what is “futuristic” in this context?
A calculator is pretty futuristic depending on where you start
I was thinking of something that would be considered futuristic to an average person today. So, maybe something uncommon, with impressive capabilities, but still affordable?
Not sure if many items fit that criteria, but was curious if any!
I once found a curved 4k monitor at my local thrift shop for $70.
While “good for you” and “congrats”, it’s not something anyone can buy for under 100 bucks.
That specific monitor? No. But I often see things second-hand that are under $100 and could be considered “futuristic tech”.
If you know where to look and are patient there are good deals to be had.
An R36s is like 40 bucks, and can emulate a LOT of old game consoles. I think that’s pretty neat
Where can you get one and does it take a lot of work to set up?
Ali express (like Chinese Amazon, mostly direct from factories I think).
They are always “on sale”, but the prices are usually 30-50 bucks.
Here’s an example: https://a.aliexpress.com/_mOcxZJq they come with thousands of games that for the most pretty just work. It a game doesn’t emulate well, like mario64 didn’t for me, I don’t know what you can do about it.
Get the r36S - the S is faster or something.
Looks like they sell them on Amazon and some .UK site but I only see them for $65
We got ours off Aliexpress (pretty sure all other sites are just dropshipped from there anyway)
Technically they come with the full OS and all the games preloaded, but their SD cards are very shoddy and you run the risk of losing all your data if you use those
Setting up a fresh SD Card took my husband about an hour for both of our consoles, so I guess it wasn’t too tricky
Sam with miyoo mini plus. Great time to get into emulation machines.
That’s a good example! I have a RG35XX, and definitely fun to see how far gaming tech has come.
Probably a cheap 3D printer
I’m actually blown away by how good of a 3D Printer you can get for ~$200 now. Huge improvement from just a few years ago.
I got an ender 3 pro for about $100 a couple years ago
I started off on an Ender 3 V2 a few years back. The AnkerMake M5C and Bambu A1 Mini are both down to $199 and can’t believe how much faster / more reliable they are for the price.
this entirely. It’s awesome and frustrating haha. My Neptune 3 from 2022, that I’ve poured hundreds of dollars and hours into, is completely outclassed by an out-of-the-box printer of the same or lower price today.
I’m really happy that it’s getting so approachable now, I hope that I can get my grandfather his own printer during his time. I love that you don’t need to be an engineer anymore to get the things to work.
I wish my grandad had made it long enough to have had a 3D printer, he would have absolutely loved it (he died in his 90’s, so he did alright).
Hey, he got to see the invention of plastic. Obviously we’re dealing with the repercussions of it now, but imagine what that must’ve done to the hobby industry.
True (E: actually not quite, he was born a little after plastic was invented), and he loved laminating shit lol though he was more in to metal work. But later in life he really got in to computers, which is why I think 3D printing would have been right up his ally, because he could use the computer to make things he might no longer have been able to with his hands, and then get to play around with all of his creations (and gift us grandkids an endless supply of things lol)…
I feel like that really depends on how you view futuristic.
I think things with colored e-ink displays, USB C chargeable AA batteries, handheld emulators, 2230 NVMe drives, and USB C power portable displays are really cool but I feel like their availability these days has made them lose a bit of their futuristic luster. They would have blown my mind when I was a kid.
More niche products like Meshtastic and ESP32 Marauder devices are things I view as futuristic (and can be found for under $100).
I think this is really the best answer. The future is decentralisation, to me. Stuff like meshtastic could take the best parts of the internet and make it local and community owned.
In fact, I think there are a bunch of things you can get for free which to me represent the future. Linux, Lemmy, FOSS in general. Physical technology is only a small part of the puzzle nowadays.
Yeah I feel like having control over the things you use is definitely a big part. Something that really hampers my enthusiasm for AI is that so much of it is out of my control and generally disconnected from me.
Having AI that I can modify and run locally on my devices seems a lot more sci-fi than something that can relies so heavily on the Internet and rigid responses.
