I agree. Look at the swing from opposing gay marriage to supporting it. It went from mostly opposed to mostly supporting it in ten years. Obama went from opposing to supporting it during his presidential term.

And it wasn't violence or obnoxious protests that changed people's minds. In large part, they just saw it, talked about it, experienced it, and became ok with it. Mostly because the culture had advanced to a point where the discussion could be had.

I remember reading a fan-made alternate history for some sort of cyberpunk game setting back on usenet in the day.

The instigating effect that diverged the timeline was some sort of technological innovation around 1983-1984 that allowed an instant leap in CPU speeds and memory densities by many orders of magnitude. The timing of the advancement was such that the IBM PC architecture was hopeless outmoded and soon died off. Apple retrofitted the tech into their Macintosh line, so they stayed relevant, but the Amiga was still in the design stage and so was able to build their new OS and UI around the enhanced capabilities. It went on to dominate computing for the next several decades.

Their version of Amiga Intuition was able to include photo-realistic VR, global networking, massive neural nets, and so forth, which all contributed to the cyberpunkness of the setting.

I so wish we could go back to that convention, rather than the silly '0x' convention. Every language I write in my head (and there's been a bunch) uses that.

This is 7 AIs playing diplomacy against each other. It's a little old now, but interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEOTKYxiIzs

Playing the game is not what is interesting. It’s the long term reputation management outcome. It’s the meta-diplomacy.

It used to be that pretty much everyone who ate meat butchered it themselves. They still ate as much meat as they could.

I have seen many human-generated M-dashes, tortured analogies, and 'not x but y' phrasing. I have never seen a human refer to the shape of code.

There's a huge amount of people who need nothing but, basically, a chromebook. A Linux laptop works great for that.

My wife gave up her Dell Windows laptop because the performance was terrible. I installed kubuntu and started using it, and then she immediately reclaimed it because all she ever needs is a browser and Linux vastly improved the performance. ("Well, it is my laptop...") She knows nothing about Linux, and the only Linux-specific question she ever had was how to recover when it sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep. Overall, much less frustration than Windows.

I've been very happy with the low-end moto phones I've bought, and plan to continue with them until they inevitably get worse.

I've heard their flagships will start coming with GrapheneOS next year. Should be a step in the right direction.

I wonder, if we could accurately resolve discrete neural signals in the human brain, if a similar process would work.

We have no theory as to how the brain works at a granular enough level. Remember that matrix multiplication can simulate almost any group structure.

Understanding assembly coding makes you a vastly better C coder.

Nah, not really. Not anymore. Nice skill to have when debugging weird stuff, but nothing you can't get by without.