I tend to not really care for most new things, as most of it feels cheap, inauthentic or a scam to further the surviellance facist oligarchy state. Id be completely content with time frozen in 2004.
So, to be a little more positive, what are some new things that are actually good?
Note, to me, new is within the last 10 years.
I’ll start. The fediverse concept is neat.
Alright I can answer this because with all the shit there have also been a ton of cool tech that isn’t fascist, and ton of instances of the community building something awesome:
**Commercial things: **
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Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)
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Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people
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Prusa and Bambu have made 3d printing not just a hobby, but very functional and practical. Now people themselves can replace broken parts, create new functional parts and tools without having to make their entire hobby and personality trying to fix and optimize their 3D printer
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MCUs have blasted off the past 10 years. nRF has revolutionized the Bluetooth space with nRF52 and newer. ESP has brought WiFi to literally everyone in any device they want with whatever processor strength with no antenna design. STM is very friendly to hobbyists and has everything for motors, and NXP makes performance beasts (and all non-US companies doing the great things of course) and they have all become so much more dramatically efficient.
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Multiple MCU companies have switched to open source toolchains that are inter-compatible, more portable, and transparent, making embedded development much less relying on shitty half-baked manufacturer libraries that are incomplete for different offerings.
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FOC motor control and bringing it to the masses have created a huge step in motors and have made implementing efficient servos actually viable for open source projects
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RLCD is an up and comer that gives epaper-like reduced eye strain and outdoor visibility while having an update rate of an LCD.
Maybe older, but still great:
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open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc… Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.
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epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices
**Community Projects: **
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HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every
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Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price
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Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.
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The leaps and bounds made in self hosting software in general is incredible and taken self hosting from a quite risky and very very complicated technical endeavor to do safely to a medium difficulty hobby project that is 100x less of a time sink. Not only that, but commercial software has genuinely good replacements Traefik/caddt, crowdsec, docker, immich, paperless-ngx, jellyfin, mealie, syncthing, nextcloud/opencloud, *arr suite, etc…
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The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don’t need to explain the impact
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Gadgetbridge, turning smart wearables spying on you and selling your biometric data to insurance companies to just plain useful local devices for looking after yourself
There is more, but this is already long
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EGPWS - stops airliners accidentally flying into mountains.
Home Assistant - full control over your smart devices, internet optional.
Sierra Leone hospital - their first hospital that has a neonatal unit, already drastically reducing the maternal mortality rate.
PMSM - electric motor that can exceed 95% efficiency.
Solar panels combined with House batteries or Vehicle to grid is cheaper and more reliable than a backup generator, and in many cases, is even cheaper than using energy from the grid.
The majority of materials in each battery and solar panel can be recycled into new batteries and solar panels at end of life (often after 25+ years), so the raw resources are only needed once.
Most new batteries don’t use rare or controversial materials.
Andor is arguably the best Star Wars content since the original movies
Heat pump technology has come a long way recently. In locations that stay above 0F (-18C) they’re now competitive with fossil gas furnaces for performance and cost (cost results may vary based on local incentives). Many units now work below 0F too, but they get more expensive/less efficient
Personalized mRNA vaccines to prevent pancreatic cancer recurrence after surgery have had some promising early results in clinical trials. This is one of the hardest cancers to treat, so this could be huge.
I don’t think it’s even an argument. It’s just better than the original trilogy IMO. They need more Star wars movies with the same feel.
Heat pumps work great and are super common to install on homes where winter temps drop well below that. They’re so efficient they’re worth it even if you use supplemental heat for the coldest part of the year.
Andor was indeed great
We have heat pumps at my job for our factory.
They are literally useless around of below freezing in the experience here.
They exchange heat so they blow out air colder than outside air, then their entire radiator gets completely covered in ice, then it has to switch off and then the entire factory cools off while they have to turn on the resistive heaters to defrost themselves, then they turn themselves back on and because they are covered in water from defrosting, very quickly freeze again and the whole cycle repeats while the factory is very marginally warmed up during the cycle.
Yeah I don’t mean every model, make, and year is good but almost every house has one here where it’s -15C 3mo of the year and often -20C and below.
As someone who focus on low/no-tech, I must say it’s a tricky question. But the answer is obvious for me: medications.
I should have died many years ago, and if I’m still alive today (nearing my 60s) it’s thx to constant innovations in the medical fields and research in pharmaceuticals (and also thx to radical life changing decisions, but those would not have been an option at all without new medications to begin with).
Heated Rivalry
For super duper recent news, the Giant Panda has been moved off the endangered species list and into Vulnerable status.
