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.
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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 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.
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.
what model do you have if you don’t mind me asking? curious what’s out there working for people from someone who would like to get into it but just hasn’t (nor looked into it very much)
I’m still using an Creality Ender 3 for FDM because it was cheap and does the job, but a lot of great FDM printers have come out in the past few years at competitive price points. I use this for larger items where fine detail isn’t important (tabletop buildings, terrain, vehicles, large creatures, etc)
For resin I’ve got an Elegoo Mars 3 Pro, but anything 4k is going to give pretty good results. Keep in mind though, resin is more involved than FDM. You’ll need gloves and a VOC respirator to handle fresh prints, and I sprung for the wash/cure station to make my life easier. I use this for small prints with thin parts or fine details (character minis mostly).
FDM is where most people start to get their bearings, but if your use case is exclusively small detailed prints, it may be worth it to jump straight into resin. Just prepare for a slightly steeper learning curve.
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.
And all that manufacturing has caused a decline in snow, hasn’t it?
True, but at least where I ride they have 100% snow making covered. Solution to man made warning is man made snow.
Joking aside, the season in the midwest sure has shrunk since I was a kid.
Damn… I still snowboard in my gear that is over 20 years old. Has it really changed that much? I only go a few times a year so I never wanted to spend the money on new stuff. Lift tickets already cost an arm and a leg.
It’s like going from moms station wagon to a high end sports car. Do I need the performance sports car? Usually no, but those few times you push it, it’s ready for all that and more.
Thermal form boots are a must, though I guess that tech is more than 15 years old in ski boots at least. I no longer cringe and grunt when I put on my boots, they are as comfortable as any footwear I’ve owned.
The flexibility in modern plastics means the straps and bindings themselves are stiffer where they need to be, and have give where they don’t. Combined with the boots there are no more pinch points at all, and all the force you put into riding goes where you want it.
I ride almost exclusively in the midwest US, so hard, rough, icy conditions that most people wouldn’t consider snowboarding in are the every day. A board with reverse camber, often called banana, and magna tractions, serrated edges for holding grip on ice, are a must.
“Turns ice into powder”, well I dont know if I’d go that far. I can lay into turns in the worst conditions and completely trust the edge to hold. When you get that horrible downhill edge that wants to catch and slam you into the ground, the newer complex curves in the camber means more often than not you will pivot out instead of hanging up. I can’t count the number of times I’ve felt that edge wanting to catch and end my day, only to slip around switch and get away with it.
I’m sure there are more now, but a product called 3DO gel was the first I saw. Flexible and soft normally, it turns ridged under force. I have pads of that stuff basically all over my body, knee and elbow pads, but also tail bone, forearms, and in the liner of the helmet. Saw a demo where they were hitting a guy with a shovel and instantly thought “That’s for me”.
If I had to pick one, a board with C2 or C3 gen camber from lib tech, or its equivalent makes the biggest difference. The over all package of a new setup bought and sized together for my cough, um, “modern” weight requirements, took riding from a painful and nervous experience, and made it relaxed and enjoyable again. Due to many old injuries, I used to ride an hour, maybe two, and had to quit. Now I can ride a full evening, and feel good about doing a few hours the next day as well.
Damn… Now I want new gear.
Also “I ride almost exclusively in the midwest US, so hard, rough, icy conditions that most people wouldn’t consider snowboarding in are the every day” - I’m in the northeast, so I am very familiar with ice boarding, so I’m sold.
I went into one of the larger local shops to buy some risers or something to try and adjust my old setup. Older sales guy about my age took one look at my gear and said “Your knees must hurt like hell”.
I had the money, so I just went full in on new gear, and came away with something I would never have picked for myself.
Not only did he size everything proper for me, he made sure all the pieces were right together. For the first time in my life toe and heel line up exactly with the edge, and where they belong on the pressure points. I’d always riden too small a board and had far too wide a stance to make up for it.
I was still skeptical, but he told me if I didn’t love it he’d do a full price exchange.
Even though it’s about the longest board I’ve ever had, the banana camber makes it feel half the size. Took about three runs to actually trust the board, and I was completely sold, you couldn’t pay me to ride the old gear again.
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I would agree if they followed consumer desire instead of dictating what features get kept and removed.
NZB360. Lovely piece of software :)
Also uBlock originI googled what nzb360 was and it said it was an app to manage your radarr, sonarr and lidarr. But I don’t know what any of those are either. You’re welcome
It’s exactly that.
In essence a companion app to control those self-hosted applications.
You know uBlock Origin is good when Google is trying to kill it.
Linux is pretty sweet. I haven’t got a new computer in over a decade, and don’t plan to, and this OS just continues to work like a dream.
I may become a Linux boy once windows 10 is EOL.
The enshittification of Windows seems to be accelerating at a crazy rate. Haven’t used linux in like 15 years when I tried using uBuntu, and I’ve heard it’s only grown exponentially better.
