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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a set of Sony MDR-7506 which are widely agreed to be the seriously good entry level audiophile headphones. They cost me £80. That’s quite a lot of money for some people, especially for just wired headphones, but they really are incredible.
But at the other end of the scale, you can now pick up really good Chi-fi IEMs for £20. When I was a teen 30 years ago, you were either paying £15/£20 for dog shit earphones that fell apart after a month, or £50+ for anything that was half decent, but still only lasted a year. Basic £10 wired buds sound pretty damn good these days. You might not hear the bongo man on Earth Wind & Fire, but you’ll get a good idea he’s there.
Our phones are such amazing pieces of mobile, personal technology. We're using them for all the most mundane details though and they're detracting from some of the better things we could be doing with our time and intellects.
I feel it's a problem for all of us but as an elder millennial at least I have experienced a world without them. I feel for the younger generations - they're all consuming for them.
When I noticed it encroached on something I enjoy - trying to guess or remember a bit of trivia - my partner and I now have a rule that we must spend at least 5 minutes trying to guess who that actor is from, or who sings this song before we look it up. The technology was robbing us of imagination and rifling through the mental files.
I don't disagree with you at all though - we're using star trek tech and it's fucking cool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I need hearing aids. My aids are so small they fit completely in my ear, so unless you are standing up close, you can't see they are in.
I've had them for about 3 years and I'm still blown away how small they are and how well they help me.
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.)
I've been an EMT for over 15 years. It's now common place that ambulances carry battery powered devices that do cpr compressions for you. The things are incredible, really. Freeing up a person from needing to do it, no longer worrying about fatigue, and not having an extra person to do compressions in the way of moving around the patient is just fantastic.
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.
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.
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 the grub installation afterwards. Took me a few hours of hair pulling and way too much coffee to figure that one out.
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've been following 3d printing since the early 2000s, when it was all homemade machines printing with weed whacker line, slicers weren't a thing, and resolution was garbage. Now I have a resin printer that cranks out tiny detailed tabletop miniatures no problem. What a time to be alive.
I recently purchased a bambu labs p1s after many years of fighting with an Ender 3. I've printed so many things and not had a single fail, it prints so fast I actually don't know what to do next..
The AMS also opens up a whole new world, I've printed book marks (I know it sounds silly) but these things look amazing, something I never would have thought of ever. My only gripe is not having all the filament colours I want due to cost haha.
Yes! I grew up with Warhammer, and I can't tell you how many times as a teen I wished I could just make my own minis, or print something specific to add on while kitbashing.
Fast forward to today and I have a resin printer, unfortunately my free time is a bit less than it was 20 years ago so it doesn't see as much use as I'd like. God I feel old.
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.
I hadn't thought of that, but you're right. When I was growing up, incandescent bulbs and massive short-lived batteries made flashlights suck. Now flashlights are tiny, throw a tonne of light, and last a really long time.
I have an obsession with light. Love the golden and blue hours and I don't want to know why, it's just so beautiful to watch. Being like this I'm pretty conscious of lighting and, in general, it has become just wonderful to have that precise dim and warmth in every space for a reasonable price. Not only this, less-intrusive lighting had become something urban ecologists quietly succeeded on spreading all over the world (bat-friendly lighting, for example) thanks to the available technologies.
By the same token, and I consider these a different category, headlamps. Camping got a whole lot better with a solid headlamp setup. The red light is crucial.
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!
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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
Yeah technically you aren't supposed to ride on the sidewalks here (USA) but there's barely any safe infrastructure to do otherwise, and I'm sure as hell not going to ride on the street with the death machines honking all over the place, so the sidewalk it is until city infrastructure is less car-brained.
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.
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.