1mo ago

Without unnecessary brand name dropping, what current technology blows you away?

I was listening to the New Year's Day concert by the Vienna philharmonic and wondered who one of the composers was so used a popular song recognition app. (I expected it would make some fuzzy match on the piece and give me the name + composer). To my amazement it did give the name and composer but as played by the Vienna philharmonic in 2005 in the same location. The orchestra does not have the same members as 19 years ago, nor was it the same conductor, so it seemed the piece was matched on the acoustics of the Musikverein where they were playing, which I found astonishing.

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My cancer medication for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia.
I don't have to have chemotherapy. I take a single pill once daily. There are side effects, sure. My life isn't as full of pep as it used to be, sure. I'm still in pain all the time, sure.
But I've seen cancer, and I've seen how bad it can get and I'm floored at how much of a real life I'm capable of leading while being treated for this disease.
The cost and risk of losing access to it hanging over my head is very stressful, but I can't deny the actual results, which are life-changing and life-saving to say the least.
- Progress in the last few decades has been amazing. One of my coworkers died in the late 1990s from some kind of leukemia that today is highly curable.

Mobile networks.
It used to be absolutely amazing to get 1.5Mbps into your home with bulky equipment, on a dedicated copper line. Now you can get 100x times that bandwidth, while moving, on a device that fits in your pocket.
Batshit.

Diffraction gratings because light is cool, and I like the pretty colors.
Not super modern but you can 3d print in a mold, or even make chocolate, and it will look "holographic." You don't add anything, you just manipulate the surface of the object to have tiny grooves with thickness in the nanometer range. Then light hits it and waves do their thing and we perceive a rainbow effect.

This is from a Reddit post, one of the top homemade "holographic chocolate" posts.
- Wow that's cool!
  If it's your thing, here's a full on deep dive into how 3d image holograms work. I'd never really appreciated how insane it is to encode a moveable 3d volume onto a 2d surface nor how early the maths for it was developed! (method 1948, first 3d image 1962, nobel prize 1971)
- Presumably you could print a hologram-like portrait on chocolate, which blows my mind.

Lossless compression Even after reading how it works, it still seems like magic to me.
- Even more magical is the lossless Zstandard _is _this _a _name _drop?. It does so much stuff, it's awesome!
  hella fast compared to similar-leveled compressors (zoom)
  no matter the zstd compression level, decompression takes equal time! (ux!)
  zstd can use a user-given dictionary, or train its own on a sample set (wowie)
  zstd can be used for live compression (compress and decompress as you read and write, not before or after)
  on ram (install more ram??)
  in filesystems (2.5x your disk??)
  saves CPU by not compressing if it's not worth it (efficiency!!)
  
  use ALL the cores!
  So kool. lol
  
  Name dropping's fine lol, I just wanted to discourage obvious spammers away from top level comments
- Honestly the lossy compression algorithms are some real magic. The way video can be streamed over wireless networks at all is pretty astonishing and requires many orders of magnitude of compression.
  If you ever have time, read up on how JPEG compression works.
- Yes, compression has often fascinated me. It was fractal compression (lossy) that got me interested in computation when I was a kid
- IMO lossy compression is crazier. You do some wizard math on a block of pixels and it shoves all the energy into one corner. Any half-ass job of storing those values will transform back into nearly the same image... so instead, we pursue just-barely-acceptable quality from dwindling fractions of an ass.

White LEDs. Having a light bulb that can last for decades an consume very little electricity is pretty cool.
- LEDs kind of blow me away in general. People will look back at this period and be like, "they sure did love putting LED lights on top of and on the sides of their skyscrapers just for show".
- I never used to use my phone's flashlight function because it's so bright, I assumed it would suck the battery dry. But recently I had it on for like 15 minutes and it only used up one or two percent. Amazing.

bittorrent
- That magnet stuff is like magnets - almost magic.
  
  Magnets are magic. They're concentrated magic. Almost absolutely everything we interact with is the electro-magnetic field (besides gravity).. why we see things, why we touch things, how that touch signal reaches our brain, how our brain even processes it.. all electro-magnetic! It is really hard to not see it as infused with something of the essence of reality. The strangeness of reality is everywhere and in feeling one magnet repel another we're just toying with that magic concentrated in one place.
- You know what's wild about the protocol?
  Some super nerdy smart autistic dude literally woke up one morning and it's like I'm going to make this.
  Programmed it, took a shit and was done for the day.
  A little bit of poetic license here but not far from the truth!
  
  poetic license
  For sure, you left out all the paperwork - he'd had Taco Bell the night before.

It might not be current-current, but there's an online encyclopedia where you can literally just hit the front page, click any of the featured articles, and go down a rabbit hole for hours and hours and hours. It's absolutely incredible.
- It is indeed, it's where I spend most of my time! Absolutely amazing.

Smartphones. In the span of a few decades, we've managed to cram literally hundreds of tools and devices into a single, pocket sized notebook, affordably. Its fucking mindblowing you can find full fledged smartphone for 100$. Go back a couple decades and even a rudimentary budget model would be unimaginable
Its fucking insane that my groceries for a week cost more than this ground breaking technology.

