Does anyone else feel like tech peaked around 10+ years ago?
Does anyone else feel like tech peaked around 10+ years ago?
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I'm 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn't improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
To quote one of my favorite authors:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Yeah but Facebook was invented when I was a teen and I knew pretty quickly that shit was evil.
At 15 the thing i wanted most in the world was an escape hatch from all these other assholes I had to spend my time with everyday at school. Right around that time Facebook arrived ensuring they would have more access to me and the people around me more then any other time in history.
You must have been very mature for your age, and very cool.
How did you feel about pop music that came out when you were young? Born in the wrong generation at all?
What about things that are invented when I'm younger than 15?
That's number 1.
Man, the toys invented around that time are the best.... But that's probably all you're really paying attention to at that point.
And for kids now? Well they have things like Skibidi Toilet to keep them occupied.
But for a more serious answer I think that's when they're in their most creative mindset and everything is new to them and they're learning how things work.
Obviously the exact age at which someone starts to take an interest in tech is going to be different from person to person. For me, I was a fan of reading popular science magazines at a younger age as well as manuals on all of the different setting/functions/features of operating systems...
I think new tech is still great, I think the issue is the business around that tech has gotten worse in the past decade
Agree. 15+ years ago tech was developed for the tech itself, and it was simply ran as a service, usually for profit.
Now there's too much corporate pressure on monetizing every single aspect, so the tech ends up being bogged down with privacy violations, cookie banners, AI training, and pretty much anything else that gives the owner one extra anual cent per user.
What's crazy is that they were already making unbelievable amounts of money, but apparently that wasn't enough for them. They'd watch the world burn if it meant they could earn a few extra pennies per flame.
[off topic?]
Frank Zappa siad something like this; in the 1960's a bunch of music execs who liked Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong had to deal with the new wave coming in. They decided to throw money at every band they could find and as a result we got music ranging from The Mama's and The Papas to Iron Butterfly and beyond.
By the 1970s the next wave of record execs had realized that Motown acts all looked and sounded the same, but they made a lot of money. One Motown was fantastic, but dozens of them meant that everything was going to start looking and sounding the same.
Similar thing with the movies. Lots of wild experimental movies like Easy Rider and The Conversation got made in the 1970s, but when Star Wars came in the studios found their goldmine.
You know this happened with cars also, until there is a new disruption by a new player or technology - companies are just coasting on their cash cows. Part of the market cycle I guess.
Lots of the privacy violations already existed, but then the EU legislated first that they had to have a banner vaguely alluding to the fact that they were doing that kind of thing, and later, with GDPR, that they had to give you the option to easily opt-out.
The question op is posing is:
Which new tech?
In the decade op's talking about everything was new. The last ten years nothing is new and all just rehash and refinements.
ML, AI, VR, AR,, cloud, saas, self driving cars (hahahaha) everything "new" is over a decade old.
AI is not technically new, but generative AI was not a mature technology in 2014. It has come a long way since then.
Well it is literally not going as fast.
The rate of "technology" (most people mean electronics) advancement was because there was a ton of really big innovations at in a small time: cheap PCBs, video games, internet, applicable fiber optics, wireless tech, bio-sensing, etc...
Now, all of the breakthrough inventions in electronics have been done (except chemical sensing without needing refillable buffer or reactive materials), Moore's law is completely non-relevant, and there are a ton of very very small incremental updates.
Electronics advancements have largely stagnated. MCUs used 10 years ago are still viable today, which was absolutely not the case 10 years ago, as an example. Pretty much everything involving silicon is this way. Even quantum computing and supercooled computing advancements have slowed way down.
The open source software and hardware space has made giant leaps in the past 5 years as people now are trying to get out from the thumb of corporate profits. Smart homes have come a very long way in the last 5 years, but that is very niche. Sodium ion batteries also got released which will have a massive, mostly invisible effect in the next decade.
There was a lot of pioneering in the 70's. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70's. Most people ended the 70's living like they did in the 60's but now there's cool shit like the Speak n' Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.
There was a lot of invention in the 80's. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80's. We emerged from the 80's with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren't that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.
There was a lot of evolution in the 90's. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren't a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system...it's the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user's life. An N64 is exactly what you'd expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it's still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it's the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won't take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven't embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it's not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.
There was a lot of revolution in the 2000's. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It'll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.
There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010's. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don't notice; you buy a new phone and it's so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they've converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren't there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you're probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.
Now we arrive in the 2020's where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010's, it's older than 4 years, but we're days away from the halfway point of the decade and it's becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term "enshittification" because it's got the word shit in it and that's hilarious, but...I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20's represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.
From an old geek; spot on.
Feels the same with lot of other tech too: space voyage, cars & motorcycles, robots, most are just like last year with some small cosmetic change or 7% more of this or that.
Sure, things are getting better but it doesn't feel like it does any more.
Edit: hey, Lemmy & the decentralised fediverse is quite cool new tech.
Dial-up could still be pretty exciting. Or at least for me.
I am just amazed by data transfer via sound. When I found SSTV I was amazed by the ability to transfer analog images by sound. I was playing around with it for hours for months. I can get amazed by random crap like that. I can hear the image as it's being transferred. So cool!
But recently I was playing around with QSSTV and found HamDRM. Same thing, but digital. And it's not only for digital images, it can take any binary file. Sadly, no Android apps for HamDRM unlike analog SSTV. So, I just saved it as wav, moved it to my phone and played it to my laptop.
