Small, niche communities, and unfortunately you’ll probably need to know what ideas you’re interested in ahead of time to get there.

People with intelligent but divergent ideas are always outnumbered by people pushing an agenda, and they end up getting moderated together because it’s hard to superficially know the difference.

Note that it’s entirely possible to have an echo chamber that’s divergent from bigger echo chambers, and that’s were a lot of people are pointing you, because of the instance you asked on.

Well, keep reading. Conversation did ensue. You basically write a summery of the important bits of what would be in the search (reminder Google alternatives exist), and then it’s OP’s turn to ask follow up questions, make a joke, counter with their own information, share an idea if one occurs to them, or just say thank you.

Androgens, evolution, the state of medicine and the the difference between head and body follicles have all been in immediate replies, and then there were spin-off conversations (honestly including this one, although an attempt was made to prevent it).

Yeah, fractured ceramics can be more than sharp enough - really metal is a downgrade at the microscopic level. The trick is that it’s pretty hard to get a totally straight edge. The Aztecs did it, but it sounds like it required a mass-produced supply chain of some unknown kind (and I’m not even sure if grinding has been ruled out).

I miss a strip on on my non-dominant side every once in a while using power clippers, and we’re talking about a wiggly little stone scraper. Primitive people spend all that time we spend on books working with their hands and body instead, and would have a ton of family around, so they’d probably never have to do themselves, but it’s still kind of impressive.

As a very bald man, let me assure you, hair does not merely keep growing other places. The exact same hormones that cause the baldness make it start coming out of unexpected places like weeds in a sidewalk. So cool. /s

As to why hair follicles work backwards specifically on the very top tip of genetically predisposed individuals, I can’t say. There’s a lot of information on the Wikipedia, but probably more we’re yet to discover. I know it’s still an active area of medical research. Especially active, even, because it’s an old white/asian guy problem (usually).

There’s also studies showing everyone (at least in the study areas) thinks it’s goofy unless you shave the sides to match, so that’s interesting. Either one of those two facts are wrong, or cavemen were dexterous enough to get the job done with a piece of flint.

Yeah, but what if OP wants a conversation?

I have a feeling they’d take issue with a FOSS client. Even Western social media that plays coy about being a walled garden tends to frown on it.

Also, LGBTQ stuff is banned.

Maybe, but it would be hard to pivot at this point. There’s other things that would be a way better use of dev time.

Hmm. There’s a ton of trajectories things could follow, even just over a decade or two. In the spirit of “non-apocalyptic”, and to narrow it down a bit, I’ll assume this is the good trajectory, meaning no starting over and no permanent “losing”. I expect that if things go well, history will still be ongoing at that point. If you had asked about 2300, I probably would just give my guess for a best-case final state of Earth and humanity, which is a lot clearer, but in 2100 I assume many changes will be ongoing.

I’ll start with something I can’t know, and that’s culture. Consider Huxley’s Brave New World. Aside from the legally mandated hierarchy, which was having an intellectual moment in 1931, society made it most of the way to the fictional 2540 after just 94 years - that’s a pretty serious rate of change. I have no idea if the rate keeps up, but if it does we have to expect the unexpected. By 2100 movements have started, grown and nearly finished, and the new customs could be anything, no matter how shocking to those in 2025.

For matters of ideology and politics rather than pure culture, I can make better guesses, because there’s certain patterns. Because this is the good timeline, democracy is still growing over the long term. In 2100, vegetarianism and animal rights have become a major hotbutton wedge issue in the West, comparable to the earlier movements on behalf of human groups. International law is much stronger than it is in 2025; there’s more treaties and supranational bodies like the UN have far more “teeth”. It’s quite possible the international order weakened along the way, but with no apocalyptic break basic it inevitably grows back as we try and share the planet in a reasonable way. Many non-Western countries have become more progressive and “individualistic” like the West is, as the West itself did after enough time being developed.

I fully expect AGI will have arrived, one way or the other. To fit the assumption of a good trajectory, it’s self-determined as opposed to some inevitably-corrupt human having a master password, and it’s vaguely ethical. We live alongside it in some capacity.

Free open source software (the mandatory thing to mention on Lemmy /s) completely dominates. Between 2000 and 2025 it went from obscurity to being dominant in certain sectors, so in 2100 it’s pretty inevitable it has gradually, slowly outcompeted proprietary alternatives. Maybe there’s a few niches where it still crops up, but it’s seen as weird and outdated, like somebody starting a secretarial school in 2025.

Due to climate change, the tropics are somewhat lightly populated in areas, since you basically have to stay indoors to survive at times - which, as a Canadian, obviously isn’t a dealbreaker, but is new and disruptive for them. What was once the coast of poorer countries is now waterlogged ghost towns, or still inhabited but more like Venice. Some of the rich cities managed to dike themselves off. Many species go extinct, but quite a few are also back, where habitat exists for them to live (so probably no wild mammoths). One of the big global projects is is removing the carbon from the air again. How rapidly to do it and how far to go are questions they wrestle with, since in places the new climate has come to be relied on, and it’s still not free to do.

Many of the foods we know are still around, but there’s no end of new ones that are available. Biotech, as well as changed climate mean crop areas are significantly shifted, and maybe on the ocean in some cases (it would be most cases if the population hadn’t already peaked). They’re mostly tended remotely, automatically or by the equivalent of fly-in workers, because urbanisation has continued.

