Valid point, the Star Trek universe is not without its dark history and calamitous events, still the Federation, for all its flaws, its evil admiral problem, and Section 31, even shortly after the atomic crisis, it’s still a society that has solved poverty and homelessness on their own planets and eliminated most medical annoyances, like the common cold and headaches.

And even the Ferengi the cartoonish caricatures of unrestricted capitalism are quaint compared to the horrors that capitalism of the real world present day.

We have all kinds of branding on socks about all the SpEcIaL sWeAt WiCkInG tEcHnOlOgY for maximum sweat wickage, and yet companies can’t make a sock that lasts as long as socks from 50 years ago. What the fuck are companies spending all their research on to make these apparently incredible socks that barely last a year or 2 before they wear themselves thin? And then because they’re these super proprietary blends of synthetic materials, any repair job is going to be a pain in the ass to make even as good of a repair as decent quality cotton socks from 50 years ago.

Capitalism promised us better technology, cheaper products and more efficient use of our time and energy, and yet we went from fully metal constructed refrigerators that used to last multiple decades of borderline abuse to cheap pieces of plastic that break and shut fown if you use the wrong drm controlled water filter and we can’t even fix it ourselves any more because the corporations owned by capitalists don’t sell replacement parts to the public, don’t have schematics freely available, and purposefully design their stuff to break even worse if you do try to repair it.

The future I want and we used to be promised looks like the Jetsons or Star Trek, where everything menial is automated away, I have time to pursue what actually interests me, and I get to chose my own path in life. The future we got was Cyberpunk 2077 without the neon aesthetic and socks that wear out from standard use in the span of a year because nothing is built to last any more.

And it’s not even a good search engine either. It just spits out sarcastic jokes from barely up voted reddit posts.

Technology Connections did a really good video a few years ago explaining how e-readers and eInk works and what draws people to them. It’s really informative, goes over a bit of the tech history of it, roughly how it works, and whether it may or may not work for you.

https://youtu.be/dhRgw0HfrYU

It’s a lot. Like a lot a lot. GPUs have about 150 billion transistors but those transistors only make 1 connection in what is essentially printed in a 2d space on silicon.

Each neuron makes dozens of connections, and there’s on the order of almost 100 billion neurons in a blobby lump of fat and neurons that takes up 3d space. And then combine the fact that multiple neurons in patterns firing is how everything actually functions and you have such absurdly high number of potential for how powerful human brains are.

At this point, I’m not sure there’s enough gpus in the world to mimic what a human brain can do.