agent008t

A different kind of 'Point & Click', but Her Story was rather enjoyable.

But 'living to 130' is an option, not an obligation. You can always leave sooner if you want.

Is OMAD also a good idea if you struggle to maintain/gain weight even with 3 meals a day? Is it consistent with making progress in sports, i.e. getting stronger/faster/increasing endurance? Is it consistent with outdoor activities like walking/hiking ~25km/day?

Also Policenauts and Snatcher. Amazing games by Kojima.

The Ford Focus cars from back then seem amazingly robust and reliable.

Ironically, happiness and success often don't go together.

Someone who is happy has no need of working towards success (defined conventionally, as getting close to the top of the wealth/career/peer ranking). It is often unhappiness that drives people towards success. And then, due to hedonic adaptation, they find they are not necessarily much happier, there is always someone ahead of them on some metric so there is always more success to strive for to alleviate unhappiness.

It only really works when what you call success comes as a byproduct of something else, not as a goal, of an activity that makes one happy regardless of peer ranking or any other such 'success' metric. Feynman comes to mind, who seemed to be mostly driven by curiosity and the joy of finding out how things work. In fact, according to his own writings (or my interpretation of them), he was most unproductive and miserable when he was trying to be 'successful'.

Or that in the current era we have elevated appearance way above where it should be, instead of judging people by what they say and do.

Radio, television, and finally internet and smartphones made things progressively worse in this regard.

No such thing as 'wasting' life. It doesn't really matter what you do - the core moment-to-moment existence if the same for everyone, what differs is just what you sense moment-to-moment (touch, smell etc., but more importantly also mental impressions like emotional states and various other mental images like memories). In fact, all of existence has always been just here in this moment; this moment is all that has ever been and will ever be. So 'have been wasting most of my life' is just a mental construct, and not a very useful one at that.

But do you want to be spending so much time on your phone?

To me, buying an expensive phone is somewhat like buying an expensive tobacco pipe. It will just encourage you to use it more. When in fact, most of the 'use' is worse than useless.

$180 is about how much a phone should cost, and even that is too much what with forced (completely unjustified) obsolescence. $450 for a 'budget' phone is madness. $1000+ for a flagship is insanity. Unless you have a specific, legitimate need for it - most people don't.

Exactly. Where are the users? What are the demographics? What places are seeing inflows/outflows of users? IRC, newsgroups, Discord, blogs, HN? Is it true that small message boards are as popular today as in 2005, it's just that the internet overall is bigger so they have a smaller share? Personally it absolutely does not feel true.

Thanks, that's actually rather inspiring.

The time of a changing world order is usually a time of war. I am not sure why you think it would lead to a more peaceful world.

Furthermore, I am not sure a world dominated by China would be more free and peaceful than a US-dominated world order.

I would also disagree with you assertion that the troubles around the world are due to US efforts to contain China. China could have easily stopped Russian aggression in Ukraine, but chose not to. China could have left Hong Kong with its autonomy, but did not. Had it made different decisions on those two issues, it could have gained tremendous soft power in the West, leading to pressure on Western governments for friendlier relations, peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue, and greater role in world affairs. As is, China has demonstrated that a world dominated by China would not be a nice one, and left the West with no choice but to resist its growth.

Now, I do realize that this view may be naïve, and that the US would have been resisting the rise of China regardless, leading to conflicts. Unfortunately, there is not an international mechanism for peaceful transition of power.

The two scenarios are not comparable. For example, they would result in very different social environments, different access to education, employment etc.

100 years or more is the key here. Post-WW2, things were very good in the US, and getting better in Europe. Now the future does not look so optimistic for the US or Europe.

But sure, it could be far worse.

Yet it used to be possible to buy a house and support a family with children on a single income, and now you would struggle to do it on two incomes. That does not sound like a big success for the economy to me.

Perhaps a reason to be optimistic is that this trend will reverse, but it is hard to see a road to that. In the medium term, we are looking at a large population of retirees to be supported by a dwindling working population, that are also faced with servicing a massive debt that the older generation accumulated; at the same time faced by a rising challenger nation. That sounds like it could be dreadful, actually.

The collapse of the Roman Empire lasted for a few hundred years. Imagine living during those times. It is not inconceivable that we are living through that right now.

It will make things worse for a lot more people though, just like the likes of 'dating apps' and pornography did. I wouldn't be optimistic about that; the only hope is that we develop a culture to regard it as we now regard smoking, and try to revive normal human contact.

I don't hang out with a lot of teenagers, but what I see of them paints a sorry picture. Rampant mental health issues, many infants I see glued to junk on iPads that would make children's TV of the 90s the height of intellectualism, etc.

