What's a piece of technology you LOVE the progress of?

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!
- Sooo many issues getting wifi or sleep working in the past. It's so much better now.
- I wholeheartedly agree with you, but 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?
- 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.
- We had Widelands and we liked it! Don't even get me started on trying to view porn!
- 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.
- 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.

Open source software in general. Seeing Blender become an industry standard was awesome, and it looks like the Godot engine may do the same for gaming. Krita has evolved into a truly wonderful painting program (and not half bad as a Photoshop replacement), and Linux itself has come so far, having become a genuine gaming platform.
Quite happy about all of that. :)
- It's been years since I had to deal with MATLAB licenses, since basically everything in scientific computing/data science uses Python these days!
- I love Krita, it's my go-to layered image editor unless I need to do something more fancy

Active noise cancellation. It's a bit like magic. Don't be a wanker and say "Um actually, all you have to do is emit an inverse waveform." I think it took a hell of a lot of work to get this right, especially integrating it into relatively inexpensive consumer devices. Thanks, scientists and engineers. Well done.
- What blows me away is how they fit all of that technology into microscopic earbuds
  
  I bought AirBudz pros to delete an annoying coworker and when I first had my partner try them, they were like “HOW DID YOU TURN OFF ALL THE FANS”
  
  I need hearing aids. My aids are so small they fit completely in my ear, so unless you are standing up close, you can't see they are in. I've had them for about 3 years and I'm still blown away how small they are and how well they help me.
- I think the concept was old and fully grasped. Reducing the latency enough to make it work in headphones and earbuds was the magic part.

This will sound a little mundane but, FLASHLIGHTS! Particularly bicycle head lights. The prices before LED's were just STUPID. Hundreds of dollars for small amounts of light (which to be fair was the best you could get at the moment). Which were being used for night mountain biking. But all I needed was to get to and from work safely at night, I didnt have $400 for a headlight that would actually let me see the ground in front of me.
BUT, then came the revolution. China started putting out these LED lights that blew everything else out of the water ... FOR CHEAP! In two years light prices went from $400 to $100 for top of the line lighting. US bike light companies were a year or two out before they could re-tool to match the lumens coming out of china. Mind you, the Chinese lights were not always the most reliable. BUT they were 1/4th the cost of a name brand light. So even if it died, you could still buy ANOTHER one for less than the price of a high end name brand light.
And since the LED revolution, things have not changed much. Prices either go down or stay the same and the lumens increase OR the burn time increases. Its just a win win for customers/consumers.
- By the same token, and I consider these a different category, headlamps. Camping got a whole lot better with a solid headlamp setup. The red light is crucial.
- I hadn't thought of that, but you're right. When I was growing up, incandescent bulbs and massive short-lived batteries made flashlights suck. Now flashlights are tiny, throw a tonne of light, and last a really long time.
- I have an obsession with light. Love the golden and blue hours and I don't want to know why, it's just so beautiful to watch. Being like this I'm pretty conscious of lighting and, in general, it has become just wonderful to have that precise dim and warmth in every space for a reasonable price. Not only this, less-intrusive lighting had become something urban ecologists quietly succeeded on spreading all over the world (bat-friendly lighting, for example) thanks to the available technologies.
  So, yeah... not mundane at all.
- I've been biking at sunset after I get the kids to bed and have super cheap lights on my bike to blink for visibility. Each light is powered by 2 CR2032s (BIOS batteries) I forgot to turn them off one day after my ride recently and left it in the garage blinking away, came back the next day to no visible decline in light output after running them for over 24 hours. Honestly those lights are probably approaching 24 hours of actual usage time not counting leaving it blinking in the garage

Insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. But that's boring: flashlights these days are AMAZING!
- Insulin pumps are way more amazing
  But I don’t have the beets and I have ten flashlights
- Easier management of potentially deadly medical conditions is super exciting!

