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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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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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.
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.
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
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!
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.
What was i expecting. Of course Linux is the most top-rated answer ITT.
Sigh.
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.
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.
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.
Compact fluorescent bulbs were very common here 15 years ago.
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
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
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.
Rejuvenation technology!
They have already rejuvenated an old mouse back to mid life!
It’s like battery tech though, small small increments.
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.
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
So once upon a time this was a thing…
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.
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.
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.
NZB360. Lovely piece of software :)
Also uBlock originYou know uBlock Origin is good when Google is trying to kill it.
I googled what nzb360 was and it said it was an app to manage your radarr, sonarr and lidarr. But I don’t know what any of those are either. You’re welcome
It’s exactly that.
In essence a companion app to control those self-hosted applications.
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).
Synthesizers and music technology in general.
I could write an essay or two about how much they’ve changed in the past fifty years.
My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio
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.
The music equivalent of ‘everyone has a novel in them, and god willing that’s where most of them will stay.’
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
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.
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.