The evolution and utility of drones.
- I don't think they meant "blows you away" as in "dropping a grenade on Russian infantry."
  
  blows them away tho
  
  I was unfortunate enough (or fortunate depending on your point of view) to see a video of Russian soldiers having a grenade go off right next to them. I used to think some of the effects at the start of Saving Private Ryan were a bit janky and obviously prop based. But apparently, no, that's exactly what a person being blown up by a grenade looks like.
  
  works for me tho
- Why are they called drones instead of remote-controlled whatever? What's the difference between a drone plane and the remote-controlled planes flown by hobbyists at the park?
  
  The name being applied to aircraft supposedly comes from the engine noise from unpiloted target drones that used a jet engine. The term originally comes from the insect world, I bee-lieve.

Large Language Models.
While it’s trendy to hate on them and nitpick every single flaw, I still have a vivid memory of how terrible chatbots were just a few years ago. The fact that I can now have an actual, insightful discussion with a computer still amazes me. I hope they continue to improve to the point where it’s impossible to tell them apart from a real person.
- It's funny, because what makes them more like a real person is their inability to be consistent.
  Like genuinely, LLMs are indeed cool, but in many ways all we've done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.
  It lies with the same confidence that it uses to tell the truth, mostly because it can't actually make distinctions between the two.
  
  in many ways all we've done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.
  What we have done is even worse because by and large the marketing around AI has worked and people categorically trust what a single AI will tell them after asking the question only once and if that doesn't terrify you, you aren't paying attention.
  If there is a future for ai it is in "ensembles" where you ask several independently trained and developed LLMs the same question, preferably at least checking some of the LLMs for consistency/indepth correct knowledge by asking them the same question twice in two different sessions. Then you evaluate from the ensemble of answers what you think the real answer is.
  Sound tedius compared to just using a search engine that works?
  ...and to that question I respond emphatically - Yes, very much so!
- I've been working with cursor.ai lately and it's pretty mind blowing in composer mode. I understand the hate and how the tech is limited, but it's still pretty amazing at what it can do.
  
  What is it? The link looks like a demo page for a search engine.
- I see a lot of hate for them on Lemmy, but I find hem quite helpful with earning how to work with computers and also summarizing general info I search for on the internet. Rather than spend 20 minutes reading thru various websites on a topic know nothing about, I can simply ask an LLM. Eve if they are known to make mistakes, I can accommodate that possibility if the stakes are high enough by looking into it further.
  
  A programmer friend of mine uses AI constantly now in his work. Once during a D&D game he had ChatGPT write database code for a character generator or something, I forget the actual goal, just while sitting there between turns. It churned out the tedious routine crap you always have to write for tasks like that. He said he's had it refactor his own code, and it has come up with interesting approaches he wouldn't have thought of. Pretty amazing for software that essentially just reshuffles material it's already seen to create something that looks like what a human would produce, without actually understanding what it's doing.
- If it's your thing 3Brown1Blue do an excellent deep dive on neural networks including LLMs that's really informative

VR. Both the good and the bad blow my mind. The good in that it's actually useable now. I tried it in the 90's as a kid and it was straight garbage, not to mention the way I experienced it wouldn't be possible at home (fucker was huge and needed to be suspended by bungee cords). The bad in that it blows my mind that the adoption rate is super low and there's not a helluva lot of good software for it, and it's not even necessarily a price thing; people just don't wanna deal with Meta (which is understandable).

COVID antiviral medication.
- I was reading a paper on it and was blown away at how they referred to "programming" with mRNA that has very real parallels to computer programming. The encoding of the molecule so that it has sections for production, delivery and transport. It's incredible.

Smartphones - multi purpose tool in your pocket, flashlight, phone, navigation, gateway to the internet, camera, etc.., also can summon help when you're in danger (although results may vary).
Quadcopters with GPS auto return feature and position hold (aka: "Drones") - I mean, can you imagine just flying through the air?
I mean, sure, there are planes, but most people don't fly in planes everyday. And you don't really get to be in control, yoi're just a spectator.
Imagine just flying though your neighborhood like a bird. That's whag flying around with a drone feels like. Its throught a screen, but its probably the closest thing to getting the view of a bird.
These days, drones are just like $300 to $1000, basically the cost of a smartphone.
Very fun stuff.
I'm honestly kinda afraid that governments are trying to ban drones because of perceived "national security threats". Politicians always ruining every fun thing 😓

What better way to demonstrate international simultaneous television broadcasting than with an annual song competition? It's quite literally the only reason why I turn on my telly anymore.
The only thing I hate about it is the fact that it can get quite political, and it certainly results in often very depressing controversy. Last year was a prime example of this.
But still, the tech behind it was and continues to be just so cool. Thanks, Switzerland.
- What better way to demonstrate international simultaneous television broadcasting than with an annual song competition? It's quite literally the only reason why I turn on my telly anymore.
  Oh, they are talking about ESC!
  The only thing I hate about it is the fact that it can get quite political,
  Awww, not really.
  Seriously, ESC is the least political show on whole of television, they are trying to avoid anything controversial as much as they can, just look at how they handled that Dutch singer who fell from grace. There was zero discussion or mentioning, he was just cut from the show.
  