Do you really think there are reasons to be optimistic about the new generations? What little of them there will be, given the drops in fertility rates.

That has been my tactic too. Basically, think the XXs were great? Well, you have all the technology to emulate that in your own life - just need to find a few people that would be on board with you. E.g. think that social media is making life miserable? Find your social circle that are technology minimalists, only call each other on the landline (or equivalent) and actually knock on each others' doors instead of texting when they want to talk, and think that taking selfies should not be normalized.

True, but one could also easily find someone with an optimistic take. Tons of utopian science fiction from the 60s, say. Not so much today. That's why I made this thread.

If you were an optimistic science fiction writer, any ways in which this may change ordinary lives for the better?

14/18. Yes, a lot of the world has improved a lot from a very low base. That does not infuse me with optimism, though, particularly for Europe and the US.

2 and 4 are things that have already happened, to a large extent. Hard to see a source of optimism for the future there though. 1 is mostly about avoiding disaster, it seems universally acknowledged that overall we will need to consume less energy even if we transition from fossil fuels, which ultimately means lower standard of living.

Collaboration among people around the world is good, but we seem to be on trend to enter a more fractured, cold-war-iron-curtain kind of world.

Arguably, housing is the biggest and most important expense in one's life, and that has become a lot less affordable.

First and last ones seem to be mostly about avoiding disaster, rather than making tomorrow better. The other points are good, but interesting how they involved "collapse of society" as potential caveats - not inspiring great optimism!

What I see is that the most capable people I know are working on making ads more efficient, one of the most visible latest innovations is people delivering food on bicycles, and don't even get me started about crypto.

So that's what I'm asking - what is there to be optimistic about? Say, in the 1950s you could be optimistic about all the home automation tech coming out, like dishwashers, washing machines, cars etc. getting better and more affordable. I find it hard to get excited about a future of startups where for a small subscription fee they send you some rubbish every month to exploit your dopamine reaction to novelty and surprise. A lot of 'innovation' seems to actually make our lives worse lately, and it seems like a trend that will continue.

The fact that 'they' can deactivate anything in an item you own is dystopian in its own right. In general, items need to be usable even after their manufacturer goes out of business and stops supporting them, which seems to be less and less often the case.

People used to laugh at Stallman, but increasingly it seems like he was actually a prophet of what's to come.

Agree on crowdfunding, but a side-effect of that has been fragmentation of culture. That means that pop culture has had to increasingly pander to the lowest common denominator and get a lot worse: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31024896

On user-generated content, I also think things have been getting a lot worse since the 2000s. What you refer to as the small forums on the fringes of the internet used to be its motor. Now you have big corporate platforms, that act more like a hive-mind, with no real online communities and no individual voices heard. There has been more centralisation, not democratization in this regard. Add to that the commercialization of it all - now you never know if something you read is an astroturfing campaign, a sponsored 'influencer', someone out to build a following and make money, or true authentic hobbyist content. Back then it was almost all the latter.

Back in the 90s we were not glued to smartphones with personalized ads and influencers selling us crap. Yes, we had ads on TV, but that is not nearly as bad, and there is only so much of TV you can watch. There was more connection and more humanity, and 'corporations' had far, far less power than today.

In any case - you're just describing what has happened. What is the vision or the bright future that we go to from here?

Overall, yes, the median person on the planet is materially better off. But that is the past, and was in many ways due to a great long period of relative peace and globalisation. The 50s and 60s had great optimism about new scientific advancements making life better for the next generations. Nuclear, space, all kinds of automation, television. The late 80s and early 90s had great optimism about the end of the cold war, the world coming together, end of history. Late 90s had great optimism about the internet bringing people together and massively boosting productivity, with robots automating a lot of boring manual tasks.

But what to be optimistic about now? Do you really have a positive, optimistic vision of US 2050 or Europe 2050? What is it? What kind of a world are we actually building and going towards?

1. I realize this is a narrow/selfish view, but if you are European or American, does it really still apply? Have things really been improving much in this regard there since the 90s/2010s? Why is the future here going to be brighter for Europe/America in this regard? I do realize I am moving the goalposts here a bit.

2. Again, the internet has been around for some time, and it was arguably better 10-15 years ago. Old message boards and old YouTube are certainly better than modern Twitter, TikTok, instagram 'influencers'. Yes, there was plenty of rubbish on the internet back then too, but at least we knew it was rubbish - now it is mainstream culture.

3. Logging off the news will not switch off the big risk that will affect all of us, like the stuff I outlined in the original post. But yes, at least it will help with worrying about things outside your control. Still, that is kind of saying "yes, there are few reasons to be optimistic, the world is getting worse - find ways of dealing with it".