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.
Cell phone service.
$25/month for unlimited data at >100mpbs is definitely being taken for granted.
For sure. I remember the 5 cents per text…or whatever it was
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: **
-
Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)
-
Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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:
-
open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc… Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.
-
epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices
**Community Projects: **
-
HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every
-
Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price
-
Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.
-
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…
-
The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don’t need to explain the impact
-
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
I’d love to hear more a out your custom setup for 18650 sodium batteries. What are you using them for? Are you making some sort of DIY UPS?
have created a huge step in motors
Solid word play
Everything you mention is great. However I think everyone needs GadgetBridge in their lives. Especially with the “internet helper” they’re working on to allow opt-in ability to share with internet things (like they’re working on supporting Endurain)
Home Assistant
I’ve had HAOS running in a VM on an old Mac mini for the past year or so, to figure out how it works and eventually shift away from Alexa. Last week I finally got serious, shifted my install over to an M1 Mac mini I have,installed Ollama alongside it, then went around the house cataloguing all the smart devices I have and making sure they were all working in HA. I’m now at everything but 5 Govee Matter bulbs, which I’ll figure out when I’ve got time.
I’ve replicated all of our Alexa automations in HA and begun activating them to make sure everything is working, and so far I’ve been really happy with the results.
All of this from someone who only picked up Linux a year ago and is learning as I go along.
Docker
Similarly, over the past year I’ve gone from being kinda nervous of Docker (on Linux) because I can’t really see what it’s doing, to being reasonably confident at installing various bits of software that can chunter away in the background being incredibly useful to me.
-
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)
As someone who focus on low/no-tech (edit: and older stuff in a general manner), I must say it’s a tricky question. But the answer is still 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).
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.
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.
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.
Comments like yours reinforce my idea that I’m simply not part of the target audience for most of the modern renditions of what I liked in the past.
Id be completely content with time frozen in 2004.
You mean when the US had just invaded Iraq based on lies and greed for oil? Fabricated entirely from a bullshit “global war on terror”?
I do like highlighting things that have gotten better (and thank you for the thread), but rose-tinted glasses and all.
99 then ;)
There’s always shit going on.
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.
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
Sodium companies closing is incredibly painful because also if you look at the reasons, outside of Northvolt, it is literally all startups where their investors pulled out and screwed them because lithium prices dropped and they wanted to recoup their costs with 30% market share on week 1 of launch (exaggeration of course)
Proving yet again that rich fucks are complete and total idiots who can’t look any further at all than 4-8 quarters.
China sodium is luckily going strong, so we have a fallback when lithium prices inevitably spike yet again.
Are we talking about the Donut Labs battery, or is someone alse promising to bring solid state batteries to market this year? My gut says Donut Labs is like 1/8 odds of coming through.
People have been inventing new 1000x capacity batteries every year for the past 20 years.
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.
Car back up cameras.
Waze
2025 Seadoo GTX models
Many Broadway Plays
Keypad front door locks
Online DVRs
Legalized gay marriage
Legalized pot
Waze was founded by former members of Unit 8200, but has been owned by Google since 2013. I do like that it can alert people to the presence of police, but that’s about it.
Edit: Gay marriage is pretty cool, though!
I do like that it can alert people to the presence of police, but that’s about it.
Apple Maps does this now as well.
Are the superchargers lasting longer on the new doo’s? I’ve been out of the loop for a while but I never really cared for the rotax supercharger setup. Kawi made the ultra fugly on the last update though.
Fallout tv show
They’re off on official lore big time but that hardly matters to me because they captured the essence of the series perfectly 👍
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. :)
That’s interesting, and good, that you have that reaction!! I am polar opposite…I hate seeing new crap being built because it is always A. Another fucking bank, or B more housing that’s destroying forest groves and farmland left and right until its a concrete wasteland here that floods because they’ve destroyed natural drainage. We have tens of thousands of empty housing, we don’t need more. I’ve never been excited to see new construction. And its 2 companies doing all the work in town. Most are shoddy cheap built with new white paint mcmansions. Or overpriced apartments. I’m sick of seeing the land destroyed.
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.
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 neighborhood 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.
Dropout TV! I like Make Some Noise, it’s got the old Whose Line feel.
Dirty Laundry, Gastronauts, and Game Changer is where it’s at.
Very Important People is great, I don’t quite understand how some of the costumes are done, so it’s extremely impressive.
VIP is hit or miss for me, but when it hits, it’s some of the best improv stuff I’ve ever seen.
Fiber internet. Cheaper than cable/DSL and faster too.