Absolutely! Running local LLMs is way more exciting than something I need to figure out an API and billing for. Tedious corporate bullshit? No thank you. A robot that I have trained to enthusiastically denounce capitalism? That’s more like it!
Hell yeah. I tried to train one to feed me misinformation and encourage bad habits like drinking and driving and it was a lot more fun and lively than anything else I’ve seen
The thing about meshtastic is the walking distance range and limitation to text messages.
Though I don’t know if it is possible to integrate a LoRAWAN concentrator with a nice collinear J-pole antenna to mount on the top of your house to move to a double digit range where it could be useful as a neighborhood mesh with multiple channels. (With the added benefit of using lorawan devices like pet trackers and things).
Still Lora smart (but local) home agriculture, water collection, etc… Is a really cool technology for large properties.
I find it’s a lot of those ideal use cases I find futuristic. The RISC V architecture and Briar are kind of similar. They’re really neat and I could see some cyberpunk style uses for them but the drive for their adoption and the level of it just doesn’t seem to be there yet.
5 months of an OpenAI subscription
Lemmy don’t like LLM’s
A basic DNA test can tell you your ancestry back thousands of years and identify numerous genetically determined traits. It’s kinda crazy what kinds of things they can tell you about yourself.
And if you send in your dna three times, you can find all three if your ancestries! Really tho, there was some funny news on this a while back when identical twins took those tests and got different results
lighters. fire on demand! for all of preindustrial human history these things would be worth more than gold
A full working computer, more powerful than what we used to go to the moon, and using less power than a light bulb.
It can take many forms, like smartphones, SBCs or older PCs/laptops.
By that logic, a lighter. Better than smashing two rocks together, that’s how we used to make fire.
One of those fancy plasma lighters, sure. But butane lighters have been around for decades
You can buy an ESP board that meets all those qualifications from AliExpress for less than $3CAD shipped.
Setting one of those up was the first time in a while I’ve been so impressed with just how cheap and accessible tech has gotten. It’s a web server with WiFi and Bluetooth shipped to my door all for the price of a chocolate bar.
A knife. Futuristic in that it will be handy for hunting and self-defense after the future collapse of civilization that results from our insatiable appetite for consumption - of, among other things, useless gadgets.
It’s interesting the difference in what people think a collapsed civilization will look like.
Some people think we will “return to monke” where wilderness survival skills will be essential and people who have them will be the “main characters.” That would probably be the easier and better future.
The more likely option will be technofeudalism where rich people have small, brutal armies and control localized power grids, farming operations, and politics with tech as mass migrations happen and wildlife becomes all but extinct outside of human cultivation. Survival skills won’t matter when all land and food scarcity is controlled by a rich few with absolute control. The average survivalist will be wiped out with the first natural disaster or by the feudal lords with drones. Return to nature might only come after 50 years when chip supplies and power grids have dried up and fallen apart, but it would just as likely be mad-max as oil could likely still be used.
Who knows. Fascism might take over with how it is going now and solve the climate crisis with mass genocide and forcing green energy for all we know.
I see you’ve read Yanis Varoufakis. In all realism though, a fallen society is most likely to be a result of climate change. First it gets too hot for Africans, so their only option is to move northward and eastward to the Middle East. This results in tightened borders and the death of many due to heatstroke and dehydration - I also don’t doubt a slave trade-like and human exploitation era might come about because of this. Increased demand for AC’s in the west will also be a byproduct of this. Melting ice caps will also increase the danger to many of those living in coastal regions - Florida probably sinks faster than we’d predicted.
All of this I project to happen within the next 50 years where the problems are left for Gen Z and further generations to deal with.
It’s more or less an inevitability at this point, regardless of what we do. Really we’re just trying to get corporations and countries to make changes so it will be Gen A’s (or the following generation’s) problem instead of Z.
Normalcy now has an unavoidable term limit. The question is if we’re going to shorten how long that timespan is by desperately holding onto normalcy now for as long as we can, or if we’re going to start making things harder, more challenging, and less normal sooner to make the transition less painful and give it a longer on-ramp.
