The Future, Unevenly Distributed: Cybertruck Folds While the FAA Still Runs on Floppy Disks
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Two technology timelines collided this week in ways that capture something essential about how progress actually works. Tesla is winding down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales, quietly closing the chapter on a vehicle announced with enormous fanfare in 2019 and delivered — four years late and substantially modified from its original design — to a market that largely didn't want it. At the other extreme, the US Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it will not retire floppy disks from air traffic control systems until 2028, a detail that generated 279 comments on Hacker News and no small amount of incredulity.
The two stories, taken together, illustrate the asymmetry of technological change: consumer products can rise and fall within a single product cycle, while safety-critical infrastructure operates on timelines measured in decades. The FAA's floppy disks are not there because nobody noticed them — they remain because every component in an air traffic control system must pass exhaustive certification processes, and swapping storage media requires recertifying the entire software stack that interfaces with it. According to observers with aerospace backgrounds, the 2028 retirement date likely reflects genuine fragility in floppy disk supply chains rather than any sudden awakening to their anachronism.