I feel as if technology has stagnated, all that are left are grifts or just make everything terrible, like AI. I was thinking Zoom calls maybe? The tech has definitely improved since Skype.
3D printers, hands down. These used to be ridiculously expensive, janky pieces of technology that fought against you every step of the way and gave you shit results. Nowadays you can just buy one, put the parts together, plug it in and start printing straight away. They’ve come a really really long way in the last ten years.
As for how they’ve improved my life, I don’t even know where to start lol I’ve made countless woodworking jigs which would have cost me a ton of money. I’ve made several replacement parts and adapters for things that I use at home. I’ve made a ton of fidget toys to keep my ADHD ass entertained during video calls.
3D printers are cool and you should make sure that you have one if there’s ever a healthcare insurance shareholder conference in your city.
what kinds of things are you making?
mine sits gathering dust in a shelf for 90% of the time, until i need the occasional tiny part for a project.
Well, I mostly use it for woodworking tools, here’s some of the stuff I made for the workshop and home:
- I copied the whole Matchfit line of woodworking jigs and fixtures for pennies (these are ridiculously expensive where I live)
- I made dust collection adapters for pretty much every single tool I have
- I made small try squares and can make them in any angle I want with a very good level of precision
- Several tool holders to organize my hand tools
- Infinite pegboard hooks for lightweight tools
- Incredibly accurate templates to work with a router and flush trim bits and to mark spots for drilling holes
- A million different little tools that would otherwise add up to way more than the cost of the printer
- Replacement drawer pulls
- Bottle cap collector for recycling
- Coffee filter holders and organizers
- An insane variety of fidget toys
- An adapter that allows me to connect an external power socket to the very non-standard hole in the brick wall in my room without having to drill any additional holes
- A plurality of cat toys
- There was a day when I needed to replace my shower head and didn’t have the right size of wrench to unscrew the old shower from the wall. It was a weekend and I couldn’t go to the hardware store, so I took measurements and two hours later I had a single-use tool that worked a charm and allowed me to take a shower that day.
The list goes on. A 3D printer is only useful if you have that spirit of always trying to be crafty and resourceful, even when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. I mostly use it to support my woodworking hobby, and I find that it really shines exactly like that, as a tool that synergizes with other DIY activities that you enjoy and provides you with an alternative to buying another single-use tool. Of course, I wouldn’t use it to make something that my life depends on, it’s often going to be a slapdash solution that’s only good enough, but it can really help in a pinch for stuff that’s not very critical.
Also, if you do get one, it’s not necessary but highly recommended that you also learn how to do basic 3D modeling with Fusion 360 (the one I use), Onshape, TinkerCAD or Blender and ZBrush if you want to get into stuff like sculpting for high-res resin printers. I only know how to work with an FDM (filament) printer. If you (or anyone else reading this for that matter) want some recommendations on where to start, let me know!
The proliferation of electric bikes
And Linux software, the Proton wrapper for games on steam changed a lot of the statistics around Linux adoption
I’m a longtime Linux user now but I still remember the day Proton dropped, seeing 95% of my games suddenly run on my system was kind of amazing.
That’s very interesting, because gaming is the number one reason I haven’t migrated from Windows yet. How’s the performance? Is there any notable impact?
just from experience, some games will perform a bit worse but it’s usually comparable on the same hardware, the overheads are not very great for modern hardware to handle. and some perform even better!
So currently AMD open drivers are better than Nvidia closed drivers as far as pure gaming goes. I want to mention that because it’s a lot of back and forth about that stuff in the Linux gaming communities. But with that said, I use Nvidia and the only issue I have is that I need to turn off v-sync for most games because I get tearing, which is backwards, right?
Anywho, pretty much anything Unity Engine is gonna feel like native. Most Unreal games will too. It’s been so long since I’ve had a dual boot system to compare I don’t think I can reliably comment on performance, tbh. I run an RTX 3080 and normally get 60+ fps on max settings for pretty much all games. I had pretty major framerate drops on Echo Point Nova once or twice but there was a lot going on onscreen. I will say that it seems like a lot of stuff on Linux is locked at 60 fps though. But overall, performance has been great over the last few years for me at least lol.
Some games from video comparisons I’ve seen will have a slight performance drop but some actually seem to run better.
I do wanna mention that a lot of games that use anti-cheat won’t run because the devs don’t seem to want to deal with supporting Linux, and some go as far as saying Linux users cheat, which is just silly.
