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 know, I know, it’s getting boring, but…Linux.
Nowadays you install it by clicking “next” a few times, and when you’re done, the latest updates are already installed, the firmware for your hardware is installed, your wifi is connected, your networked printer/scanner combo is already recognized and set up, storage media or devices you plug in are auto-mounted, most games work out of the box, bluetooth works, MS Office files can be opened without becoming a garbled mess, touch screens work, touchpads work better than on Windows, …It didn’t used to be this way. 20 years ago, Linux ran only on desktop PCs with Ethernet cable connection, all games had a penguin as the main character, shopping for a printer made salesmen look at you like you’re from Mars, and when someone sent you a .doc file, you sent back a reply to please use a free format or PDF.
all games had a penguin as the main character
I see no issue with this
Penguin gang rise up!
tux to be you
What was i expecting. Of course Linux is the most top-rated answer ITT.
Sigh.
The things we like don’t change much from day to day.
We had Widelands and we liked it! Don’t even get me started on trying to view porn!
Linux has been easier to install than Windows for a while now, particularly with all the goofy hacks you have to pull out just to make an offline account on Win11.
Sooo many issues getting wifi or sleep working in the past. It’s so much better now.
I just used Virtualbox’s auto install feature yesterday and it was insane. Literally just put in name and password and iso and it did the rest.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, but today I feel like ranting about the debian 12 installer a bit and its inability to accept that, yes, I do in fact want to install grub on two separate hard drives at once, so that I have two sets of /boot/EFI
The OS itself allows installation on mdraid, but grub does not. So in the end I had to set up one /boot/EFI partition on one drive, and reserve an identically sized partition on the other drive so I could manually duplicate the grub installation afterwards. Took me a few hours of hair pulling and way too much coffee to figure that one out.
Have you ever tried something like this with a Windows installer?
I haven’t used a windows installer in a decade, so no. Does windows even allow basic partition8ng during install?
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Basic, yes. But windows still assumes it knows better than you and does whatever it wants anyway. But you can set up separate partitions for C:\ and D:, etc
Synthesizers and music technology in general.
I could write an essay or two about how much has changed in the past fifty years. Most of it for the better.
The level the “hobbyist” music producer can reach now days is mind boggling with the free software they can get on their phones and pcs.
According to Rick Beato on YouTube this is why music is shit nowadays. He’s got real “old man yells at cloud” energy and he’s fucking wrong. The fact that someone can make music easily means that there is tons of great music being produced because the barriers to entry are not prohibitive anymore.
He’s especially wrong because music is shit EVERYDAY we just have the privilege of looking back on decades of music we can sift through.
For every Led Zeppelin there are 50 Whingers. We just don’t remember them because they are lost to time.
Anyone who claims ‘music today sucks’ will change their tune in 10 years when the real classics of today are remembered.
I imagine you missed the nuances of what he describes as the human elements of music. Humans fluctuate tempo. Humans can play music with other humans impromptu based on common repertoire or musical templates, themes, and styles. Humans can call and response based on riffs or quotes. Music and dance are quite literally on the few cultural pillars of humanity across all cultures and time for its social uses. Often, all this music software is used in solitude, never to be utilized in a social way. New music tech and music instruments are just tools. It is about how one uses them.
Often, all this music software is used in solitude
Beethoven composed in solitude, too.
Yes, there’s something about a live performance that can’t exactly be reproduced jamming with yourself in your bedroom, but that doesn’t mean that great music can’t come out of both processes.
Beato is definitely channeling a little “git offa mah lawwn!” vibes. The reason we don’t get any more Led Zeppelins or Pink Floyds or whichever brand of classic rock he worships at the altar of isn’t because there aren’t talented musicians making music. It’s because the circumstances that those artists thrived under no longer exist, and likely never will again.
Something being accessible usually means that the results have a lower low-end and higher high-end, no? In the context of music, it would mean that there are bigger heaps of trash with a few hidden gems
Haha yeah we have seen some wonderful singers come out of nowhere with fully produced songs.
Yes there are a lot of people who are having fun, but people producing songs for fun doesn’t make songs you enjoy worst. It’s amazing that someone can from the comfort of their home and stuff off amazon they can produce a song in about 6 months with equipment/software that would require a studio 20ish years ago. Also probably never been more satisfying to produce a song. Even if it’s not “Great” it still adds to the joy of music.
The music equivalent of ‘everyone has a novel in them, and god willing that’s where most of them will stay.’
My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio
Guitar tube amplifier emulation.
I love it because as absolutely horrid as it was when it was emerging tech, those sounds along with every other link in the chain comes with certain nostalgia for music that was created using it in whatever intermediary period it was at in that time. Today we’ve basically hit endgame in that the emulations of today’s tech are so close to the real thing that they’re basically indistinguishable from the genuine article. We have access to the full range of sounds from Boss DS-1’s to the old Line6 Pods to modern Kempers. If you’re a guitar player who likes experimenting with the over all sound of your rig, this is the good stuff.
You talking software or like DSP pedals? I’ve been out of the game a while.
All of the above depending on what your budget is.
Many software emulations are more than serviceable, and again depending on your budget can offer some really advanced parameter controls to mimic different types of speakers in differently sized cabinets being recorded with different types of mics in different recording spaces.
Pedals can still vary widely in quality, but there are some really good ones out there that can serve as a backup in case there’s any on-stage technical problems, or even serve as a completely fine fly rig in and of themselves.
Kemper makes the top of the line stuff these days (so far as I know, it’s been a couple years since I payed very close attention to cutting edge tech). Their profiling amps allow you to make complete profiles of real amps and cabs through recording a series of signals through that rig. These profiles can be shared online and downloaded straight onto their “heads” which can be rack mounted in a studio setup. For stage use they have versions that serve as a typical amplifier head would, or use the form factor of those multi-effect floor units. They sound incredible.
Honestly the apps on my phone that do this are amazing. I bought an adapter that adds a 1/4” and an 1/8” jack so I can listen to it through headphones and it’s beyond anything we had just a few years ago.
Bought a Helix LT a few months and have basically not used my tube amp since. There is a bit of option paralysis with it. I have about 20 patches set up now with various snapshots, previously I had about a dozen pedals. There’s definitely more options, but part of me thinks there’s maybe something missing at times.
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.
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
“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.
Smart phones and ssd’s. Every smartphone I get is an upgrade because every 5 years the tech at my buying point gets better. Ssd’s just make everything so much faster then hardrives and works with my old AF computer. But the hardrive I had lasted 10 years slowly failing and still booting windows somehow.
I would agree if they followed consumer desire instead of dictating what features get kept and removed.
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
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.
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
GNU Taler
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Rejuvenation technology!
They have already rejuvenated an old mouse back to mid life!
It’s like battery tech though, small small increments.
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).
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.
