Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?

  • QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1944·
    21 hours ago

    To quote one of my favorite authors:

    “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
    1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
    2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
    3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

    ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

    • fsxylo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      37·
      17 hours ago

      Yeah but Facebook was invented when I was a teen and I knew pretty quickly that shit was evil.

      • Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
        4·
        8 hours ago

        At 15 the thing i wanted most in the world was an escape hatch from all these other assholes I had to spend my time with everyday at school. Right around that time Facebook arrived ensuring they would have more access to me and the people around me more then any other time in history.

      • Libb@jlai.lu
        32·
        20 hours ago

        This is the answer.

        I beg to disagree. The answer is 42. The real issue being: to what question? :p

          • 9bananas@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 hours ago

            would be nice, but isn’t true according to Douglas Adams himself:

            Inspiration for the number 42

            Douglas Adams revealed the reason why he chose forty-two in this message .

            “It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’”.

            personally, i think it’s way funnier that it is actually, completely, deliberately meaningless ;)

          • Lumidaub
            4·
            6 hours ago

            Fucking hell it’s true. This is exactly the kind of obscure nonsense I love, how did it take me 30 years to learn this?

    • Gieselbrecht
      33·
      20 hours ago

      What about things that are invented when I’m younger than 15?

      • QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        19 hours ago

        Man, the toys invented around that time are the best… But that’s probably all you’re really paying attention to at that point.

        And for kids now? Well they have things like Skibidi Toilet to keep them occupied.

        But for a more serious answer I think that’s when they’re in their most creative mindset and everything is new to them and they’re learning how things work.

        Obviously the exact age at which someone starts to take an interest in tech is going to be different from person to person. For me, I was a fan of reading popular science magazines at a younger age as well as manuals on all of the different setting/functions/features of operating systems…