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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GNU Taler
All kinds of EVs (especially e-scooters and other small fun PEVs), and computer hardware.
Unfortunately, gains with hardware are usually met with regressions in software performance.
Batteries. That’s the next stage in human advancement. Different battery technology
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Open source NVIDIA drivers (NVK, nouveau, nova) finally being usable for gaming.
Linux phones, postmarketOS
RISC-V CPUs becoming more and more viable
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
The newest cheapo Raspberry Pi including two RISC-V cores was an exciting surprise.
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.
Oh I forgot to mention pedals AI for distributed AI inference so its possible for smaller systems to contribute and use a larger model then they could theoretically do alone.
Home automation - I love being able to yell at my phone to turn tv/lights on and off when I’m comfortable or its cold
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just looked this up and found Lucas.
That looks straight up from Scifi, that is amazing.
The Lucas looks more Sci fi, but usage wise, I prefer one called AutoPulse. It looks less “brutal” when being used in front of patients family/bystanders, isn’t as loud, and the newer ones have a built in tarp with straps to pick up the patient and carry them so the stretcher. Also has a much lower profile.
Ooh watched an AutoPulse one!
AutoPulse looks almost Star Trek. Very sleek and usable. It looks so unassuming when they pull it out, then it makes that chest COMPRESS. I’m aware that you have to press hard enough to get the ribcage moving, but I was not prepared for such an unassuming device to have that much force. I can see them slipping a vest onto someone in star trek that pumps their heart and helps carry them to sick bay.
Lucas is more star wars. It looks like a rib cracker.
So I think I’d prefer an auto pulse XD
Charging for cell phones. So much better than a decade ago.
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!
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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).
Machine Learning or as the non-techies call it, AI. It’s incredible what open source models can do these days.
Making sense of huge data sets will have science make huge leaps forward, the freaking whale alphabet
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.