I also bounced off of Ubuntu, when it first came out and nowadays it is even more ridiculously simple to I install and start using.
No guarantees that you won’t have to do a bit of research of you’ve got particular hw or sw that you want to use, but as far as a general purpose os it has it all
this is the year of the linux desktop after all
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
You can also literally solve problems with a computer lying around - bitcoin mining isn’t very useful, but you can contribute to science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects
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 get what you mean, but home x-ray machines should probably never happen hahaha
I would much rather do x-rays at home with an app or something, than have to go to the hospital to get them done.
for sure, it’s just that xrays are ionizing radiation and as such are extremely hazardouss. xray techs wont even be in the same room as the machine when its on. the glass they’re looking at you through is leaded to prevent their repeated exposure to it.
Near-field radio-wave shenanigans might fake it. There’s all kinds of electromagnetism passing through you and you’re interfering with some of it. Resolution is limited by wave-length… unless the sensor is within that distance. That’s still going to be blurry, but deconvolution mmmight recover enough detail to go “yep, that’s broken.”
I mean, the x-ray thing was just a random example, but okey 🤷
So once upon a time this was a thing…
That’s really cool! I need a pedoscope apparently. A real shame most stuff like that is dangerous.
Open source NVIDIA drivers (NVK, nouveau, nova) finally being usable for gaming.
Linux phones, postmarketOS
RISC-V CPUs becoming more and more viable
The newest cheapo Raspberry Pi including two RISC-V cores was an exciting surprise.
what Linux phone do you use?
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
“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.
Have you check out the stable diffusion plugin for Krita? The in painting technique seemed very cool watching someone work with it.
I’ll catch downvotes, whatever.
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.
Yeah definitely this. The improvements are insane compared to 10 years ago. It’s just annoying that techbro’s and CEOs have decided that it’s the next big thing and will shove it into anything. To too many people AI is a tool that’ll solve any problem, even if it’s usually a very wasteful and unpredictable solution.
Luckily we seem to be hitting the hype plateau and people are getting increasingly sceptical. I’m just hoping it won’t lead to another AI winter. There’s still plenty to gain and figure out, but we don’t need the insane hype that exists now.
The funniest part is Hollywood thinking it’ll shave a fraction off their costs, and not obliterate their entire industry. We now have a CGI studio that runs on your video card. (Or at least everyone can see the path toward making that. The ingredients for this machine are a pirated movie collection, their Wikipedia articles, and obscene amounts of computer power. So it’s not like we could stop people from rolling their own.) You feed in some greenscreen footage, and out comes a whimsical enchanted forest or whatever. Currently still gloopy and samey… but right now is the worst it will ever be, again. And the tools that take off will be the ones that let humans guide the idiot robot around those details.
It’ll still take work to make anything worthwhile, but it won’t take an army of animators eighteen months, let alone a set, a crew, and a cast. The next big gay cartoon will come out of fucking nowhere. And it’ll be cheap enough that it won’t live or die based on merch.
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.
Headphones is a really good one.
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.
Headphones was my answer. The sound quality, the true wireless in ear? Holy shit. I’m someone to whom music is super important. And someone whose brain is always overworking, and not in the best way. Now I can stick one earbud in my ear no matter what I’m doing? Holy shit. I love it.
The change in cell phones is truly unreal.
Just really hope the cell phone software catches up and is less trash as time goes on.
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.
Video games are honestly incredible. The prices have stayed relatively the same for a very long time, despite inflation, and yet the quality has shot up immensely. On the one end you have the AAA games like Cyberpunk, Jedi: Survivor, and RDR2 which look absolutely stunning. I’ve spent significant amount of time in games like those just being in awe with the graphics, taking screenshots. These worlds are so big and immersive, and there are so many tiny details.
Then you have the huge indy/smaller game scene. There are so many good games these days, it’s impossible to play them all. Factorio, Satisfactory, Celeste, Stardew Valley, Valheim, BAR, the list goes on and on. And all for a low price or even no money at all.
Batteries. That’s the next stage in human advancement. Different battery technology
No kidding. Remember when an electric drill took 4 D cell batteries and you could more easily make holes with a screw driver and a bow? Now you can mow your lawn, cut down a tree, and brush your teeth on the same charge
I actually bought an escooter about 10 years ago.
Thing couldn’t get me anywhere.
for real, solid state batteries are going to be a game changer
Oh true! Which is also why my scooter is so powerful for the price.
20 miles on a charge on a device I bought for $400? Absurd.
Insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. But that’s boring: flashlights these days are AMAZING!
Insulin pumps are way more amazing
But I don’t have the beets and I have ten flashlights
Easier management of potentially deadly medical conditions is super exciting!
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.
Quite happy about all of that. :)
It’s been years since I had to deal with MATLAB licenses, since basically everything in scientific computing/data science uses Python these days!
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