We talk a lot about enshittification of technology, so tell me about technology that is getting better!
I personally love the progress of electric scooters. I’ve been zooming around on a 400$ escooter for a year and it works so well. It has a range of around 20 miles and top speed of 15 mph, so it works just super well for my uses, and 10 years ago scooters with that range/speed/price were no where near a thing.
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I know, I know, it’s getting boring, but…Linux.
Nowadays you install it by clicking “next” a few times, and when you’re done, the latest updates are already installed, the firmware for your hardware is installed, your wifi is connected, your networked printer/scanner combo is already recognized and set up, storage media or devices you plug in are auto-mounted, most games work out of the box, bluetooth works, MS Office files can be opened without becoming a garbled mess, touch screens work, touchpads work better than on Windows, …It didn’t used to be this way. 20 years ago, Linux ran only on desktop PCs with Ethernet cable connection, all games had a penguin as the main character, shopping for a printer made salesmen look at you like you’re from Mars, and when someone sent you a .doc file, you sent back a reply to please use a free format or PDF.
all games had a penguin as the main character
I see no issue with this
Penguin gang rise up!
tux to be you
Sooo many issues getting wifi or sleep working in the past. It’s so much better now.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, but today I feel like ranting about the debian 12 installer a bit and its inability to accept that, yes, I do in fact want to install grub on two separate hard drives at once, so that I have two sets of /boot/EFI
The OS itself allows installation on mdraid, but grub does not. So in the end I had to set up one /boot/EFI partition on one drive, and reserve an identically sized partition on the other drive so I could manually duplicate the grub installation afterwards. Took me a few hours of hair pulling and way too much coffee to figure that one out.
Have you ever tried something like this with a Windows installer?
I haven’t used a windows installer in a decade, so no. Does windows even allow basic partition8ng during install?
Basic, yes. But windows still assumes it knows better than you and does whatever it wants anyway. But you can set up separate partitions for C:\ and D:, etc
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Linux has been easier to install than Windows for a while now, particularly with all the goofy hacks you have to pull out just to make an offline account on Win11.
We had Widelands and we liked it! Don’t even get me started on trying to view porn!
I just used Virtualbox’s auto install feature yesterday and it was insane. Literally just put in name and password and iso and it did the rest.
What was i expecting. Of course Linux is the most top-rated answer ITT.
Sigh.
The things we like don’t change much from day to day.
Open source software in general. Seeing Blender become an industry standard was awesome, and it looks like the Godot engine may do the same for gaming. Krita has evolved into a truly wonderful painting program (and not half bad as a Photoshop replacement), and Linux itself has come so far, having become a genuine gaming platform.
Quite happy about all of that. :)
It’s been years since I had to deal with MATLAB licenses, since basically everything in scientific computing/data science uses Python these days!
Active noise cancellation. It’s a bit like magic. Don’t be a wanker and say “Um actually, all you have to do is emit an inverse waveform.” I think it took a hell of a lot of work to get this right, especially integrating it into relatively inexpensive consumer devices. Thanks, scientists and engineers. Well done.
What blows me away is how they fit all of that technology into microscopic earbuds
I bought AirBudz pros to delete an annoying coworker and when I first had my partner try them, they were like “HOW DID YOU TURN OFF ALL THE FANS”
I need hearing aids. My aids are so small they fit completely in my ear, so unless you are standing up close, you can’t see they are in. I’ve had them for about 3 years and I’m still blown away how small they are and how well they help me.
I think the concept was old and fully grasped. Reducing the latency enough to make it work in headphones and earbuds was the magic part.
This will sound a little mundane but, FLASHLIGHTS! Particularly bicycle head lights. The prices before LED’s were just STUPID. Hundreds of dollars for small amounts of light (which to be fair was the best you could get at the moment). Which were being used for night mountain biking. But all I needed was to get to and from work safely at night, I didnt have $400 for a headlight that would actually let me see the ground in front of me.
BUT, then came the revolution. China started putting out these LED lights that blew everything else out of the water … FOR CHEAP! In two years light prices went from $400 to $100 for top of the line lighting. US bike light companies were a year or two out before they could re-tool to match the lumens coming out of china. Mind you, the Chinese lights were not always the most reliable. BUT they were 1/4th the cost of a name brand light. So even if it died, you could still buy ANOTHER one for less than the price of a high end name brand light.
And since the LED revolution, things have not changed much. Prices either go down or stay the same and the lumens increase OR the burn time increases. Its just a win win for customers/consumers.
By the same token, and I consider these a different category, headlamps. Camping got a whole lot better with a solid headlamp setup. The red light is crucial.
I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right. When I was growing up, incandescent bulbs and massive short-lived batteries made flashlights suck. Now flashlights are tiny, throw a tonne of light, and last a really long time.
