Satire pokes fun at what is happening right now; it's not predicting anything. Just like 1984 warned of the dangers of totalitarianism that was already happening, Idiocracy was about current U.S. culture at the time. It wouldn't have been funny if our culture weren't already like that 20 years ago.
The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.
This idea has been around as long as the web, but you can't get momentum behind it.
A much better idea was a .kids domain where the content was vetted, and you could allow-list your child's device to that. Much easier than trying to migrate everyone over to specific TLDs, especially when that ship has sailed already. But that never got traction either.
Edit to add: I used to work on "family safety" software. Blocking bad content doesn't work - it's too difficult of a problem. Walled gardens do work, however. The fact that there's not a push for the equivalent of an Apple App Store for kids is probably evidence of ulterior motives on behalf of regulators.
I haven't tried this because I haven't played Magic in over 20 years, but I always thought it would be more fun if you had two draw decks where the second was only allowed to include basic lands.
Then in the draw phase you could choose which deck to draw from, eliminating the mana flood/drought possibility that ruins games.
Maybe some additional rules to limit how many lands you're allowed to draw in the initial draw to one or two, I dunno.
The value prop is the dissolution of your own ego.
We experience reality filtered through our senses and our own concept of "self," which is an incredibly limited view of the world. Imagine being able to see/experience a less filtered version of reality, if only for a short period of time.
Or imagine expanding the frequencies of visible light you can see. That alone could certainly be a catalyst to change your perspective on many things.
It's not so much "losing control" as it is "losing unconscious bias." Loss of control is not the goal.
It's also one of those things that you have to experience to understand, and even then, sober you won't completely understand.
But done right, these experiences can be incredibly important to people. If it's not for you, fine, but it's funny how many people with zero experience with these substances think there can't be anything worthwhile there.
It's interesting how everything is a balance abd experience and mastery count for a lot, but nobody acknowledges this in blog posts.
There is an appropriate amount of architecture and design that should go into systems. One aspect of that is how much effort you put into scalable design. Building and maintaining scalable systems isn't free, so the "right amount" is pretty much somewhere between "none" and "we are AWS."
Knowing when adding complexity is worth doing takes experience, humility, and maturity, the exact qualities that are sorely lacking in many egomaniac software developers.
It's why we get ridiculous fads and pendulum swings where people get fed up with bad design and then go do the opposite thing, having learned nothing.
Imagine a star trek transporter was a real thing. In that show, I think the common explanation was that the transporter didn't send you places, but merely created a copy of you somewhere else and destroyed the original.
Now imagine if it were possible to instantly and cheaply travel to Paris this way. Many people would likely be just fine with doing this.
Now imagine that one day, the transporter doesn't destroy the original you and now two copies of you exist. From that moment on, the individual experiences diverge but each copy believes it's the original.
If ten days after that a technician came and said "ok, time to disintegrate you, don't worry, your copy in Paris is A-OK" I think that most people wouldn't agree to be disintegrated just because another mostly identical consciousness is alive.
And yet, if it were to happen flawlessly and instantaneously, likely that same existential fear doesn't exist. Most people think the star trek transporter is pretty cool.
But why? We have to realize that our consciousness is really an evolutionary trick that's expedient for our continued survival. The idea that the survival of my own ego and continuous conscious experience is pretty much the basest mechanism I have that makes me value staying alive.
But there's a paradox in the case of my exact copy. Logically, I shouldn't care of the star trek transporter works instantaneously or not. Let's say that it makes a copy that exists for twenty minutes before disintegrating me, but I have no way of knowing that and instead just sit in a room bored for twenty minutes until disintegration. Functionally that's a nearly identical experience to instant transport, but also seems a lot more like the broken transporter scenario.
But let's say this is the future of travel and everyone accepts the fact that my continued conscious experience is what's really important, so I'm willing to be disintegrated painlessly as long as a copy of me exists somewhere else in the universe.
That's not too big a leap to make, but it seems strange, right? Why am I not then just fine being disintegrated as long as any consciousness continues to exist?
My answer to that question is that it's an evolutionary advantage to want to live, therefore we want to live. A bit of circular reasoning. It's also our species' biggest unquestioned assumption too - that consciousness and self-awareness is better than the alternative. But "better" might just be "important to the survival of the human species."
Because it's a one-time cost and you can cheaply throw more CPU power at the problem, or just wait and then you're done.
If you're doing this at such a scale that encoding speed matters (like if you're Instagram) the major concern would likely be cost, which you're going to save in bandwidth every time an image is viewed.
Having had these experiences, the god I saw and became one with was a being with a childlike sense of wonder at the universe it had accidentally created.
More of a "whoops, woah cool" than a "let there be light"
Very much unlike of the Christian conception of God.
I'm not describing this well, because I can't describe it well. But I can't imagine anyone experiencing something similar would be a jerk about it. See the universe unfiltered though the mind's perception and it just...is. Timeless and meaningless.
This is so true, at least from my late 70's perspective. Star Wars didn't seem so much like fantasy when I saw it in the theater - it was more like the inevitable conclusion of where tech was going, and probably in my lifetime we'd be a spacefaring species.
Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids.
Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since.
The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.
I used to have this problem with our triage call center in India. I'm in the U.S. It was like pulling teeth trying to get to the point. Most annoying were the delays between pleasantries... You've interrupted what I was doing three times and then ghosted.
Or do away with performance reviews entirely. In my entire career I've never once seen a review cycle that was a net positive, and more often than not they cause the best performers who normally don't care about such things to become disgruntled and leave.
As a manager they create perverse incentives especially if you have a high performing team (which you want to have) that all deserves a promotion but a limited budget. The incentive is to keep that low performer around so you have the budget to promote the others.
It's a systematized way for management to shoot itself in the foot. But for whatever reason we think something must be wrong if we're not giving and getting report cards at the end of the year. Waste of time and counter-productive.
It's not better. It's mostly Java-style OO masturbation that hides the fact that you're using global variables and singletons everywhere.
Also a way to pretend you're unit testing everything when your code is spaghetti and includes "write to the database" intertwined with business logic instead of as a separate, composable step in a pipeline.
The amount of braindead bullshit introduced by the use of DI frameworks so that people can write insanely shitty imperative code while under the illusion they're following "best practices" is ridiculous. Most of them time they're completely reinventing language features that are already there that are provably bad ideas.
Don't get me wrong, DI has its place, but for whatever reason it's like heroin to the kind of people that like to feel clever and fall in love with complexity for its own sake.
You know how Linus hates C++ not because of C++ but because of the kind of developer that loves C++? That.
Also, Windows is an excellent way to learn systems programming because the documentation and tooling is so good and things hardly ever change.
There is a wealth of documentation on MSDN for writing device drivers and such. And great tools for remote debugging so you can set up a VM in hyper-v and step through the code from the host system.
Do make sure if you're analyzing malware you do it in a VM on a machine you don't care about having to wipe, and isolate it from the rest of your network.