2周前

also expensive

didn't find the post link again, so here is the account https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon

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I've been having the same thought lately. I feel like consumer tech has stagnated since the early 2010s. I miss watching announcements each summer as companies announced their new products and new features, and introducing literal new ways of life.
These days, there's nothing new anymore. This year's phone is the same as last year's and the year before that, except now it has more AI. This year's game console is the same as the last one, but now it has even more restrictions on game ownership. This year's car is the same as last year, but now it has a monthly subscription for power steering.
- It's a plateau. Current tools are good enough and we don't have the technology to do anything significantly better. Apple tried with this silly AR/VR headset and failed. They really put state of the art tech in it and it still wasn't better then normal laptop. Couple startups tried the AI assistant type tools and also failed. I think the next leap will be some brain-computer interfaces but those are probably decades away.
  
  Apple's headset wasn't really innovative in any way that mattered. It was just a bad VR headset that meant it was only really suitable for AR.

i'll paste my reply from mastodon:
gotta follow FOSS tech, endless wonder ✨
- I was gonna say the same
  I am actually excited for tech from the world of foss
  I love simply reading patch notes and going like
  "Ahhh yeah that annoyed me but I did not realize"
  Thanks to all the hard working devs keeping things interesting and competitive with big tech
- for real, on windows getting an update meant "ugh what thing do i need to disable now"
  now on Linux, it’s "whoa, that’s a cool feature!" and "OMG THEY FINALLY FIXED THAT FINALLY"
  the most negative thing is when they change something and you gotta get used to the new way. im not the biggest fan of the recent changes to Dolphin (the file manager, not the emulator), but it’s fine and I’ll get used to it. it’s not worse now, just different
  
  You can revert some of the changes such as bringing bottom bar back from app's settings
- Endless wonder if you enjoy reading patch notes like:
  Fixed a bug that allowed the end user to select a drop-down menu when they selected a variable date.
- In the FOSS world, I really appreciate what's happening to immutable / atomic distros like Bazzite. It feels great to have a system that "just works" while not being locked down like an Android or iPhone.
  The Fediverse gives me a lot of hope too. It will probably never surpass the centralized corporate-owned sites. But, who cares? Lemmy and Mastodon are already filling a void for me. I used to spend most of my time on Reddit, and Reddit was at its best when it was significantly smaller than competitors like Digg. Digg imploding and all the Dig Dugs moving to Reddit was one step in a whole chain of events that made Reddit suck.
  Proton is another game changer. I used to need a Windows desktop if I wanted to play PC games. I hated it, but I loved gaming. Now I only boot Windows once a month or so (mostly driver-related things).
- Well just point me towards a FOSS laptop then. Or a FOSS TV? Why not a FOSS toothbrush?
  Tech is not just software 🙄.
  
  I've only got the laptop
  https://mntre.com/
  Open source is not just software
  
  Because the last S in FOSS stands for software?
  
  Who sharted in your coffee this morning?
  Beeing excited about parts of tech does not warrant you to be a grumpy old man.
  Also RISC-V exists and there are laptops, there you go
  They are not amazing in performance but it is pretty amazing that they exist at all.
  
  Any laptop can be a FOSS laptop.
  
  firmware is software, which often powers hardware 🙄

The Steamdeck got me pretty excited to be honest. But uhm, that's about it.
- If you dont restrict yourself to only hardware then there is plenty of cool stuff. Im using git repo RSS feeds to inject changelogs directly into my veins and its great tbh. There are cool new open source TTS and STT models releasing, single camera motion tracking is getting really good, etc. You just shouldnt look towards commercial products for this excitement, because those are always just enshittified lock in traps. The real juice is in hardware independent open source software that wont fuck you without consent.
  
  Aurora Store (Play Store) apps' updates? No fun. Not even good changelogs, just generic, unchanging (or slow / rare changing) ones.
  F-droid and FOSS in general, on the other hand? Lemme see what's new. For each and every app.
  
