This is a very timely post as I've been listening to The Steam House by Jules Vern on LibriVox and it takes place in mid-19th century India having been written in the late-19th century and has entire chapters and passages devoted to the history of Indian colonization to give context. It's also neat because the book imagines RVs long before RVs were invented and characters correctly predict future technological advances that were still 30-50 years off at the time the book was published
You joke but there's a lot of grandma/grandpa gamers these days. Remember someone who played PC games back in the 80s would be on their 50s or 60s now. Or even older if they picked up the hobby as an adult in the 80s
I don't know. In a lot of usecase AI is kinda crap, but there's certain usecase where it's really good. Honestly I don't think people are giving enough thought to it's utility in early-middle stages of creative works where an img2img model can take the basic composition from the artist, render it then the artist can go in and modify and perfect it for the final product. Also video games that use generative AI are going to be insane in about 10-15 years. Imagine an open world game where it generates building interiors and NPCs as you interact with them, even tying the stuff the NPCs say into the buildings they're in, like an old sailer living in a house with lots of pictures of boats and boat models, or the warrior having tons of books about battle and decorative weapons everywhere all in throw away structures that would have previously been closed set dressing. Maybe they'll even find sane ways to create quests on the fly that don't feel overly cookie-cutter? Life changing? Of course not, but definitely a cool technology with a lot of potential
Also realistically I don't think there's going to be long term use for AI models that need a quarter of a datacenter just to run, and they'll all get tuned down to what can run directly on a phone efficiently. Maybe we'll see some new accelerators become common place maybe we won't.
I want to say the game Soviet Republic Workers and Resources uses the exact iconography I described including for cloud savings vs locally but I could be misremembering
I've seen a growing number of programs that use an arrow pointing towards a picture of a computer or hard drive for "save* and an arrow pointing away from it for "load" and I feel like that's very graceful skeuomorph to shift to that might hold up for longer (although it breaks if it's talking about cloud save, but replace the picture of a computer with picture of a cloud and you're back in business I suppose)
The amount of small items that should only be a couple of bucks selling for $10 or more on Amazon is insane
A few years ago I mused that we might see the day when eBay becomes a more trustworthy platform to purchase on than Amazon. I'm not sure when exactly the streams crossed but I think we are past it now
I was willing to accept that maybe there's some actual medical use for chiropractors except now a large chiropractic chain is one of my clients at work and along with their rampant HIPPA non-compliance I've gotten to see how the sausage is made, how much of a conveyer belt they designed that does not stop long enough for any real personalized patient care I trust them less than I ever did (another client is the fact that they also own a chain of "natural medicine" stores which they often place in the same buildings as their chiropractic clinics)
Image handling has definitely gotten better in the last 10 years or so, but realistically you can get everything you want done with Word 2003 today
The sad thing is I've encountered funky compatibility issues just between current versions of word. Going from Office 2022 (I think. I honestly can't remember their LTSC office releases off the top of my head at all) to M365 triggered some minor formatting changes, and going from local word document to one that's shared on SharePoint completely fucked up all of the images in the document and required many hours of rearranging the images because word still sucks for desktop publishing
When I worked at a bank we had a loan officer who wrote in such broken English that the email filter actually started flagging and blocking his outbound emails as a suspected compromise. Worst part is he was handling multimillion dollar agribusiness loans. Second worst part is he's as white American as they come, having had family farming not 20 miles away for generations, so it's not even like he can claim a non-local dialect or second language challenges
Bigger problem is we have these companies with so much market capture that there isn't growth to be found so they find ways to either change the laws to drive down costs or find ways to extract more money per consumer, so either way the line goes up while the majority of people suffer
We need to shift the culture away from investors who expect the line to always go up. Normalize companies just being happy to turn a nice profit doing what they do without growing because they realistically cannot grow any more