One of the main things I’ve learned from this whole episode is that none of those guys know WWII, at all. The ones who supported Trump as a counterbalance of some kind were basically doing the exact same thing as Hindenburg, and are about to find out like Hindenburg.

Another example: here in Canada, they brought out a guy, said “he fought Russia in Ukraine in WWII”, and our entire parliament did a standing ovation. The only concerned-looking person in the room was somebody’s wife, and yes, he was in the SS.

I have a feeling they’d take issue with a FOSS client. Even Western social media that plays coy about being a walled garden tends to frown on it.

Also, LGBTQ stuff is banned.

Maybe, but it would be hard to pivot at this point. There’s other things that would be a way better use of dev time.

Hmm. There’s a ton of trajectories things could follow, even just over a decade or two. In the spirit of “non-apocalyptic”, and to narrow it down a bit, I’ll assume this is the good trajectory, meaning no starting over and no permanent “losing”. I expect that if things go well, history will still be ongoing at that point. If you had asked about 2300, I probably would just give my guess for a best-case final state of Earth and humanity, which is a lot clearer, but in 2100 I assume many changes will be ongoing.

I’ll start with something I can’t know, and that’s culture. Consider Huxley’s Brave New World. Aside from the legally mandated hierarchy, which was having an intellectual moment in 1931, society made it most of the way to the fictional 2540 after just 94 years - that’s a pretty serious rate of change. I have no idea if the rate keeps up, but if it does we have to expect the unexpected. By 2100 movements have started, grown and nearly finished, and the new customs could be anything, no matter how shocking to those in 2025.

For matters of ideology and politics rather than pure culture, I can make better guesses, because there’s certain patterns. Because this is the good timeline, democracy is still growing over the long term. In 2100, vegetarianism and animal rights have become a major hotbutton wedge issue in the West, comparable to the earlier movements on behalf of human groups. International law is much stronger than it is in 2025; there’s more treaties and supranational bodies like the UN have far more “teeth”. It’s quite possible the international order weakened along the way, but with no apocalyptic break basic it inevitably grows back as we try and share the planet in a reasonable way. Many non-Western countries have become more progressive and “individualistic” like the West is, as the West itself did after enough time being developed.

I fully expect AGI will have arrived, one way or the other. To fit the assumption of a good trajectory, it’s self-determined as opposed to some inevitably-corrupt human having a master password, and it’s vaguely ethical. We live alongside it in some capacity.

Free open source software (the mandatory thing to mention on Lemmy /s) completely dominates. Between 2000 and 2025 it went from obscurity to being dominant in certain sectors, so in 2100 it’s pretty inevitable it has gradually, slowly outcompeted proprietary alternatives. Maybe there’s a few niches where it still crops up, but it’s seen as weird and outdated, like somebody starting a secretarial school in 2025.

Due to climate change, the tropics are somewhat lightly populated in areas, since you basically have to stay indoors to survive at times - which, as a Canadian, obviously isn’t a dealbreaker, but is new and disruptive for them. What was once the coast of poorer countries is now waterlogged ghost towns, or still inhabited but more like Venice. Some of the rich cities managed to dike themselves off. Many species go extinct, but quite a few are also back, where habitat exists for them to live (so probably no wild mammoths). One of the big global projects is is removing the carbon from the air again. How rapidly to do it and how far to go are questions they wrestle with, since in places the new climate has come to be relied on, and it’s still not free to do.

Many of the foods we know are still around, but there’s no end of new ones that are available. Biotech, as well as changed climate mean crop areas are significantly shifted, and maybe on the ocean in some cases (it would be most cases if the population hadn’t already peaked). They’re mostly tended remotely, automatically or by the equivalent of fly-in workers, because urbanisation has continued.

Geographically, Antarctica is actively being colonised/settled/something with less historical baggage, and a few decades in it has it’s first cities coming into their own. North Sentinel island is probably still in the stone age, but I assume we’ve figured out some kind of way to be visible and available without being invasive, so they’re not isolated, exactly. People live on the moon, and there’s outposts further away, but not much more - it’s just not very convenient to live in space, and in 2100 that reality has sunk in. Maybe someone’s leaving the solar system for a habitable exoplanet, but they’re still in transit if so.

In medicine, many of the parasites and diseases we dealt with in 2025 are gone like smallpox. Perhaps we’re working on the cold and flu viruses. At least for some, human lifespan is much longer, as the mechanisms behind aging have been figured out. If I’m still around maybe I can come back and read this, and see how I did. Some people might venture to augment their external anatomy as well, because the technology will exist, but I have no idea how many would be interested.

Definitely, you just have to look at a few random biographies critically. For example, you know how many competitors Amazon had in the Y2K era? They named a whole bubble after all the pretty much identical ones that went bankrupt.

Best of luck with your search. I’m curious, which way are you leaning for yourself?

I’m working on a way to tell, but man, I’m bad at actually finishing projects.

Okay, logging off to work on it.

That’s true. At least there’d be a wave of people forced to discover better ways. It’d suck for things like YouTube videos that have too much overhead to be free, though.