  Without good hardware to interface with software is useless.
- Me too. It revived the feeling I had when I was teen when a new console was released. Never purchased a device so quickly since valves released the trailer
- Yeah, thats the last time I was genuinely excited for something new. Before that it was usually gaming consoles, and the ps4 just wasn't the excitement factor that ps3 was.
  
  the ps4 just wasn’t the excitement factor that ps3 was.
  You liked real time weapon change and battles that actually took place in ancient japan with giant enemy crabs that much?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF8POaO-9TY

A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more "companies that will grow" not "companies that are doing something cool". But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.
Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:
Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven't done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they're going to crash hard
Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last "innovation" they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was "the metaverse", an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don't care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they're part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they'll keep making money. I can't remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They're also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they're getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don't see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they're not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won't crash too hard in the future either, although they're a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they'll take some damage too.
It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn't in the first 10 links, it probably didn't exist on the Internet.. Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn't crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple's iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn't seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they're trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I'm forgetting, I hope!
- I'm excited for peer to peer technology, because it brings us closer to what the internet was originally supposed to be like.
  I've recommended Keet (chat app) a bunch of times on lemmy earlier, which works really well and that is cool, but that is just a showcase of what's possible with p2p.
  Streaming media, sharing files, communication, browsing wikipedia, etc etc - this can be done without spying middlemen or data centres in between. Some cool demos here 09:45 https://youtube.com/watch?v=BTCsSwCpGP8&t=776
  
  One thing that seemed interesting in that vein is the Dat software / protocol, and the Beaker web browser.
  The aim was basically to create a distributed, peer-to-peer web. When I saw a presentation on it, I thought "hmm, if this works it will be really cool, but I don't think this is going to take off". It seems I was right because the Beaker browser is now gone, and Dat doesn't seem to be getting updates anymore.
  But, I still think there's hope for a distributed web. It just needs something like a killer app.
  
  Same!! P2p and self hosting is getting better and better!
  I've been searching for an alternative chat platform for a while now and I'm yet to find anything I think I can use with friends and Grandma alike, ya know? 😅 so hearing about this p2p keet app got me really excited!
  Sadly, after a bit of reading and such, I'm not so sure... 😕
  play-store or github seem to be the only install methods
  the github is release-delivery only; source code doesn't appear to be public?
  Keet uses Holepunch's (the company behind keet) "HyperDHT", a distributed hash table, to connect peers. So it seems that, while the comms themselves might be p2p, the app still relies on some server(s) to facilitate their initial connection.
  good news (kinda) though! You can self host a 'p2p server'! But the phrasing on that doc page reinforces that the network itself isn't fully p2p= "Creates a new server for accepting incoming encrypted P2P connections"
  Installed it anyway just to see. Immediately prompted to enable Google's push notifications via MicroG 😭
  the splash page of the app proudly announces "no servers!" - documentation says otherwise 😕
  creation of a username first checks whether the username is available.... Where is that being checked? No servers, right? 🤔
  I want this to be cool, but no source code and foggy talk about servers has my sus-dar goin off a little 🤔 if anyone knows more I'd love to be persuaded!! The app itself is definitely very beautiful and responsive 🙂
- Saving this post because it sums up exactly how I feel
- they haven’t done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing
  Unreal Engine's Lumen (and equivalents in other engines like Cryengine) made 'full' RTX obsolete. I can look at random lighting in Satisfactory that looks like modded Cyberpunk 2077 now. Even full path tracing in 2077 (which runs at a slideshow for me, but I tested experimentally) is just... not really worth it, with everything the performance budget GI saves could be used for instead.
  So there's that, and that's a pretty cool software innovation.
  Honestly that's where the neat stuff is now; outside the huge companies. Especially in software.
  
  I hadn't heard about Lumen, but I'll look it up, thanks!
- I can't remember [Alphabet] having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded.
  Oh come on, they made Google Wave, that was pretty neat! And... Um... That's it I guess?
  
  There are so many good ideas in the Google back catalog, it feels criminal not to just link to the graveyard.
  From AngularJS to Google Cardboard to Project Ara, really can't express how many genuinely cool ideas they floated and then smothered over the last 20 years.
  
  I never used Google wave, but it really didn't seem all that useful to me. But maybe it was innovative? I dunno.
- Oh, and my controversial take:
  Framework
  I feel like Framework started something awesome and... is stalling?
  The silicon they use is getting a little long in the tooth, and so is the engineering of the cooling, the screen quality... I get it, they're a scrappy startup, but it almost feels like they're stuck.
  Meanwhile the Framework Desktop has awesome hardware, but is largely non modular by necessity and... not available in a laptop? And not very expandable as a desktop, not even with a dGPU slot. And expensive.
  