I have an obsession with light. Love the golden and blue hours and I don’t want to know why, it’s just so beautiful to watch. Being like this I’m pretty conscious of lighting and, in general, it has become just wonderful to have that precise dim and warmth in every space for a reasonable price. Not only this, less-intrusive lighting had become something urban ecologists quietly succeeded on spreading all over the world (bat-friendly lighting, for example) thanks to the available technologies.
So, yeah… not mundane at all.
I’ve been biking at sunset after I get the kids to bed and have super cheap lights on my bike to blink for visibility. Each light is powered by 2 CR2032s (BIOS batteries) I forgot to turn them off one day after my ride recently and left it in the garage blinking away, came back the next day to no visible decline in light output after running them for over 24 hours. Honestly those lights are probably approaching 24 hours of actual usage time not counting leaving it blinking in the garage
Insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. But that’s boring: flashlights these days are AMAZING!
Insulin pumps are way more amazing
But I don’t have the beets and I have ten flashlights
Easier management of potentially deadly medical conditions is super exciting!
Lights. 15 years ago, everyone was using incandescent bulbs which were terribly inefficient and neon lights which had their own inconveniences. Today, LEDs have mostly replaced them, can produce better quality light, and use a fraction of the power.
Agreed. I remember when lightbulbs got banned here in the EU starting from 2009 to 2012 in steps. Here in Germany plenty of people were mad and hoarding them.
Nowadays with the larger focus on energy prices, especially in light of the russia-ukraine war, it seems insane that not even that long ago to light a room one or multiple lightbulbs using 65-100 watts were used. That’s like the equivalent of an office PC running just for some light.
And they run cool. My office has a fixture that was too bright which would normally take those 4’ fluorescent bulbs.
I got on a ladder take one out. Turns out they were LEDs. Cool to the touch. I put electrical tape over them and called it a day.
Only downside is people abusing the lack of headlight & bumper height regulations
Holy fuck. Have you ever seen one of those full grill panels? Brighter than the god damn death star. When it’s foggy the beam extends 3/4 of a mile
no I’d be dead
Must be a Texas thing
Better stay that way. I like the really lit up Subarus and Kias. Easier to see them on the road instead of making it harder for everyone
I miss real neon. but I like that hydroponic grow-lights now only use as much power as a 60-120watt incandescent bulb. I remember when those big metal hallide & sodium lamp setups were a huge barrier-to-entry for indoor growing.
What do you grow? Carrots, right?
Tomatoes
Compact fluorescent bulbs were very common here 15 years ago.
I’m excited to see the progress of 3d printers becoming more user friendly, reliable and inexpensive. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development of consumer printing and there are so many types of materials to print with at higher and higher details with less troubleshooting needed. I’m thinking I’ll finally jump in this year but I’ve had very little time for hobbies lately.
I’ve been following 3d printing since the early 2000s, when it was all homemade machines printing with weed whacker line, slicers weren’t a thing, and resolution was garbage. Now I have a resin printer that cranks out tiny detailed tabletop miniatures no problem. What a time to be alive.
what model do you have if you don’t mind me asking? curious what’s out there working for people from someone who would like to get into it but just hasn’t (nor looked into it very much)
I’m still using an Creality Ender 3 for FDM because it was cheap and does the job, but a lot of great FDM printers have come out in the past few years at competitive price points. I use this for larger items where fine detail isn’t important (tabletop buildings, terrain, vehicles, large creatures, etc)
For resin I’ve got an Elegoo Mars 3 Pro, but anything 4k is going to give pretty good results. Keep in mind though, resin is more involved than FDM. You’ll need gloves and a VOC respirator to handle fresh prints, and I sprung for the wash/cure station to make my life easier. I use this for small prints with thin parts or fine details (character minis mostly).
FDM is where most people start to get their bearings, but if your use case is exclusively small detailed prints, it may be worth it to jump straight into resin. Just prepare for a slightly steeper learning curve.
I recently purchased a bambu labs p1s after many years of fighting with an Ender 3. I’ve printed so many things and not had a single fail, it prints so fast I actually don’t know what to do next… The AMS also opens up a whole new world, I’ve printed book marks (I know it sounds silly) but these things look amazing, something I never would have thought of ever. My only gripe is not having all the filament colours I want due to cost haha.
Yes! I grew up with Warhammer, and I can’t tell you how many times as a teen I wished I could just make my own minis, or print something specific to add on while kitbashing.
Fast forward to today and I have a resin printer, unfortunately my free time is a bit less than it was 20 years ago so it doesn’t see as much use as I’d like. God I feel old.
E-books
I love having the physical thing in my hands, but love that we’ve gotten to a point where I can log on to Libby and just download one too, or back up digital versions of my favorites on my hard drive so I hopefully never lose them.
Have you checked out using an IRC for e-books?
