Year 2004. It's my first year of university. I just started studying computer science and software engineering. I know nothing about the field. I only got my first computer 2 years ago. I was a geeky kid, but not a computer geeky one.
Few months into my studies I'm sitting at the lecture. During the break I talk to my classmate about computers - I know very little since I didn't have them growing up and my family couldn't afford them. At the time I had some old PC with 128MB of RAM. And I really wanted 256MB of RAM and ultimate unthinkable dream was 512MB of RAM. I'm talking about this and my classmate told me that in 2020 people will have 20GB of RAM.
I was bemused. I didn't really believe him. He was a smart guy, but he visited university like 2 times a month and also he wasn't the smartest. So I couldn't lend his words any credibility.
But what he said stuck with me, because his number was 40 times higher than dream of 512MB that I had. But at the moment I looked at him like he was crazy. I'm pretty sure he just read in some journal about Moore's Law - which would really explain easy jump from 256MB to 20GB in 15 years. But I've never heard of such law at the time and I didn't understand exponential growth at all. You see at the time I had 128MB of RAM and I understood that they can be increased by 128MB or maybe 256MB per year. I didn't realize they can double! I only had computer for 2 years.
Anyway, fast forward 10 years and I live in San Francisco. During some meetup I met a guy who was talking into my ear that Bitcoin will cost 20K in 2020 or so. At the time it was probably around 300 USD. So now you see he basically saying to me the same thing that my classmate told me 10 years before. Something will go from 200-300 and increase 40-100 times in 6 years. I wasn't as skeptical as I was before. I still looked at him like he was crazy a bit, but my whole understanding and intuition about numbers changed.
Now, let's fast forward 6 more years. I was still in San Francisco. It was the pandemic and I was riding a bike with my friend during weekend. He spent several hours talking into my ear about GPT and how it will change everything. Nothing clicked for me, I was skeptical, bored and annoyed with his enthusiasm.
July 2024 Anthropic makes Claude so powerful that it can write code as good as me or better. The future is clear. Everything clicks and I connect the dots with conversation that happened 4 years ago.
Now few years later the opposite happens to me. I'm fully converted fan of agentic programming(claude code and so on). I meet random people or my coworkers and happy to talk to them about modern AI and tech. And sometimes we click and sometimes I get "the stare". I immediately recognize it - what have I done? - why did I tell them about what AI can do for me, it's obvious they didn't try the tool and I look like a crazy man to them. The very same look I gave my classmate 20+ years ago I'm getting now.
We live in isolated timelines. Everyone has their own reality. It's hard to bridge it. I usually try to understand what people know to make sure I'm not talking about something they don't know about. But sometimes my guard sleeps or sometimes I'm too excited and cannot moderate myself.
The thing that I found as a strong signal is the emotionality of the delivery. Eg unbridled enthusiasm from any person is a strong signal to me that maybe I should pay attention to that thing. This person is so excited about the thing and they want to talk about it to me for 2 hours? Maybe I need to look at it?
But the opposite emotions are also true. Eg if someone is disturbed or crying - that is a strong signal too. Happened several times in my career, when I left a startup I loved extremely disturbed and sad because of terrible character of one of the founders. One year later that founder was out and the one who remained talked to me how he missed those signals and even when he saw them tried to ignore. So the things that were clear and visible to me at one time, became visible to other person some months later.
PS It's 2026 and I have 48GB of RAM on my laptop.