from Hacker News

End of a Decade

by amursft on 11/23/19, 3:26 PM with 69 comments

  • by thundergolfer on 11/25/19, 5:26 AM

    There's a lot of.. weird stuff in here.

    - The idea that Apple, Amazon, and Google entering into healthcare would be taking healthcare services "away from centralized gatekeepers." What?

    - Two lines about Climate Change in the whole post, and the 2nd is "We’ll remember this as the decade of unfortunate procrastination." That's quite the understatement.

    - "We’ve also had more equal access to the good parts of economic growth." This needs explanation. Who is "we"? What are the "good parts" and the "bad parts" of growth?

    - "Everything has gone from centralized to distributed." No, not everything. In many important ways the opposite has happened. eg. corporate conglomeration.

  • by phoe-krk on 11/25/19, 10:39 AM

    > Everything has gone from centralized to distributed.

    Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google like this. (Microsoft also does.)

    The illusion of decentralization given by "you don't need a publisher, you need Amazon" and "you don't need marketing, you need a Facebook page" is one of their most successful creations. We haven't gone decentralized. We've given even more power into singular technology monopolies and eliminated many of the intermediaries that gave us actual choice of who to ask for publishing and how to market our products.

    Now it's "sell it on Amazon"/"market it on Facebook" or you just don't exist at all.

  • by rvz on 11/25/19, 1:15 PM

    > The healthcare system is broken in ways that are hard to fix.

    So we need more of the same old FAANG guys to 'fix' this? Do we really want our health data to be controlled in the hands of these FAANG companies because they are able to disrupt anything they touch? I hope not.

    > What should we take away from the 2010 decade?

    2010s: Was the discovery of democratising access to anything by 'programming an app for that' with collecting user data from a tool called a smartphone, which brought in a surge of unprofitable app / web companies IPOing everywhere and crazy tech companies raising ridiculous funding rounds with huge losses with little to no profit. I cannot see this continuing on into the 2020s. So my so-called 'machine learning crystal ball' forecasts something else.

    2020s: Will have a tech crash due to this hyperactivity of these startups which many of them will shutdown. The transportation market will start to shift to carbon neutral alternatives over fossil-fuel based solutions in the late 2020s. AR will beat VR to consumer mainstream and will overlay our daily lives with wearables. Cryptocurrency becomes a financial alternative in the mid-2020s. Privacy will be more controversial and questioned by many users as we keep giving it away to be collected by FAANG companies and we start to have information which can be easily faked making it easy to spread disinformation, ie. mainstream fake news.

    Now if you excuse me, I'm going to buy this cryptocurrency dip and to prepare my tinfoil rucksack and to continue to buy multiple newspapers from the local shop across the street. Hopefully that should be my new-decade's resolution.

  • by chansiky on 11/25/19, 7:29 AM

    I think for sure the rise of app and web economies have been the defining characteristic of this decade. They have had an unexpected monopoly on our attentions. From memes, to changes in consumer behavior, to social uprisings, to mass shootings, to instagram influencers, to determining elections, it would take a lot to convince me that there was not a single greater force that influenced us more in the past ten years than the side-effects of what came out of a few internet companies. Its almost hard to imagine what life was like before things like twitter, uber, spotify, youtube, and to think that they were either only a few years old or barely taking their first steps at the beginning of the decade is mind-blowing.

    In hindsight, a lot of people might claim they saw it coming, but a lot of the things I see today are things I would have never predicted the "future" to be like, and were never things I ever heard anyone predict prior to the events happening. Seriously, all these amazon boxes everywhere? ... how many people saw that coming? For sure none of the real estate developers who poured millions into building all those shopping malls now lifeless like the coral reef on a warm 2019 summer day.

    As for whats to come in the 2020's? clearly - flying cars, jet-packs, laser guns, self cleaning rooms, holograms, shiny pants, and robot servants. /s

  • by newshorts on 11/25/19, 5:13 AM

    The comments about neo liberalization at the end make me wonder if the “20s” will be remember as an era of Anti globalization and nationalism.

    We saw it start to take hold about halfway through this decade and I wonder if the trend will continue.

  • by agentultra on 11/25/19, 1:04 PM

    Teaching our kids about Siri and Alexa... and how to subvert it.

    By not participating. Reading books. Enjoying time together at a park. Finding mirth in games and late night conversations.

    By teaching them to pick up their own groceries, shop local, use the library, see local performances, and enjoying our neighbourhood.

    If 2010’s were all about staying in and binging on Netflix I hope the next decade will be about getting out and letting our computers gather dust.

  • by larnmar on 11/25/19, 6:54 AM

    I feel like decades stopped having distinctive identities somewhere round 2000.

    Previous decade-by-decade changes from the 50s to the 60s to the 70s to the 80s to the 90s were, it must be admitted, mostly aesthetic rather than being the “fundamental changes in society” that people like to pretend — people in general didn’t become greedier in 1980 and less greedy again in 1990. But there were huge changes in the aesthetics of everything — clothes, interiors, graphic design, music, cars etc.

    What has changed since 2004, in the actual physical world?

  • by barce on 11/25/19, 6:27 AM

    You mention gatekeepers going away, but aren't the barriers to doing information warfare held by the same gatekeepers (the monied and the state)?

  • by csomar on 11/25/19, 9:46 AM

    > With 6 billion people on the planet

    Did he just miss 1.7 billion people?

  • by ptrinh on 11/25/19, 6:53 AM

    Bitcoin was introduced in 2009-2010.

  • by Cougher on 11/25/19, 11:28 AM

    I can't help but think that the end of printed instructions can be shoehorned in here somehow. If I do get printed instructions with something, they're virtually unusable either because the type is far too small to read, or because it's all hieroglyphs without words. When I look for instructions online, I'm finding videos more and more often, even for something like a recipe.

  • by randomsearch on 11/25/19, 8:25 AM

    > It turned out that someone had stolen my card information and bought two copies from their own Amazon listing

    Far more likely is that you've stored those card details and your Amazon account was compromised, internally or externally.

  • by mirekrusin on 11/25/19, 10:45 AM

    Tinder in the main bullet points but not cryptocurrency/blockchain (hype or not, whatever, it was big thing throughout the decade), the "big bang" of deep learning or quantum computers?

  • by kohlerm on 11/25/19, 12:28 PM

    That picture looks like the Saarschleife in Germany.

  • by gsich on 11/25/19, 7:22 AM

    The decade is not over. The gregorian calendar has no year "0", so decades start at for example: 2011-01-01 till 2020-12-31.

    I don't use it that way either.

  • by unnouinceput on 11/25/19, 9:27 AM

    Quote: "What should we take away from the 2010 decade?"

    Take that is not over yet, the 2010's will end in over a year from now, so still plenty things to happen inside this particular decade.