IRC as in the old-school chat protocol?
Yep! There is a great post on Lemmy about hot to get ebooks from irc
Do you have that post? I was doing it from a reddit post but it recently stopped working for me ( a me problem not an irc problem probably).
Nope, but I will.
Medical things, mostly. Everyone experienced the speed that mRNA vaccines can be developed and deployed at scale. A lot is coming from that tech. One of the objectively good uses of AI is protein folding and discovering new compounds. Just being able to target a virus’s weak point is so new, stupid people are freaked out by it.
Consumer tech stuff like batteries and whatever the hype cycle is promoting — crypto or LLMs — gets all the attention but the life sciences field marches on. There are things that are going to revolutionize the way we think about certain diseases. In my lifetime, AIDS went from death sentence to something more like expensive diabetes.
And with emergency care, there are things that even an ER doctor with $200,000 in equipment can only hope to triage today that will be something an EMT can begin to triage on the way to the hospital with something simple. (NARCAN exists now but it’s an example of slow and steady progress. Imagine a NARCAN for heart attack or stroke where we just keep it in our first aid kits.)
I’ve been an EMT for over 15 years. It’s now common place that ambulances carry battery powered devices that do cpr compressions for you. The things are incredible, really. Freeing up a person from needing to do it, no longer worrying about fatigue, and not having an extra person to do compressions in the way of moving around the patient is just fantastic.
Just looked this up and found Lucas.
That looks straight up from Scifi, that is amazing.
The Lucas looks more Sci fi, but usage wise, I prefer one called AutoPulse. It looks less “brutal” when being used in front of patients family/bystanders, isn’t as loud, and the newer ones have a built in tarp with straps to pick up the patient and carry them so the stretcher. Also has a much lower profile.
Ooh watched an AutoPulse one!
AutoPulse looks almost Star Trek. Very sleek and usable. It looks so unassuming when they pull it out, then it makes that chest COMPRESS. I’m aware that you have to press hard enough to get the ribcage moving, but I was not prepared for such an unassuming device to have that much force. I can see them slipping a vest onto someone in star trek that pumps their heart and helps carry them to sick bay.
Lucas is more star wars. It looks like a rib cracker.
So I think I’d prefer an auto pulse XD
Lol. That’s a good take.
LED technology has progressed massively and is now at the state where you can carry a device with the lighting power of a car headlamp but it only consumes 10W, weighs 200g and fits in the palm of your hand. I can ride my bike through the woods at night, as if it were daytime. All we need now is some technology that makes the woods less creepy after sundown and we’ll be all set.
Another big one for me is Wikipedia and the information sphere in general. I forgot what it’s like to have to physically go to a library to look something up or learn a new skill, amazing power at our fingertips. Showing my age a bit here.
What else? Computer aided engineering tools, cordless power tools, phones and computers in general, lithium ion batteries, my automated coffee maker kills it, drug technology, I like it all.
cordless power tools
Each tool had their own battery, it discharged so fast and degraded even faster, and forget buying new batteries because the manufacturer decided to change the design again and either you’re stuck with a drill that only works for five minutes or buy a new one.
Now batteries last an eternity, and because each brand has their own ecosystem, as long as you buy tools from the same brand you can use the batteries you already have. And also the brands has no incentive to change the design and break the compatibility of the batteries, it would alienate the costumers who spent a lot of money on the tools and would go for another ecosystem.
Remember when batteries had ‘memory’ and would charge dramatically less over time?
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Usually that’s less to do with the battery and more to do with all of the apps on the phone. Try factory resetting or running in safemode and see how long the battery lasts in comparison
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On android its actually weirdly difficult to tell what apps are or are not causing battery drain, especially on Android 8 and newer (android 7.11 had the best battery usage graph of any android version, it would even show all of the “wake time” in comparison to screen time so it was very easy to tell if it was doing stuff in the background a lot) My understanding is that if the apps are going through the Google Play Services APIs to do stuff it won’t show up on your battery usage graphs.
It also doesn’t help that the square button just shows you the “recent apps screen” where it shows apps which you’ve used recently in chronological order and may or may not have a state saved in memory/swap and may or may not currently be running in the background.
So basically, Android annoyingly just does stuff and you have to trust it. And if you’re getting extra battery drain, seriously try Safemode and see if it drains noticeably slower in Safemode. Or factory reset and be slow about reinstalling apps to see if you notice a change when one gets installed
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Linux is pretty sweet. I haven’t got a new computer in over a decade, and don’t plan to, and this OS just continues to work like a dream.
this is the year of the linux desktop after all
I may become a Linux boy once windows 10 is EOL.
The enshittification of Windows seems to be accelerating at a crazy rate. Haven’t used linux in like 15 years when I tried using uBuntu, and I’ve heard it’s only grown exponentially better.
