By greatest invention I mean something that had big and positive influence.

        • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
          3·
          11 days ago

          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)

          • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workEnglish
            31·
            11 days ago

            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.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    8·
    9 days ago

    Sodium-ion batteries are likely to be the obvious answer in another decade. Dirt cheap, abundant materials, competitive density.

            • Nath@aussie.zone
              1·
              10 days ago

              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.

            • tobogganablaze@lemmus.orgEnglish
              4·
              11 days ago

              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.

                • Nath@aussie.zone
                  1·
                  10 days ago

                  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.

  • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
    71·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 days ago

      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.

  • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    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).

        • TheFriar@lemm.ee
          13·
          9 days ago

          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?

            • TheFriar@lemm.ee
              11·
              9 days ago

              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.

                • TheFriar@lemm.ee
                  11·
                  9 days ago

                  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?

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
      41·
      9 days ago

      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.

  • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
    English
    141·
    11 days ago

    I’m genuinely not sure that anything has been invented in the 21st century.

    • Goat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      13·
      11 days ago

      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.

      • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
        English
        9·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • Hexorg@beehaw.org
          61·
          11 days ago

          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

          • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
            English
            3·
            11 days ago

            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.

            • Hexorg@beehaw.org
              1·
              7 days ago

              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

              • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
                English
                1·
                7 days ago

                Agreed. These are genuinely difficult problems that aren’t going to get solved by our current crop of silicon valley “geniuses”.

        • Wahots@pawb.social
          2·
          11 days ago

          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.

    • starman@programming.devOPEnglish
      3·
      11 days ago

      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.

  • Hanrahan@slrpnk.netEnglish
    72·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • Kayel@aussie.zone
      1·
      10 days ago

      I think medical advancement could be as dramatic this century was in the last. However, patent law is likely to hold us back

  • thepreciousboar@lemm.ee
    681·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • Tmpod@lemmy.ptM
      6·
      11 days ago

      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.

      • fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
        6·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • Tmpod@lemmy.ptM
          2·
          11 days ago

          You’re right, I often forget about that. It’s still an incredible achievement.

    • starman@programming.devOPEnglish
      2·
      11 days ago

      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

      • thepreciousboar@lemm.ee
        121·
        11 days ago

        That’s why I’m saying that a single invention that changed the world is not something you can easily find anymore.

      • thepreciousboar@lemm.ee
        22·
        11 days ago

        That’s why I’m saying that a single invention that changed the world is not something you can easily find.