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.
HIV prevention drugs that last 6 months were just invented this year. We could end HIV transmission globally.
This is one of the best answers in this thread I think
CRISPR gene editing is a huge medical breakthrough. Also we can 3D print organ tissue and someday we might print entire replacement organs.
Hexbear.
Accessible game development tools have seen a lot of improvements, it’s really good for indie devs (except for Unity ofc, fuck Unity, Godot ftw)
My sun lamp/alarm clock wakes me up to artificial sunlight every morning at 5am. Is it actually a technological breakthrough from the last decade? Probably not. But in that timeframe, it’s become mainstream enough to be consumer-grade affordable.
Gigantic microsd cards allow me to watch series and movies on my phone
Voice recognition for things like text to speech (TTS) has improved quite a bit.
My smartwatch has helped me work out more regularly and keep to a regular bedtime. I like knowing that I have a history of vital statistics like heart rate, O2, sleep quality which can be directly sent to my doctor if needed. Having data from when I’m healthy is useful for catching trends early or confirming whether a problem is new, if and when one does arise.
It’s not life changing but I do enjoy the improvement in phone cameras, even cheap ones.
I agree with the overall point that tech has stagnated with regard to functional life changes. It has progressed a lot in terms of refinement and improving speed/size/cost. Those aren’t dramatically different in daily use but they change the use cases. SSDs have been around forever for example, but their recent cheapness and small size makes them usable in many cases they would not have been 10 years ago.
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?
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.
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!
I haven’t done a 1-1 comparison between linux and windows, but I’m happy with how things run on my hardware
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.
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.
Hard drives are a lot bigger and cheaper. Internet a lot faster and cheaper especially in developing countries thanks to cheap fiber
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.
Adblock
Signal and Telegram (not fucking META chat apps, tho)
Google translate has gotten very good. Also open source AI translation & subtitle software is much better if you know how to do command line stuff.
I might be wrong, but it feels easier to get into Linux now.
Adblock
Adblockers have been around at least since the 00s, if not earlier. It’s a cat-and-mouse game between ads and adblockers, and adblockers are losing imo. Stuff like adblockers and noscript are ultimately attempts at debloating webpages which are reactive measures against webpages being ever more bloated.
I might be wrong, but it feels easier to get into Linux now.
This is 100% true. There’s a huge difference even between Linux now and Linux 5 years ago.
DeepL was such a game changer for translation, it feels like all free (and even some paid) translation apps before were like banging rocks together.
Also open source AI translation & subtitle software is much better if you know how to do command line stuff.
It’s a pain in the arse to get set up though, I know because I’m doing it right now. Don’t worry, I think I’ve figured it out.
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.
