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There’s plenty of p2p, decentralized and mesh radio tech to get excited about.
I’m building my own home servers, fuck your subscriptions and privacy invading tracking and ads
This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
When you need something more esoteric than the Oculus Rift and even less user-friendly.
Isn’t that the game that almost took over the Enterprise D?
Relatively Affordable? Maybe. Absolutely Affordable? Hell no.
This is neat!
The reckoning is coming, I’m already trying to offline as much as I can.
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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
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!
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!
Look up Crytek’s SVOGI! DF did a fantastic, and brief, showcase: https://youtu.be/w31Ct25gJlI?t=446
Cryengine is back.
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 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.
Perplexitys methods are bad but the concept of a natural language web browser is a completely unique thing and thats interesting to me. Its like when google enabled people to search “how to change a tire” instead of before where people searched with keywords.
Idk how you can say self driving tech is not cool. Even the worst self driving which is Tesla’s is still very impressive. Telsa can drive autonomously through the street using only cameras. Is it perfect no but its still very good and its only a joke because of how good the competition is. That gives me a lot of hope for self driving cars.
As for that Chinese robot dog yeah I see the video that got put out, I dont think it blows away Boston dynamics version in anything but manufacturing costs. All the falling and all terrain movement the Chinese dog can do has been done by Boston dynamics for almost 5 years at this point.
Self driving tech is cool. Tesla’s take on Self Driving is not cool because it’s not effective.
Telsa can drive autonomously through the street using only cameras.
Sorta… a bit… in a way that will lead to an accident sooner or later. If they put LIDAR on their cars it would be far more effective, but Musk wants to be different. He insists on only using cameras even though you can’t safely do self-driving with only cameras. Typical Musk, cutting corners and lying.
Yeah its dumb to not use lidar and elon musk sucks but the cars can self drive without a doubt. That self driving is impressive even if waymo is already doing taxi services with near perfect driving for the past few years.
the cars can self drive without a doubt
So can my sister’s car for a few seconds if you put the cruise control on. But it can’t self-drive safely, and neither can Teslas. But, my sister’s car doesn’t advertise the ability to self-drive. But, Musk pretends that Telsas can, which is extremely dangerous. He’s killing people by muddying the waters and pretending his cars can self-drive safely.
Ok idc about defending tesla anymore. Self driving is cool tech and we can pretend Tesla’s cant self drive.
I remember reaching out to the Nextlix help desk back in the day just so I could have on record how thrilled I was to have their service.
How the mighty have fallen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything that has a chance to break up what the modern web is will ultimately get consumed by one of the larger companies, if not destroyed by them. This is the future of the internet. I don’t like it, but here we are.
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.
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.
Saving this post because it sums up exactly how I feel
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.
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.
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.
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 on the framework laptop bandwagon, it’s pretty cool~
omg I’m so jealous 😭
The only real tech that has gotten me excited lately is the steam deck, framework computers, and these little info displays called trmnl.
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.
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
I’m currently hemming and hawing over upgrading the drives in my server. I’ve got a pair of 4TB drives are are mostly full, and it looks like I could upgrade to 10-12TB for less than $300 (I also have a new chassis that I might put into service at the same time which can hold a lot more drives, plus my wife’s old CPU and MOBO would be a decent side-grade, so maybe I’ll also shift to RAID-Z1 with 3-4 drives over time and an external backup drive via PBS now that it officially supports external drives)
I’m gonna buy like 3 of these soon if nobody stops me lol
Oh shit, that price seems too good to be true. My NAS has a couple of 12TB drives in it that cost more than these.
I remember when that was the price for a 1 gb full sized sd card.
Reminder to book your colonoscopy :p
Already have a stream deck, the framework computer and trmnl look really cool!
… What other cool stuff don’t I know about??
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tech was great when it didn’t try to steal your personal information
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.
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.
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.
You think consumers can afford an Apple headset? I’d argue one of the reasons it failed is that it was completely unaffordable.
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.
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.
Also expensive
“I miss getting expensive about tech.”
🤔
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.
