I've perpetrated one which I felt crummy about. To set the background, I was a sophomore at college in 1986, and the campus is close to some bad neighborhoods. I had had a very scary incident involving several black people while I was riding through one of those areas. So later I'm standing inside the college gate when three teenage black guys come up and start asking me to let them in. Unfortunately, they had a strong accent (from Florida as it turned out) and I couldn't understand most of what they were saying. So I wasn't letting them in...and they were getting pretty pissed. At any rate pretty soon an older student came by, who understood immediately what they were saying. It turned they were relatives of someone I knew, but the way they pronounced her name I just couldn't get it. No doubt it's also because I was nervous and primed with racist preconceptions (which, as I noted, also had some basis in prior experience). Anyway he let them right in and I felt pretty darn bad about it. You come all the way from Florida to visit your cousin at an Ivy League school, and some white kid thinks you're there to steal stuff. (One irony is that later that same year I did witness a black person steal our neighbors' TV...I was so surprised, just watched him carry it down the stairs and out the gate.) All in all I would say that racism weaves a tangled web of preconceptions that can be reinforced by actual events that also are ultimately arising from racist history.
Well, regular intelligence isn't but so useful in business either. There are so many factors in business success, intelligence is just one, and usually not a very big one.
And let's not forget how exciting it was to explore around in the original Yahoo!
Although the web doesn't seem to be thing we all dreamed about anymore, it's still amazing. Remember how hard it used to be to learn about anything? Now it's so easy...but the amount of knowledge itself is oppressive.
I've felt that way for years. OO perhaps makes sense for certain things, mainly things that someone else writes and you use as a library. Using OO more widely leads to very inflexible code, and since specs are not inflexible, the result is disaster.
Yes! How much time have I wasted chasing some stupid error that "just worked" in perl which C or Java would have blocked at the get go. Just say NO to languages that try to guess what you were probably trying to do.
Changed my mind on OO after seeing how difficult it is for ordinary humans to design objects that can withstand the spec changes that are inevitable in any real project. Bad procedural code is a mess but bad object code can be completely irreparable.
E&M is far from "simple". It contains special relativity, for starters. Also it is incompatible with thermodynamics: solving this problem is why Planck invented quantum mechanics. Also point charges have infinite energy: this problem leads to renormalization theory. Also it introduces gauge invariance, an essential but complex part of all modern theories. And lastly, the mathematics of E&M is a big step up from Newtonian theory.
So, the driving force behind facebook is the newsfeed, which enables people to see everyone's updates without going one by one to each page. It's going to be hard to replicate this with personal sites, but maybe we don't want to anymore, now that we see the downsides of the addictive feed. Perhaps a person whose page you would not specifically visit once in a while, is a person who you aren't really friends with. But I'm not sure, because the feed really is fun at times. Politics degrades it as much as anything.
It's funny how nonphysicists (this author) and non-productive physicists (Hossenfelder) beat this drum most loudly. How about we do this: let the people who are obviously smartest make their own decision about what is most promising to work on, and have enough modesty to realize that their decision is better informed than our efforts to advise.
The market already doesn't allocate capital. Companies almost never issue new shares, indeed they buy them back. Given that dividends are also trifling, the market is mainly a large scale gambling scheme. Not entirely, but mainly.
You are right that it was a special and exciting feeling learning these things when these machines were brand new. When my friend's family bought a TRS-80 in 1978, it was like some kind of alien artifact that fell from space; we were utterly fascinated by it even though its capabilities were almost absurdly minimal. It had only 4k RAM and that required several minutes to load from the casette tape storage.
Nevertheless it ran BASIC and my friend and I learned to program on that machine. Subsequently we honed our skills on Apple II's at school, and later by hacking on the PDP-11 at school. In 1981 I built a simple Z-80 computer, roughly equivalent to the TRS-80 (note:"80"). At that time doing something like this literally caused newspaper reporters to come interview you. It was nice to learn these things sort of organically, albeit perhaps not optimally; I've made my living in software development and to this day have never taken any class in programming.
Of course that moment of novelty really was brief. Once the IBM PC came out in 1981, computers proliferated rapidly and they no longer seemed so special. Nevertheless I do think that our "Generation X" had sort of lucky timing with computer culture, since we were also just reaching working age when the Internet revolution hit (my first job out of grad school came from an ad which literally said "the Internet revolution is here and you can be part of it"...a small part to be sure but still part!)
But anyway every time period has its pluses and minuses! If you want to know how it really felt to grow up during that time, the truth is that we envied the 60's generation hugely and thought that everything we had was just kind of a pale imitation of what they did (for example, music). Take a look for example at the book called "Generation X", which is pretty dystopian, and really did express how many people felt. There's always something new happening!
Guess what, we don't need an internet of things. It's not going to happen and you can tell that because it's been hyped for a decade now and has not produced any product that anyone buys.