Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tomjen3 1712 days ago
Mars exploration. I don't know why, but i get all emotional and ureasonably excited about it.

AR. VR is cool and all, and I was blown away the first time I tested it, but the ability to project information into the real world, to create reality 2.0 (a term I am sure I will regret), is just well, magical.

From everyday HUDs to being able to put a fake fire place into your home, AR would be both cool and useful.

At a lower level, Docker is pretty cool and having practical ARM laptops is fantastic (even if only Apple have great ones right now).

It is easy to all doom and gloomy, but we tend to forget that we are living in a world so full of magic. We have access to the greatest library in the world[0], millions upon millions of songs in excellent quality, the most complete encyclopedia of all time and an excellent search engine to tie them all together.

We have free video calls of unlimited duration around the world, we have GPS and can navigate from any one point to any other on Earth.

As long as I am lost in a place with cellphone access I can hold down a button and tell Siri to find a way home (or to any other place).

And while we are talking about this: we have completely changed the face of the planet, throwing out night it self with artificial light. I was born in 1987, we had street lights, but flash lights was a special item that you had to bring and they weren't that bright and didn't last that long. Since LEDs became a thing, they became smaller, brighter and lasted forever. These days they are a built in thing in phones that we don't even think about.

Anyway, we have so much to be excited about if we just look around, but we don't because we take everything for granted.

[0]: what scholar of yore had access to a library with a million books? I know of none. Today anybody who can access library genesis has access to over 6.6 million books.