Lights. 15 years ago, everyone was using incandescent bulbs which were terribly inefficient and neon lights which had their own inconveniences. Today, LEDs have mostly replaced them, can produce better quality light, and use a fraction of the power.
- Agreed. I remember when lightbulbs got banned here in the EU starting from 2009 to 2012 in steps. Here in Germany plenty of people were mad and hoarding them.
  Nowadays with the larger focus on energy prices, especially in light of the russia-ukraine war, it seems insane that not even that long ago to light a room one or multiple lightbulbs using 65-100 watts were used. That's like the equivalent of an office PC running just for some light.
- And they run cool. My office has a fixture that was too bright which would normally take those 4' fluorescent bulbs.
  I got on a ladder take one out. Turns out they were LEDs. Cool to the touch. I put electrical tape over them and called it a day.
- I miss real neon. but I like that hydroponic grow-lights now only use as much power as a 60-120watt incandescent bulb. I remember when those big metal hallide & sodium lamp setups were a huge barrier-to-entry for indoor growing.
  
  What do you grow? Carrots, right?
- Only downside is people abusing the lack of headlight & bumper height regulations
  
  Holy fuck. Have you ever seen one of those full grill panels? Brighter than the god damn death star. When it's foggy the beam extends 3/4 of a mile
- Compact fluorescent bulbs were very common here 15 years ago.

I'm excited to see the progress of 3d printers becoming more user friendly, reliable and inexpensive. I've been keeping an eye on the development of consumer printing and there are so many types of materials to print with at higher and higher details with less troubleshooting needed. I'm thinking I'll finally jump in this year but I've had very little time for hobbies lately.
- I've been following 3d printing since the early 2000s, when it was all homemade machines printing with weed whacker line, slicers weren't a thing, and resolution was garbage. Now I have a resin printer that cranks out tiny detailed tabletop miniatures no problem. What a time to be alive.
  
  what model do you have if you don't mind me asking? curious what's out there working for people from someone who would like to get into it but just hasn't (nor looked into it very much)
- I recently purchased a bambu labs p1s after many years of fighting with an Ender 3. I've printed so many things and not had a single fail, it prints so fast I actually don't know what to do next.. The AMS also opens up a whole new world, I've printed book marks (I know it sounds silly) but these things look amazing, something I never would have thought of ever. My only gripe is not having all the filament colours I want due to cost haha.

E-books
I love having the physical thing in my hands, but love that we've gotten to a point where I can log on to Libby and just download one too, or back up digital versions of my favorites on my hard drive so I hopefully never lose them.
- Have you checked out using an IRC for e-books?
  
  IRC as in the old-school chat protocol?
  
  Nope, but I will.

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.

Linux is pretty sweet. I haven't got a new computer in over a decade, and don't plan to, and this OS just continues to work like a dream.
- this is the year of the linux desktop after all
- I may become a Linux boy once windows 10 is EOL.
  The enshittification of Windows seems to be accelerating at a crazy rate. Haven't used linux in like 15 years when I tried using uBuntu, and I've heard it's only grown exponentially better.
  
  I also bounced off of Ubuntu, when it first came out and nowadays it is even more ridiculously simple to I install and start using.
  No guarantees that you won't have to do a bit of research of you've got particular hw or sw that you want to use, but as far as a general purpose os it has it all

LED technology has progressed massively and is now at the state where you can carry a device with the lighting power of a car headlamp but it only consumes 10W, weighs 200g and fits in the palm of your hand. I can ride my bike through the woods at night, as if it were daytime. All we need now is some technology that makes the woods less creepy after sundown and we'll be all set.
Another big one for me is Wikipedia and the information sphere in general. I forgot what it's like to have to physically go to a library to look something up or learn a new skill, amazing power at our fingertips. Showing my age a bit here.
What else? Computer aided engineering tools, cordless power tools, phones and computers in general, lithium ion batteries, my automated coffee maker kills it, drug technology, I like it all.
- cordless power tools
  Each tool had their own battery, it discharged so fast and degraded even faster, and forget buying new batteries because the manufacturer decided to change the design again and either you’re stuck with a drill that only works for five minutes or buy a new one.
  Now batteries last an eternity, and because each brand has their own ecosystem, as long as you buy tools from the same brand you can use the batteries you already have. And also the brands has no incentive to change the design and break the compatibility of the batteries, it would alienate the costumers who spent a lot of money on the tools and would go for another ecosystem.
  
