By greatest invention I mean something that had big and positive influence.
Guys you’re all wrong.
It’s PornHub.
It’s obviously bofa
What’s bofa
Bofa deez nuts
Goteem
Waze.
Boycott Israel
¿Porque no los dos? 💈
Boycott Waze, Wix, HP, Unilever (and their many subsidiaries), Cif, Coca-Cola, Colman’s, Danone, Dell, Domino’s, Elle, McDonald’s, Monster Energy drinks, Nescafé/Nestlé, Paypal, Pret-a-Manger, Reebok, Starbuck’s, Sun (the laundry detergent)
Waze and many of the companies you listed are not BDS targets, for good reason:
The global nature of today’s economy means that there are thousands of companies that have links to Israel and are complicit to various degrees in Israel’s violations of international law. However, for our movement to have real impact we need our consumer boycotts to be easy to explain, have wide appeal and the potential for success. That’s why globally, while we call for divestment from all companies implicated in Israel’s human rights violations, we focus our boycott campaigns on a select few strategic targets. We also encourage the principle of context sensitivity, whereby activists in any given context decide what best to target and how, in line with BDS guidelines.
https://craft.co/waze/locations - it’s headquartered in Tel Aviv. Boycott it.
“The modern economy is very global and interconnected” is a cliché - too vague and obvious to guide action. Boycott Israeli companies. Waze is an Israeli company.
https://craft.co/waze/locations - it’s headquartered in Tel Aviv. Boycott it.
Maybe some horrible massacre happened there once, but that’s like the heart of 1948 Israel, not some illegal settlement in the West Bank.
“The modern economy is very global and interconnected” is a cliché - too vague and obvious to guide action.
Maybe, but it is an esteemed, Palestinian lead organization employing that cliché and providing good justification for it. I will be giving the guidance from BDS more weight than yours, @frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml.
Maybe some horrible massacre happened there once, but that’s like the heart of 1948 Israel, not some illegal settlement in the West Bank.
So people reading this are aware: the boycott movement is not just about boycotting goods from the occupied territories: it’s about the whole of Israel.
Sodium-ion batteries are likely to be the obvious answer in another decade. Dirt cheap, abundant materials, competitive density.
The smartphone
That was 20th century.
What smartphones existed in the 20th century?
The IBM Simon, Nokia Communicator or Ericsson R380 for example.
Didn’t the iPhone come 2007?
Sure, but the iPhone was far from the first smartphone.
Okay, the iPhone and the smartphones after it. Better? :)
Honestly the iphone was the first big (culturally) smartphone it not the first one.
It may depend on your culture, but Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones were both fairly common in business circles years before iPhones.
The iPhone was an incremental advancement, not a major invention out of nowhere. The first iPhone was actually pretty crap compared to some models on the market. It wasn’t until the 3G model that iPhones took off.
I totally agree. But the question was about inventions not mass adaption.
That’s like saying Henry Ford invented the car because the Model T was the first widely available one.
I think anything you could call a smartphone had to be from post-2000 though, right?
That’s going to be a tough one to call. Nokia Communicator had diary (calendar), web browsing and email features in the 90s. You could also tether off it, but it was dialup and most phones could do that.
That was pretty much the definition of a smart phone at the time.
I mean we only have had fourth and things happen over time. So I want to say blue led but they existed before the century but just got the process such they can manufacture them. Native white ones are invented now but most white is using the combination method currently with the blue ones. Anyway if it counts I can’t imagine how much energy this has saved even over halogens for lighting and then for dispalys to. I would hate to think how much fossile fuel we would be using if we were still on incadescents and crts.
I didn’t truly understand how much energy incandescent were burning. Grew up with nothing but those.
One night my AC crapped out in my tiny apartment so I killed the lights except one in a far corner. The air was so still I could reach my hand out and sense the heat from a 60W bulb.
the base of the lcd still gets way hot. makes me think they could be made even more efficient and hoping they will.
The fediverse. I can’t believe nobody mentioned that yet.
After all, this entire website wouldn’t exist without it, and we’d be all stuck on terrible, terrible Reddit (and Twitter, and… pretty much any centralized social media platform that are so well known).
Monero
Best crypto
I cast: sudo shred *
My little girl.
:)
Warmed my heart.
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It was…clearly a joke. A silly reaction to something that was wholesome and sweet. Have you never had a sense of humor? Or is the lack of one more recent and something maybe a doctor should know about
Edit: wow. You really went back in my comment history to try to harass me? It doesn’t bother me as much as it worries me. Real creepy and, honestly, kinda sad behavior? You good?
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It wasn’t bullying. It was meant to make you laugh. It was meant to make everyone laugh. It wasn’t homophobic. It was the absurdity of reacting to flippantly something entirely wholesome and sweet that all comments were gushing over. Because the answer was sweet and wholesome. It’s really the kind of joke you can only make in an accepting and pro-lgtbtq community. Because the response was meant to be absurd. I didn’t realize it’d hit such a sore spot for you. I didn’t think it could, honestly. Because you way fuckin overreacted.
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lol you think I’ve never been bullied? That’s how I know exactly what bullying is. Of course I didn’t go into your history. I had no idea you were gay. That doesn’t change the joke, though. I’m sorry to have hit a sore spot for you, that definitely wasn’t my intention. The joke was meant to be on me. The joke wasn’t that loving your goddamn kid is “gay.” How the hell could it be? The joke was that the reaction was meant to stand out as absurd and stupid. The joke was meant to point to my reaction as the thing that stood out as backwards. Now your love for your child. Nor being gay. It wasn’t even about the common use of the word “gay.” It was the idiotic caricature of someone who refuses to engage in anything remotely human or sentimental—it was basically a joke on toxic masculinity. Do you see that?