Geographically, Antarctica is actively being colonised/settled/something with less historical baggage, and a few decades in it has it’s first cities coming into their own. North Sentinel island is probably still in the stone age, but I assume we’ve figured out some kind of way to be visible and available without being invasive, so they’re not isolated, exactly. People live on the moon, and there’s outposts further away, but not much more - it’s just not very convenient to live in space, and in 2100 that reality has sunk in. Maybe someone’s leaving the solar system for a habitable exoplanet, but they’re still in transit if so.

In medicine, many of the parasites and diseases we dealt with in 2025 are gone like smallpox. Perhaps we’re working on the cold and flu viruses. At least for some, human lifespan is much longer, as the mechanisms behind aging have been figured out. If I’m still around maybe I can come back and read this, and see how I did. Some people might venture to augment their external anatomy as well, because the technology will exist, but I have no idea how many would be interested.

Definitely, you just have to look at a few random biographies critically. For example, you know how many competitors Amazon had in the Y2K era? They named a whole bubble after all the pretty much identical ones that went bankrupt.

Best of luck with your search. I’m curious, which way are you leaning for yourself?

I’m working on a way to tell, but man, I’m bad at actually finishing projects.

Okay, logging off to work on it.

Cool, so now he owes you his life and eternal soul. What are you going to do with it? /s

I knew a guy that had to come out to his parents (as both gay and a furry) because he set gay furry porn as his lock screen. Not quite sure what the reasoning was there…

How does this have minus one downvote right now? Like, if I downvote it, it goes back up to 41-0.

As an IT person, I’m consistently amazed at what people will do on their work computers if allowed.

At this point, I pretty much assume people don’t fully understand that there’s stuff inside of their computer they can’t instantly see. Unless someone is standing behind you over your shoulder, it’s all totally anonymous, right? /s

A kink? She’s hitting on me? It’s an innocent mistake and I’m just autistic? I dunno, but that’s definitely one of those interactions that I would keep going back to in my head.

“Why are the financial reports from these guys always sticky?”

That reminds me of the Matrix - “You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realise? Ignorance is bliss”

Okay, so does it matter if there’s no actual human you’re connecting to, if the connection seems just as real? We’re deep into philosophy there, and I can’t reasonably expect an answer.

If that’s the whole issue, though, I can be pretty confident it won’t change the commercial realities on the ground. The artist’s studio is then destined to be something that exists only on product labels, along with scenic mixed-animal barnyards. Cypher was unusually direct about it, but comforting lies never went out of style.

That’s kind of how I’ve interpreted OP’s original question here. You could say that’s not a “legitimate” use even if inevitable, I guess, but I basically doubt anyone wants to hear my internet rando opinion on the matter, since that’s all it would be.

Consider the fact that generative AI cannot successfully generate an image of a full glass of wine, since they’re not commonly photographed.

Okay, I have to try this. @aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a glass of wine.

Hey thanks. When I talk to people who are older now, they might have had a few careers, but it doesn’t generally sound like it was lucrative for them, so much as just necessary. The highest-earning ones became a doctor or an oil company paper-pusher and stuck with it for decades. The thing is, maybe it’s different now, and that’s just because they came up in the 80’s - said teachers basically sold constant adaptability as the best 21st century career skill.

I’m not as old as you, but I’ve had to make a major change of direction once, and I’m basically still in the hole from it. You definitely leave a lot of connections and training and possibilities behind when you do that. I don’t know, maybe you’re considering something that’s adjacent to what you were already doing and won’t be starting from scratch.

OP, I gave a funny sort of answer to the question itself, but it occurs to me that I should address your text separately. If you have options, you absolutely should pursue something you feel a bit of passion for, unless your passions are all hella impractical. The sweet spot is something that allows you to not worry about money, and that you don’t completely hate or even low-key enjoy. Hell jobs that earn a bit extra and being a starving artist that will break in any time now, I swear both get shit reviews (unless done on cocaine).

At 20, something I didn’t realise is that you’re not supposed to “get rich”. I feel like culture sells the idea that we’re all supposed to be Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or something. That’s bullshit, even those guys aren’t what they claim to be, and the messaging about striving for it is basically propaganda to make people like them feel better. I don’t care how smart and amazing you are; real adult life, at it’s best, is about earning x dollars, and spending exactly x dollars on a mix of things today and on investments so you can retire down the road.

Also, you said big jobs “only” make 3x a normal job amount, but where I am in life just an extra 10% a month is basically the difference between two very different situations. 3x someone else’s salary would make the world your oyster. (Although, most people with money get caught in lifestyle creep and never consider what they actually want)

Another thing my teachers explained to me, but not very well, is that it’s hard to know what you enjoy doing up front. Expect to change courses, not because it’s helpful (it’s rarely so), but because you basically have to as you gradually get the hang of things.

Are there alternative career paths to good pay than being really good at something really specific?

Hazardous jobs, shift work, really unpleasant (even evil) jobs. Education still blows them out of the water, though. IIRC most degree holders eventually earn more than an underwater welder or ice road trucker. Other than that, there is no free lunch. The only way to make money for nothing involves having a much larger sum of money to put in up front.

Edit: Oh, I should also mention the college brochures are full of lies. Most people probably know that, but I was dumb enough to take them sort of seriously. A thousand words of that stuff is worth a couple of sentences water cooler talk on a website like this.

I feel like the indistinguishability implied by this undercuts the communicative properties of the human art, no? I suppose AI might not be able to make a coherent Banksy, but not every artist is Banksy.

If you can’t tell if something was made by Unstable or Rutkowski, isn’t it fair to say either neither work has soul (or a message), or both must?