A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
Crypto whatever (coin, token, nft)
Social media
Internet as a whole (you can always dig a hole further down)
"You are not a worker, you are an entrepreneurial partner!" Type of corporate bullshit
Electric vehicles (mostly due to faulty batteries, but also because they don't fix the problem of shitty car focused city design)
Even in a future where we fix car dependency, electric vehicles will still exist as busses, trains, emergency vehicles, ebikes etc.
EVs are fine, but there will be a wake up call when the cheap, Chinese BMSes on them start failing.
I think a lot of the therapy speak we use in casual conversation is going to be embarrassing in hindsight. A lot of it is already verifiably inaccurate, but even the stuff based on real psychology can potentially be disproven as understanding and research methods improve. And people will quietly cringe remembering how they used junk science to justify being a dick in 2024.
I have memories of different therapy words that my divorced parent and others used to disparage their exes in the 1990s. It's an awful circle. Nobody can just have normal conflict.
AI programming. I feel like it will get to the point where AI will start writing code that works but nobody can understand or maintain including AI.
If you are able to explain the requirements to an AI so fully that the AI can do it correctly it would have taken shorter time to program by yourself.
AI powered code completion is another story though and I'm looking forward to it.
I feel like it will get to the point where AI will start writing code that works but nobody can understand or maintain including AI
Already there, and have been for awhile. In my work we often don't understand how the AI itself works. We independently test for accuracy. Then we begin trusting results without verification. But, at no time do we really understand the logic of how the AI gets from input to output.
If you are able to explain the requirements to an AI so fully that the AI can do it correctly it would have taken shorter time to program by yourself.
This makes sense for a one-time job. But, it doesn't make sense when there's a hundred jobs with only minor differences. For example, the AI writes a hundred AI's. We kill all but the three to five best models.
The 2020s iteration of Twitter with Space Karen at the helm, and the sharp rise in antivax beliefs with the advent of the COVID vaccine. It's quite amazing to me how people that even get every other routine vaccine have completely false beliefs about it and don't get that one. Weaponized disinformation is a terrible thing.
My coworker told me two weeks ago that she was not getting any more COVID vaccines "because they're pushing it on us", and yet went and told Public Health that she has multiple sex partners so she could get the monkeypox vaccine. My head is spun over that.
I was gonna say superhero movies but that's more a thing of the 2020s.
Regardless, i think the current phase of Hollywood won't go down in history, all these remakes being unceremoniously shoved into streaming services to be forgotten forever will leave a black hole where 2020's culture should be.
Trump definitely will.
He is a symbol for a large part of America where people will look at and wonder '...why?' even if they understood. Trump is just a symbol of everything wrong with America contained.
Like a sort of Lite™-Hitler edition? With less mass-killing (ignoring the middle east thing for now in regards to the US) and same railing up the voters
More than 0 people being anti-mask, anti-vaccine, covid deniers, or covid minimizers.
Turns out people don't even need a selfish reason to stab their neighbor in the back, they'll do it just for kicks, and then stab themselves in the face for no benefit whatsoever.
Trump/MAGA
eighty years later, in Germany is still trying to live down their shame
eighty years later, in Germany is still trying to live down their shame
Yet, it seems many Germans are prepared to go down that same road with the AfD.
:|
well except all the Nazis in Germany that were brought directly back into:
but other than all of that though!
(And that's not even mentioning the Nazis and collaborators which made up the origins of Radio Free Europe/Liberty, the "Victims of Communism Foundation" which grew out of the fascist-filled anti-Soviet "Captive Nations Lobby" headed by OUN-B Nazis from Ukraine, and all the Operation Aerodynamic, Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise, Operation Beladonna, Operation Lynx, etc etc.)
uhh, most of germany yeah.
Maybe. The US would have to first begin to feel actual shame about colonization and slavery though, which hasn't really begun in earnest.
I don't know if the US has the capacity for feeling the weight of its true guilt.
Pretty much everything.
I think climate denial will look pretty funny in hindsight after agriculture has broadly collapsed leading to mass famines, and a bunch of coastal cities are several meters under toxified saltwater.
Like, that thing I just described is the optimistic scenario, where humanity/society survives despite things turning way shittier. It could be much worse.
That is not accurate, and doomerism only helps those who want us too demoralized to put up a fight. If you want to be part of the solution to climate change, I recommend doing some reading on what the range of projections and outcomes actually look like.
