Name a single technological breakthrough in the past decade that has improved your life in some way
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.
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:
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
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.
It easily feels as though technology is stagnating when capitalism cannibalises everything that can be used to alienate and placate workers.
A few big ones:
Solar technology is now cheaper and more efficient both economically and materially than fossil fuels.
MRNA vaccines went from theory to revolutionising vaccine research with implications across diseases we've already created therapies for.
Neural networks have genuinely done good things for medical sciences, physics, engineering.
3D printing has made our appliances and devices more repairable than ever, and allows partisans to subvert the state's monopoly on violence in new and ingenious ways.
Modern communication software and the encryption behind them has given modern socialist movements secure and anonymous communications that even the most powerful intelligence services cannot penetrate without social engineering.
that's all stuff that helps me but there's many more I bet
Modern communication software and the encryption behind them has given modern socialist movements secure and anonymous communications that even the most powerful intelligence services cannot penetrate without social engineering.
Danger. They don't need social engineering, they can hack you. They can hack your iphone, your carrier will help them. They can hack your computer, your ISP will help them. Are they doing this all the time to everyone? No, it's not practical and more use raises more chances of your tools and methods being detected. Should organizers be wary of the limits of their abilities to secure their electronic communications on devices that are likely compromised with backdoors at the hardware level? Absolutely. Even regular cops can use zionist cyberweapons they purchase to hack racial justice organizers, what the NSA and CIA have are even nicer but totally classified.
Do use encryption, do make it so your data can't be easily subpoenaed or siphoned up in bulk collection. Do make it harder on them. Do force them to burn expensive methods if they ever try and produce anything they have in court. But do not think it makes you totally invulnerable if you get on their radar and they want to get that info as it does not.
Meh, encryption hasn't really changed much in the past decade. Most data is still encrypted using AES, which has been around since 2001. RSA and elliptic curves have been in use for decades as well.
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.
Hard drives are a lot bigger and cheaper. Internet a lot faster and cheaper especially in developing countries thanks to cheap fiber
wireless and small continuous glucose meters.
The invention of the insulin pen as an alternative to vials and syringes, too. Edit: I missed "last decade". Still nice, though.
Worked with a guy who had one of these hooked up to his phone so he knew of trouble well before it became a danger to be up on a ladder.
I change my answer to this because technically it did improve my life by not having to witness something horrible.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon covers this thesis more broadly, that "tech" has stagnated and will never repeat the amazing productivity gains and life improvement we saw in the early 20th century because the jump from like computer to faster computer has no meaningful impact on somebody's life compared to like getting indoor plumbing and electricity. Really well researched and convincing imo.
Convinced that this is partially to do with Moore’s Law being sold as a truth and not merely an observation
People appeal to this shit all the time with AI as if transistors are fucking infinite
I upgraded to SSD in this time period. They're fast.
I like my airfryer? lmao
Are air fryers meaningfully different from those counter top convection ovens?
I remember seeing those commercials as a kid and I wonder if air "fryers" is just them finally making the form and concept more marketable.
Same mechanism, air circulating hot air. Convection is slow fan speed evenly distributing hot air whereas air fryer is higher air speed at higher heat.
Air fryer results in crispier exterior, convection result in more even. Good for all the things you'd usually fry (but healthier). Convection is often still better for things you'd oven bake.
Some of them are disappointing though, the first one I had wasn't good and would've turned me off it as a meme if not for eating my friend's food and trying again with a better one.
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.
Wireless headphones becoming mainstream (both like fully wireless or the ones that sit on top of your head) have been a game changer for me. The sound quality isn't amazing, but I used to suffer cables tangling, one of the headphones dying and not justifying buying new ones until they died for good every few months. When you have sensory issues and didn't realize you had them, it has really helped.
I've had the same fully wireless headphones I use everywhere to minimize sensory overstimulation for four years and they're fine.
they've got cheap too, i have a set of bluetooth ear buds from a six letter that cost me the equivalent of $25
the battery lasts ~6 hours each and they charge in like 40 mins
the sound quality isn't really good enough for music but audiobooks and podcasts are perfectly fine
Wired headphones have gotten amazing at various price points. If you know where to look, you can get something quite good for $18. Moondrop Chu II comes to mind for earbuds, for example.
Yeah definitely. A friend got some IEMs for very cheap and they sound amazing. I'm just grateful I don't have to bother with cables tangling and breaking anymore, and when I want to really listen to something i do use wired.
Definitely noise cancelling has improved significantly within the last decade, and it's been super handy for me. I love being able to just turn off the noise when I'm on a plane, or the loud person on the bus or train.
Mics on the same headphones seem much better too; in all the cases where i'd previously need to check on the phone "can you hear me!?", now they just always can.
And as pointed out somewhere else in the thread, it's gotten cheap, too. I got some over-ear headphones I wear on planes or on the train, and they have really good noise canceling, for under 50 dollars when I bought them. They're not as good as Sennheiser or Sony, but they're 1/6 of the price so pretty good ANC is more than plenty.