  I haven't been following them that closely. I hope they come out with new stuff soon though, because I really want them to succeed. Mostly, I want this concept to succeed though. So, if they stumble, I hope someone else picks up the baton.
- I really had to dig through my cynicism to the buried tech optimist in me. But here is some tech I think is really cool.
  Framework: obviously
  Cloudflare: the features like cloudflare workers and anti ai stuff is pretty cool. Ddos mitigation they do is impressive.
  Nvidia: their GPU tech is insane. They are going full stack with their own networking and GPU on the motherboard like a CPU. Their dlss as much as I hate it is very impressive.
  Perplexity browser is interesting to me I can't wait to see what it turns out to be. The idea of having a new way to browse the web is cool.
  Ar glasses are getting really good x real air 2s i want a pair so bad.
  Self driving cars: waymo and Tesla self driving is incredible.
  Boston dynamics robots are sick. Warehouse logistic robots are sick I really like what Amazon is doing on that front.
  Bluesky is cool tech as much as I hate that it copied the fediverse and usurped it with vc funding
  
  Yeah, Cloudflare is doing some interesting things. But, for the most part those aren't consumer-focused services.
  Perplexity is one of the worst of the AI offenders. Their crawlers don't respect "robots.txt" or other things that say that LLM crawling isn't allowed.
  For self-driving cars, I'll give Google credit there. Their Waymo division is really making progress in self-driving cars. They didn't come up with the concept, but they're pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
  OTOH, Tesla's self-driving is a joke. In fact, by calling their bullshit "full self-driving", they've forced the legitimate self driving car companies to use a different term. Tesla's self driving is so bad that it's hurting the rest of the industry and setting back the possibility of actual self-driving vehicles by years.
  Boston Dynamics humanoid robots are cool, I'm not as impressed with their robodog though. But, from what I saw from Beijing last week, they're already way ahead of Boston Dynamics. Even when some of their bots were failing, the kinds of movement they were making before they failed seemed more advanced (and natural) than the Boston Dynamics bots.
  I disagree with some of your choices, but you've got some good ideas too.
- Is (non-neuralink) deep brain simulation interesting because I know some doctors and they probably know some companies. Never asked to get dad's cyborg parts back when he died for some reason.
  
  It would be interesting if it actually works. It's really promising, but it still seems like it's something that will be cool when it happens at some point in the future, rather than something that is happening now.
- Apple died with Steve Jobs. They went from being a company whose success was based on making things that people wanted to becoming a company that only cares about “maximizing value for shareholders.” Having customers is now just an inconvenience.
  Late stage Capitalism in action.
  
  Apple died with Steve Jobs.
  Steve Jobs was a psychopath. He had maybe two good ideas (both of which Microsoft did first) and a ruthless drive to hustle those ideas into the public consciousness. But Apple was, at its heart, an advertising company that made some useful technology. It was so much of an advertising company that Jobs ended up dying from his own kool-aid, convinced he could outsmart the nation's leading oncologists when he was diagnosed with an easily treatable form of cancer.
  I only hope Musk and Zuck suffer the same fate.
  
  It also feels like they’re trying to be like Steve but without any creativity.
  I don’t think he’d ever have thought VR was a big deal, for example.

The only real tech that has gotten me excited lately is the steam deck, framework computers, and these little info displays called trmnl.
- I'm pretty hyped for the new Seagate HDDs with dozens of TB on a cheap external drive.
  
  Oh yeah true. I almost pulled the trigger on there 26tb drives that are shuckabke for an extension on my nas
- Be me, still waiting for the Deckard...
  
  That's valve's rumored new vr headset right? I had the index but didn't use it enough so I sold it. VR is cool though.
- Add the new Pebble watches to that list and, yeah, same. I've preordered the Time 2 and it's the first time I've been excited for a new gadget in years.
  
  Nice! I actually had a preorder but canceled it. Had the original plastic pebble so they have a special place in my heart, but I've gone back to a dumb watch and have been enjoying being more disconnected.
- Tech I am excited for:
  Better and larger color e-ink. I'm not excited for the software in this particular case, but the hardware is excellent.
  The NocFree &, the only wireless, split, 75% staggered column keyboard I've been able to find (I would have preferred a full keyboard but I'll take what I can get) It should be great for disability accommodation.
  Sony A9 III While the A9 III is way too expensive for me, this camera basically promises that eventually global shutters should make their way down to mid-level prosumer cameras, and I'll eventually get a used one or something. I just wish Sony didn't artificially handicap third party lenses.
  I have a Framework 16 and I love it.
- Already have a stream deck, the framework computer and trmnl look really cool!
  ... What other cool stuff don't I know about??

