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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Even in my lifetime power tools have come a long way.
I remember the first cordless electric screwdriver I ever saw. You’re better off using a normal screwdriver, the thing had no speed and no torque. I guess it could take the screw out of the battery door on the remote if your wrists hurt.
When I was in high school, long about 2002, my father bought a Black and Decker cordless drill. 12v, they don’t make the batteries for it anymore, might have been ni-cad at the time, and it could pretty much drill a pilot hole into a 2x4 and then run a wood screw into it.
Twenty years later I’ve got an off the rack homeowner grade cordless drill that will pull the lug nuts off of my truck. I used the damn thing to drive a quarter inch lag bolt through plywood and pine without a pilot hole and it wasn’t even working hard.
The one that really impresses me is my cordless router. Takes a 20 volt drill battery and will easily turn any 1/4" router bit I chuck in it. It’s fairly rare that I use a router that isn’t mounted in my router table or that little cordless job.
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.
Gaming mice, in particular those designed for FPS players, have improved a lot within the last decade. They are incredibly light now and wireless mice are as responsive as wired ones. You can get well built mice with great sensors for very cheap, and there are loads of different shapes and sizes to choose from. It’s actually getting really difficult to buy an objective bad mouse now.
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.
What was i expecting. Of course Linux is the most top-rated answer ITT.
Sigh.
Sooo many issues getting wifi or sleep working in the past. It’s so much better now.
We had Widelands and we liked it! Don’t even get me started on trying to view porn!
I wholeheartedly agree with you, but 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 it 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
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.
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.
all games had a penguin as the main character
I see no issue with this
Penguin gang rise up!
tux to be you
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 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.
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.
My family has a history of blood pressure problems, so my mother, in order to keep control, has had to buy a couple of devices to measure her blood pressure, which she also uses with my father and grandmother.
I just think it’s fantastic that such devices already exist and are so affordable. It makes me wonder if maybe in a handful of years we will have the ability to do x-rays at home and things like that, it would be great.
I get what you mean, but home x-ray machines should probably never happen hahaha
I mean, the x-ray thing was just a random example, but okey 🤷
So once upon a time this was a thing…
I would much rather do x-rays at home with an app or something, than have to go to the hospital to get them done.
for sure, it’s just that xrays are ionizing radiation and as such are extremely hazardouss. xray techs wont even be in the same room as the machine when its on. the glass they’re looking at you through is leaded to prevent their repeated exposure to it.
We have some pretty amazing drugs today. Both commercial and recreational.
I’m happy you like your scooter, but it’ll soon be a piece of toxic garbage like most outdated technology.
Storage. SanDisk recently announced an 8TB SD card. I remember back when all I had was 1.44MB floppy disks in like the 90s.
Smart phones and ssd’s. Every smartphone I get is an upgrade because every 5 years the tech at my buying point gets better. Ssd’s just make everything so much faster then hardrives and works with my old AF computer. But the hardrive I had lasted 10 years slowly failing and still booting windows somehow.
I would agree if they followed consumer desire instead of dictating what features get kept and removed.
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?
Nope, but I will.
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).
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.
Synthesizers and music technology in general.
I could write an essay or two about how much they’ve changed in the past fifty years.
The level the “hobbyist” music producer can reach now days is mind boggling with the free software they can get on their phones and pcs.
According to Rick Beato on YouTube this is why music is shit nowadays. He’s got real “old man yells at cloud” energy and he’s fucking wrong. The fact that someone can make music easily means that there is tons of great music being produced because the barriers to entry are not prohibitive anymore.
He’s especially wrong because music is shit EVERYDAY we just have the privilege of looking back on decades of music we can sift through.
For every Led Zeppelin there are 50 Whingers. We just don’t remember them because they are lost to time.
Anyone who claims ‘music today sucks’ will change their tune in 10 years when the real classics of today are remembered.
Something being accessible usually means that the results have a lower low-end and higher high-end, no? In the context of music, it would mean that there are bigger heaps of trash with a few hidden gems
The music equivalent of ‘everyone has a novel in them, and god willing that’s where most of them will stay.’
I imagine you missed the nuances of what he describes as the human elements of music. Humans fluctuate tempo. Humans can play music with other humans impromptu based on common repertoire or musical templates, themes, and styles. Humans can call and response based on riffs or quotes. Music and dance are quite literally on the few cultural pillars of humanity across all cultures and time for its social uses. Often, all this music software is used in solitude, never to be utilized in a social way. New music tech and music instruments are just tools. It is about how one uses them.
My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio
“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.