  Remember when batteries had 'memory' and would charge dramatically less over time?

Open source software in general is getting incredibly complex. While big companies mopolized the software industry at the end of the century, now the most widely used technologies are completely open source (kvm, linux, docker, apache, ssh, c++, rust), which means that everyone has access to it and can use it for personal or light commercial use without too much cost and hassle. Sure, companies still monopolize, but only because they offer hardware and services at a big scale, if you want to have an indipendent space on the internet, this would be the perfect time
- I'm a libreoffice user myself and I forget I have the "replacement" most days. The entire suite feels great these days.
  
  I always thought LibreOffice was shit and it always felt like I was using a "replacement". However, after finally using Word again after many years I've come to the conclusion that it's actually not miles ahead and also quite shit. The docx format is bad, so Word is still better at dealing with it purely because it's their format, but LibreOffice honestly has a nore logical but uglier design. The Word top bar is pure pain

Battery tech and self-sufficient energy solutions for a home in general. Being able to provide your own energy and store it for later use is just excellent.

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.

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.

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.

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

Storage. SanDisk recently announced an 8TB SD card. I remember back when all I had was 1.44MB floppy disks in like the 90s.
https://www.techradar.com/cameras/camera-accessories/sandisk-announces-the-worlds-first-8tb-sd-card-the-biggest-memory-card-weve-ever-seen

E-Ink and Ebooks in generell. Maybe not all the shitty Software/DRM that often comes with them but the technology itself is amazing.
- That is incredible tech. And now they're backlit and in color? Amazing. The only thing holding me back is shitty software and DRM. If there was a color eReader I could run something like Alpine on I would get one instantly. Instead it is often some proprietary shovelware begging to subscribe to their proprietary cloud service.
  
  E-ink screens aren’t backlit. It’s one of the reasons they are so easy on the eyes. They are front-lit. There are LED’s at the edge of the screen and a light guide on top of the screen that diffuses it onto the e-ink screen. Instead of staring directly into a lightbulb like with LCD the light you see is reflected off the page.
  
  Yeah I 100% percent agree. But as far as I know most of the eBook reader also slow plain ePub or PDF and than you can often find these online or order them directly at the publisher. Sometimes you buy them at the publisher there will be only a signature and no DRM.
  
  I've heard the coloured ones are not as cool and page transitions are slow
- I think I like that the progress that happens actually make sense and makes my life better. Of course there is almost no progress that you can feel I'm this technology over the course of one year but that eInk in gnerell became a think over the course of my life still amaze me everytime I think about it
  
  Some believe that competition is finally ramping up.
  We have color and okayish refresh rates now!

Battery tech is making a lot of things better/possible. E-mtb for example. Drones, camper van power, etc.
- All hail the mighty 18650!
  
  I have soooo many. Lol

Batteries. That's the next stage in human advancement. Different battery technology
- No kidding. Remember when an electric drill took 4 D cell batteries and you could more easily make holes with a screw driver? 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.
- 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.
- for real, solid state batteries are going to be a game changer

Displays. Even the cheap TVs and monitors look incredibly good.

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.
- My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio

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.
- 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.
- 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.