Getting open source and fair use products gets me fairly excited nowadays.
I got my new Fairphone 6 with e/os yesterday and it made me giddy to finally degoogle.
- I'm on the framework laptop bandwagon, it's pretty cool~
- omg I'm so jealous 😭
- Its £500 though. If they made one for like £50 I might be interested in actually buying a new phone but at that price not a chance.

I'm building my own home servers, fuck your subscriptions and privacy invading tracking and ads

We need a resurgence in getting excited about manually finding weird stuff in weird corners of the internet.
Tear down the walls of all the shit gardens! Make Internet Feral Again!!!!!
- recently my partner got back on tumblr and it reminded me of the old internet. i was never a user but i’d stumble upon it from time to time back in the day and it seems to my outsiders eyes very much as it did then. seeing the way people interact with posts and have conversations is distinctly different from most modern social media platforms. and now after writing that i’m just thinking about stumbleupon and all the chaotic and random rabbit holes you be sent down from there. i miss the old internet
  
  Yeah, I was reminded of webrings earlier this week. Which was an idea that was so short of accomplishing the goal of web discovery before search engines, but at scale today would be something worth looking at again. Basically decentralized internet tribes. As long as there's activitypub plugins, it's even federated.

on the bright side, now you can get excited about old tech!
- Literally all these people going back to 1960s with satellites instead of cell towers. Trying to make it a new technology.
  
  I just revived my old iPod XD

Tech was great when it didn't try to steal your personal information

On the upside, won't spend as much.
- Yeah I saved a fuckload on phones since they stopped putting the features I want in them. Thanks for setting that trend apple!

You know what I miss? PDAs. 20 years ago I had a PDA with physical keyboard and WiFi running Debian. It wasn't even that expensive. Today those simply don't exists. From time to time something gets released on Kickstarter but it's usually very expensive. What happened? I would expect that with all the advances we would have more gadgets like this today, not less. Is it really matter of scale? I'm sure those old PDAs weren't selling in millions. What is it?
- You can get a GPD pocket and it's basically a PDA.

This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
https://www.emotiv.com/collections/all/products/epoc-x
- Relatively Affordable? Maybe. Absolutely Affordable? Hell no.
- When you need something more esoteric than the Oculus Rift and even less user-friendly.
- This is neat!

Also expensive
"I miss getting expensive about tech."
🤔

Who would have thought that a system that rewards creating problems to solve would stifle the tech that addresses real problems?

In the energy space, I'm excited about advanced geothermal (basically using the drilling/fracking techniques developed by the oil and gas industry but applying them to harvesting geothermal heat in places previously not practical). It's dispatchable energy that can fill in the difference between wind/solar supply and overall grid demand in a way that might make carbon emissions unnecessary.
I'm also excited about a bunch of rechargeable battery chemistries that might make grid scale batteries much more cost effective (and possibly safer and more reliable).
Energy policy in the US is kinda screwed up right now, but hopefully the tech can be developed/rolled out elsewhere, or the merits of the technology will still lead to rapid adoption even in a hostile regulatory climate.
- I don't think we need new battery chemistry for grid scale deployment of batteries, the gravity based ones would be sufficient and much more ecologically friendly. Byecause Dr.Goodenough(not joking that is the guy who practically invented current lithium based batteries) deserves some rest.
  
  I don't see how gravity storage could possibly scale. Pumped hydro was the dominant storage tech, but is severely limited in geography, so there's no easy way to scale that. Solid weight gravity systems might come online at some point, but nothing about the trajectory of their development suggests they'll leapfrog chemical batteries in overall adoption.
  And the battery chemistries I'm most excited about don't involve lithium at all. Sodium batteries are starting to come online, and some metal-air systems seem to be ready to hit the market soon.
  
  Well, he is resting in peace since 2023, so he's not going to be working as part of further advancement.

There's plenty of p2p, decentralized and mesh radio tech to get excited about.

New tech today is just worse tech. Each android update now is just shittier than the previous

The Sindene Light Guns and Flipper Zero are two products that made me excited for new tech. The big tech companies are just boring and shitty as is tradition.

Not only that, but tech reach a peak that is hard to create something really new it’s all improvements over what exists already.

Kinda true... Tech just gets more expensive and locked down while the gaisn get ever smaller.

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