Many kids now grow up only interacting with touchscreens and assume they’re the default. I genuinely wonder if the average 18 year old knows how to use a standard PC now, given they’d be interacting with almost exclusively with chromebooks, ipads and smartphones throughout school

I mined a bit too. Got almost 2 bitcoin in 2 weeks. Figured it was a pyramid scheme, went back to running folding@home. Forgot my wallet passphrase.

I bought and moved like 1 in late 2013 when it spiked just to play with it and see how it worked, out of curiosity about the tech. (And soon after, mined Dogecoin on Reddit when it started, and we all began tipping like crazy because it was fun and funny.) I made a few bucks off the BTC and kinda regretted not holding it longer. Then cut to a decade later… Sheesh. I may be more sour on the tech now, but damn I’m not so crazy as to not regret selling it.

I let ~20 of them disappear after hearing about the first domino pizza being bought with them for 600 some odd

Before it launched I thought Bulldozer would be good. I even had an FX-8350, and in hindsight I’m not sure it was even an upgrade from the Phenom II X4 955 black edition that I had before

except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

The one niche that they’re probably the biggest is the “I just need a public facing web browser in this spot”

Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot

I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.

Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.

Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.

Yeah, I think tablets are cool, but if they were full-fledged Windows/Linux computers with mobile app compatibility, they’d be absolutely incredible.

Did you take share dilution into account? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_dilution

I get it and was very skeptical at the time… But soon after I began to believe they’d stick around, and my annoyance at installing through multiple discs (and also putting discs in the tray to play a game) won out.

Never stopped hating being forced to use that piece of monopolistic trash ever since I was on dialup when HL2 released. I buy everything I can on GOG.

I especially resent how closed off the Steam Workshop has made the mod ecosystem for a lot of games.

There are dozens of us who still aren’t convinced.

Man I think all of us mistakenly thought this. The early internet had such promise.

It kinda did that for a few wonderful years.

It wasn’t just you, this was the general sentiment in the west. Cory Doctorow (now of “enshittification” fame) wrote “The Net Delusion” about it

I often think about an Arthur C. Clarke book—I think Songs of Distant Earth?—that has a colony of humans that solves all the big debate questions facing their society anonymously through the internet, which has completely solved the problem of judging ideas based on who said them.

Bless the optimists.

came here to see this

considers

I’ve been in a couple conversation threads about this topic before on here. I’m more optimistic.

I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways. I mean, if you have an Internet connection, you have access to a huge amount of information. Your voice has an enormous potential reach. A lot of stuff where one would have had to buy expensive reference works or spend a lot of time digging information up are now readily available to anyone with Internet access.

I think that the big issue wasn’t that people became less critical, but that one stopped having experts filter what one saw. In, say, 1996, most of what I read had passed through the hands of some sort of professional or professionals specialized in writing. For newspapers or magazines, maybe it was a journalist and their editor. For books, an author and their editor and maybe a typesetter.

Like, in 1996, I mostly didn’t get to actually see the writing of Average Joe. In 2026, I do, and Average Joe plays a larger role in directly setting the conversation. That is democratization. Average Joe of 2026 didn’t, maybe, become a better journalist than the professional journalist of 1996. But…I think that it’s very plausible that he’s a better journalist than Average Joe of 1996.

Would it have been reasonable to expect Average Joe of 2026 to, in addition to all the other things he does, also be better at journalism than a journalist of 1996? That seems like a high bar to set.

And we’re also living in a very immature environment as our current media goes. I am not sold that this is the end game.

There’s a quote from Future Shock — written in 1970, but I think that we can steal the general idea for today:

It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves.

Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

That’s just to drive home how extremely rapidly the environment in which we all live has shifted compared to how it had in the past. In that quote, Alvin Toffler was talking about how incredibly quickly things had changed in that it had only been six lifetimes since the public as a whole had seen printed text, how much things had changed. But in 2026, we live in a world where it has only been a quarter of a lifetime, less for most, since much of the global population of humanity has been intimately linked by near-instant, inexpensive, mass communication.

I think that it would be awfully unexpected and surprising if we would have immediately figured out conventions and social structures and technical solutions to every deficiency for such a new environment. Social media is a very new thing in the human experience at this scale. I think that it is very probable that humanity will — partly by trial-and-error, getting some scrapes and bruises along the way — develop practices to smooth over rough spots and address problems.

Consider, say, the early motorcar, which had no seatbelts, windscreen, roof, suspension, was driven on a road infrastructure designed for horse-drawn carts to travel maybe ten miles an hour, didn’t have a muffler, didn’t have an electric starter, lacked electric headlights and other lighting, an instrument panel, and all that. It probably had a lot of very glaring problems as a form of transportation to people who saw it. An awful lot of those problems have been solved over time. I think that it would be very surprising if electronic mass communication available to everyone doesn’t do something similar.

Yeah. Didn’t we all. Although I’ve met several smart young people that self educated themselves in to a impressive degree.

Then again I’ve met dozen times more dumb-dumbs that have made their idiocy much much worse and are spreading it around.

Polarizing as always. Sorry to say, on average for the worse.

Same, except mid-00s.

Yeah I never thought how it would be the hot bed of spreading misinformation…

I remember thinking similarly. Specifically “well duh you’ll just be hitting buttons with your face on calls with those dang touchscreen phones” except it turned out I spend way less time on phonecalls than circa 2006 me could have ever imagined, and also the proximity sensor blanking the screen and blocking input works really good (and even did back in the early 2010s when I got my first smartphone)