I know it's dumb, but cellphones. They went from bricks to pretty much super computers. I'm amazed at the stuff I can do on my phone. Music, games, drawing, texting, phone, video call, camera, recorder, ebook, audio book reader, etc.
Headphones. I'm not an audiophile so I'm sure there are varying qualities, but there are so many different headphones now, almost all Bluetooth. Most are pretty good because the base standard seems higher overall. I remember getting cheap headphones and having then sound awful. Now I buy cheap headphones and it's really not that bad. And now there noise canceling? Like magic. Hell, getting my first Bluetooth headset made me feel like I had made it (I in fact did not make it, they just became lower in price).
Video games. There are a llllooootttttt of issues with the gaming industry, but the variety, accessibility, and quality is nuts. My first console was a my grandma's SNES. My first handheld device was a Gameboy. Not game boy color, just game boy. I've watched my grandma and I go from black and white / basic graphics, to being able to see the peach fuzz on someone's face. I was playing a game and felt the rain from the vibration in my controller. I thought VR was something I might be able to see towards the end of my lifetime, not pretty much at the start of it. I also think how easy it is to connect and play with people is amazing. I can play with my friend across the country, and speak with her, and share my screen, and have her play like she was on the couch with me.
- Our phones are such amazing pieces of mobile, personal technology. We're using them for all the most mundane details though and they're detracting from some of the better things we could be doing with our time and intellects.
  I feel it's a problem for all of us but as an elder millennial at least I have experienced a world without them. I feel for the younger generations - they're all consuming for them.
  When I noticed it encroached on something I enjoy - trying to guess or remember a bit of trivia - my partner and I now have a rule that we must spend at least 5 minutes trying to guess who that actor is from, or who sings this song before we look it up. The technology was robbing us of imagination and rifling through the mental files.
  I don't disagree with you at all though - we're using star trek tech and it's fucking cool.
- Video games are honestly incredible. The prices have stayed relatively the same for a very long time, despite inflation, and yet the quality has shot up immensely. On the one end you have the AAA games like Cyberpunk, Jedi: Survivor, and RDR2 which look absolutely stunning. I've spent significant amount of time in games like those just being in awe with the graphics, taking screenshots. These worlds are so big and immersive, and there are so many tiny details.
  Then you have the huge indy/smaller game scene. There are so many good games these days, it's impossible to play them all. Factorio, Satisfactory, Celeste, Stardew Valley, Valheim, BAR, the list goes on and on. And all for a low price or even no money at all.
- The change in cell phones is truly unreal.
  Just really hope the cell phone software catches up and is less trash as time goes on.
- Headphones was my answer. The sound quality, the true wireless in ear? Holy shit. I’m someone to whom music is super important. And someone whose brain is always overworking, and not in the best way. Now I can stick one earbud in my ear no matter what I’m doing? Holy shit. I love it.
- Headphones is a really good one.
  I have a set of Sony MDR-7506 which are widely agreed to be the seriously good entry level audiophile headphones. They cost me £80. That’s quite a lot of money for some people, especially for just wired headphones, but they really are incredible.
  But at the other end of the scale, you can now pick up really good Chi-fi IEMs for £20. When I was a teen 30 years ago, you were either paying £15/£20 for dog shit earphones that fell apart after a month, or £50+ for anything that was half decent, but still only lasted a year. Basic £10 wired buds sound pretty damn good these days. You might not hear the bongo man on Earth Wind & Fire, but you’ll get a good idea he’s there.

Said like 80 times in this thread already but, Open Source & Free software (papa stallman will murder my family if I don't make the distinction)
Fifteen years ago when I first got into it, Linux was a programmer/sysadmin's OS that could cover one's web browsing needs and run some media players and retro console emulators.
Nowadays it is a reasonable daily driver for high-end gaming, it can cover 85% of the creative tasks I do for work, plus all the shit it did back then, all the while being faster, lighter, and comfier than windows.
There's good libre applications for pretty much everything I care about.
And now we even have open-source powered social media (hi we're in Lemmy)
Fuck, even if I'm this close to butlerian jihad thinking in regards to the whole concept, I'll give it up for the advancement of open source AI models. I might think the whole invention is poison, but better for it to be a public, shared, community built poison than one under the thumb of three megacorps.
- Nah, I've been using Linux vasy only desktop for over 20 years now, 15 years algo it was already so much more than a sysadmin OS with a browser. Granted, it had little games but everything else was there already.
- Assuming you mean LLM's and image generation, yeah open source is much better! Cause that way it'll be used for dumb silly things.
  An LLM in a video game? Sure, could be cool. A game like spore where it generates species, and it uses image generation? Could be cool. Also if an artist wants inspiration from AI images, I don't hate on anyone's process. All those things I feel like are better if the people using them are in control of them.

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.

