• Chozo@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    71
    ·
    16 days ago

    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.

    • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      15 days ago

      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.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        15 days ago

        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.

        • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          15 days ago

          As always, Apple waited until the tech matured and tried doing it the right way. It wasn’t innovative but it was the best thing you can make at a price consumes can still afford.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            14 days ago

            You think consumers can afford an Apple headset? I’d argue one of the reasons it failed is that it was completely unaffordable.

            • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              14 days ago

              It was on the verge of affordability. Definitely not something average consumer would buy but achievable for the upper-middle class. I was also aimed at professionals and if a device can you help do your work faster it’s a great investment. The problem was it didn’t let people work faster because despite all the tech it still sucked.

              • merc@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                14 days ago

                I think it was way over the verge, in fact, a few verges over in another verge entirely.

                If a device can help you do your work faster it might be a great investment based on how much faster it can help you do your work. For a $3500 USD investment, the Apple AR headset would have had to make you massively more productive to justify that up-front cost, or it would have to be something you could expect to last for decades while you paid off that up-front cost with increased productivity.

    • Stitch0815@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      31
      ·
      16 days ago

      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

    • Chloé 🥕
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      15 days ago

      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

    • Velypso@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      15 days ago

      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.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      15 days ago

      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).

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      edit-2
      15 days ago

      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.

      • lemmyknow@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        15 days ago

        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.

    • yumyumsmuncher@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      15 days ago

      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

    • callouscomic@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      15 days ago

      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.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    ·
    15 days ago

    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!

    • belit_deg@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      15 days ago

      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

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        15 days ago

        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.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            14 days ago

            Unless powerful antitrust breaks up these monopolies, I agree. Trump obviously isn’t going to do anything about it, but under Biden, Lina Khan was making really headway. At least Europe and a few smaller countries are now challenging these monopolies, but it probably won’t be enough.

      • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        13 days ago

        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 🙂

        • belit_deg@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          13 days ago

          You raise a lot of points here, I recommend you join the community room in the app, you’ll get every detail from the developers there.

          they haven’t opensourced it yet, but they say they will do so, and they have done so with all the components that keet is built on top of. So given that track record, I think it’s just a matter of when.

          I asked a developer about the dht, in this context a “server” is just a dht node that you can connect to with its public key (but agree it’s confusing they use the same word). the wording might be confusing, but its definitively not what anyone understands as a server in a centralized network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

          as i’ve understood, all push notifications on android has to pass through googles servers (but they are encrypted)

          and they don’t need a server to check for duplicates in usernames

          so I recommend you continue to explore and ask around in the chat rooms, figure out if this is for you!

          • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            12 days ago

            Cheers for the response! Extremely excited to hear you’ve heard about open sourcing from the devs, I’m gonna keep my eye out for sure!! Excited to read about dht!

            Thanks again for sharing the app! 🙂

            • belit_deg@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              12 days ago

              yea🤘 the tech is really fascinating. Like yea, the p2p-approach introduces some new challenges, but it solves so many existing ones:

              For example costs. The more popular an app gets, the more traffic it gets, the more it costs to run it. I’ve heard telegram spends hundreds of millions of dollars on servers, with hundreds of developers.

              P2P is the complete opposite. Keet is made by a small team, and the more people use it, the better it runs (because more peers can relay data). It can scale with no such restrictions.

              someone should do the math of what would be the environmental impact if all communication went p2p instead of datacentres.

              • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                11 days ago

                Yeah I have been trying to read a bit more about DHT (good lord these are complicated, one video attempted to explain hypercubes??! 😵‍💫). It seems one of the bigger use cases is in torrenting! Which is fascinating, both from technical and security perspectives.

                From what I’ve learned, it’s clear DHT is extremely scalable and resilient, which kicks ass! If it also brings inherent security benefits, I’d say this is a clear choice for a new messaging platform!! 😃 I’ll have to learn a bit more first though to be sure.

                What I can say is the app itself is GORGEOUS, and very responsive! The devs are also quite active in the community chat room, and seems to listen to (and have full intents to act on) user feedback, which is amazing!

                • belit_deg@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  11 days ago

                  Oh absolutely. I like the qualitative way they interact with their users. Instead of lots of static pages with lists of issues to vote on, roadmaps, FAQs and that kind of thing, feedback and updates all happen in the chats, interacting with the actual developers. When I make requests or report bugs, ppl chime in and those things actually get addressed, and sometimes fixed really fast. Feels like a digital village!

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        14 days ago

        At least with Netflix what happened wasn’t really their fault. The companies that owned the copyrights to the media that Netflix wanted to show wanted Netflix to fail, so they refused to license them anything good. They were willing to lose money by not licensing things to Netflix, and/or by trying to built a competing online video platform.

        Netflix fought back by producing its own media. That was somewhat successful. But, their expertise was really in the distribution side of things. You can’t really spin up a world-class movie and TV studio in a few years, no matter how much you’re willing to spend.

        It sucks that Netflix has killed the things that made it unique and good in order to survive, but it’s not like a lot of the other companies here that locked in a monopoly and then started to squeeze it.

    • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      14 days ago

      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.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        14 days ago

        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.

      • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        14 days ago

        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.

        • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          14 days ago

          We know that Steve considered AR to be the next major leap in personal technology, but that vision has almost nothing in common with Vision Pro. AR should be able to change and enhance your environment, not separate you from it. Even if you consider Vision Pro a demonstration of the concept owing to the fact that the technology to make it properly doesn’t exist, it fails at even that. It fails at every meaningful use case of AR. AR is not “phone apps floating in space”, it’s about recognizing and augmenting the world around you, the objects around you, and the actual physical space that we inhabit. I’ve given up on ever seeing proper AR in my lifetime, even as a bulky, ugly, expensive proof of concept.

          • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            14 days ago

            Yeah, and I think Steve would have thrown any VR headset prototype across the room and fired everyone involved.

            I agree with you on AR. The power requirements of computing have gone way down, but making a display bright enough to see in daylight needs a lot of power, and making them light enough to last all day would require massive improvements in battery tech.

    • Rose@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      15 days ago

      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?

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        14 days ago

        I never used Google wave, but it really didn’t seem all that useful to me. But maybe it was innovative? I dunno.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        14 days ago

        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.

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      14 days ago

      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.

    • LousyCornMuffins@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      15 days ago

      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.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        15 days ago

        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.

        • LousyCornMuffins@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          15 days ago

          i mean it worked in my dad. he was part of a trial to install DBS on moderate parkinson’s patients rather than waiting until the patients had severe parkinson’s. Short story, gave him ten extra years he could work. A bit longer and more details, he was able to manage nearly all of his dyskinesia through the implant rather than via medication (some kind of levi/carbidopa). It was a really neat device, the MDs who put it in were the best at what they do (and, as a professional patient I’ve gotten good at evaluating that) and provided us with all the support we needed up until dad died. So our experience was nothing but positive. I think the charger is in the garage and I can dig it up tomorrow to find out what company built his computer if you want.

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      14 days ago

      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.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        14 days ago

        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.

      • steal_your_face@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        15 days ago

        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.

        • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          15 days ago

          It is! I have an Index myself that I once used to use quite a bit, but I find I avoid it lately because of how cumbersome it is. I really want an inside out all in one VR setup, as I think it would help me overcome those hurdles, but no way in hell am I buying a Quest from Meta.

    • Liz@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      15 days ago

      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.

    • rmuk@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      15 days ago

      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.

      • steal_your_face@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        15 days ago

        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.

    • riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      15 days ago

      Already have a stream deck, the framework computer and trmnl look really cool!

      … What other cool stuff don’t I know about??

  • Jumi@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    15 days ago

    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.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      14 days ago

      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.

  • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    15 days ago

    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!!!

    • m_xy@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      15 days ago

      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

      • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        15 days ago

        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.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      15 days ago

      Yeah I saved a fuckload on phones since they stopped putting the features I want in them. Thanks for setting that trend apple!

  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    15 days ago

    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?

  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    15 days ago

    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.

    • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      15 days ago

      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.

      • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        15 days ago

        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.

        • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          14 days ago

          To add to my initial thoughts on gravity storage, the formula for potential energy in a gravity battery is basically mass x height x 9.8 m/s^2 . The sheer amount of weight and distance necessary to store a reasonably useful amount of energy makes for very large scale engineering projects.

          The typical cell phone battery holds about 4000 mAh in a 3.7V battery, which translates to about 14.8 Wh, or 53.3 kJ. In order to get the equivalent storage in a gravity systems with a 1000 kg (1 tonne) weight, you’d need to raise it about 5.4 meters, with 100% efficiency.

          A Tesla battery capacity is 75 kWh for some of the long range models, which translates to 270 MJ. To store that amount of energy you’d need to raise a 1-tonne weight about 27.6 km, about 3 times the altitude of Mt Everest and more than double the typical cruising altitude of commercial passenger jets.

          So the most practical real-world projects they’re pursuing tend to use weights of around 20-25 tonnes in abandoned mine shafts as deep as 3km, and can recover the energy at something like 80% efficiency. Each weight can therefore store something like 735 MJ or 204 kWh (aka 3 Tesla batteries). But obviously these types of projects are very expensive and complex, and require enormous scale to be cost effective.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            14 days ago

            Gridscale batteries also have the benefit of being a very good place to reuse tired automobile batteries that otherwise would just be dumped. If we can get batteries that last 10-15 years in an automobile then another 10-15 in a grid scale deployment that’s far better than just lasting 15-20 years in an automobile. It also sucks that batteries completely die and have to be disposed of somehow because that’s not sustainable at all, but maybe there will be advancements in the future that make that less of a problem

            • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              14 days ago

              I’m not sure about technological advancements, but there might be economic developments where the price of lithium rises to be high enough that recycling the materials in old batteries becomes a no-brainer and pays for itself. Some are working on scaling lithium battery recycling, and there are serious engineering challenges involved, but the long term trends on lithium prices makes R&D in recycling a pretty attractive investment.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        15 days ago

        Well, he is resting in peace since 2023, so he’s not going to be working as part of further advancement.