I haven’t done a 1-1 comparison between linux and windows, but I’m happy with how things run on my hardware
what the fuck is this thread half of y’all apparently do not know how long a decade is…
why are you putting down GPS and epub/eReaders both of these technologies were basically solved by 2015. In fact I’d go so far as to say ereaders have stagnated in the past decade because they keep throwing shit at the wall hoping it’ll stick (what if you could…use your ereader as a digital notebook?? if you use our $800 ereader you can do that!! What, you’re just looking for an e-ink that isn’t going to display ads at you 24/7 like the Kindle? China has been making some great things and it has taken Amazon years to catch up. Oh there’s a new color e-ink kindle out this year? wow the Boox Poke 2 came out in like 2011
Ebikes is like…ok sure I guess, various startups like Lime didn’t really get rolling til 2015 or so…NYC’s Citibike didn’t start until 2013 so this is one of those threshold cases…
Zoom - have you fucks never heard of Pidgin or MSN Messenger?? Both were offering video calls exactly like Skype and subsequently Zoom. Don’t you even think about Discord it has built its empire upon the bones and corpses of the great ones before it like Trilian and Teamspeak & again - it is not a breakthrough to release a ‘easier’ or more user friendly messaging app.
dunno why i got titled reading the comments on this post i think i didn’t get enough sleep last night…
Huh, you’re right. I remember GPS sucking really hard up until 2015 or so. It was not pedestrian friendly up until around then, having gotten lost in spectacular fashion back before that cutoff.
advances in medical technology definitely
theres a lot of “niches” in medicine where the tech and research advances really quickly and its not really talked about
Cancer treatment is getting very, very effective. So many cancers are increasing in survivability and even later stages are getting more manageable.
It easily feels as though technology is stagnating when capitalism cannibalises everything that can be used to alienate and placate workers.
A few big ones:
Solar technology is now cheaper and more efficient both economically and materially than fossil fuels.
MRNA vaccines went from theory to revolutionising vaccine research with implications across diseases we’ve already created therapies for.
Neural networks have genuinely done good things for medical sciences, physics, engineering.
3D printing has made our appliances and devices more repairable than ever, and allows partisans to subvert the state’s monopoly on violence in new and ingenious ways.
Modern communication software and the encryption behind them has given modern socialist movements secure and anonymous communications that even the most powerful intelligence services cannot penetrate without social engineering.
that’s all stuff that helps me but there’s many more I bet
Modern communication software and the encryption behind them has given modern socialist movements secure and anonymous communications that even the most powerful intelligence services cannot penetrate without social engineering.
Danger. They don’t need social engineering, they can hack you. They can hack your iphone, your carrier will help them. They can hack your computer, your ISP will help them. Are they doing this all the time to everyone? No, it’s not practical and more use raises more chances of your tools and methods being detected. Should organizers be wary of the limits of their abilities to secure their electronic communications on devices that are likely compromised with backdoors at the hardware level? Absolutely. Even regular cops can use zionist cyberweapons they purchase to hack racial justice organizers, what the NSA and CIA have are even nicer but totally classified.
Do use encryption, do make it so your data can’t be easily subpoenaed or siphoned up in bulk collection. Do make it harder on them. Do force them to burn expensive methods if they ever try and produce anything they have in court. But do not think it makes you totally invulnerable if you get on their radar and they want to get that info as it does not.
Meh, encryption hasn’t really changed much in the past decade. Most data is still encrypted using AES, which has been around since 2001. RSA and elliptic curves have been in use for decades as well.
EPUBs and eReaders, but not fucking Kindle
It’s weird how Kindles seem to me like they’re kinda frozen in time, in pretty much every single way I can think of. Mine is ten years old and still works just like it did when I purchased it, and I’m a pretty heavy user. I checked if there was a fancy new version so that I could think about upgrading mine, but no, there’s just about zero real difference between the latest Kindle and mine. Maybe the interface is a little snappier, maybe the resolution is better, but I’m not using it for anything that even requires speed or a high-res screen.
Even the price doesn’t seem to have changed all that much over the decade, which is crazy considering the exchange rate to my local currency should now make this thing at least twice as expensive. A comparatively good cellphone nowadays costs easily four or five times as much as it would have ten years ago, considering inflation and all that.
I think this is a good thing, though, not complaining. But still, it’s just a weird little gadget that doesn’t seem to follow the same trends you see happening with other tech products.
I use Kobo, which allows me to import epubs with no stress. Fuck I’m not gonna support Amazon now.
Absolutely, if you don’t have one already, don’t buy a Kindle, fuck Amazon. It’s pretty easy to pirate with a Kindle, though. Just email yourself the epub to your Kindle email and you’re golden.
Even the price doesn’t seem to have changed all that much over the decade
They’re heavily subsidized to get people into the Amazon ebook ecosystem, where they can make massive profits through not having to provide a physical object.
Well then I’m happy I bought it at a loss to Amazon because I exclusively read pirated books and classics that are sold on the Kindle store for like two bucks lol
God yes. I have a small eReader that runs custom android and I can just do so much on it. It’s so good.
What’s the brand, may I ask?
It’s a Boox. I think they discontinued the model I have, but I’ve heard all of their stuff is pretty good.
wireless and small continuous glucose meters.
The invention of the insulin pen as an alternative to vials and syringes, too. Edit: I missed “last decade”. Still nice, though.
Worked with a guy who had one of these hooked up to his phone so he knew of trouble well before it became a danger to be up on a ladder.
I change my answer to this because technically it did improve my life by not having to witness something horrible.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon covers this thesis more broadly, that “tech” has stagnated and will never repeat the amazing productivity gains and life improvement we saw in the early 20th century because the jump from like computer to faster computer has no meaningful impact on somebody’s life compared to like getting indoor plumbing and electricity. Really well researched and convincing imo.