BTW, love the username and profile pic. Petrodragonic apocalypse is maybe top 2 KG&LZ albums to me.
As someone said before: e-bikes. I don’t have one but I still think they’re cool.
Zoom calls are great, they’re almost everything I liked about the video call technology you see in the pokemon anime.
This is a big one since I live way out in the boonies and it’s the most accessible to me: I also like some of the improvements to vegan food, I’m following perfect day dairy right now because I really want to see animal-free cheese in my lifetime. Not just because it’s kind to animals but imagine abundant organic cheeses that’s affordable to the masses. I’ve even noticed that some plant-based meat has evolved to be better than nutrislop you see right-wing comics fearmonger about.
It’s a small thing but animation technology has improved and hasn’t taken the love out of some of my favorite animation: Spy Family is gorgeous and Pixar’s Luca was really colorful and well designed.
I’ve seen a couple kinda cool smart mirrors and I wish I was better at coding so I can make one. But I seem to just be horrible at coding lmao.
Every so often I have to tell myself I’m not a Luddite, I don’t hate tech I hate the “why” behind most tech.
For me currently, probably portable vegan food since I am currently a delivery driver and I get no breaks because I need to deliver 300 packages in 10 hours.
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.
The cybertruck has been an incredible source of entertainment
GPS and maps on phone along with train and bus tracking wherever i am and easier taxi booking. This enabled me to do things i otherwise never would have done and afforded a degree of spontaneity that helped me build a lot of friendships. Without this I probably wouldn't have ever gone outside. I know this stuff is a bit older than a decade but i didn't get a smart phone until quite late lol
As someone who works in IT, I don't think anything has. I was thinking SSDs, but they became good by ~2013 really. Phones are still garbage in my experience. AI is probably the closest to being slightly useful, at times. Honestly, as someone who used free Skype extensively back around ~2010, I don't find Zoom to be meaningfully better (and I've yet to find anything beat Skype's original noise-cancelling algorithm).
No, I've really thought and genuinely have nothing else. If technology regressed 10 years I think I'd personally be unaffected (and happier, I could avoid upgrading my hardware for so long).
And as they say, hardware being ever faster is balanced by software being ever more bloated. The only exception is SSDs which makes booting a lot faster and solves a lot of issues inherent with HDDs being electromechanical instead of being pure electronics, but I don't see a major difference in SSDs between 2015 and now outside of them becoming cheaper.
software being ever more bloated
Javascript and its consequences...
hardware being ever faster is balanced by software being ever more bloated
This is the key, really. I get that for a while, developers spent a lot of time and effort on optimising stuff to a tee, but we very much now go the other way, and developers will increase software size 10-fold before they spend a couple days work to make it actually efficient.
Games nowadays will just include a 4GB texture for every dirty brick wall before they think about coding a shader for a prettier, smaller, less GPU-load, effect.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is now about a gigabyte. To read PDFs. Yet far as I can tell outwardly the PDF format hasn't changed in two decades, when the Reader was more like 10MB.
So many modern days programs package in whole-ass web browser engines for like, one screen.
If tech regressed ten years the internet would be more usable
Let's do 20 years, javascript is bourgeois decadence and the proliferation of dogshit js frameworks was pre-2015
SSDs have doubled in speed over the last decade, haven't they?
Yeah they’ve improved in every aspect since the early SSDs. Cost, physical size, storage size, read/write speed, and longevity. SSDs have existed for a long time, but they’ve improved a lot too.
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.
NVMe storage
Isn't that just a form factor for solid state drives? I suppose the upgrade from SATA to PCIe for data transfer to and from storage is a major improvement, but the main innovation here is better quality Solid State drives + faster cacheing.
Yeah, it is. AFAIK there's absolutely no reason you couldn't build an NVMe HDD, aside from the fact that it'd be totally overkill because it could never make use of all that bandwidth.
I was going to say Instant Pot, but that came out in 2010. Linux got better, but that's mostly incremental changes rather than a really big change on top of Windows getting a lot shittier. I guess there's RISC-V CPUs, but those aren't commercial products, so at best, you can say that RISC-V CPUs can be the technological breakthrough that we're missing.
risc-v looks like itll have commercial computers in the far future, some interesting boards and laptops coming out of places like sifive
NASA is also standardising on RISC-V for all in-space control systems going forward.
My 5G chip implant prevents me from getting coronavirus
Gene therapy & mRNA vaccines seem to have kicked off in the last decade.
Calling Zoom a "breakthrough" doesn't sit right to me. I like your other word "improvement" better for something like this.
However if we're using a more expansive definition of breakthrough, my answer is Disco Elysium
I'm not sure what they mean by Zoom, but I feel like video chats have not improved in 20 years. I think Skype introduced video chat in 2005, and AFAIK every video chat ever (I mostly use MSTeams, unwillingly) prioritizes seeing a blur at 15 frames per second instead of a clear picture. Which is annoying, because coworkers want to write on whiteboards.