Wikipedia (Jan 2001, so barely squeaked in)
Hell yeah on correctly recognizing what year was the first year of the 21st century! Thinking the new millennium started in 2000 is a pet peeve of mine.
I’m genuinely not sure that anything has been invented in the 21st century.
Many things that were conceptually conceived in the 20th century didn’t become viable until the 21st, such as OLED, VR and AR, raytracing, telesurgery, a whole slew of types of artificial organs, a gigantic amount of miscellaneous advancements in integrated circuit fabrication, alternative vehicle fuel such as methane, hydrogen and rechargeable batteries; maglev trains, innumerable safety improvements in aviation, mRNA vaccines and so on and so forth. I don’t think it’s fair to credit all that stuff to the 20th century, unless someone somewhere saying “be real cool if we could do that” counts as inventing something.
OLEDs were built in 1987 I saw my first VR demonstration in the 90s (and it wasn’t cutting edge then). I saw my first AR demonstration then as well as part of an undergraduate engineering fair. And so on. I just looked up maglev trains - in commercial use since 1984.
I don’t disagree that there hasn’t been refinements, improvements, or commercialization of technology, but there hasn’t been a technological leap or invention that I can think of in the 21st century.
To be fair, there’s only been 24 year’s of 21 century. Most things you gave listed happened at the end of the 20th century. But also the question is somewhat self negating - we won’t know what’s the greatest invention until we see it working great, but it takes much more than 24 years to take an invention from concept to consumption. For example computational biology is kicking off. Computer aided dna generation started in the past 24 years. But it’s so new few people think about it. Just like no one thought of internet as the greatest invention in the 70s… it was just too new
You’re not wrong. But there are counter examples. I was going to use the example of the jet engine in my last answer as a true paradigm shifting development that had immediate impact. And in the mid-century period too! Or the first powered flight occurred in the first decade of the 20th century and had an immediate impact. The transistor and solid state electronics would be another example.
So let me flip it around and say we’ve had a quarter century without a major technological breakthrough. There’s been progress, but it feels incremental. I spent a night with a physicist a few years ago who was arguing that progress is slowing because we are still relying on the exploitation of Newtonian physics. There are a few technologies that have made the leap to nuclear physics. But we’ve had the basics of quantum physics for a century now and haven’t been able to exploit it in a useful fashion.
Good point! I wonder if we’re spoiled by computer invention though. Would be interesting to compare preWW2 invention rates and now. I suspect computers just made everything else easier, but now we’re back to hard problems
Agreed. These are genuinely difficult problems that aren’t going to get solved by our current crop of silicon valley “geniuses”.
3D printers were a 21st century invention, I think.
Quadcopters and other multirotor designs resulted in an incredible leap in affordable cinematography, racing applications, rescue, mapping, and warfare.
A lot of 3D printing patents from the 80s and 90s expired between 2010-2020, clearing the way for commercial 3d printers and a million innovations. I’d call them honorary 21st century inventions, since the patent holders squandered the technology in the 90s.
https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/articles/how-patents-die-expiring-3d-printing-patents.html
We had a 3d printer in the 90s at my Uni. It built layers with laser cut paper lol. It was the cheapest version available and it lived in the engineering department for rapid prototyping. This link says they were invented in 1981, metal sintering was added in 1988 and fused filament in 1989. https://ultimaker.com/learn/the-complete-history-of-3d-printing
Only birds.
Yeah, I was thinking about it and then asked here. It seems like most of nice stuff was invented in the 19st century, and in the past 24 years we just improve it.
Can’t tbink if anythung really, all we’ve done is refined some stuff butmaybe mRNA vaccines ?
Mostly we’ve just enshitified everything and/or made it disposable…From headphones to entire operating systems etc.
I think medical advancement could be as dramatic this century was in the last. However, patent law is likely to hold us back
Social media ;) /s
Most video games
We are in a time where a single invention can rarelt be great. For technological development you need thousands of small inventions, each that use previous technological breakthrough through decades of research. And even great things we have, are just refinement and miniaturization of things we already had.
But if a single thing had to be said, I would say mRNA vaccines. Covid vaccines saved milions of lives, were developed in record times, and their technology could be used for HIV or even antitumoral vaccines.
Was going to say that too. Regardless of the motives and driving forces behind the incredible speed at which the vaccines were developed (i.e. certainly a similar urgency could be applied to other diseases killing thousands and millions in poorer countries, but there ain’t as much interest in that), the mRNA technology proved quite powerful and an avenue to continue exploring in future research.
People forget that the research behind those vaccines had been going on for 30+ years. What was accelerated was the trials and the gathering and analysis of efficacy and safety data. The actual vaccine technology had been in existence for around a decade at the time.
You’re right, I often forget about that. It’s still an incredible achievement.
The first successful transfection of designed mRNA packaged within a liposomal nanoparticle into a cell was published in 1989. “Naked” (or unprotected) lab-made mRNA was injected a year later into the muscle of mice.
But on the other hand, first human test was in 2001
Came here to say it.
The heroic inventor story is archaic.
but the research began already back in the 60s.
That’s why I’m saying that a single invention that changed the world is not something you can easily find anymore.
That’s why I’m saying that a single invention that changed the world is not something you can easily find.
