What's a piece of technology you LOVE the progress of?
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.
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. 20 years ago, Linux ran only on desktop PCs with Ethernet cable connection, all games had a penguin as the main character, shopping for a printer made salesmen look at you like you're from Mars, and when someone sent you a .doc file, you sent back a reply to please use a free format or PDF.
Open source software in general. Seeing Blender become an industry standard was awesome, and it looks like the Godot engine may do the same for gaming. Krita has evolved into a truly wonderful painting program (and not half bad as a Photoshop replacement), and Linux itself has come so far, having become a genuine gaming platform.
Active noise cancellation. It's a bit like magic. Don't be a wanker and say "Um actually, all you have to do is emit an inverse waveform." I think it took a hell of a lot of work to get this right, especially integrating it into relatively inexpensive consumer devices. Thanks, scientists and engineers. Well done.
This will sound a little mundane but, FLASHLIGHTS! Particularly bicycle head lights. The prices before LED's were just STUPID. Hundreds of dollars for small amounts of light (which to be fair was the best you could get at the moment). Which were being used for night mountain biking. But all I needed was to get to and from work safely at night, I didnt have $400 for a headlight that would actually let me see the ground in front of me.
BUT, then came the revolution. China started putting out these LED lights that blew everything else out of the water ... FOR CHEAP! In two years light prices went from $400 to $100 for top of the line lighting. US bike light companies were a year or two out before they could re-tool to match the lumens coming out of china. Mind you, the Chinese lights were not always the most reliable. BUT they were 1/4th the cost of a name brand light. So even if it died, you could still buy ANOTHER one for less than the price of a high end name brand light.
And since the LED revolution, things have not changed much. Prices either go down or stay the same and the lumens increase OR the burn time increases. Its just a win win for customers/consumers.
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.
I'm excited to see the progress of 3d printers becoming more user friendly, reliable and inexpensive. I've been keeping an eye on the development of consumer printing and there are so many types of materials to print with at higher and higher details with less troubleshooting needed. I'm thinking I'll finally jump in this year but I've had very little time for hobbies lately.
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.
Medical things, mostly. Everyone experienced the speed that mRNA vaccines can be developed and deployed at scale. A lot is coming from that tech. One of the objectively good uses of AI is protein folding and discovering new compounds. Just being able to target a virus’s weak point is so new, stupid people are freaked out by it.
Consumer tech stuff like batteries and whatever the hype cycle is promoting — crypto or LLMs — gets all the attention but the life sciences field marches on. There are things that are going to revolutionize the way we think about certain diseases. In my lifetime, AIDS went from death sentence to something more like expensive diabetes.
And with emergency care, there are things that even an ER doctor with $200,000 in equipment can only hope to triage today that will be something an EMT can begin to triage on the way to the hospital with something simple. (NARCAN exists now but it’s an example of slow and steady progress. Imagine a NARCAN for heart attack or stroke where we just keep it in our first aid kits.)
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.
Open source software in general is getting incredibly complex. While big companies mopolized the software industry at the end of the century, now the most widely used technologies are completely open source (kvm, linux, docker, apache, ssh, c++, rust), which means that everyone has access to it and can use it for personal or light commercial use without too much cost and hassle. Sure, companies still monopolize, but only because they offer hardware and services at a big scale, if you want to have an indipendent space on the internet, this would be the perfect time
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.
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.
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.
Self hosting is pretty great right now. Immich, Tailscale, truenas, docker, vaultwarden - you can solve so many of your own problems with any old computer you have lying around
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.
I know it's dumb, but cellphones. They went from bricks to pretty much super computers. I'm amazed at the stuff I can do on my phone. Music, games, drawing, texting, phone, video call, camera, recorder, ebook, audio book reader, etc.
Headphones. I'm not an audiophile so I'm sure there are varying qualities, but there are so many different headphones now, almost all Bluetooth. Most are pretty good because the base standard seems higher overall. I remember getting cheap headphones and having then sound awful. Now I buy cheap headphones and it's really not that bad. And now there noise canceling? Like magic. Hell, getting my first Bluetooth headset made me feel like I had made it (I in fact did not make it, they just became lower in price).
Video games. There are a llllooootttttt of issues with the gaming industry, but the variety, accessibility, and quality is nuts. My first console was a my grandma's SNES. My first handheld device was a Gameboy. Not game boy color, just game boy. I've watched my grandma and I go from black and white / basic graphics, to being able to see the peach fuzz on someone's face. I was playing a game and felt the rain from the vibration in my controller. I thought VR was something I might be able to see towards the end of my lifetime, not pretty much at the start of it. I also think how easy it is to connect and play with people is amazing. I can play with my friend across the country, and speak with her, and share my screen, and have her play like she was on the couch with me.
Said like 80 times in this thread already but, Open Source & Free software (papa stallman will murder my family if I don't make the distinction)
Fifteen years ago when I first got into it, Linux was a programmer/sysadmin's OS that could cover one's web browsing needs and run some media players and retro console emulators.
