Electing a convicted felon President of the United States.
That one cuts deep. It’s really weird too because if you asked your parents they would say america would never elect a felon. Then they went on to elect a felon.
I sometimes think about trying to reach out to older folks to better understand their views but then I remember the absolute garbage brain rot they believe.
US conservatives calling Russia the good guys and electing a convicted felon as president.
And literal nazis marching in the streets
My math teacher: “You can’t walk around with a calculator in your pocket!”
Well well well, look at me NOW, Mr. York!
I have a calculator in my pocket that I can talk to and it’ll talk back. “Hey Bixby, what’s half of five and three-eighths?”
About 33% of the time the dumb bitch comes back with “Okay, here’s what I found on the internet.”
never opens calculator app
Hah, I suck at math so I use it all the time
I don’t know if I suffer from dyscalculia but, man, is mental arithmetic so hard for some reason. I did well in all my other math classes up to college, wtaf, brain.
Satellite navigation. In my early childhood we sometimes played a street racing video game that had an arrow pointing the direction on the screen. My mom would remark that she wished she had such an arrow when she drove a car IRL, by now she definitely got that wish.
GPS is now like mini maps in racing games.
Wait, how old is consumer satnav? I am pretty sure it was available (albeit not too commonplace) when I was a kid in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. I really do take it for granted… As long as my government doesn’t deliberately scramble it for security reasons, which happened a lot in the past year.
Dedicated units were available from brands like TomTom in the early 2000’s, and cell phones started getting it around 2007 or so (I remember very expensive blackberry plans had it around then). Android launched with it in 2008, and iPhones started allowing apps like Google Maps with turn by turn navigation by around the end of 2012 or so.
I don’t remember my first gps, but maybe early 2000’s. It was a Garmin, with no route planning, no maps and the position was coordinates
I think my family at least got it in the early-to-mid 2000s, a few years after that.
Burning a CD while using your computer for something else in the mean time.
That’s come full circle as many modern machines don’t even have disc drives anymore
Back in the 90s part of my job was to change the daily backup tape on a computer when I got there in the morning. It was an 8GB cassette the size of a deck of cards, and I remember marveling that I could carry 8 Gigabytes in my shirt pocket. Now you can get thumb drives for $20 that hold many times more, and thousands of times more than my first hard drive. (which cost about a grand)
Lol, that seems like a pain. God bless robotic tape libraries.
I was laughed at on the playground when I got the idea for wireless charging back in the 90s.
Nikola Tesla was working on proof of concept from 1900 until JP Morgan pulled project funding in 1917.
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My man Nikola would have invented FTL travel had he lived six months longer
Phones doing a good chunk of what computers can
I mean it’s almost wrong handed to call something like an iPhone or Android device a “phone” because it’s really a pocket computer that, among many other things, can place phone calls.
For that reason, I like how they are called Hand Terminals in the Expanse (books, I dont think they are referred to at all in the show)
In fact the thing that irritates me is how useless a smart phone is without a connection to the internet. You have to put in actual effort to make actual use of its local power.
A good chunk? My watch is far more capable than my first computer, many times the storage, and its screen has more pixels
Combined with the Internet a “phone” - as we still charmingly call it - does what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy could do.
Telling the “computer” to do a thing and it just does. AI has it’s upsides and saves me so much time and energy
For real. Who would have guessed the most realistic prediction from Star Trek was talking directly to the computer. Whereas the least realistic one is that a post-scarcity society would benefit average people.
Directly measuring gravity waves, the first measurement using LIGO was back in 2016 and they’ve observed almost a hundred so far. The observations are being used to create newer generations of gravity wave detectors.
Being single
I don’t know if people were really talking much about this kinda stuff back then, but a PC like device that wasn’t a laptop that allowed you to play full-on PC titles at home, either hooked to a TV or on its own, or on the move. Especially a device that also allows you to do normal computer things outside of playing games.
Again, not including laptop since I personally don’t know any people who actually used their laptops for playing games while in a moving vehicle. There probably are plenty of people who did it or do it, but I don’t know any.
A battery powered table saw.
Absolutely not a thing in the 1980’s, in stock now at your local Lowe’s.
That one does blow me away - I’ve had a cordless drill for years, but a tablesaw??? - when I realized they even existed I couldn’t believe it.
The first battery powered drills were pretty horrible. Batteries have come a long way
I mean, when you think about it, it’s just a battery-powered circular saw flipped upside-down. Not too crazy to consider like that.
Battery powered circular saws were also science fiction the day I was born.
Go watch early seasons of The New Yankee Workshop and look for the cordless power drill he uses in the first couple of seasons. It’s got this gigantic permanently attached battery hanging out of the hand grip (the hand grip is like a foot long) and it can just barely turn a wood screw.
By the time I was in high school tiny, underpowered circ saws were available that ran on drill batteries. These things had like 5 inch ultrathin blades. Now look at it.
Owning my own home. Most of us are just going to be renting for the rest of our lives.
I had a job at the time that let me WFH maybe once every 2-3 weeks and I thought it was crazy generous lol.
Now I’m home virtually every day.
A computer program winning a Go tournament.
In chess, human grandmasters routinely beat the best computers, but changing that was simply a matter of faster processors and larger memory, problems solvable by the application of sufficient quantities of money. In principle the game was already solved, and within a few decades, would be solved in practice as well.
Go was considered a much harder problem. Programs of similar complexity to a decent chess program couldn’t even look at a finished game between go pros and reliably say who won, let alone get there itself. Well, guess what?
Child me is just dying to have the dancing and gaming skills I have!
Child me wishes he had the basic communication skills and treatments for his mental illness.
