I understand. Nobody* will care.

People already have traded privacy and a comprehensive personality profile for silly streams of video, photos and text on social media for the past 20 years. Imagine what happens, when you get something immensely useful out of it.

Today, nobody will work with you, if you are unable to manage E-Mail. In the future, nobody will work with you, if you can't properly use the time information dimension that this technology enables. You will simply look demented by comparison.

To anyone who thinks this sounds far fetched, check back in a couple of years. I can only think of one alternative future, in which things are not headed in this generally Orwellian direction, and the alternative may be even worse (complete or nearly-complete social collapse)

I think, roughly, having good access to information is a super power (good being a mix of mostly: quick, simple, easy, accurate, free). My personal information is most valuable to me, so having access to that is specially powerful.

The only way to make that happen is to store that information somewhere. The best way to do anything, that I just want the benefits of, is automatically.

And now we are here. It feels monstrous but, to me, the above still stands. How to connect the dots to get to a place that feels good, I do not know. I would not be shocked if it turned out to be mostly about adjusting ourselves to it over time.

But I am almost 100% positive we will all* want this super power, in some much better and much more complete form, in our future lives. And not being able to have it will feel absolutely silly, from there on out forever.

For a moment my perception of Microsoft was that it has become a cool company (github acquisition, Linux Sub-sytem). I was impressed by how Satya Nadella turned the company around (at least in terms of image).

Between Recall and the mandatory account login to install Windows 10 I am progressively reverting to how I felt about them.

I agree that the original article should be linked here, not my summary.

I take offense to the clickbait accusation. This post wasn't intended to be shared elsewhere, it was a bookmark on my personal website. I have 7,000 more of those here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=&type=blogmark

Forgot the PhD!

This misses a lot of nuance. The decisions are yes/no on regret and an extremely short reason. These aren't going to help others make reasoned decisions about things. You can't really help with that anyway, because you're just setting someone up to write in the future "I wanted X but I read about someone else who regretted it. But now I regret not doing it because I'm not them."

For example, I once quit my salaried job to work as a contractor for a start-up, making up the money shortfall with other contract work. I regretted it quite quickly because my calculations on making up that money were off the mark, and my wife started to get pissed off about it. But it led through an interesting experience and cumulated in finding a job that has been so good to me and has paid so much more. So I think it was the best path I could have taken, and I shouldn't regret it at all, it has changed our family life. However, I still have regret because my wife doesn't see the causal relationship between my mistake and 9 months later having that opportunity, so it was a source of tension between us for much longer.

I could write similar stories about many things, like going to uni, having kids, moving country. The experience, the aftermath, and the effects much further down the line.

I'd add inverse options. E.g. I decided to not buy a house and now I'm regretting it. The reason is rent was cheap in my area. Now it's ~3x the past bank interest. I was creditworthy at all times but chose to avoid unnecessary expenses, lol.

RTO - return to office