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- Hacker News
- The last technology that truly excited me was the ebook. I truly believe is one of the greatest gadgets ever invented. It's just fantastic the disconnection you get with it, the quality of the screen, how long battery lasts and obviously how many books you can carry in a small package.by liendolucas
- >disconnection you get with it, the quality of the screen, how long battery lasts and obviously how many books you can carry in a small package
After a while, It turned out that none of these mattered. And I am back to paper books..
by qsera - This is good because there are much better places to find fulfillment.
It's like when you get a new smartphone and you baby it for those first couple weeks until, bam, it falls and gets a ding in it. Then after a brief sense of loss, you suddenly see it as a tool with utility and a lifespan. I think that's where you want to be with material things and technology.
by hombre_fatal - >But maybe I'm wrong? If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.
i'm 24. I think that improvements in tech nowadays mostly involve the hobbyist of any niche, while the general public is ever more satisfied with what already exists.
sd to hd to full hd was cool, full hd to 1440p i can see the difference, at 4k yes but it is not so big. Miniled is something people won't really care about imho (and they can already go very bright, i'm only waiting for more minileds to be integrated in monitors before changing mine).
Audio, well, most people will be satisfied with cheap razer/gaming/bose/whatever headphones are there. Sure anc is cool if you're in a noisy environment quite often
Bikes, well at 24yo i'm not really knowledgeable to say whether a bianchi that costs more than a motorbike is worth the upgrade from an older model... but ebikes are kinda nice even for people outside of the cycling world
However, what has happened with audio and video - and a change that i can perceive -, is the prices of things (not cpu/gpu related, for obvious reasons) coming down. oleds were so espensive ten years ago, now they are not. 4k minileds monitor are as expensive now as my regular non miniled 1440p va monitor from ~4/5 years ago. Hifiman has (permanently) slashed the prices of its headphones more than once over the years. It is not exciting as new tech but it is "just" nice
p.s. wifi printers are a pain in the ass much more than cable printes, and for llms i am kinda happy with them, i'll give you that, they're a godsend for studying; i'm less excited about the idea they'll replace most workers
by amarcheschi - Cheap radios are in everything now.
Think about all the fun wifi, zigbee, matter devices that you can play with (if you are inclined).
Meshtastic and LoRa is a great toy to play with.
The kitchen is full of interesting things, Sous Vide is great, the air fryer is... interesting and useful.
Lots of people love their robot vacuum
LED strip lighting has gone from nerdy to high design and has interesting features now.
Those "VCR" and "iPhone" moments are rare. There is a lot of practical innovations that make my life better and I would be hard pressed to give up.
by zer00eyz - The cheap radios boggle my mind a little bit. I can order a wireless transmitter for an electric guitar for cheaper than the cable next to it. How is this possible? $18 ESP32 with a camera attached and WiFi for an instant cheap IP camera? Crazy!
Those kitchen advances never feel like advances to me though. Maybe I'm over simplifying it, but I'm tired of "needing" yet another box that gets hot. I am pretty sure an air fryer is just a small convection oven.
You can take my panini press from my cold dead hands though.
by doubled112 - Echoing others here, but I think part of it is that a lot of the new tech is designed to make things worse.
If I think about new tech, all the examples that immediately spring to mind are negative ones: surveillance cameras, AI-enabled spam & propaganda, autonomous weaponry.
The less flashy advances tend to be harder to get excited about, and they're also often negative. My computers get more expensive, but they also collect more data on me, and it's harder to get one without a bunch of unwanted features.
People used to be excited about new tech because it was exciting and aspirational; I think we've lost a lot of that.
by Planktonne - I still get excited by the sheer power of current and upcoming tech
It may be the same stuff we had 20 years ago, but the specs!
What was a supercomputer before is now just a component in a datacenter, one of 72 per rack.
by deflator - What used to be a super computing center now fits in my pocket and runs on batteries. I haven't tried, but I'm reasonably sure my phone can emulate a Cray-1 at faster than the original.by bluGill
- I used to be like that. I would pore over feature matrices in Computer Shopper ads and pick out stuff I couldn't afford and wasn't going to buy.
Then, about 7 years ago I realized that for the first time, I was more or less happy with the tech in my life. My computer was good, I liked my phone, my tablet, and my ereader. I had a good TV and stereo I used all the time. The appliances in my home are reliable and work well. The tools I use in my garage and yard are all fine. With Android Auto or Car Play (I've used both) even my car felt like it had crossed some threshold of being good enough that I didn't really have the itch for something better.
I had been working full time for 30ish years and had accumulated a lot of stuff that makes my life better and there really isn't much more that I want and certainly nothing that I need. When Christmas rolls around and people want gift ideas for me, it's hard for me to think of things. My favorite thing in the world is to have a few days off and no plans or commitments and I can sort drill bits, change my guitar strings, watch a movie, or take a nap.
by criddell - I am not part of the group being polled (firmly ensconced in middle age), but I feel the opposite. Yes, the AI roll out has been shambolic to say the least, and it can also be annoyingly intrusive. On the plus side, AI is allowing me to take on projects that I would never have bothered in the past because the learning curve would have been too arduous. I am currently reverse engineering an embedded system going in there with a multimeter and logic analyzer. It is a lot of fun and I am learning a ton. If you told me five years ago that I would eventually be taking on such a project, I would not have believed you. On the job side, a lot of what I do involves troubleshooting (e.g., looking at reams of logs), and there too AI has been a boon. So, yes, actually excited about where things are going (with some misgivings).
- High quality eBikes are pretty amazing: I have nearly 4000 miles on one of ours, and nearly all of those are replacing car trips around town, including most of our grocery shopping.