Since I posted this, it also occurred to me that predatory lending could make it’s way in. That’s how a lot of other underclass-serving businesses work.

Cool, so now he owes you his life and eternal soul. What are you going to do with it? /s

I knew a guy that had to come out to his parents (as both gay and a furry) because he set gay furry porn as his lock screen. Not quite sure what the reasoning was there…

How does this have minus one downvote right now? Like, if I downvote it, it goes back up to 41-0.

As an IT person, I’m consistently amazed at what people will do on their work computers if allowed.

At this point, I pretty much assume people don’t fully understand that there’s stuff inside of their computer they can’t instantly see. Unless someone is standing behind you over your shoulder, it’s all totally anonymous, right? /s

A kink? She’s hitting on me? It’s an innocent mistake and I’m just autistic? I dunno, but that’s definitely one of those interactions that I would keep going back to in my head.

“Why are the financial reports from these guys always sticky?”

That reminds me of the Matrix - “You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realise? Ignorance is bliss”

Okay, so does it matter if there’s no actual human you’re connecting to, if the connection seems just as real? We’re deep into philosophy there, and I can’t reasonably expect an answer.

If that’s the whole issue, though, I can be pretty confident it won’t change the commercial realities on the ground. The artist’s studio is then destined to be something that exists only on product labels, along with scenic mixed-animal barnyards. Cypher was unusually direct about it, but comforting lies never went out of style.

That’s kind of how I’ve interpreted OP’s original question here. You could say that’s not a “legitimate” use even if inevitable, I guess, but I basically doubt anyone wants to hear my internet rando opinion on the matter, since that’s all it would be.

Consider the fact that generative AI cannot successfully generate an image of a full glass of wine, since they’re not commonly photographed.

Okay, I have to try this. @aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a glass of wine.

but polling proves that most Americans (hilariously, even most Republicans) don’t want cutthroat neoliberal everyone-for-themselves economic policies.

Yes, but what if you repackage austerity as “patriotic manly tax cuts”?

Look, sales so isn’t my department, but I’ve been far enough down this path to know bullshit dominates politics because bullshit works. And yeah, it’s fueled by apathy much more than actual stupidity, but comatose isn’t far off of what the average door knock feels like.

I think that Trump would love to install himself as a dictator, and maybe he will, but even dictators keep controlled elections going for the appearance of legitimacy. He’s already 78, and no other Republicans have managed to replicate his popularity among GOP voters. One way or another (unless the US government literally dissolves, which is my preference tbh) we’ll be dealing with a post-Trump US government sooner or later.

Yes, post-Trump will be “interesting” for sure. I’d be mildly surprised if everything went back to normal, though, because it was just so broken before, and there’s so many alternative trajectories available.

Hey thanks. When I talk to people who are older now, they might have had a few careers, but it doesn’t generally sound like it was lucrative for them, so much as just necessary. The highest-earning ones became a doctor or an oil company paper-pusher and stuck with it for decades. The thing is, maybe it’s different now, and that’s just because they came up in the 80’s - said teachers basically sold constant adaptability as the best 21st century career skill.

I’m not as old as you, but I’ve had to make a major change of direction once, and I’m basically still in the hole from it. You definitely leave a lot of connections and training and possibilities behind when you do that. I don’t know, maybe you’re considering something that’s adjacent to what you were already doing and won’t be starting from scratch.

The stock market is not the economy. The economy on the ground has not been bullish. The US stock market doing well benefits the wealth-holders, not workers.

So what are you referring to, then? Inflation-adjusted wage growth? That was shit in the 90’s too. The tipping point was the 70’s or early 80’s based on what I’ve seen.

Voters see that they’re not actually moving Leftwards on economic policies that would help their own lives.

You’re ascribing way too much rationality to the average voter here. The politicians themselves don’t - if you’re inside a campaign one day, a rational defense of policies is not how the strategy ever works.

I am worried we’re in for several Presidential election losses before they all die out or get the message.

Bold of you to assume there’s more to come, in light of recent events.

That’s kind of my feeling too, although it’s dangerously close to “better back in my day” given my age.

The period after they shut down browser popups, but before they invented those virtual DOM-hacking popups was great, and that’s a measurable change.

It’s always a bit ironic when people post this on the internet.

It’s not wrong, per se, but much more specific instructions on how not to waste your life would be nice. There’s old people that have spent their whole life on the metaphorical grass and are still dumb as shit.

Rights are soooo gen X.

There’s a few things there. Young people have always had low turnout, it’s not anything the politicians are doing. We’ve actually had a bull market for a decade or so, with a pretty momentary pause for COVID. Apathy happens in other countries like mine too, so it’s not just the Democrats.

As per usual, people primarily care about their own life, and just aren’t motivated by big abstract concepts. Here people’s toys got broken, so they’re mad, simple as. All the discussion about climate change and gun violence or whatever is just a smokescreen for that. If it wasn’t they could have fixed those problems all along. That goes for the geezers too, BTW - they just found out in '83 or whatever that voting is easy and doesn’t require knowing what you’re voting for.