Readit NewsI mean, all Kindle does for me is save me space. I don't have to store all those books now.
Who predicted the humble internet forum though? Or usenet before it?
The Shockwave Rider was also remarkable prescient.
Even Southern England cannot get enough wind energy from Scotland to fully utilise wind farms because transmission capacity is insufficient. I would imagine a transmission line to Norway will be even more expensive than to England.
People opting for unchallenging pseudo-relationships over messy human interaction is part of a larger trend, though. It's why you see people shopping around until they find a therapist who will tell them what they want to hear, or why you see people opt to raise dogs instead of kids.
Funnily enough, I've saved instructions for ChatGPT to always challenge my opinions with at least 2 opposing views; and never to agree with me if it seems that I'm wrong. I've also saved instructions for it to cut down on pleasantries and compliments.
Works quite well. I still have to slap it around for being too supportive / agreeing from time to time - but in general it's good at digging up opposing views and telling me when I'm wrong.
On the one hand, my youngest was just getting into gaming with friends when the first lockdown started. I will be forever grateful that he did as his social life hardly seemed to suffer and he just carried on playing online, shouting and yelling with them just as much as if he was outside at a playground.
My teenage daughters had a much harder time of it though, as neither were into gaming and lost a lot of treasured contact with friends. Both suffered poor exam results as a result and have struggled to stay in touch with friends since.
The other aspect is those babies and toddlers who grew up in lockdown with no peer interaction at all. AIUI, they are still having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction.
Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.
We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.
Worked wonderfully well.
- Walked in a different aisle at a store. My daughter started going to the store alone from she was about 7.
- Talked with neighbours without parent. Uhm. That's just weird. I'm assume she was around 4? That's when we moved here..
- Made plans with friends, yeah, from she was around 5/6 or thereabouts.
- Walked/biked w/o parent: From 6/7, to/from school, and to friends.
- Built a structure outside: She's been part of building various structures in scouts.
- Sharp knife: Since she was about 6 or 7.
And now I realize I need to wag my hands a bit back and forth with all the 6-7 stuff.
Anyhow; one of the best things we did was ensuring she joined the scouts. Creates incredibly independent kids. I've seen threads on reddit where people are wondering if it's OK to leave the 9 year old at home alone for 30 minutes, and I'm wondering what kind of lunacy that is. My daughter has been capable of walking / biking home from school since she was 6 or 7, and proceed to make her own afternoon snack before we arrive home from work. She's been baking since she was 8. Making toasts, omelets and whatnot since the same age. Scouts taught her how to use a gas burner outside when she was about 8 or 9.
I mean; come on.
I'm not so sure the Morris worm was the turning point.
Email, Usenet and IRC was great.
Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it.
Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea.
Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things.
Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too.
IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.
Am growing tired of Ubuntu though. Just not sure where I should turn. I want a .deb based system. Ubuntu is pushing snaps too heavily for my liking.