For me professionally: managed cloud-hosted services have come along considerably (aws aurora in particular is really slick) and processor improvements have allowed me to scale down the fleet of servers I manage (less power and $ usage is great)
Like someone else mentioned, mRNA vaccines for sure.
Cellphone infrastructure, i live out in the sticks and didn't reliably get service in my area until 2-3 years ago
active noise cancellation in headphones has gotten a lot better in the last 10 years for sure, adding ANC to earbuds has been a gamechanger for my autistic ass
Regrettably, some internet-connected devices have also been really useful from an accessibility standpoint for me too. Just getting push notifications when my laundry is done has been a huge help with ADHD-related laundry struggles
Oh and the proliferation of backup cameras in cars has been very nice (albeit not as nice as widespread reliable public transit would be)
the proliferation of backup cameras in cars has been very nice
Keep in mind this only happened in compensation for a decrease in rear visibility. The cameras were added because it would be impossible to back up otherwise. Though, I agree with the overall point that safety features have improved a lot: collision warning/braking, IR parking sensors, lane keep assist, adaptive cruise (if you can get it).
I'm having a hard time even thinking of significant technological breakthroughs from the last 10 years. It seems like we're in an incremental improvement plateau. Someone said mRNA vaccines and that's a good one. "AI" is mostly a grift, but I do like the call screening feature on my Android phone; I basically never get bothered by spam calls anymore, because a robot screens all my calls and doesn't ring my phone unless it's someone I know or the caller can articulate what they want. That's nice I guess.
there are none and no one in this thread have posted any. GPS? ever heard of a map? wireless earbuds? yeah i love worse sound quality and throwing lithium into the landfill. SSDs? yeah i love it when my slop machine gets me faster to my slop
nothing good has happened in the last thirty plus years
Hexbear.
Most all of the FOSS alternatives that have popped up over the last ten years have been major. There is a decent FOSS alternative for just about everything I need on the computer.
Windows compatibility layers on Linux are powerful beyond my wildest dreams a decade ago.
My Steam Deck.
Also, I love my smart watch. It makes things easier and helps keep up on my health.
Then compared to a decade ago, android phones and the OS have gotten a ton better.
Also, solar has gotten a lot cheaper and many electric companies have started storing electricity in large zinc batteries to reduce pollution and prevent brown outs.
EV cars suck less, but they still aren't quite ready to replace gas completely. I think that will happen over the next decade.
Really, just the internet sucks more now.
Are these really breakthroughs, though? Incremental improvements are cool but your list is
-portable computer
-smaller wrist computer
-hand computer is faster
-more solar panels exist
-cars with different power source are better
When i think of breakthrough i think of going from paper punch cards to computer based file systems not computer based file system to faster one.
I also really like my steam deck fwiw
It didn't go from paper files to computers in a single breakthrough. It went from handwritten documents to typewriters to better typewriters to gaint discs to magnetic tape to optical storage to hdds to SSDs. That wasn't one breakthrough, but a handful.
Breakthroughs are usually pretty slow, man. Like, the only thing that happened the decade before that was smartphone. Nothing really the decade before that one. Then "the internet" the decade before that.
I thought I'd be cheeky and look up a list of shit that's come out since 2015 but was inundated with AI slop telling me about random bullshit so
Yeah it's all shit
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)
cloud gaming streaming bullshit, not because of actual cloud gaming, but so i can play split screen games with no netcode over the internet with friends
Unless we count the field of medicine idk if I can think of one. And even then some were being gatekept
We were doing that back on dial-up.
China is doing cool things with 5G networks and drone technology. Respectively, remote surgery and pesticide deployment are the two uses I can recall, but there are many other useful implementations as well.
Discord is nice. I like being able to stream games/movies with my friends.
VR. The Oculus Rift was the first modern VR headset and is from around 2015, 2016. I use VR several times a week. Helps me keep social with people who share my niche interests.
linux gaming, steam deck, gigabit internet proliferating in my country.
Electric unicycles have been improving fast over the last decade, and all that development has been happening in China. The initial invention of the modern style seatless EUC was around 2010, but that inventor is just patent squatting at this point so there's zero US work in the category.
I definitely echo what @gay_king_prince_charles@hexbear.net said, but will also add that the Rust programming language has been a great development.
Mountain bikes have gotten so much better in the last 20 years.
Disc brakes have proliferated to be basically a standard feature on road bikes, used to be only high end ones + mountain bikes got them.
I really do think that LLMs are the only technological breakthrough that's improved my life in the last decade, and 75% of those gains just fill the void left by Google search's deterioration. And may even be a net negative, since spammers and spreading misinformation benefit 100x more from the technology than I do.
Not gonna lie, ai has helped me a fair bit. It's so good for job applications.
Neural Networks for image recognition, BTRFS, Proton, cheap SSDs are great. However, there are some truly terrible pieces of technology made with good intentions, such as Gradle.
The James Webb telescope, quantum computing breakthroughs, sustained fusion reactions, almost ready to deploy thorium reactors, and AI even if you only see the dumbest applications of it right now.
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.