Things that should seem amazing but just don't

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEDrMriKsFM

nah i'm feelin it

anyone else get this? 3 minutes into the infinite scroll and you've already witnessed a handful of mindblowing things and yet you barely lift an eyebrow.

i mean i know that people DO think things like this are amazing. every facebook video like his has 4 trillion reactions and everyone's tagging their siblings. but you can't have that reaction to everything, because then most of your waking life would consist of saying 'whoa' at a screen.

i chose the hoverboard thing to kick the thread off just because it was the latest example of that feeling for me, but really it could be anything

great thread

xp i think that is my waking life p much

tbf that hoverboard thing is pretty amazing.

so i guess maybe just post videos of amazing things and every once in a while i'll make depressing remarks on the side, it'll be great

but at some point don't you have to acclimatize yourself to the increasing rate of technological progress? we can keep saying whoa at the screen but eventually there's nowhere to go but whoa > whooa > whoooooa! > whooooooooaaa! > whooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!! > WHOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT4XpWFIMKs

No AC/DC in that one, sorry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MiwBSUQi28

so are you saying that we've now hit 'peak future' and there's literally nothing to be amazed by now? Nothing left to do now but trudge jadedly towards the singularity?

Watch my video, dog. No one has to trudge anymore!

whoooooaaa!

xpost
no, i'm just noting the weirdness of the constant dazzle. what a strange situation to be in! i guess the positive way to approach it would be to constantly say "whoa" (or whooooooooooaaaa!) and alert your friends and family to the latest amazing thing that has happened. but the more common reaction, i think, is to become accustomed to it. i imagine a guy walking to work with bullets whizzing by and giant explosions in the background, "this is normal"

You still work in DC, right?

lol

nah, not anymore. now i take the train across the east river to work every day - an experience that would have blown minds in the 18th century but now seems commonplace!! (thought i'd just go full blown self-parody there)

Why not keep going wooooahhhh thos

sore throats

It's usually those year-end roundups of scientific breakthroughs that make me 'whoa'. Like mind-controlled cybernetic limbs and 3-D printed ears and shit like that.

And stuff like this.

Maybe it's the medium? Little snippets of video with enthusiastic voiceovers

I used to watch a lot of those "beyond 2000" type shows when I was a kid and it seems like so many of the things discussed never became realized or widespread, so I always feel a little skeptical of all those "amazing scientific breakthrough" videos. But in general I think we are surrounded by so much technology that actually is incomprehensibly amazing, that the mind tends to shut down to it a bit, because it's overwhelming.

until they make a machine that can make chimichangas just by me saying "woogieboogie" I reserve the right to not be impressed by anything

imo the framing of things can add or detract from a sense of wonder

the dude riding what looks like a large helicopter board thing is ehhhh, who cares, I know those things can carry some weight these days, he's just standing on one

the leprechaun is magical, but more for the sense of spectacle

I think a sense of awe is dependent on things either seeming impossible, dangerous, or the promise of an event that seems like a spectacle

guy rolling around the kabah on a hoverboard is o_O, I appreciate it

hoverboards also explode so they don't seem that amazing for that reason alone

Thought that was part of its appeal.

imo that makes them more amazing

kind of like how a segway is supposed to be an auto-balancing, handle-barred thing that's incredibly safe, instances of it doing the complete opposite are amazing to me. no matter how much engineering was put in to make it the most boring, dorky-looking form of transport, it still has the potential for danger

the main investor in a company that bought segway's assets died on a segway. rolled to the side to let a dog walker pass him on a trail, but he rolled backward off a cliff. amazing.

yeah that is one of my favorite modern business fables tbh

Oedipus married his own mom and the segway guy went off a cliff on a segway.

cool we can bring extinct animals back to life

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/should-we-bring-extinct-species-back-dead

this thread has never made any sense, but i feel like this thought should prompt people running out into the streets but instead it feels like part 47.b of the wednesday morning news haul

Is it a complete coincidence I started a poll about that just moments before your revive Zach? :)

(Thread rules btw, lets see how she fares imho)

not a coincidence! :)

i feel like there's something wrong with me that the thought of reviving extinct species doesn't completely upend my day, because it should. and it doesn't seem to upend anyone else's day either. it's bizarre.

i guess this thread could just replaced by a link to a good medium post on how the capacity to be amazed is diminishing. i don't even care if it's true or backed up by evidence, i just want someone else to sympathize. i miss childlike amazement. possibly i'm just slowly dying like everyone else is

what if we can bring species back, but it's only really dumb and ugly ones

O_O

now THAT'S amazing

It's weird because we simultaneously seem to be basically living in The Future (like, all of the amazing scientific and technological shit from movies and books is happening! Right now! New and amazing stories every day!) and The Past (like maybe it's time for Norman Lear to dust off his typewriter and get back in the game). Exasperation over the latter often leaves me too busy shaking my head in depressive amazement to register that two daddies can have a baby all by themselves now.

