77 • As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
2025-07-20
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A classic “80-year predictions” episode. How did we do, humanity?
Links
$ Why support us on Patreon? Mostly, to hear our “Future Off Coding” monthly bonus episodes, like last month’s examination of literal values in code and how they might support visual programming, or the prior’s design analysis of the breakout-hit puzzle video game Blue Prince. You also help cover the costs of producing the show and running the community — much appreciated!
- We’re considering changing The Name of the FoC community, podcast, et cetera.
- Transatlantic Accent, and all the ships at sea.
- This episode’s advertisements: Ex-Lax, Mifflin, et cetera.
- The New Media Reader is a good read(er).
- Blue Prince is surely everyone’s 2025 GOTY. You’ll find ample discussion of its twisty design in our bonus feed.
- Oppenheimer was probably my least favourite David Nolen movie.
- ENIAC was, for a time, the computer.
- Engelbart
- The Polaroid instant camera dates back to the 1940s!
- Google Glass and Ray-Ban Meta, sigh
- Wikipedia’s List of Existing Technologies Predicted in Science Fiction
- Apparently microfilm and microfiche are both instances of microform.
- Boy Milk, no explanation needed.
- Sean M. Carroll, physicist.
- Claude Shannon, information theorist ;)
- AI Is Not Your Friend appeared in The Atlantic on May 9th, 2025.
- Amazon Mechanical Turk is “artificial artificial intelligence”.
- Awesome GitHub lists
- Daring Fireball and Kottke.org are two long-running blogs that helped popularize the “linkblog” form.
- The Wirecutter was our previous top pick for product recommendations, but their history of shilling junk and our growing concerns about e-waste have led us to downgrade them in our rankings.
- Devine (the other Lu) maintains a pair of wikis, one for hundredrabbits and another for research and projects.
- Alexander Obenauer also does a lovely job publishing research notes.
- Unison and Dynamicland are two strong visions for the future of computing.
Music:
- lemon (tussed/screwed because everyone listens at 2x)
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See you in the future!