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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I would agree if they followed consumer desire instead of dictating what features get kept and removed.
Machine Learning or as the non-techies call it, AI. It’s incredible what open source models can do these days.
Making sense of huge data sets will have science make huge leaps forward, the freaking whale alphabet
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.
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
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
We had Widelands and we liked it! Don’t even get me started on trying to view porn!
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.
Sooo many issues getting wifi or sleep working in the past. It’s so much better now.
What was i expecting. Of course Linux is the most top-rated answer ITT.
Sigh.
Open source NVIDIA drivers (NVK, nouveau, nova) finally being usable for gaming.
Linux phones, postmarketOS
RISC-V CPUs becoming more and more viable
The newest cheapo Raspberry Pi including two RISC-V cores was an exciting surprise.
what Linux phone do you use?
I’ve tried most of the common options (with the notable exception being the vastly overpriced Librem 5). The best option IMO is the OnePlus 6 or 6T (they’re almost identical) running postmarketOS. It is much faster than the PinePhone Pro with way better battery life and has proper modern GPU support (OpenGL up to 4.x, Vulkan). The main thing preventing daily driving the OnePlus 6/6T is that the earpiece audio doesn’t always work for calls and that it won’t wake from sleep when an incoming call comes in. The PinePhones are better to use for voice calling, but slower, lacking many graphics APIs (no Vulkan, limited OpenGL), and have much worse battery life. The camera doesn’t work at all on the OnePlus phones yet, it is starting to work on the PinePhones but the picture quality isn’t all there.
At the moment I have both a OnePlus 6 and 6T, but I have stock Android on the OnePlus 6 and postmarketOS on the 6T. I use the Android one as my daily driver with my primary number SIM but got a second cheap Mint Mobile SIM for the postmarketOS one for experiments and mobile data. I prefer browsing on the postmarketOS phone, and I use it for VPN, SSH access, file management, and some coding on the go which are things Linux phone excels at over Android. I mostly use the Android phone for calls, texts, camera, maps, email (GMail), Discord, and casual browsing. If they fix the earpiece audio issue I would probably be fine daily driving the
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.
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 🤷
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.
So once upon a time this was a thing…
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.
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.
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.
Steam deck everyday
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.
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.
Charging for cell phones. So much better than a decade ago.
You know the funniest thing? Smartphone charging has been made much more powerful in the last years. Now, instead of 10W, they can seep 80W and charge really fast.
However, due to smartphones also using way more power than before and having way bigger batteries, all those improvements are completely offset.
I have a phone from 2017 and another one from 2023. Both take the same time to charge, and the new one needs a 40W brick, while the old one is happy charging on a 2.5W computer PSU. But the old phone lasts longer than the new one!
I find the time a battery keeps going to be almost irrelevant when I can charge from 0 to 100% in 25 mins.
And because I only charge from around 20 to 30% up to 80%, it’s a 10-15 minute wait at most.
My biggest battery drain is sot, with a large battery it’s not inconvenient at all.
Old phones can’t compete and iPhones are a joke.
Yes, wireless charging is the pinnacle of design and totally isn’t a huge waste of power for a slight increase in convenience. Also I’ve haven’t read it myself, but I’ve hearsay’d some amazing(ly awful) things about the USB-C spec (or lack thereof).
deleted by creator
“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.
