Note that to some extent, this might have been a necessary step in the relative popularity of computing.

Folks remembering how flexible and open ended things were in the 90s were a tiny sliver of the population. At the time about 1% of the world were participating in the internet, now the majority of the population participates on the internet.

I would have loved for the industry to keep up the trends of the 90s (AOL/Prodigy lost out to a federated internet, centralized computing yielded to personal computing) instead of going backwards (enduser devices becoming tethered to internet hosted software, relatively few internet domains and home hosted sites being considered suspicious rather than normal), but this might have just been what it took for the wider population to be able to cope.

Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.

By now, we’ve made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can’t be trusted not to break themselves with malware.

The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there’s over 24x as many non savvy people that don’t need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.

There’s a smell of it being some pet project of a big architect.

Windows 10 had a feature called ‘Timeline’. It wasn’t particlarly wanted by many people and it cluttered up an otherwise somewhat useful task overview. It was canned.

This seems to be that guy saying “Hey, I know you canned Timeline on me and called it a failure, but that’s just because we didn’t AI it up, and now we can and everyone is going to want it!”

Babbage’s

I get and appreciate devil’s advocate sort of approach. I sometimes do that. But I do so by trying to find additional context and concrete information. I don’t think it’s as useful to go to some lengths to invent hypotheticals not in evidence. Here we have the full link in context with Twitter list of reasons of why they could mark it unsafe. Reading through that list and that link, there’s not a whole lot of room for a surprisingly understandable non obvious reason to put above the more straightforward explanation.

There are plenty of ass hats who are not seemingly tied to Russia. However Gabbard seems concretely tied to Russia, and Carlson explicitly went over there to help with Russian state propaganda. Trump has been heavily influenced by Russian manipulations, though I’m not sure if he’s knowingly “on the take” or just super susceptible to being manipulated.

Haven’t heard about Jill Stein, but hardly paid attention since she doesnt influence anything at all. I did look at her platform and saw the “just have Ukraine surrender to Russia” and thought that was super weird, but I chalked it up to being just terribly naive rather than assuming Russian influence.

McDonald’s tried to get AI to take over order taking. And gave up.

Yeah, it’s not going to be coming for programmer jobs anytime soon. Well, except maybe a certain class of folks that are mostly warming seats that at most get asked to prep a file for compatibility with a new Java version, mostly there to feed management ego about ‘number of developers’ and serve as a bragging point to clients.

Nah, if it doesn’t pan out then all these folks will pretend they never said this, but in 24 months programming will be obsoleted by <insert fresh buzz here>

Broadly speaking, higher taxes required to responsibly fund progressive programs.

You have to convince folks they’ll get their money’s worth.

Particularly rural areas are skeptical, they think they get money taken from them to solve city problems, and even if they might be able to benefit, the program might not be able to reach them.

So you might have decent luck with medicare for all (though there’s a huge special interest influencing them against that too), but if you wanted big infrastructure and transit plans, they’ll think the government is going to toss money at the cities and do nothing for them. Or worse, they’ll be one of the folks that get eminent domained to bulldoze their home to make way for rail connecting two big cities.

Note they didn’t imply she looked young, just that she doesn’t look 84, and I’ll grant that. She also doesn’t look as utterly absurdly surreal as some people who have had work done, so her and her cosmetic surgeon(s) are displaying some degree of restraint about what is realistically worth attempting.

Even if they accurately predict the popular vote, doesn’t do anything since the electoral college is what matters, and we already know that republican candidate is advantaged for electoral college votes to overcome a significantly more popular candidate.

A comment likened Republicans to dinosaurs, and being eager for them to be extinct, since dinosaurs are extinct. One possibility is saying they are mostly old and waiting for them to die, another is that they have outdated ideas, even the ones not that old, and to go extinct just means they don’t have power and don’t matter.

Dinosaurs were made extinct by an Asteroid in the Yucatan. So to contribute to that latter half, work toward making them irrelevant, voting and chosing your media engagements appropriately.

At this point, I would not presume someone is advocating literal lethal violence against the entire GOP, if nothing else that is wildly infeasible and as it stands much more reasonable actions are available to minimize their influence…

The real problem is that Nothing brings… nothing to the table. Oh look, another startup making another Android phone in a sea of companies making Android phones, with yet another skin.

At least with Photoshop (as bad as the model is), at least they are actually running the software and storing and backing up the associated data for it.

With the car, it’s all local to the car without BMW having to incur any expense for that functionality to keep going.

Sorry, your bicycle’s gear selector is locked into a single gear until you pay your subscription for the other gears.

I used to just watch YouTube at default, taking the ads as they felt like.

Now, no thanks. If I have to watch as many ads for as long as they mandate, I’ll just watch other things.

There’s no way they could have pulled off any vaguely credible election from scratch with about a months warning.

The larger number of ‘not sure’ may be due to having three extra weeks of knowing of Vance. Some people either are truly not sure or at least want to sound like they are carefully evaluating a candidate they only heard about in the last couple of weeks.

Even putting that aside, the “bad” was also underestimated.

So Trump gets 4 years before we can vote him out, he’s bad, but how bad could it be.

Folks didn’t think about the number of supreme court justices that would go over.

Folks certainly didn’t expect January 6th to go down the way it did and for there to be lingering aftermath of “if we win again, we will overtly rig the system to prevent losing again”.

So I hope people view the stakes as higher and the GOP as more dangerous than people would have guessed in 2016.

True, but given the timing of when he did drop out, Harris is about as close to approximating a democratic choice as they could manage. She at least was on the ticket in the 2020 election so people did technically vote for her as VP in 2020, with everyone knowing that an 80 year old man becoming incapacitated would mean she would be president. They are at least following the succession as was voted for. Any other person would have absolutely been a “coronation” of sorts on that timescale.

While you may say “but people don’t really pay too much attention to the VP”, I’d say that Palin tanked McCain’s chances by being obviously unfit for office.