That's really not even close to the optimistic scenario. It's arguably not even in the pessimistic scenario if you're not just in the "make stuff up club."
We're talking at most half a meter of rise by 2050, at most 2 meters by 2100, at most 4 meters by 2150. The intermediate projection is a third of a meter by 2050. The optimistic projection (which we're not going to hit) is 3/20th of a meter.
Climate change is real. The risk of famine is real. The risk of global conflict is real. The risk of trying storms is real. However, "doomsday everybody dies" is not really on any serious projections. The worst case is "a lot of people in a lot of poor nations die and rich nations have more wars and more immigration."
3/20th of a metre is a wild measurement to read.
That is someone applying imperial system logic to the metric system. No one in their right mind uses fractions to describe 15cm.
Henceforth we shall have the imperial metric system, where everything is based on the metric system but is presented as if it were imperial’s
Yeah - really confusing. I worked it out as (c.) 6 inches and then further confused myself as to why I was thinking inches from metres. Wild. Luckily I’ve lived with both metric and imperial and am apparently bilingual.
Probably low-hanging fruit here, but Cybertrucks
Hate to break it to you, but nostalgia will probably make them cool. Nostalgia is the rosiest of tints.
Ugh you're probably right, it's going to be our generation's DMC DeLorean. The vehicle itself will age poorly, but slap it in a BTTF reboot in five years and it'll fit right in
I feel like there's been a trend of people switching from alcohol to cannabis as its become more widely accepted but I know a lot of people who have ended up taking it to excess as well. The idea of being addicted to it still really doesn't come up often and looking back that might be viewed as problematic.
I'm not against people using it or anything but I do feel bad for the people who have gotten to the point where they need to smoke to feel like themselves.
People don’t think pot is addictive because it’s not chemically addictive, like nicotine or alcohol are. Those things actually change your body chemistry, and your system becomes reliant on them.
Pot doesn’t do that, but it can definitely be psychologically addictive . Virtually anything can be psychologically addictive, like video games or watching TV. If you feel the need to take a few bong hits every hour of every day, or if your desire to get high interferes with your responsibilities, then yeah, you’re probably psychologically addicted. Get help.
Getting wasted every once in a while is probably okay, though. People need to make sure they’re not like one of those idiots I knew in college, who insisted they drove better when high. They didn’t, and neither does anyone else.
100% agree!
As an addition to this I firmly believe medical marijuana is a phase.
Now I've made people angry here's the nuance.
CBD/THC combinations certainly have a role in some patients with chronic pain, especially where it's use can avoid or reduce the use of opioids.
There are clear specific uses such as intractable epilepsy where it is clearly the best treatment. It is effective for glaucoma but there are better treatments available.
I'm highly suspicious of marijuana having any role in mental health and there are, in my opinion, no convincing studies published showing that it is useful at all despite the fact that large studies have been done and presumably file-drawed.
The idea that smoking is an appropriate delivery method for a medication when other methods are available is insane. Very few things are as bad as tobacco smoke but inhaling smoke is bad for you.
My prediction is that in 20 years we will have cannabis derivatives in capsules that fulfil the specific purposes and the idea that any doctor prescribed marijuana to smoke will seem insane to younger doctors.
there are plenty of other delivery methods. our studies in australia are using CBD oil, THC oil, or you can choose to smoke it etc if you’d like… but afaik there are specific studies around using the oils and i can’t imagine if they’re found to be as effective they’d allow smoking - for the obvious reason that smoking being bad for your health, and the less obvious reason that smoking is, by the nature of having repetitive action, addictive
CBD and THC oil has definitely been good for me. it helps me sleep far far better! 0.1ml occasionally if i’m feeling like my brain just isn’t slowing down - maybe once per week on average, sometimes 2-3x if there’s a lot of stressful things going on
At the Cancer institute they offered me CBD pills for nausea. People smoking weed is terrible, like they learned nothing from everyone on oxygen tanks after cigarette smoke destroyed their lungs
MAGA
This. Racism, bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, etc will never go away, but hopefully it will go back to being something that is shunned instead of promoted
The haircuts
Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It's such a wasteful abomination that we don't need right now.
Any sort of jokes about hoarding toilet paper or anything else ridiculous during the pandemic. I've always thought they were already cringe to begin with, but I assume that if society doesn't completely collapse before the 2030s that people will hopefully look back and call those cringe.
I don't get it, what's cringe about making a joke out of people's selfish and exaggerated behaviour?