I think that it’s interesting to look back at calls that were wrong to try to help improve future ones.

Maybe it was a tech company that you thought wouldn’t make it and did well or vice versa. Maybe a technology you thought had promise and didn’t pan out. Maybe a project that you thought would become the future but didn’t or one that you thought was going to be the next big thing and went under.

Four from me:

  • My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of lynx on a terminal. I was pretty unimpressed. Compared to gopher clients of the time, it was harder to read, the VAX/VMS build I was using crashed frequently, and was harder to navigate around. I wasn’t convinced that it was going to go anywhere. The Web has obviously done rather well since then.

  • In the late 1990s, Apple was in a pretty dire state, and a number of people, including myself, didn’t think that they likely had much of a future. Apple turned things around and became the largest company in the world by market capitalization for some time, and remains quite healthy.

  • When I first ran into it, I was skeptical that Wikipedia would manage to stave off spam and parties with an agenda sufficiently to remain useful as it became larger. I think that it’s safe to say that Wikipedia has been a great success.

  • After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering youtube-dl much less useful, the yt-dlp project came to the fore, which worked around this with parallel downloads. I thought that it was very likely that YouTube wouldn’t tolerate this — it seems to me to have all the drawbacks of youtube-dl from their standpoint, plus maybe more, and shouldn’t be too hard to detect. But at least so far, they haven’t throttled or blocked it.

Anyone else have some of their own that they’d like to share?

  • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Of all things, the war in Ukraine will probably be the thing that sets the stage for what our drone-filled future might look like. Not something I would’ve predicted 5 years ago!

    This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can’t be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.

    This is what present day warfare looks like now, its all flying buzzing drones attacking people and other drones. And what happens after the peace treaties are signed? A ton of that engineering and tooling for making this tech will get refocused into consumer and commercial products.

    Autonomous tractors are already commercial products, reducing the number of people needed to complete a task on a farm. Many new non-autonomous tractors these days already have whats effectively cruise control on steroids, where the tractor will follow a predetermined path with the driver just sitting in the cab to monitor and take over if anything happens. And of course at home the robot vacuum cleaners are available from many brands. I’ve even seen one of those floor mopping machines adapted to run autonomously at my local Menards (which shocked me as I live in a pretty small town with about as low of a cost of living as it gets really) and while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray. I saw a security robot making the rounds at a convention center in Florida while on a business trip. A Coworker told me about a robot working at a hotel he stayed at in San Francisco which would transport ordered/requested items to guests’ rooms. And there’s those dog sized food delivery robots in many cities. The more I think about it, wheeled and legged robots are probably what we will see a lot more of, since many already do exist in real commercial applications, and the legal, logistical and ethical barriers to their integration into our lives is much lower than flying robots.