Gaming:
- Steam Deck and Linux gaming altogether
- Solo TTRPGs
- The TTRPG space in general
- Board games
Music making:
- Dirtywave M8
- Synthstrom Deluge
- Elektron Digitakt
- An absolute flood of amazing software and plugins
- Tons of pedals from boutique manufacturers
- Music software for mobile devices
- Import guitars are top notch without breaking the bank
PS: A ten year old GTX 1080ti can still run most modern games at 1080p…which is still a very popular entry level monitor resolution.
Still running a 980ti Classified, there’s only a handful in the overlap of “Games I want to play” and “Games I can’t play” diagram at 1440.
Webb space telescope
Fully homomorphic encryption doing useful things
Higgs boson detected (oops, 2013)
Solar power and battery storage cheap enough to displace fossil energy and let ordinary people go off grid
New tacqueria in my neighboorhood is actually pretty good.
What more could you want?
New tacqueria in my neighborhood is actually pretty good.
And I’m only finding out about this NOW?!
Fully homomorphic encryption doing useful things
Like what?
Private information retrieval with just one server! Nobody thought that was possible.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~csd-phd-blog/2024/piano-private-information-retrieval/
Shit like this is what makes me realize I’m an engineer and not a computer scientist. I get the logic, but not so much the practical math.
It seems like there’s a lot of unknowns for where PIR is best used, though. Like using DNS as their example has a lot of issues (that they mention). In what cases is it really best to download the whole dataset (temporarily) to just then go back and query the server on that dataset?
Though maybe I’m just not that creative of a thinker.
Single server PIR is kind of a theoretical surprise but good ways to do it with multiple servers have been known for a long time. See the Wikipedia PIR article. Yes it’s maybe a solution looking for a problem, but it’s way cool that it can be done at all.
Induction burners for cooking are pretty cool. All the heat of gas with none of the “slowly poisoning you and may explode”.
My favorite 3 things of the last decade
Electric cars, Incredible performance, low maintenance.
Steam deck, great fun in a small package, great to play games before bed
Podcasts, seriously there’s one that will speak to you.
Bonus: taskmaster, it’s entirely free on YouTube, it’s a worldwide phenomena, simple low stakes fun, akin to the great British baking show without the manufactured drama (not that there’s much in gbb)
I saw recently they’ve cured Parkinsons for the first time, and I think HIV can be reversed now. So that’s pretty cool.
Oh, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they fixed airport and hotel wifi. I don’t know why I thought shitty wifi in hotels and airports was something I would have to live with for the rest of my life. It just always was that way, so I thought it would always be that way. But the last time I went on vacation, blazing public wifi at the airport and at the hotel. with video playing. We are the future.
You’re gonna have to link that Parkinson’s news.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stem-cell-therapy-parkinsons-china-b2880000.html
I think it was probably this one that I read, though they did not use the word cure. They significantly improved symptoms.
Good thread, since I hate a lot of “new” things. It’ll be good to read about the good ones.
I’ll add: GrapheneOS (and other custom phone OSes) giving us a choice besides being tracked by the big corpos.
Same. Updated to Graphene almost two weeks ago and have been loving it so far. The only thing I’m missing is the built in call screening. I get so many spam calls.
What do you use for call screening?
Batteries are about to get really good. Solid-state is close and that should be huge.
And for those not aware, by “close” they meam that solid-state batteries are being manufactured in mass this year.
Plus sodium batteries are going online too, though at a much lower rate due to the cost of lithium going down causing many sodoum battery manufacturers to declare bankruptcy since they’re having trouble with sales
Are we talking about the Donut Labs battery, or is someone also promising to bring solid state batteries to market this year? My gut says Donut Labs is like 1/8 odds of coming through.
Love the question! Urban infrastructure. At least in my city. I get super stocked whenever I see a new construction site. Not only because I get the feeling that the tax money is actually being used but also because these projects are more often than not really cool. Wider pedestrian spaces, third places and just safer more pleasant areas. Sometimes they only do it half heartedly and didn’t thought about something but the direction is the right one. Of course this is easily done especially considering how hostile they made city’s after ww2, i’m still happy about it though. :)
I live in San Diego, CA, which apart from a bit of rain in December and January, has really nice weather year round. They’ve been slowly upgrading the bike lanes to provide better isolation from cars. There’s still lots of room for improvement, but I bike most everywhere these days and it’s awesome. With e-bikes becoming so cheap and widespread, I can’t help but think better bike lanes would benefit a lot of people.
I’d love to live in a place like that. when they build anything here, I know its taking away current infrastructure, small businesses, and open spaces with an over priced, cheaply built, high rise apartment building.