Currently we seem to be choosing option A.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen some friends take things a little more seriously when I’ve explained that currently we’re going to see abrupt and incredibly disruptive changes at the point in our (Gen Z and Millenials) lives when we’re at the age when we’ll be least able to tolerate the changes and most reliant on others. In 40-50 years, Z and M are going to be senior citizens at best. While we may be full of distracted, dopamine-seeking denial now, by the time shit really stays hitting the fan, we’re going to be extra weight on the generations struggling desperately to survive.
Don’t expect a happy retirement.
I think the deauther watch is pretty cool if we’re thinking cyberpunk-esque
I’m not sure what that’s for but it looks cool as hell
Deauther is generally used for kicking clients off WiFi networks.
You can setup a mirror network, kick clients off the real one, they’ll try to reconnect to yours, by which you can steal the WiFi credentials, or even listen in on the traffic.
Or just for testing, obviously.
Raspberry Pis and other microcomputers can be had for pretty cheap, and they can be put to a surprising variety of tasks. You need to be a bit of a jack of all trades to fully embrace that DIY element, but I’d bet that showing off a project that you mostly built yourself would be seen as futuristic by most people.
The RPI400 is basically a full solution. You just need a display and a mouse, and you have a fully functional desktop computer. Not very powerful, but good enough for basic tasks like writing documents or browsing the web, coding etc.
Does web browsing count as a “basic” task these days?
A smartphone
What smartphones are you buying for under $100?
the Walmart special can be had for $20, it sucks and is locked to a useless carrier, but can load web pages on WiFi.
Low end phones aren’t that bad, if you are willing to make some sacrifices, like an uglier screen, worse camera.
For example, the Samsung Galaxy A05
This would have to be some burner or 2nd/3rd phone cuz there’s a lot more than worse screen or worse camera. The only A series phone i would consider using would be the A54/55/73.
Well no shit it’s not great.
It’s still pretty damn impressive that you can buy smartphones for that cheap at all.
Honestly the sacrifices they make are pretty reasonable for every day use too. I used ultra cheap Umidigi smartphones for four years as a student and they held up quite well with a huge upside being shockingly good repairability. The biggest downside is the rear camera usually, I wish I had better photos from those times.
You can get the Umidigi G9 5G for just $99 shipped on aliexpress. Even budget phones under $100 get 8gb RAM, 128GB storage , and 90hz displays now. There really aren’t as many sacrifices as you’d expect, and by the time you spend $200 you even get plenty respectable cameras that would be flagship quality just a few years ago.
… So am I the only one that whenever I want a new phone, I just look for highest rated phone under 100 dollars? Been doing that for years, generally it’s just always just like top of the line models from 3-4 years ago.
Been doing it for years and I’ve never really had any complaint with my phones.
I normally check whatever was the flagship 2-3 years ago and buy it refurbished.
How often do you buy phones?
A stolen one
“previously owned”
Stolen iPhones
Devices less sophisticated than smart phones were once pretty common in sci-fi novel, but they still achieved the same sort of thing, all the world’s knowledge in the palm of your hand.
You can get smartphones for absurdly cheap these days, and while crappy by modern standards they’re still technological marvels.
Still this thing, 20 years on:
Kinda true, how this thing even worked, nobody knows
The tape head is basically a small and really sensitive electromagnet. Magnetized tape creates small disturbances in the magnetic signal. Amplify those disturbances and you get sound. Similar to an antenna, but only works in close proximity.
This also works in reverse. Feed an audio signal through the electromagnet, and the electromagnet will create the disturbances in whatever is next to it. You can do this to record to a tape, or you can do this to pass sound to another tape head, which is how these aux cassettes work.
You can build one yourself really easily. Just take the tape head from a broken player and solder to an aux cable. Take a cassette, remove the tape, and put the tape head in the middle portion so it comes into contact with the player tape head.
Of course it’s Technology Connections. Who else would make a video about a (now) useless piece of 80’s tech with enough content to satisfy any level of curiosity.
I think of it as extremely 00s. It’s the “I only have an mp3 player/phone and my computer doesn’t take aux” device