Displays/screens, especially OLED these days. My phone screen uses this technology, my smartwatch, my tablet and my Alienware ultrawide PC monitor for gaming and movies.
- And how did they get so freaking cheap?
  
  Part of it is the manufacturing process is unified between TVs, monitors, smartphone screens, car screens and anything else with a screen in it. Its all the same manufacturing process and they just slice and dice the LCDs based on what's in demand and what they can cut out of each panel
  
  Mostly from ads and tracking you
  Edit: especially on TVs. They're subsidizing an upfront loss to make more from selling data with the Smart TV features

Beyond the obvious answer of FOSS, there are some nonfree software out there that have powerful APIs and extremely rich third-party plugin/extension ecosystems. The two that immediately popped into my mind are Obsidian and FoundryVTT. Both are incredibly powerful tools that are only made more powerful by the huge amount of plugins available. Maybe it's because I've been running D&D a lot lately that those two stick out in my mind.
- What obsidian plugina do you use? I used the Google keep import but nothing else since then
  
  Only thing I'm using currently is datatables, but I've considered using leaflet and the AI integration since I mainly use it for TTRPG prep

- I would agree if they followed consumer desire instead of dictating what features get kept and removed.

Do you use the escooter on sidewalks? What are the laws on that where you are?
Oh to answer your question: ebikes, pedal assist electric bikes. I think they really have the ability to change transportation.
- Yeah technically you aren't supposed to ride on the sidewalks here (USA) but there's barely any safe infrastructure to do otherwise, and I'm sure as hell not going to ride on the street with the death machines honking all over the place, so the sidewalk it is until city infrastructure is less car-brained.
  
  Its kinda fun locally because drivers just have no clue what to do around bicycles and just stay way the heck away and avoid passing, so I just bike a bit more aggressively, owning the lane when I need to and whatnot because that's the best way to make sure drivers have any clue what to do and keeps us both out of eachother's way
- I love my e-trike.
  
  Why'd you go with the trike?
- I will use the sidewalk when approaching a busy high speed intersection so I can cross as a pedestrian using the cross walk. These are always larger sidewalks and I slow down a ton so I haven't had any problems and seems like what the bikers do.
  Otherwise I am in the bike lane/bike path/gutter/road. For places I go to a lot I've found routes that are mostly along non busy roads where it's more chill. Where I am the rules are just the same as for bikes. I have considered ebikes, since the range on those are comically long.

I'm no expert on the technology but God I love our battery powered lawn mower. Our lawn, front and back is mostly temporally embarrassed grass (weeds) but keeping it down is critical in Australian snake season. Plan is to get rid of most of it and do the native plants and minimal grass thing.
In the meantime, no fumes, no refueling, the dog isn't scared of the noise, and it works a treat. The batteries and how to recycle them in the future is certainly something to worry about, but in the meantime it's vastly superior to our old stinky, do a rotator cuff turning it on, 2 stroke option.

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

My family has a history of blood pressure problems, so my mother, in order to keep control, has had to buy a couple of devices to measure her blood pressure, which she also uses with my father and grandmother.
I just think it's fantastic that such devices already exist and are so affordable. It makes me wonder if maybe in a handful of years we will have the ability to do x-rays at home and things like that, it would be great.
- I get what you mean, but home x-ray machines should probably never happen hahaha
  
  So once upon a time this was a thing…
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
  
  I would much rather do x-rays at home with an app or something, than have to go to the hospital to get them done.
  
  I mean, the x-ray thing was just a random example, but okey 🤷
  
  Near-field radio-wave shenanigans might fake it. There's all kinds of electromagnetism passing through you and you're interfering with some of it. Resolution is limited by wave-length... unless the sensor is within that distance. That's still going to be blurry, but deconvolution mmmight recover enough detail to go "yep, that's broken."

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!
- 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).

