If I understood it correctly, the main problem it can solve is lack of trust. If the involved parties can’t find a single authority to trust, they can use a blockchain instead.

Finding cases like that is a bit tricky. For example, you trust your ISP, your bank, maybe even your government… to some extent… They’re not your best friend, nor do they have to be. You can still trust them enough to take care of certain jobs. You pay your ISP via bank transfer, and they provide the service you signed up for. As long as there’s just enough trust, the system still works and there’s no need to use a blockchain.

Same goes for banks. Most people trust that the bank isn’t going to run away with your money. As long as that trust exists, there’s no need to use a blockchain.

It depends on which kind of climate disaster we’re facing. If it’s reversible over the next million years, humanity as a species should be fine. The population would be cut down to just a tiny fraction, and the survivors might have to start from pre-industrial tech level.

If it’s irreversible, and the Earth becomes a Venus like hellscape, the whole planet should be pretty much sterilized. Good luck surviving that.

Ooh, just remembered one: Always on display. Android has had this feature for years, but it was always black and white. However, Apple did it with colors, which looks nicer. Is it more efficient though? Probably not, but I guess apple uses prioritize looks over practicality.

Yeah, that refinement thing is definitely a part of it. To me it seems that in most cases of the delayed features, there wasn’t really that much refinement. I guess some of them were refined, but I can’t think of a good example right now.

On average, Apple catches up 4 years after something has become a widespread standard feature.

Even Excel has a function called “average”, whereas R uses the “mean” function for the same thing. Interestingly, R doesn’t have a function called “average”, because that term is far too ambiguous to statisticians. I think that summarizes pretty well who these tools were made for.

You’re fortunate that your field happens to be reasonably accessible to common people. For example, if you’re a production engineer in a company that manufactures network infrastructure, it suddenly gets very hard to even explain what you do for a living. Normal people may have seen a router, but they’ve never even heard of switches. Regardless, they never paid much attention to network hardware, because they didn’t have to.

Climate is a lot harder to ignore. Everyone has thought about these things at some level. Everyone has heard about climate change at school, on TV, news articles etc. People also experience these things on a very personal level. Only very few people can say the same about network switches, let alone submarine line terminal equipment.

There are even more obscure fields out there. The relatives of those professionals just know that their nephew does something technical and hard to understand. I guess those dinner table conversations might gravitate towards some easier topics.

And it’s also so much faster than full disk encryption. Cool little trick the admins don’t want you to know.

Climate is something people already understand to some extent. If you start talking about different climate models and their assumptions, you should get those confused looks straight away.

Oh, but you gotta drop a chmod nuke at least once to feel the terror having done something irreversible. As a bonus, you’ll also gain a brand new appreciation for snapshots.

Spend the euro on NFTs, sell them for cryptos, spend them on upvotes, likes and reviews. Alternatively, you could buy lootboxes and skins instead.

See also: stoicism

Since it runs Android, you should be able to use any app in the store, right? So, let’s say you need to buy train tickets, take care of banking, track package deliveries, check your PUK code, troubleshoot a wifi router, control smart lights, book a time for the dentist etc. There are a variety of random things where the modern world expects you to have either Android or iOS with you, so can this phone handle those situations too?

About 10 years ago, you didn’t really bump into situations like that very often, so you could get stuff done by making a phone call, using a browser etc, but the 2020s are getting increasingly app dependent. It’s just wild how many things you can’t do these days unless you have a reasonably modern smart phone with you.

That’s why fractions suck. The difference between 1/2 and 1/3 looks small, but it’s way bigger than the difference between 1/202 and 1/203. Same goes for coffee recipes expressed using rations like that.

When it comes to tiny fractions, just go with 1E-6 style instead. So much easier to compare numbers.

Same goes for medicine in general. You take a pill, and headache goes away. How did that happen? Ask a pharmacist/biochemist/etc. Everyone else might just intuitively think of it as magic.

What about phone calls then? How does your voice travel so far? Feels pretty magical, doesn’t it?

If you count only 100% vibed code, it’s probably a 20 lines long script.

Usually, I tweak the code to fit my needs, so it’s not 100% vibes at that point. This way, I have built a bunch of scripts, each about 200 lines long, but that arbitrary limit is just my personal preference. I could put them all together into a single horribly unreadable file, which could be like 1000 lines per project. However, vast majority of them were modified by me, so that doesn’t count.

If you ask something longer than 20 lines, there’s a very high probability that it won’t work on the 15th round of corrections. Either GPT just can’t handle things that complicated, or maybe my needs are so obscure and bizarre that the training data just didn’t cover those cases.

You’ve never seen what’s at the bottom of a lake? Could be dinosaurs. You’ve never seen what’s on the other side of the moon. Could be space nazis.

See also: chart of nuclides

It contains the periodic table and all the unstable isotopes of every element. The island of stability would be somewhere in the top right corner, outside the chart.

When you look at the half-life data, it’s pretty clear that lead is the last fully stable element. Anything past that line (126 neutrons) is more or less unstable, but not necessarily useless. For example, uranium and thorium are pretty far away, but they can still have practical applications.

Between hydrogen and lead, stable isotopes are abundant, but after lead, finding anything you can reasonably do chemistry with gets a bit scarce. When you go past plutonium 244, you’ll find even less chemistry there.

You’re talking about equality, which is a very different type of measure of urgency. Obviously, that is not being prioritized as all, because that’s how capitalism works. Quite the opposite actually. When it comes to matters related to equality, the rich people prioritize themselves over everyone else.

However, I was referring to a completely different type of urgency based prioritization that can be seen pretty much everywhere in society. We build machines that are just barely good enough for the job instead of being actually great for the job, good for the people who use them and good for the environment. That sort of long term thinking just doesn’t have a place in our current system, because making machines just barely good enough is hard enough as it is. If we could do all the basic things with zero effort, we would have left over resources that could be directed towards making everything actually better in a variety of ways. Currently, those left over resources don’t exist, because they’re tied up in making all the basic stuff happen in the society. That’s why we aren’t focusing on making things actually good.

Individual people and some companies are actually trying to make sustainable and humane decisions, but the society isn’t.

Well, there’s a bit of that in there as well. Maybe that example was too specific to serve its purpose.

The idea is that urgent tasks get prioritized, while everything else gets ignored. Currently, we are ignoring a variety of important tasks, because they aren’t important enough.

Once automation fixes all the urgent stuff, we’ll tackle all the less essential ones, and oh boy are there a lot of them. Some of them trivial, and some quite useful.