I’m actually not sure about the “one big touchscreen” idea - it’s seems likely some designer considered it, but even Star Trek TNG PADDs had more than one touch display segment.

Portable radio-type devices have been all over, portable computers as well, and networking radios autonomously together made appearances. Ditto for adding a camera to standard communications devices. I’m not really sure how much of it you need going at once to consider it a smartphone.

Like the guy in the link mentions, what people would choose to do with them and just how often was the hard thing to predict. When someone pops open a version of the internet in Heinlein it’s always to do research. It’s never cat pictures or porn or to post a random picture of themselves and what they’re doing. Usually the computer is part of your spaceship or whatever, not in your pocket, just for that reason.

And then there after things that nobody can even imagine today. Like nobody could imagine a smartphone thirty years ago.

I mean, there’s people who did, going back pretty far. Just not the exact societal impact they would have. The laws of physics have been nearly complete for many decades, so don’t expect a life of true surprises like a person born in 1870 would have experienced.

If you actually read this, OP says there’s little point going anywhere in the solar system other than Earth. There’s barren rocks right here if that’s your thing, and they even come with free oxygen, gravity and radiation shielding. The rest is about interstellar travel.

Lol, isn’t that symbolic.

Funny you asked, because Google just stopped releasing Pixel Device-Specific Code that allows Custom ROMs to be more easily built, requiring Custom ROM developers to reverse-engineer the source code, which takes a lot of time.

Crap. It was inevitable, I guess.

Its like a FPTP Election system, it’s a Duoply. You need a mainstream device for apps to work, either iOS or Android, as long as Google is just slightly more free than Apple, you still would want Android.

It’s a good description description, it’s why I’d definitely choose Android if I had to. The nice thing is that AOSP needs far less support than any third party to function, and isn’t going away overnight.

Yeah, I’m reconsidering now that someone mentioned that. I’m not going to the meets, though, they get bad reviews for exactly this reason.

It’s entirely possible. Actually I suspect Elon might get to Mars and realise it sucks, because he’s nearly alone on a barren planet and Twitter has massive lag.

After the moon, Titan is the only place here that seems worth bothering with a colony on. Hopefully we do (some variant on) sleeper ships at some point, because our sun will only last so long, but if there’s no dumb billionaires to fund it in the future we might just not bother.

Edit: That said, I wish OP made more of a distinction between cost, feasability and present mature technology. We can feasibly live without an atmosphere, but it might not be worth the cost. We can feasibly reach a few percent of lightspeed, but not with conventional rockets. (Other technologies are mentioned in the footnotes, but OP’s grasp of the alternatives seems to be lacking. Fission-electric has working prototypes, we could theoretically make ourselves smaller or more space-hardy, magnetic parachutes to slow down…)

I think the conclusion is justifiable, but the whole thing is a bit sophomoric.

I mean, we already did the moon, and probably will get back before shit gets too crazy to fund it.

It definitely is.

OP worries about being replaced “like the programmers of old”.

I’m pretty sure this is set in the future.

Regulators and geopolitics are rising against them, though. I’m way more hopeful than I was several years ago on the FOSS front.

Probably because there’s a bubble of nerds inside it that managed to survive from the “don’t be evil” days, before profit incentive inevitably won. Reddit still has their old frontend available, and I suspect it’s the same story.

It’s not an answer, but I really hate how hard this is to do on Android, including it’s FOSS versions. You can root it and do something like that then, but that undercuts the whole system design and is a terrible hack.

That’s like my main beef with the whole mobile ecosystem.

“Parking lot princesses”

It’s particularly jarring when people have them in Canada.

I mean, it can mean opposition to the US way, which is basically the old British Empire way. The polls bear this out, too - patriotism is correlated with voting left and tolerance in Canada.

It’s not judgement so much as a red flag, but those sunglasses that are like a solid cylinder wrapping around your head. They’re popular with manosphere dudebros, which is unfortunate because I actually kind of like them.

Lifted pickups that I know cost more than a modest house. It’s the same as buying a sports car, except you’re also posing as a humble working man simultaneously.

Yeah, expensive shit that looks just like normal shit is a real phenomenon, it’s not just Succession. Although that’s also dumb. Prada is for people dumb enough to buy Prada.

There’s a difference between quality and a Gucci bag made in the same factory as a 50 dollar bag the exact same way, though. Or anything like precious metals and jewels.

It’s because they’re more self-censoring in real life.

I’m sure Ned Flanders swearing seems implausible in Australia.

Oh shit, maybe I need to reconsider, as a very poor person with fancy test results.