Nowadays it is a reasonable daily driver for high-end gaming, it can cover 85% of the creative tasks I do for work, plus all the shit it did back then, all the while being faster, lighter, and comfier than windows.
There's good libre applications for pretty much everything I care about.
And now we even have open-source powered social media (hi we're in Lemmy)
Fuck, even if I'm this close to butlerian jihad thinking in regards to the whole concept, I'll give it up for the advancement of open source AI models. I might think the whole invention is poison, but better for it to be a public, shared, community built poison than one under the thumb of three megacorps.
The advances in material science and manufacturing in sports equipment in the past 15 years has been amazing.
That means boots, bindings, and a snowboard that would have seemed like alien technology to me when I started riding. Same goes for all the saftey gear, knee pads, helmets, integrated wrist guards in gloves.
The performance, comfort, and saftey offered by modern equipement means I can still enjoy my favorite sports at 50. The thought of getting on a hill with gear I had just 15 years ago makes me shudder.
Even in my lifetime power tools have come a long way.
I remember the first cordless electric screwdriver I ever saw. You're better off using a normal screwdriver, the thing had no speed and no torque. I guess it could take the screw out of the battery door on the remote if your wrists hurt.
When I was in high school, long about 2002, my father bought a Black and Decker cordless drill. 12v, they don't make the batteries for it anymore, might have been ni-cad at the time, and it could pretty much drill a pilot hole into a 2x4 and then run a wood screw into it.
Twenty years later I've got an off the rack homeowner grade cordless drill that will pull the lug nuts off of my truck. I used the damn thing to drive a quarter inch lag bolt through plywood and pine without a pilot hole and it wasn't even working hard.
The one that really impresses me is my cordless router. Takes a 20 volt drill battery and will easily turn any 1/4" router bit I chuck in it. It's fairly rare that I use a router that isn't mounted in my router table or that little cordless job.
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.
Beyond the obvious answer of FOSS, there are some nonfree software out there that have powerful APIs and extremely rich third-party plugin/extension ecosystems. The two that immediately popped into my mind are Obsidian and FoundryVTT. Both are incredibly powerful tools that are only made more powerful by the huge amount of plugins available. Maybe it's because I've been running D&D a lot lately that those two stick out in my mind.
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'm no expert on the technology but God I love our battery powered lawn mower. Our lawn, front and back is mostly temporally embarrassed grass (weeds) but keeping it down is critical in Australian snake season. Plan is to get rid of most of it and do the native plants and minimal grass thing.
In the meantime, no fumes, no refueling, the dog isn't scared of the noise, and it works a treat. The batteries and how to recycle them in the future is certainly something to worry about, but in the meantime it's vastly superior to our old stinky, do a rotator cuff turning it on, 2 stroke option.
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 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.
Light and tv. Led never breaks and is bright as hell. Also screens look ok now no matter what you buy. There is always better range of screens but cheap is not bad anymore.
Gaming mice, in particular those designed for FPS players, have improved a lot within the last decade. They are incredibly light now and wireless mice are as responsive as wired ones. You can get well built mice with great sensors for very cheap, and there are loads of different shapes and sizes to choose from. It's actually getting really difficult to buy an objective bad mouse now.
Distributed computing. Its amazing to see things go from isolated PC to things like p2p torrenting and BIONIC to block chain and IPFS to kubernetes to the fediverse and Matrix and Tor.
All filling wildly different niches of trust and capability.
Want to run a secure shared virtual reality space in p2p way? Check out 3rd space built on the matrix protocol.
Want to build a highly secure computer system spanning regions and dataceneters? Check RKE2!
What about just a secure little thing in your house or across friends and family houses? Not gonna believe it but rke2 or its simply brother k3s.
Just need to store public data? Chuck into IPFS and share it in a highly cooperative way.
Want to push it out in a pub/sub fashion or sub to others info? Check out ActivityPub. Great for medium trust networks since you can choose who you publish too or subscribe from.
Maybe you want to share just metadata between private servers but real time data between users, check out matrix.
Maybe you want to share data publically but what hard incentives to keep the compute and control of that distributed. Check out block chains and pick your poison of incentive models (e.g. pow or pos or maybe look at the wierder ones). With current pick of creating a limited supply digital asset to act like currencies do.
Maybe you just need a VPN you can trust, maybe try a distributed network of volunteers using layers of obfuscation to minize info leaked about your network.
Plenty of human problems around all of these but still super cool how far we've come.
I have driven manual shift cars for my whole life, and the transmission in my new (ish, about 10 years) car is incredible.
The first one was a 3 speed Mustang without hydraulic clutch. It was so hard to shift I only let one other person drive it. 1st speed so rough, 2nd at like 10mph, 3rd at about 30, that was it. It was just springs and chains and gears.
This one? Smooth as silk, there is enough overlap between gears that it is so easy to shift, 6 speeds, the 6th gear I can drive 90mph and it is cool and comfortable. It's ridiculously easy to drive and so much fun.
"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.