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.
EGPWS - stops airliners accidentally flying into mountains.
Home Assistant - full control over your smart devices, internet optional.
Sierra Leone hospital - their first hospital that has a neonatal unit, already drastically reducing the maternal mortality rate.
PMSM - electric motor that can exceed 95% efficiency.
Proton - allows almost any game to run on Linux.
3D printing - much cheaper rapid prototyping and custom parts. Even used on the ISS.
Cell phone service.
$25/month for unlimited data at >100mpbs is definitely being taken for granted.
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.
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: **
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Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)
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Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc… Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.
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epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices
**Community Projects: **
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HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every
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Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price
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Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.
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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…
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The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don’t need to explain the impact
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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
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.
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)
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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).
Glad you’re still with us!
thx :)
Heated Rivalry
Solar panels combined with House batteries or Vehicle to grid is cheaper and more reliable than a backup generator, and in many cases, is even cheaper than using energy from the grid.
The majority of materials in each battery and solar panel can be recycled into new batteries and solar panels at end of life (often after 25+ years), so the raw resources are only needed once.
Most new batteries don’t use rare or controversial materials.
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.
Andor is arguably the best Star Wars content since the original movies
I’ll get down voted for this, but remove the nostalgia goggles, and the original Star Wars trilogy are 7/10 movies at best. MAYBE Empire would get an 8.
A 7/10 is great when most of what hollywood shits out these days is a 1 or a 0.
You also don’t get to just “ignore” the historical impact a series like Star Wars had on the entire medium.
Maybe in a modern context, but compared to the movies at the time, it was kinda mind-blowing.
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.
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.
Elden Ring is, so far, the near-perfect culmination of
76 previous entries in the genre. Every iteration of pretty much every system they have built is at its peak in this game. It somehow manages to be an easy to get into entry for first time soulslike players while still challenging anyone who has played them all. It has its share of issues, not least of which are performance related, but it is also the biggest and best in terms of player experience and QOL improvements made over the course of87 titles when including this final entry.Eight titles? Demon Souls, three Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. If you count Sekiro (I don’t), that’s seven. What am I missing?
KING’S FIELD. (I just miscounted 🤦♂️)
And why would you not count Sekiro? The only major difference between it and the rest is the swapping of an RPG system with something more traditional to platform adventure games of old, like the original Castlevanias or Ninja Gaiden. It’s basically Dark Souls, but you’re forced into a katana build 🤷♂️
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?
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.
New tacqueria in my neighborhood is actually pretty good.
And I’m only finding out about this NOW?!
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.
I’m intrigued by solo TTRPGs. Is there a particular one you can recommend?
I’d start with the one that really kicked the segment into high gear; Ironsworn. More specifically, its sci-fi (western in space) sequel, Ironsworn:Starforged.
Also, most Free League games that have been released lately have included a solo mode. Also a solo mode for Cyberpunk Red has also been recently released. Most if not all of these solo modes have been inspired or heavily influenced by Ironsworn.
Also, the PDF of the original Ironsworn is free to download. Although the setting (think viking) is not to everyone’s liking, there are hundreds of re-skins and hacks for it.
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.
Kirby Air Riders. I waited 22 years for this sequel and it delivered. I’m actually blown away by how much Sakurai has managed to evolve on the concept.
Quite a lot of modern anime. My list of all-time favorites has become dominated by shows from just the last few years. Apocalypse Hotel, Apothecary Diaries, Bocchi the Rock!, CITY: The Animation, Dungeon Meshi, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Takopi’s Original Sin.
Induction burners for cooking are pretty cool. All the heat of gas with none of the “slowly poisoning you and may explode”.
For super duper recent news, the Giant Panda has been moved off the endangered species list and into Vulnerable status.
larger hard drives/flash storage, faster/power efficient processors maybe…
