But quantum debugging is a bitch...

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I'm guessing quantum debugging won't be any harder for them than current debugging is for us.

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that's why i've been putting off learning programming theory. i can knock out some python here and there, but the inner workings of a microprocessor are still mysteriously magical to me.

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With all the failed promises of flying cars and sky cities I grew up with for the last 20 years its nice to see some stuff that actually seems like science fiction becoming reality.

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The last 20 years or so brought improvements in many different fields but for the most part it was just an extension of technology that was around for those 20 years. The internet evolved from RBS systems to facebook but it was still just an evolution. Same with cars, computers, etc. The closest thing (IMO) that we got was they kinda modeled flip phones after ST communicators (which even cellphone technology, while getting smaller and cheaper was still just steps). Now there are actual revolutions. Completely changing how computers work like this. Completely changing the tools we use to perceive reality.

It just seemed like (again, to me) while the last 20 years brought improvements its only been the last 5 (or maybe even 2 or 3) that have brought actual revolutions which to me seem like the "future".

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yep. what is the ipod but a futuristic walkman? what is my HDTV... besides just being a better TV? and incrementally better at that - from the time TV came out until what, 10 years ago, it was all 240x320. and it took us 60 years to get that up to 1900 x 1080? and still 720 is far from being ubiquitous? so really what we see is that it took us 60 years to make our TVs ~2.5x more detailed.

i think what happened is there were all these leaps and bounds in the early 20th century that drew an overly optimistic projected curve of progress. people had lives that went from horses and steam trains to the model T and television, human flight. If you were born in 1890, and managed to live until 1970, you saw it all, from horses to walking on the fucking moon, in a mere 80 years time. you would HAVE to imagine that in another 40 after that we'd be way ahead of where we are now.

so no flying cars, no civilian space flight, no holographic projectors, no full immersion virtual reality, no auto-dry jacket or self-lacing nikes. no new energy sources really. no fundamentally new, unprecedented technologies.

there're some exceptions, but they're highly singular - for example i believe someone achieved a faster than light transmission of data utilizing quantum entanglement. we've done single particle teleportation. quantum computing is making some moves. materials science has made some major improvements as well. but all in all, it's just been getting cheaper - that's the real profit of this whole last half century, is that it's gotten cheaper.

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