Coding in C++ will be a lot of fun via voice I’m sure…
Oh wait nobody is going to write code anymore, it’s all just vibes and I’ll have no more career.
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Still mostly works. For some reason I hit a wall with Hannah Gadsby: Arts Clown…
Also there doesn’t seem to be a podcast for this:
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They are. They just get it all wrong. You know, just like with the Torment Nexus.
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I think part of the reason is that the easier targets have already been hit. Communicators? Hypospray? Universal translator? Sophisticated scanners? Androids (minus the sentience)? We have all of those things now, to varying degrees. We could even stretch it a bit and claim 3D printers are a very primitive precursor to replicators and tasers are able to stun people like a phaser.
So that leaves the really difficult stuff that they invented more for plot convenience rather than as a natural extension of where they saw real life technology headed- things like the transporters, force fields/shields and warp drive. Somebody is probably working on that stuff somewhere, but it’s a lot less accessible to anyone without advanced science degrees and success is likely to be the result of gradual discoveries over decades or even centuries, so the people working on it (and what they were inspired by) are practically invisible, as part of that long, grueling chain of progress (assuming those technologies don’t turn out to be literally impossible for some reason).
In other words, the only Star Trek-inspired invention we’re likely to see within our lifetimes that doesn’t already exist is the Agonizer. 
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We have hypospray? Why do people keep giving needles then?
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I’m not a medical professional, but from what I understand it’s mostly used for injecting large numbers of people quickly, when fiddling with and disposing of massive numbers of individual needles would be difficult. It’s also more like a paint gun than a compact handheld device.
ETA: More info here: Jet injector - Wikipedia
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Could be worse - how much fun will Perl be, I wonder?
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That punch card along with the discussion of coding via voice reminds me of Batman’s most ingenious escape, where he and Robin survived passing through a giant piano-roll-punching machine by singing the exact notes needed such that it punched out their outlines in the sheet music while missing their bodies.
So you never know, voice-based coding could save your life!
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I did not know that Liberace was a Batman villain and this world just got a tiny bit weirder and more wonderful.
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Yeah, sometimes, but mostly, it’s just too woke.
Also, can I say that, joking aside, a key aspect of Star Trek wasn’t just the technology, but the humanity of the show’s premise. That we can have a well-ordered society, built by strong public institutions, technology and gadgets, but they aren’t the point. The point is that everyone is given the tools for a good life and the freedom to pursue that good life, without the oppressive control by for-profit corporations. It undermines the libertarian argument by having such a strong focus on people being the center of everything, with technology as our servants. It’s deeply anti-racist in it’s presentation, and it’s hard to dismiss, because you have people from all over the planet (and all over the federation) working and playing together quite happily. The messaging on that front is so strong, that you can’t miss it. Say what you will about Roddenberry, he wanted to make sure that the audience got it. Because it’s not technology for it’s own sake, but technology in the service of human freedom, the techdudebros are not as interested in it.
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Even better: he was two Batman Villains. (Chandell and his twin brother, Harry.)
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I know I’m a bitter GenX person, so maybe this is me entering my yelling at clouds stage of my life, but I just spent a large part of my morning writing PowerShell and batch scripts to take care of some of our network tasks for our new computers. They can claim DOS is no more, but a quick peek under the hood disproves that. (“That’s not DOS, that’s Cmd!” Right. Keep saying that sport, maybe you’ll start to believe it yourself.)
Voice interaction will certainly improve and that’s good, but claiming keyboards are going to go away? That’ll be as likely as the paperless office that’s just around the corner. I love that this is in PC Gamer which is a nice recursive rebuttal to why this just isn’t going to happen.
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Apparently EBCDIC and other encodings intended to be used with punched cards had a design constraint: a single character couldn’t have too many binary 1s… so that the cards wouldn’t fall apart.
Some clever engineer today might wonder why punch cards didn’t just use a binary encoding—after all, with 12 rows, you could encode over 4000 characters. The Hollerith code was used instead because it ensured that no more than three holes ever appeared in a single column. This preserved the structural integrity of the card. A binary encoding would have entailed so many holes that the card would have fallen apart.
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Our whole generation…
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