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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Light and tv. Led never breaks and is bright as hell. Also screens look ok now no matter what you buy. There is always better range of screens but cheap is not bad anymore.
No more burn in!
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.
Compact fluorescent bulbs were very common here 15 years ago.
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.
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
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.
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
E-Ink and Ebooks in generell. Maybe not all the shitty Software/DRM that often comes with them but the technology itself is amazing.
That is incredible tech. And now they’re backlit and in color? Amazing. The only thing holding me back is shitty software and DRM. If there was a color eReader I could run something like Alpine on I would get one instantly. Instead it is often some proprietary shovelware begging to subscribe to their proprietary cloud service.
Yeah I 100% percent agree. But as far as I know most of the eBook reader also slow plain ePub or PDF and than you can often find these online or order them directly at the publisher. Sometimes you buy them at the publisher there will be only a signature and no DRM.
E-ink screens aren’t backlit. It’s one of the reasons they are so easy on the eyes. They are front-lit. There are LED’s at the edge of the screen and a light guide on top of the screen that diffuses it onto the e-ink screen. Instead of staring directly into a lightbulb like with LCD the light you see is reflected off the page.
Interesting take. This is a technology that is often claimed to be a slow mover, so I’m curious what you’ve seen that suggests the opposite.
I think I like that the progress that happens actually make sense and makes my life better. Of course there is almost no progress that you can feel I’m this technology over the course of one year but that eInk in gnerell became a think over the course of my life still amaze me everytime I think about it
Some believe that competition is finally ramping up.
We have color and okayish refresh rates now!
I mean technically smartphones. I have watched the smartphone world start, and BLOSSOM, and now we’re certainly seeing some enshittification here & there but I have started to fully embrace the budget Samsung phones. Knowing that except for the insulting, glaringly bad exception that is battery life, it is better than the SGS3 of old I had in almost every other way.
I really appreciate LED lights. They used to be so expensive, and yet so basic!! $10/bulb, back when the USD was worth even half a damn, and quality? Ehhh you buy what we have, go fuck yourself. Now… I can buy a pack of quality LED bulbs where I can shift the tone/shade on each one via toggle switch, an 18-pk is $37? A little over $2/bulb?? 😌 Very, very cool
I just picked up TWO solar panel, rechargeable, D-Cell battery Duracell LED lanterns for $16 each (Costco). USB-C cable included. They can also be use to charge small electronics. Pretty nifty, and for not much money at all! You couldn’t get that 10 years ago.
Security cams & recordings, obviously there’s also a massive uptick in abuse/deception/people being shitheads. Comes with the territory. But take the shitty people out of the equation & objectively speaking, picture/video/audio quality is soooooooo much better. And digital storage has never been cheaper! So many good options! I saw a $30 security camera you can stick on your WiFi smart garage door opener. Again, looks pretty slick & it costs just a little more than eating out at a nice restaurant. Crazy.
CNC milling & creating art, structures, whatever with lasers & machines is fucking amazing & getting better, more advanced with each passing day. We can mill pieces to screw or friction fit…precisely…together. It’s so simple but I’m telling you guys, this is going to lead to a lot of really cool stuff! And some scary stuff. But again, comes with the territory.
On the point of Samsungs, maybe dont get them. They have the worst battery management of any android phone out there. Thats even after detailed usage management on the user’s part. I.e. turning off GPS/Bluetooth, deleting and disabling bloatware.
Lesser known brands like Sony and Motorola have mid range phones with excellent battery life.
Surprised it hasn’t been mentioned, but Electric Vehicles in general. I remember wishing for them to be a thing when I used to drive my family’s gas-guzzling vehicles. If you look outside of Tesla, there are plenty of options even affordable ones, it might Leaf you in disbelief.
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.
“AI”, especially art. I’ve spent years trying to learn to draw on and off and have never gotten good at it, but now I can use words to create illustrations I want in a level of quality and detail I could never dream of.
Now I just want the interface to be easier and more able to understand natural language and be capable of making directed changes better.