I mean technically smartphones. I have watched the smartphone world start, and BLOSSOM, and now we're certainly seeing some enshittification here & there but I have started to fully embrace the budget Samsung phones. Knowing that except for the insulting, glaringly bad exception that is battery life, it is better than the SGS3 of old I had in almost every other way.
I really appreciate LED lights. They used to be so expensive, and yet so basic!! $10/bulb, back when the USD was worth even half a damn, and quality? Ehhh you buy what we have, go fuck yourself. Now... I can buy a pack of quality LED bulbs where I can shift the tone/shade on each one via toggle switch, an 18-pk is $37? A little over $2/bulb?? 😌 Very, very cool
I just picked up TWO solar panel, rechargeable, D-Cell battery Duracell LED lanterns for $16 each (Costco). USB-C cable included. They can also be use to charge small electronics. Pretty nifty, and for not much money at all! You couldn't get that 10 years ago.
Security cams & recordings, obviously there's also a massive uptick in abuse/deception/people being shitheads. Comes with the territory. But take the shitty people out of the equation & objectively speaking, picture/video/audio quality is soooooooo much better. And digital storage has never been cheaper! So many good options! I saw a $30 security camera you can stick on your WiFi smart garage door opener. Again, looks pretty slick & it costs just a little more than eating out at a nice restaurant. Crazy.
CNC milling & creating art, structures, whatever with lasers & machines is fucking amazing & getting better, more advanced with each passing day. We can mill pieces to screw or friction fit....precisely...together. It's so simple but I'm telling you guys, this is going to lead to a lot of really cool stuff! And some scary stuff. But again, comes with the territory.
- On the point of Samsungs, maybe dont get them. They have the worst battery management of any android phone out there. Thats even after detailed usage management on the user's part. I.e. turning off GPS/Bluetooth, deleting and disabling bloatware.
  Lesser known brands like Sony and Motorola have mid range phones with excellent battery life.
  
  I'm going to keep an open mind, but I haven't seen much positive about Sony & Motorola smartphones. Haven't even looked at them for probably 10 years.
  A big thing that kept me away from them, aside from their reputation for lackluster/poor performance, was the lack of root/ROMs.
  But I've gotten older. Specific root benefits have become much fewer, punishments for rooting are more common, well maintained custom ROMs just aren't a thing (and for what phone?). So all of the rules have changed on me...and maybe it's time to take another look at Sony, Motorola. 🙂 Do you have any specific recommendations?
  I want USB-C, I mean they all should be. I want microSD expandable storage. I'd sure like an aux port but I can go without.

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.

Rejuvenation technology!
They have already rejuvenated an old mouse back to mid life!
It's like battery tech though, small small increments.

NZB360. Lovely piece of software :)
Also uBlock origin
- You know uBlock Origin is good when Google is trying to kill it.
- I googled what nzb360 was and it said it was an app to manage your radarr, sonarr and lidarr. But I don't know what any of those are either. You're welcome
  
  It's exactly that.
  In essence a companion app to control those self-hosted applications.

I could not think of one initially but actually my washing machine is better than yesteryear.
- Yes and no.
  Modern sensors and timing cycles are a FUCKTONNE better and you get much cleaner clothes in less time with less water.
  BUT
  It will die in 5 years while your grandma's Whirlpool washer dryer stack will outlast the heat death of the universe.
  
  true. it was more about the cycles and just it pausing and starting in a nice way when the lid is opened. Oh and I love it has a soak cycle.
  
  I don't think that's all that true. There's a lot of survivorship bias at play, a whole lot of cheaper models failed long ago and were replaced. Older washers have less protection against user error too, stuff like load balancing alerts. Finally the market has widened, washer/dryers are much less of a luxury as they once were, so the low end of the market has filled out with poorly constructed models.
  What is definitely the case is that they are harder to repair. Part of this is cultural, part of this is companies being dicks (looking at you samsung) and part of this is genuinely more complexity.

Light and tv. Led never breaks and is bright as hell. Also screens look ok now no matter what you buy. There is always better range of screens but cheap is not bad anymore.
- No more burn in!

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.

Steam deck everyday

"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.

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.

GNU Taler

We have some pretty amazing drugs today. Both commercial and recreational.
I'm happy you like your scooter, but it'll soon be a piece of toxic garbage like most outdated technology.