now spend 4 hours. Most of those things end up in closets. Or on eBay.
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Well didn't it? Considering Youtube and Netflix... Or is that some specific technology that I don't know about?
No, it hasn't. Still, the majority of TV viewers use TV utility providers, not ISPs. When the average couch dweller sits down, grabs a remote, and turns on Netflix instead of "channel 42" on cable TV, WebTV will be commonplace, but it won't happen until the young Netflix-watching generation completely replaces the older cable-watching generation.
I'm disappointed none of the various constructed "universal" languages (like Esperanto) ever took off. Having a single common language spoken by everyone would be enormously useful. As it is, the closest we have is English, but it's a natural language and therefore complicated and difficult to learn.
And yet easy enough for basically everyone in the world to learn. Just think, it could’ve been French. It was dominant for many many years. Russian was a huge candidate as well. Wanna learn that? I’m a native Slavic speaker and I wouldn’t wish a Slavic language on anyone who needs to become fluent enough to do business. Spanish was (is?) a big candidate too, that one is about as hard as English i guess. Portuguese? I…
To me English doesn't feel logical at times (maybe a subjective observation) but at least we all can agree that the ortography with its historical baggage is not optimal.
Personally, I think the most helpful thing has been the cultural dominance of English language movies and TV series in my youth. Also, much of today's computer technology coming from the US, all that material is in English. It could have been any of those languages, because I don't strongly believe in that languages are intrinsically difficult to learn. They are just different. And typologically, English is quite distant from my native language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh oh, I think I'm about to rant. Scuse me. Given how cheap even powerful general purpose computers are I don't think they ever will be prized beyond availability. Aficionados, internet stores, arm, Linux, market forces, etc. To some part, good riddance. Software engineers and product designers are the reason the PC is effectively broken by design in UX. Because they are inexcusably slow. There is 0 reason anything I…
> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC You do have some merit to the argument, but your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI, and that matters to some people. It didn't do dynamic language processing to figure out if you've made a grammatical error. It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware. It did not have to use a significantly restricted…
If the latency begins to cross a threshold and begins to be inconvenient or distracting, it is time to step and think that may be the pretty UI is too ahead of its time, and we should stop making the UI prettier than it can be at this time.
CRISPR. My naivete surrounded me. I didn't realize that even though there was a high output of genetic marker tests that very few if of them would result in viable CRISPR targets. There's 60K genetic marker tests on the market. 8 to 10 new ones come out each day. Humanity has little hope of figuring out the sort of "druggable targets." Genome Wide Association Studies aren't like websites or apps waiting to be optimiz…
A close mentor of mine has been working on private cancer research for close to three decades and just recently retired. He was both incredibly hopeful and positively terrified of CRISPR. He explained CRISPR as "one of the crucial technologies we don't yet have the wisdom to wield" I recently learned (I believe on here, in the past week), CRISPR was used to develop a genetic treatment on the first human patient to so…
3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.
In the consumer/household space, sure. 3D printing is huge in prototyping and hardware R&D though. High-end printers are even good enough for mass production runs now.