Like, we're ultimately just going to wind up reviving extinct species for the benefit of survivalist racists who want to chew them apart with assault rifles, so why even bother?

It's weird because we simultaneously seem to be basically living in The Future ... and The Past

this is called the present

I knew there was a word, thank u

np; i love to dust my old grammars

reviving extinct species at this juncture sounds to me like a way to fill our hearts w joy at human ingenuity and compassion right before they all perish again but this time with us

maybe we could bring back some sea creatures that are tasty that enjoy warmer oceans and lots of sunshine

No no, I miss it too. And this may sound very 'society is in the gutter' but pre-Internet the experience of amazement wasn't as easily diminished? That's what's bothering me. Say something is completely amazing for you and (on social media esp) the next guy will say "you didn't know that lol you fool" , crashing round the corner in mere seconds.

I don't know how to change that, apart from believing one should never be ashamed or feel inhibited by being amazed.

Many xp's

who in your life is saying these things? is everyone just super rude or something, because when I bring up stuff like that people are usually like "oh yeah, pretty cool, huh? saw that a while ago"

I couldn't give you any names, my friends certainly would respond the way yours do. But outside of friends it seems to be en vogue to be cynical? I don't know. Can back it up. But I do feel the same way ZS feels, in that amazement is frowned upon more. (But admitted, this could be an anxiety I feel not backed up by reality)

reviving extinct species at this juncture sounds to me like a way to fill our hearts w joy at human ingenuity and compassion right before they all perish again but this time with us

yeah, we can't even keep the species alive AT THE MOMENT from going extinct, let's concentrate on stopping that before we expensively and pointlessly resurrect animals with no habitats who'll just be trophies for rich bastards and scumbag hunters

Arnav Kapur, a student in @MIT’s Media Lab, can surf the internet with his mind. He silently Googled questions and heard the answers through vibrations transmitted through his skull and into his inner ear.

The future user interface is your MIND. pic.twitter.com/4VQfPhaqxV

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) April 26, 2018

oh cool, now we can google anything in our minds and have the answer delivered back to us without anyone else ever knowing. cool. 77 retweets

So wait a repository for knowledge in one’s own head that we can access at any moment?

nah (not yet), just googling. but it's not hard to imagine the ability to download a copy of wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download) and search it "locally" (entirely within your head, rather than doing an API call to google)

and once again, my trenchant dystopian thoughts on things like this - wealthy people will have access to it first, and they'll always have access to the newest, best performing, best accuracy versions, so it will drive inequality unless all of a sudden wealthy powerful people decide to share their power with the poorest people.

all of you already have this technology, don't you

you're looking at the screen and beaming your reply back
you're in a yacht, in your mind

Think of the endless possibilities for implanting personally tailored falsehoods into the minds of selected groups, based on their online profiles. It's a propagandist's wet dream.

a godlike musical genius, a dog

ワンちゃんが情熱的にピアノ弾きながら歌ってる動画が最高すぎ pic.twitter.com/gP8jtczapg

— ཧཔདད།གཐའཛྷ (@GUCCIMAZE_LAMED) August 18, 2018

no big deal, just a normal video

That it can take a millennium for cold, briny deep ocean water to circulate around the earth’s oceans and come back to the Antarctic currents where it started.

exactly.

that should be amazing! in 1632 the discovery of such a fact would have resulted in the execution of a dozen people by the catholic church. today, perhaps it will be selected as the featured page on wikipedia

Meanwhile the revive of the ox gallstones thread has just blown my mind

oh cool you can just draw wave physics now and it pretty much looks real

Made some more progress with my river render. Switched from using advected textures to Stefan Jeschke's Siggraph 2018 Wave Profile ideas. Looks much richer! #screenshotsaturday pic.twitter.com/9ZaejVsngK

— jpg (@greje656) September 15, 2018

I bet Ray Harryhausen would have buzzed his tits off over that!