I just had an experience with a auto soap dispenser, sink, towels and dryer set in the same place in a public restroom, didn’t have to walk to a shared dryer
Plus if electric cars become the norm, the streets will be quiet for the first time since the industrial revolution
Ebikes have transformed where I live. It’s mountainous so the only cyclists you’d see were skinny lycra-clad guys on 5 grand bikes.
Now virtually everyone has a bike, from kids to octogenarians, and the only difference between the lycra-clad cyclists and the shorts n t-shirt cyclists is the fact the ones on the ebikes are all smiling 😊
totally this, such a simple idea but it’s transformative in so many ways
When I was a kid, I had to reference several manuals and carefully assemble a double handful of parts in specific order to connect two computers to eachother. I’d have to fiddle with protocols and speeds and obscure features and traits to make the stars align. Transferring 200mb would be an overnight task. If I wanted to show pictures from my vacation on a big screen, I would have to have them printed on cellulose and insert them in tiny frames to project on a thick screen with a huge machine.
Yesterday, I went to a friend, pointed my phone at a
magic symbolqr code and sent a full movie to their PC in a few minutes. Then I pushed a button to make the photographs on my phone appear on their TV.I have a magic little box sitting in my garage that allows me to dream up a weird little device, create it on a computer, convert it to a big pile of computer code automatically, hit “go” on the magic box, and come back in 4 hours to a hunk of plastic in the exact shape I dreamt up only a few hours before. A shape and functionality that had never before existed on the face of the earth.
Ya, 3d printing feels pretty futuristic.
my job is basically design and manufacture, the dependencies of 3d printers make my job wouldnt exist 10 years ago.
Electric cars will certainly be quieter at low speed but they will still be noisy at higher speed due to tire noise dominating. Lower speed limits in cities would help here significantly.
The dystopian novel vibes.
Technology that is so ubiquitous that younger gen’s don’t know how to troubleshoot them at all.
I grew up with many examples from mag tape media to 802.11b that was basically only useful within a clear line of site to the router.
As a very curious person with very wide interests, it is so easy to access really hard-to-find information. In the past five years I’ve satisfied my curiosity more than adequately on hundreds of topics I’d wondered about all my life … from home. One plus side of Covid.
On the darker side, there were plenty of predictions (from science and fiction) in decades past that are becoming very real. Too many heads buried in sand.
smartphones are pretty damn impressive.
they downright make scifi gizmos like dataslates, or comunicators seem outdated.
gps navigation arround the world,
even without cellula reception if you have offline map data.
and automatic navigation / route planninga vast array of communication services be it text sound, or video,
one on one, as a group, or in a public forum.a vast sea of information on every topic immaginable.
ever improving camera & sensor tech.
and smartphones do it all in one device small enough to fit in your pocket.
and i didn’t even mention the computing power & storage that oveshadows some room sized supercomputers of the past
Yep! That was my thought as well, especially that we can carry the internet around and talk to pretty much anyone anytime.
Being addicted to the internet
Plus if electric cars become the norm, the streets will be quiet for the first time since the industrial revolution
The sound of hooves on cobblestone is incredibly loud and annoying!
What really baffles me is modern computers. The whole assortment from mainframe batteries, desktop PCs, laptops to smartphones, watches, wireless earbuds, microcontrollers, miniaturised sensors, etc. Even the cheapest modern microcontrollers have insanely complex and tiny patterning that really speaks volumes for the amount of process control and precision in semiconductor fabs. Truly, I would call the modern IC a miracle if I wouldn’t know better. It is physics, materials science and chemistry at their best.
Playing with my own AI models is interesting.
The hopelessness.
My Steam Deck!
Jesus Christ, it is SO GOOD!
The speed of light means that light that left our sun arrives on my roof’s solar panels 8 minutes later. I unplugged my EV from my home charger, and drove to get a burrito. I drove on energy that left the sun 10 minutes before I used it to go get lunch.
Also, my electric bill arrived yesterday and it was the same amount due for the past 3 months: Total bill $0 “No payment due at this time”.
Aeropex - bone-conducting earphones
Coolify2 - Personal neck AC/heating with peltier technology
GrapheneOS - Able to use a smartphone to its full potential, without the tracking/bloat/handholding of other default OS choices.
I really like how those first two are basic science, but somebody was actually able to innovate them into doing something useful.
I wish more technology was like this, and not whatever the crypto/metaverse/NFT/AI people are doing (mostly mistaking fluff for innovation)
Like the progression of LEDs over the past 40 years, an outstanding increase in brightness and colours.
Also, listening to
Kool Keith - Earth People