While not revolutionary - they're kind of an incremental improvement - I'm pretty impressed by all the things a cheap Chromebook can do.
by davidw - We went from hipsters with tattoos on fixies to this guyby redthorn
- eBikes may be pretty amazing in isolation, but as a pedestrian, I absolutely hate people who ride eBikes.by dosisking
- Last year I purchased an e-scooter (Hiboy X300)to compliment my car. I used it so much, I accidentally let my car rot into disrepair. The e-scooter is great, but it is quite limited in what you can carry (only what you can put in a backpack). Instead of getting another car for the things that I can't really use the scooter for, I got an acoustic, belt driven bike :) (the Priority 600). I went acoustic and belt driven specifically to compliment the shortcomings of the e-scooter (other than the carrying capacity, which any bike is an improvement on), in that I don't have to worry about it failing in any weather that I throw at it, rain, snow or shine. There is no battery to get too cold and no electrical system to get too wet.
Had I known I were going to be getting rid of my car, an e-bike would have definitely been a better value. I feel lucky that things worked out the way that they did though - having both an e-scooter and an acoustic bike has been great!
by Zambyte - I feel the same way. I think the difference is that new tech used to be an improvement to your life. New tech is there simply to suck life (your attention) and money away from you.
There are exceptions of course, But the general trend is worrying.
by pbohun - New tech is so you can do your job more efficiently to get more X for less time for your employer, to satisfy the customer, to pay the share holder.by BLKNSLVR
- I've been playing Project Zomboid with my friends. It's an isometric survival game set in 1993 in a fictional area around Louisville, Kentucky. It has VHS tapes, TV and radio broadcasts, ham radio, CDs, and landlines in it. So far in my playing experience, there's no real internet component.
There's some sort of disease outbreak that turns people into zombies and society starts to collapse. Eventually things like the power grid and water/sewage infrastructure break down. Food rots. Gasoline runs out. It's basically guaranteed that you and your teammates will die in this game.
Even after living through a pandemic and all of the shit that came with it, and despite the grim atmosphere of the game, I still miss the time period that this game symbolized. I know I was only a child during the 90s and the era had its real problems, but there were good things about it and the state of technology at the time that have gotten worse in the decades since.
It was a time when media was a physical good and had meaning, when there wasn't a constant deluge of information, when my attention was less valuable than advertisers have made it today, and there was, at least for the majority of society, a shared informational reality.
That's all gone and there are massively powerful interests working to make sure it stays gone.
by lenerdenator - I do agree it feels different but there is still a lot of interesting and exciting tech innovation. OP is about the same age as me so my list will be from my lifetime.
* Lithium batteries. They are one of the most important innovations of our generation. They are so much better than NiCads and lead acid batteries. Much of today's important tech, like mobile phones, wouldn't be possible without them.
* Solar panels went from a novelty to something that we can put on our homes with a positive ROI in a short time.
* EVs. If you haven't been in one go take a test drive. The prices are still too high, at least in the US, but Chinese innovation are pushing that down.
* Driving automation such as radar cruise, lane assist, and other autonomous driving features.
* Digital media, streaming or self hosted. Yes streaming services peaked 10+ years ago but the innovation is there. Having a small server in a closet hosting hundreds of 4k videos is quite an innovation compared to VHS.
* Home automation. It was previously limited to wired devices for the rich. Now anyone can put together complex self-hosted home automation with inexpensive Zigbee/ZWave devices and a Raspberry Pi hosting Home Assistant.
* Hobby electronics have become far more accessible and inexpensive. Arduino, raspberry pi, etc.
* SDRs radically changed radio technology.
* FDM/3D printing.
* Other CNC manufacturing became accessible to hobbyists.
* Bluetooth
* WiFi
* Progress in machine learning / AI, invention of LLMs
by driverdan - I remember my grandparents making this exact same complaint: All of the new technologies during their younger years were amazing and improved the world. All of the technologies that came along in their later years were only complicating life after they had settled into comfortable routines.
In my hobbies and other real world activities I cross paths with people in their 20s a lot. It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future, contrasted with all the cynicism you get when you spend time in places with a lot of jaded adults who wish the world would stop changing.
I think it’s natural to wish that technology would pause right at the point in your life and career where you’ve got it all figured out and lose your appetite for new things. It feels good to be on top of it all and feel like your knowledge, routines, and career skills are never going to go out of style. It feels uncomfortable when the world continues to change after you’ve settled into something familiar and routine.
by Aurornis - Were they wrong?by mrdependable
- It may be based on your mental categories.
Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).
What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.
Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.
By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.
Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.
What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.
TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.
by AnimalMuppet - “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
by orionsbelt - > It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future
What new technologies are they excited about?
by dqv - Don't feel that's it at all. Let's be more specific instead of just "tech" since that can be so many things.
I used to be very excited when new tech came out that empowered me to do new different things in more flexible ways that I can customize to be just perfect for me.
And you know what.. I'm still quite excited by new tech that does all of that! Latest for me is 3d printers (I know, I'm late to that game). Drawing and printing 3d objects is as exciting as when I discovered assembly language in elementary school in the 80s.
What's different? It used to be that most new tech fell into that category.
Today most new product releases are things that de-empower me, taking away flexibility, taking away my access, reducing configurability, further tighening the walled gardens, increasing dependencies on giant corporation clouds (which can block me in an instant), forcing in more and more spyware and advertising.
So yeah, no, I'm not excited about any of that garbage.
by jjav - The difference is that their TV wasn't spying them but our TVs definitely are (aka ACR).by coldbrewed