Convinced that this is partially to do with Moore’s Law being sold as a truth and not merely an observation
People appeal to this shit all the time with AI as if transistors are fucking infinite
Hard drives are a lot bigger and cheaper. Internet a lot faster and cheaper especially in developing countries thanks to cheap fiber
I upgraded to SSD in this time period. They’re fast.
I like my airfryer? lmao
Are air fryers meaningfully different from those counter top convection ovens?
I remember seeing those commercials as a kid and I wonder if air “fryers” is just them finally making the form and concept more marketable.
Same mechanism, air circulating hot air. Convection is slow fan speed evenly distributing hot air whereas air fryer is higher air speed at higher heat.
Air fryer results in crispier exterior, convection result in more even. Good for all the things you’d usually fry (but healthier). Convection is often still better for things you’d oven bake.
Some of them are disappointing though, the first one I had wasn’t good and would’ve turned me off it as a meme if not for eating my friend’s food and trying again with a better one.
Guitar plugins have gotten really nice. Instead of paying a small fortune for an amp, cab, pedal board, mics, etc. you can just get an audio interface and a NeuralDSP plug-in for 150 bucks together and just plug in your guitar and play. Fantastic for poor people like me.
Wireless headphones becoming mainstream (both like fully wireless or the ones that sit on top of your head) have been a game changer for me. The sound quality isn’t amazing, but I used to suffer cables tangling, one of the headphones dying and not justifying buying new ones until they died for good every few months. When you have sensory issues and didn’t realize you had them, it has really helped.
I’ve had the same fully wireless headphones I use everywhere to minimize sensory overstimulation for four years and they’re fine.
they’ve got cheap too, i have a set of bluetooth ear buds from a six letter that cost me the equivalent of $25
the battery lasts ~6 hours each and they charge in like 40 mins
the sound quality isn’t really good enough for music but audiobooks and podcasts are perfectly fineWired headphones have gotten amazing at various price points. If you know where to look, you can get something quite good for $18. Moondrop Chu II comes to mind for earbuds, for example.
Yeah definitely. A friend got some IEMs for very cheap and they sound amazing. I’m just grateful I don’t have to bother with cables tangling and breaking anymore, and when I want to really listen to something i do use wired.
Definitely noise cancelling has improved significantly within the last decade, and it’s been super handy for me. I love being able to just turn off the noise when I’m on a plane, or the loud person on the bus or train.
Mics on the same headphones seem much better too; in all the cases where i’d previously need to check on the phone “can you hear me!?”, now they just always can.
And as pointed out somewhere else in the thread, it’s gotten cheap, too. I got some over-ear headphones I wear on planes or on the train, and they have really good noise canceling, for under 50 dollars when I bought them. They’re not as good as Sennheiser or Sony, but they’re 1/6 of the price so pretty good ANC is more than plenty.
BTW, love the username and profile pic. Petrodragonic apocalypse is maybe top 2 KG&LZ albums to me.
As someone said before: e-bikes. I don’t have one but I still think they’re cool.
Zoom calls are great, they’re almost everything I liked about the video call technology you see in the pokemon anime.
This is a big one since I live way out in the boonies and it’s the most accessible to me: I also like some of the improvements to vegan food, I’m following perfect day dairy right now because I really want to see animal-free cheese in my lifetime. Not just because it’s kind to animals but imagine abundant organic cheeses that’s affordable to the masses. I’ve even noticed that some plant-based meat has evolved to be better than nutrislop you see right-wing comics fearmonger about.
It’s a small thing but animation technology has improved and hasn’t taken the love out of some of my favorite animation: Spy Family is gorgeous and Pixar’s Luca was really colorful and well designed.
I’ve seen a couple kinda cool smart mirrors and I wish I was better at coding so I can make one. But I seem to just be horrible at coding lmao.
Every so often I have to tell myself I’m not a Luddite, I don’t hate tech I hate the “why” behind most tech.
For me currently, probably portable vegan food since I am currently a delivery driver and I get no breaks because I need to deliver 300 packages in 10 hours.
Not sure this qualifies as a breakthrough and I’m not sure what the silicomancers did to accomplish this, but I have a 1tb flash drive the size of my index finger with a chunk of my movies and my entire audio library in high bitrate mp3 and a good subset of my flacs
Slippi/rollback netcode for melee is an incredible technological achievement (which nintendo could not engineer in more “sophisticated” implementations of smash that had access to entire teams of developers) that allows me to continue to play melee even though due to covid I can’t really participate in that community in person the way I could prior to 2020
The only other breakthroughs I think I encounter these days are subtle. My laptop isn’t much faster or more powerful than the one I had in 2015, but the battery lasts 3x as long doing the same tasks. My ereader has a backlight and only needs to be charged once every 2 weeks.
That said, the grifts are pervasive and it definitely feels like we’re not making the same kinds of qualitative leaps in technological capability that we were even 20 years ago.