I also bounced off of Ubuntu, when it first came out and nowadays it is even more ridiculously simple to I install and start using.
No guarantees that you won’t have to do a bit of research of you’ve got particular hw or sw that you want to use, but as far as a general purpose os it has it all
Open source software in general is getting incredibly complex. While big companies mopolized the software industry at the end of the century, now the most widely used technologies are completely open source (kvm, linux, docker, apache, ssh, c++, rust), which means that everyone has access to it and can use it for personal or light commercial use without too much cost and hassle. Sure, companies still monopolize, but only because they offer hardware and services at a big scale, if you want to have an indipendent space on the internet, this would be the perfect time
I’m a libreoffice user myself and I forget I have the “replacement” most days. The entire suite feels great these days.
I always thought LibreOffice was shit and it always felt like I was using a “replacement”. However, after finally using Word again after many years I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually not miles ahead and also quite shit. The docx format is bad, so Word is still better at dealing with it purely because it’s their format, but LibreOffice honestly has a nore logical but uglier design. The Word top bar is pure pain
Battery tech and self-sufficient energy solutions for a home in general. Being able to provide your own energy and store it for later use is just excellent.
I’ll catch downvotes, whatever.
Is there too much hype in the AI space? Yes. Is it still absolutely incredible, the advancements we’ve made since 4chan made gpt2 racist?
We got LLMs that can one-shot code up simple games like snake and minesweeper. I can throw 12 pdfs at a single prompt and ask which of them talks about an idea that might not be explicitly mentioned in any of them and not only can it identify it, it can summarize it and expand on it.
Am I sick of seeing it shoved into everything? Yes. Is it basically magic? Also yes.
Yeah definitely this. The improvements are insane compared to 10 years ago. It’s just annoying that techbro’s and CEOs have decided that it’s the next big thing and will shove it into anything. To too many people AI is a tool that’ll solve any problem, even if it’s usually a very wasteful and unpredictable solution.
Luckily we seem to be hitting the hype plateau and people are getting increasingly sceptical. I’m just hoping it won’t lead to another AI winter. There’s still plenty to gain and figure out, but we don’t need the insane hype that exists now.
The funniest part is Hollywood thinking it’ll shave a fraction off their costs, and not obliterate their entire industry. We now have a CGI studio that runs on your video card. (Or at least everyone can see the path toward making that. The ingredients for this machine are a pirated movie collection, their Wikipedia articles, and obscene amounts of computer power. So it’s not like we could stop people from rolling their own.) You feed in some greenscreen footage, and out comes a whimsical enchanted forest or whatever. Currently still gloopy and samey… but right now is the worst it will ever be, again. And the tools that take off will be the ones that let humans guide the idiot robot around those details.
It’ll still take work to make anything worthwhile, but it won’t take an army of animators eighteen months, let alone a set, a crew, and a cast. The next big gay cartoon will come out of fucking nowhere. And it’ll be cheap enough that it won’t live or die based on merch.
Guitar tube amplifier emulation.
I love it because as absolutely horrid as it was when it was emerging tech, those sounds along with every other link in the chain comes with certain nostalgia for music that was created using it in whatever intermediary period it was at in that time. Today we’ve basically hit endgame in that the emulations of today’s tech are so close to the real thing that they’re basically indistinguishable from the genuine article. We have access to the full range of sounds from Boss DS-1’s to the old Line6 Pods to modern Kempers. If you’re a guitar player who likes experimenting with the over all sound of your rig, this is the good stuff.
You talking software or like DSP pedals? I’ve been out of the game a while.
Honestly the apps on my phone that do this are amazing. I bought an adapter that adds a 1/4” and an 1/8” jack so I can listen to it through headphones and it’s beyond anything we had just a few years ago.
All of the above depending on what your budget is.
Many software emulations are more than serviceable, and again depending on your budget can offer some really advanced parameter controls to mimic different types of speakers in differently sized cabinets being recorded with different types of mics in different recording spaces.
Pedals can still vary widely in quality, but there are some really good ones out there that can serve as a backup in case there’s any on-stage technical problems, or even serve as a completely fine fly rig in and of themselves.
Kemper makes the top of the line stuff these days (so far as I know, it’s been a couple years since I payed very close attention to cutting edge tech). Their profiling amps allow you to make complete profiles of real amps and cabs through recording a series of signals through that rig. These profiles can be shared online and downloaded straight onto their “heads” which can be rack mounted in a studio setup. For stage use they have versions that serve as a typical amplifier head would, or use the form factor of those multi-effect floor units. They sound incredible.
Bought a Helix LT a few months and have basically not used my tube amp since. There is a bit of option paralysis with it. I have about 20 patches set up now with various snapshots, previously I had about a dozen pedals. There’s definitely more options, but part of me thinks there’s maybe something missing at times.
