You could be in the finest school in the world and the phone would still win.

Also, France started doing this a few years ago already and has seen improvement across every metric. Better grades, more socializing, 80% less bullying, less anxious kids. They only downside they found? Parents complaining they were unable to call the kids at any moment.

My wife wanted a switch for her birthday since my son is getting older and wants to spend more time playing games. So we waited on the Switch 2 Direct announcement and it was clearly just a cash grab. Even the hardware demo “game” is a digital purchase. The Chat button only works with a subscription. €90,- for a Mario Kart game and expensive upgrades for games you already own.

So Steamdeck it is, the OLED model is a bit pricey, but i’ve only been hearing good things. And it wil run emulators which is an added boon.

Other examples are drone deliveries. Was supposed to be the next big thing, but even more than 15 years later most companies are gone. And mainstream drone delivery is not a thing.

Or take AR/VR glasses. Supposed to revolutionize how we work. But in practice it’s mostly used to play games. First Google Glass and then the Apple Vision Pro gathered quite some attention but is already mostly forgotten. The VR space is still thriving, it’s just not the paradigm shifting technology the early investors wanted it to be. Facebook’s Metaverse cost 36 billion dollars and was a complete flop.

My feeling is that it’s an AI bubble right now. The value seems apparent and money is being trucked in. But the uptake is lagging. Humans don’t need a piece of software that can write an essay for them. I want an AI that can find this obscure comic I read 10 years ago. That can order tickets for me. Find me the cheapest flights/connections to get from A to B. Summarize a text for me. My feeling is that it’s generative features are the least important.

It’s very telling that smart speakers are also in a very different place now. They were supposed to make shopping easier. That was how they were going to make money. But people just used them for music, asking for the weather and setting timers.

The most fascinating thing I heard a while ago was that like 60% of readers will stop reading a text if they suspect or discover it’s written by AI.

The internet has been ‘app-ified’. For many, if not most, people the internet is a collection of apps. Mail, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. The time of webrings, forums and indexes are long gone.

Sometimes I feel blessed to have been around when the internet was like the wild west, everything open to everyone. Now gatekeepers are everywhere. Your success on-line determined by the algos from multi-billion dollar companies.