Ask Lemmy

Electing a convicted felon President of the United States.

US conservatives calling Russia the good guys and electing a convicted felon as president.

"Work from home" for so many jobs.

The fall of America.

My math teacher: "You can't walk around with a calculator in your pocket!"

Well well well, look at me NOW, Mr. York!

A cure for AIDS

In my pocket I carry a library of Alexandria, an infinite Walk-man, a camera and a camcorder with effectively infinite film, a personal navigator... You get the idea, the list goes on. 80s me would have thought this was impossible, even if I am a bit disappointed about the flying car and hoverboard situation.

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.

Burning a CD while using your computer for something else in the mean time.

The mortality of my parents. My mind is often stuck in the future of what ifs; but this is an inevitable event that will come sooner or later and it terrifies me. I do my best to cherish the time I'm fortunate to have with them while channeling energy into my own kids. I know it's the natural cycle of things, but still... Life is hard man.

I was laughed at on the playground when I got the idea for wireless charging back in the 90s.

Not to steal the other comment but yeah a swiss army knife of a device that pays for things, browses the internet without running up the phone bill (and I can browse AND talk on the phone at the same time), has games and music, is a flashlight, etc.

But most importantly a name change. I thought it was impossible or extremely hard but it wasn't. Just write, pay $65, pay $12, send the documents to wherever, and that's it.

Phones doing a good chunk of what computers can

Telling the "computer" to do a thing and it just does. AI has it's upsides and saves me so much time and energy

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.

Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.

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.

Being single

A battery powered table saw.

Absolutely not a thing in the 1980's, in stock now at your local Lowe's.

Protein folding

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!

Nuclear War.

I though leaders were cool headed and rational, that they would never destroy the world.

Then I learned about Cuban Missile Crisis with Vasily Arkhipov, and the radar false alarm invident with Stanislav Petrov, amongst many more "close call" incidents. Our world almost died.

I mean like: If the many-worlds theory is true, there are probably some universes where WW3 happend and most of life is dead. Probably every 9 out of 10 universes, we died. We are alive because of luck. (I mean, we wont exist to be able to perceive a dead universe anyways).

But that can happen again. Its not over.

The "Doomsday Clock" is a prediction by scientists of existential risk to humanity, and these scientists are predicting an even more tense doomsday risk than ever before, even more so than the height of the Cold War.

(I actually had a dream/nightmare of see a nuke go off outside my window. Maybe its a vision of another timeline, or the future... 🤷‍♂️)