  Good job. Also, the fact that they couldn't just, idk, play one of his past performances and using that for the final instead of pretending he never even existed is a bit weird.
  
  The votes are always political even when the show doesn't highlight it. Who wins and looses is mostly about which country the artist is from and the current events in that country. The music, performance, composition etc. barely matters

Man, I'm still hyped that I have a device that fits in my pocket, can carry an entire book library, a giant collection of music, plus selected videos, and if that was all it could do, it would still be a sci-fi dream come true, but it does more than that too.
- I started my game development career in 1996 and we were developing for a brand new system that used "the internet" for touch screen terminals.
  At that time of my life, if you told me you could have something the size of a pack of cigarettes that could render 3D video faster than my entire rendering farm, let me talk to any human on the planet like a Star Trek communicator, tell me the upcoming weather... I would have told you you are insane and this will never happen
- "An iPod, a phone, and an internet communications device."
  That quote never gets old.
- Broadband satellite internet. The proof of concept was HugesNet, but was so awfully slow as to be virtually unusable nowadays.
  With the proliferation of LEO satellites (and acknowledging the problem this brings to astronomers) we can now have broadband connectivity even in the middle of the ocean.
  That we came from 14.4kbps hard-wired connections shared by residential phone service to space communications which can be used in the palm of our hands amazes me to no end.
- I try to remember to appreciate it the way ten year old me would have (when still loading computer games from tape). It's so much more satisfying.

I’m not sure this fits the bill, but I’m blown away by the depth and breadth of available hardware. Not computer hardware (tho that’s amazing, too), but latches, levers, nuts and bolts. I can go down a McMaster-Carr rabbit hole the way most people can go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. It’s just fascinating to me how many highly engineered, precisely machined, perfect, beautiful solutions exist to specific problems. If there’s ever an apocalypse, I’m seriously going to miss the ability to have brilliant mechanical solutions available at the click of a mouse.
- McMaster-Carr is the 8th wonder of the world.

not sure this counts, but wikipedia always amazes me; I wish we could fashion the world this way, out of voluntary labor that provides commercial or better quality

Video generators are cool as fuck and I refuse to pretend otherwise. You can tell a robot "make this look more Pixar" and it works. Even if what you feed in is a block of solid noise. Yeah yeah yeah, sometimes you get six-legged dogs who are walking both ways at once, but even those amusing failure cases exist in photorealistic forests pulled from thin air.
This is science fiction technology, and you're mad at it because of... copyright?
- Knives are cool tech until you stab someone. People are less worried about the LLMs than they are about the stabby bits, like expropriation of others' work.
  
  Yeah they sure seem worried about intellectual property in this specific context and literally nowhere else. Can't have the robot learn English from library books. That's stealin' knowledge.
  We expect an artist-program to know what 'more Pixar' means without seeing any Pixar!

Home automation technology and completely free development tools. Arduino and ESP controllers are amazing nowadays and unbelievably cheap. I just got a little $20 module that's a 3" square 480x480 touch display with an ESP32 on the back of it. I haven't even decided what to do with it yet, but it will probably end up as a wall-mounted indoor display/touch panel controller for the heater and vents in the greenhouse I just built in the backyard. I will add outdoor temperature as well, and maybe weather forecast icons. I was going to just use a phone app, but this thing was so cheap and will be readable from across the room at a glance without pulling out a phone. And totally DIY!
- Yes! My ten year old brain would have melted at what's available off the shelf now. A raspberry pi zero is, what, £20 or something? Picos I think are intended to compete directly with Arduino are even cheaper. That's completely nuts
- Home Assistant. It's just so good at what it does and makes things like what you are talking about more accessible to people like me.
  
  I've been reluctant to embrace Home Assistant because the config files seem so arcane. I'm using NodeRED at the moment, which hides all that, You just create visual process flows on a drawing surface, and it generates a web UI. It reminds me of block programming languages like Lego Mindstorms lol.

I recently found a battery powered device for hot/cold therapy, and it has worked wonders the tendonitis in my arm.
- I know the OP requested no brands, but would like to know what these are called?
  How hot and how cold.
  
  It's the Therabody RecoveryTherm Cube, and it get's hot and cold enough on the highest setting it feels intense enough you can't comfortably use it directly on skin. That said it's not as cold as an ice pack, but I don't think that's the intended use.
  It has 3 modes, here are the temps from the manual:
  Heat: 24 minutes (95°F, 102°F, 109°F)
  Cold: 18 minutes (61°F, 54°F, 46°F)
  Contrast therapy: 20 minutes (Cold: 46°F, Heat: 109°F)

Any AI that can learn. Something always seems off when suddenly an AI that can't even hear you claims it "learned" that "hors d'oeuvres" is pronounced "orderbs". Sometimes it gives me mechanical turk vibes.
- In spelling, V comes before R. But in pronounciation, it's the other way round. Weird.
  I always said "ore-doovers" or even just "hors d"oeuvres" like in French. That's always how it sounded to me.

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