GNU Taler
Displays/screens, especially OLED these days. My phone screen uses this technology, my smartwatch, my tablet and my Alienware ultrawide PC monitor for gaming and movies.
And how did they get so freaking cheap?
Mostly from ads and tracking you
Edit: especially on TVs. They’re subsidizing an upfront loss to make more from selling data with the Smart TV features
Part of it is the manufacturing process is unified between TVs, monitors, smartphone screens, car screens and anything else with a screen in it. Its all the same manufacturing process and they just slice and dice the LCDs based on what’s in demand and what they can cut out of each panel
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
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.
Batteries. That’s the next stage in human advancement. Different battery technology
for real, solid state batteries are going to be a game changer
No kidding. Remember when an electric drill took 4 D cell batteries and you could more easily make holes with a screw driver and a bow? Now you can mow your lawn, cut down a tree, and brush your teeth on the same charge
I actually bought an escooter about 10 years ago.
Thing couldn’t get me anywhere.
Oh true! Which is also why my scooter is so powerful for the price.
20 miles on a charge on a device I bought for $400? Absurd.
Displays. Even the cheap TVs and monitors look incredibly good.
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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The advances in material science and manufacturing in sports equipment in the past 15 years has been amazing.
That means boots, bindings, and a snowboard that would have seemed like alien technology to me when I started riding. Same goes for all the saftey gear, knee pads, helmets, integrated wrist guards in gloves.
The performance, comfort, and saftey offered by modern equipement means I can still enjoy my favorite sports at 50. The thought of getting on a hill with gear I had just 15 years ago makes me shudder.
And all that manufacturing has caused a decline in snow, hasn’t it?
True, but at least where I ride they have 100% snow making covered. Solution to man made warning is man made snow.
Joking aside, the season in the midwest sure has shrunk since I was a kid.
Damn… I still snowboard in my gear that is over 20 years old. Has it really changed that much? I only go a few times a year so I never wanted to spend the money on new stuff. Lift tickets already cost an arm and a leg.
It’s like going from moms station wagon to a high end sports car. Do I need the performance sports car? Usually no, but those few times you push it, it’s ready for all that and more.
Thermal form boots are a must, though I guess that tech is more than 15 years old in ski boots at least. I no longer cringe and grunt when I put on my boots, they are as comfortable as any footwear I’ve owned.
The flexibility in modern plastics means the straps and bindings themselves are stiffer where they need to be, and have give where they don’t. Combined with the boots there are no more pinch points at all, and all the force you put into riding goes where you want it.
I ride almost exclusively in the midwest US, so hard, rough, icy conditions that most people wouldn’t consider snowboarding in are the every day. A board with reverse camber, often called banana, and magna tractions, serrated edges for holding grip on ice, are a must.
“Turns ice into powder”, well I dont know if I’d go that far. I can lay into turns in the worst conditions and completely trust the edge to hold. When you get that horrible downhill edge that wants to catch and slam you into the ground, the newer complex curves in the camber means more often than not you will pivot out instead of hanging up. I can’t count the number of times I’ve felt that edge wanting to catch and end my day, only to slip around switch and get away with it.
I’m sure there are more now, but a product called 3DO gel was the first I saw. Flexible and soft normally, it turns ridged under force. I have pads of that stuff basically all over my body, knee and elbow pads, but also tail bone, forearms, and in the liner of the helmet. Saw a demo where they were hitting a guy with a shovel and instantly thought “That’s for me”.
If I had to pick one, a board with C2 or C3 gen camber from lib tech, or its equivalent makes the biggest difference. The over all package of a new setup bought and sized together for my cough, um, “modern” weight requirements, took riding from a painful and nervous experience, and made it relaxed and enjoyable again. Due to many old injuries, I used to ride an hour, maybe two, and had to quit. Now I can ride a full evening, and feel good about doing a few hours the next day as well.
Damn… Now I want new gear.
Also “I ride almost exclusively in the midwest US, so hard, rough, icy conditions that most people wouldn’t consider snowboarding in are the every day” - I’m in the northeast, so I am very familiar with ice boarding, so I’m sold.
