I like your canary; it reminds me of the Terence McKenna quote "The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because if the artists - who are self-selected for being able to journey into the Other - if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.".

If the hackers - who are self-selected for being able to journey into the Machine - cannot find the adventure, then the adventure cannot be found.

Things which have made me wow in more recent years:

- Large scale aggregation of data, specifically when Google started using data from phones around the planet to overlay live road traffic data on Maps, or when individual businesses are typically busy on different days of the week. Live map views of lightning ( https://lightningmaps.org/ ) or weather ( https://www.windy.com/ ). Things a skilled programmer might build (a map on a website) but which can't work without a global network of sensors.

- More continuously active sensors, brought about by specialist circuitry and low power systems, e.g. a phone with raise to wake, step tracker, and which silence incoming calls when they detect unusually stressful manouevres in a car.

- JSLinux and v86 browser-based virtual machines. I know the tech of running a VM isn't particularly knew but the ability to boot a Linux/Windows VM with one click in a browser almost everyone has without needing a cloud/container instance behind it feels like it will bloom into a lot of new things over time.

- The first app to run on smartphones which did OCR of the camera, translation of the text, and live overlay of the translated text back on the picture on screen. I forget its name now, and now it's builtin to cameraphones.

- Going back about 15 years, but when content aware scaling came in - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving

- Something else which is scale related but not ML, when a cloud storage program like DropBox can hash a file on your local machine, send the hash to their servers, notice that someone else has already uploaded that file, and tag it into your account so you can 'upload' non-unique files without the time or bandwidth of actually uploading them.

- When DropBox live recompress JPGs using a lossless compression to save tens of petabytes of storage, then decompress them back into JPG as people access them. https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/05/01/the-design-implementatio...

- Internet traffic highjacking by 'bitsquatting' domain names which are one memory-bit-flipped-bit away from the correct name, and then using the incoming traffic to estimate the global amount of flakey memory and cosmic ray events happening: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=squatting%20memory%20b...

- Deepfakes; they appeared as hype and then faded from hype, but the ability to synthesize another person's facial appearanace and vocal mannerisms on someone else is impressive.

- Drone FPS flying with VR headsets. Coordinated light-drone displays in the sky instead of fireworks.

- ML related, but iPhone accessibility features can describe pictures, live while using the camera ( https://youtu.be/UnoeaUpHKxY?t=39 ) or in the photos app or on websites. Or apps like Audible Vision (e.g. https://youtu.be/QiEKMTTwTZg?t=377 ).

- ML related, Stable Diffusion, being able to generate visual scenes from text descriptions.

> "Now, ML is a fresh breeze but it is lacking the "garage-ability" that computing has been famous for; good luck competing with the bigshots on that field."

Doug Miles is trying with LogicMoo ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdG6GVCwJrw ), trying to build an AI that learns inside a virtual world instead of using big data and ML techniques.