The fax machine actually had a massive impact on society and is much older than you think (newer than the telegram, older than the telephone, and in use during Abraham Lincolns life time).
Just because it's usefulness had declined in the prior 10 years to him making that statement, doesn't mean it didn't affect the economy.
In the year 2100 or 2200 the internet as we know it may have been superceded by methodologies we can't even comprehend right now.
I read a follow up quote somewhere the last time I saw this that he said it sucks to be remembered for one dumb quote- though I feel like by ‘98 you’d have a better read than that, the internet wasn’t “new” in 98. The iMac which famously shipped with a built in 56k modem came out in 97.
I will say, the internet in 1998 looked nothing like the internet today. There was barely any commerce at all. 1998 is maybe the year you'd start to say that Amazon "made it", but even then the common take from established reporters was that they'd never be able to compete with brick and mortar booksellers like Barnes and Noble. To the extent that the average person was even aware that you could buy things on the internet, it was mostly because they'd heard that it was dangerous to use your credit card online.
At the time, the web was still pretty small. Google launched in 1998 -- prior to that Yahoo was the most popular "search engine", but Yahoo was mostly a human-curated list of web pages organized by topic. Windows 95 was still what most people used, and it didn't even come with a TCP/IP stack enabled.
Certainly not a brilliant prediction, but it's hindsight that takes it from "pretty mediocre take" to "comically stupid".
It's not a real Nobel Prize, it's a Bank of Sweden prize and it's a better reflection of Swedish economic politics than true innovation in the field (probably because economics is more applied philosophy than science).
I did something like that once, I wasn’t very good at SQL but I needed some data, so I logged in into the production database and run my SELECT queries, I didn’t change anything so everything was good, or so I thought.
I created a cross product over tables with millions of entries and when it didn’t respond I thought it was odd but it was time to go home anyway. On the way home they called me and asked what I did. They had to restart the DB server because once the cache timed out one application after another started failing.
The announcement is missing mentioning that any content tagged aw NSFW will not be accessible from their app. This was one of the biggest points that made the API changes impracticable for app devs, charging a very significant amount of money for a reduced experience .
lemmy.world
Hot