Holy shit! I transferred a 55kB document in 5 minutes using sound! It just feels so crazy and awesome. It sounds basically like random noise, static, but there's real data in it. If only there was an Android app to do this, I could play around it for hours transferring small data back and forth over the air, using sound waves!
But hey, I can even be excited by a large QR code. 2 seconds of 8kbps MP3 in a QR code, pretty cool!
Nice summary! I've been here through that whole time period. If it had stopped at the stage around 1995-2000 (before FB & web 2.0 took over the internet, before every business model became about bombarding us with ads and spying on us), our lives would be much better today.
- a lot of pioneering in the ’70s*
- right there in the late ’70s*
- Most people ended the ’70s* living like they did in the ’60s*
- a lot of invention in the ’80s*
- crystalized in the ’80s*
- We emerged from the ’80s*
- lot of evolution in the ’90s*
- a lot of revolution in the 2000s*
- a lot of stagnation in the 2010s*
- Now we arrive in the 2020s*
- In truth this began in the 2010s*
- the sinisterization of the ’20s*
But you got it right for “TRS-80s” & “August of ’91”!
I didn't sign up for an English class this semester, and I'm certainly not paying tuition. You gonna pretend you didn't understand what I meant?
It all went downhill when the expectation of an always-on internet connection became the norm. That gave us:
- "Smart" appliances that have no business being connected to the internet
- "Smart" TVs that turned into billboards we pay to have in our homes
- Subscription everything as a service
- Massive zero-day patches for all manner of software / video games (remember when software companies had to actually release finished/working software? Pepperidge Farm remembers)
- Planned obsolescence and e-waste on steroids where devices only work with a cloud connection to the manufacturer's servers or as long as the manufacturer is in business to keep a required app up to date
- Every piece of software seemingly sucking up all the data it can about you and feeding it back to the mothership so you can be profiled and sold to advertisers
- Pretty much everything Apple does is designed to further lock you into their ecosystem and/or remove a port that's standard in order to pocket the savings and sell you a dongle for $29.99
- Dwindling / disappearing availability of physical media you effectively own forever in favor of digital libraries that you only have a flimsy license to access at the company's whim (even though you "bought" the title for the same price it would have cost on physical media). Those have been ruled non-transferable (e.g. if you want to leave them to someone in your will) and the company going under leaves you with no rights or ability to get a refund or physical copy of things you supposedly bought but can no longer access.
Other than hardware getting more powerful and sometimes less expensive, every recent innovation has been used against us to take away the right to own, repair, and have any control over the tech we supposedly own.
Edits: I keep thinking of more things that annoy me lol.
And to force subscriptions, ads and tracking, the tech is getting more and more locked down.
Not just flashing phones and wifi routers, but you may not even watch high quality video, even though you're paying a subscription if your device's HW and SW don't conform.If something gets discontinued, it's not just that it may be unsafe to use or be too slow for modern use, no, look at cloud-managed network gear. The company decides it's a paperweight, and it is. And this is going to just extend further.
Not discounting anything you listed, but I overcome lots of this by being patient. I find it best to let the dust settle on everything now. I don't even see new movies till like, the next year. Why be a beta tester for enshittification
Same. Most of my media collection (TV series, movies, console video games) came from yard sales where I'd find the DVD/Blu-ray box sets for $10 or less. I'm just salty that streaming / digital distribution is chipping away at my frugal media habits lol.
One of the good things about the internet is you can watch videos about whatever the thing that you're interested in is. Get your "fix", and then patient-gamer it.
Before the net you had to actually buy the thing.
I'm not sure about the touch displays on cars.
How long does a Chinese tablet last, 10, 12 years ? If you keep it safely stored and don't drop it.
The things in cars seem to be even cheaper, they only use phone uPs designed to last no more than a few years. And they're roasted in hot weather, frozen and shaken to bits.
Good luck finding one of them in a few years, assuming they can be taken out at all without ripping up the dash.
I hate touch screens in general, so don't get me started on how much I hate them in cars lol.
Kangoo 2014 gang checking in!
I also have knobs on my stovetop for heating my food thankyouverymuch.
Tech has definitely become worse since megacorps killed the little guys & sucked the fun out of everything. Open source & self hosting is becoming/has become the only way. So glad I taught myself how to do it
Its called enshitification. Its a process that's been happening in all areas of tech for a while now.
Yeah, I'm not sure why the top comments are seeming to ignore this. Stagnation and greed is the problem here.
Your BS radar has simply improved I'm guessing. Go through a few hype cycles, and you learn the pattern.
Hardware is better than ever. The default path in software is spammier and more extortionist than ever.
The technology has not peaked, the user experience has peaked
The default user experience maybe. Get better software, enjoy the better hardware.
In my opinion as an engineer, methods like the VDI2206, VDI2221 or ISO9000 have done irreparable damage to human creativity. Yes, those methods work to generate profitable products, but by methodizing the creative process you have essentially created an echo chamber of ideas. Even if creativity is strongly encouraged by those methods in the early stages of development, the reality often looks different. A new idea brings new risks, a proven idea often brings calculable profits.
In addition to that, thanks to the chinese, product life cycles have gotten incredibly short, meaning, that to generate a constant revenue stream, a new product must have finished development while the previous one hasn't even reached it's peak potential. As a consequence, new products have only marginal improvements because there is no time for R&D to discover bigger progressive technologies between generations. Furthermore the the previous generation is usually sold along side the next one, therefore a new product can not be so advanced as to make the previous one completely obsolete.If you really want to see this with your own eyes, get a bunch of old cassette players from the 90s from different manufacturers. If you take them apart you can easily see how different the approaches where to solve similar problems back in the day.
Technology? No.
Consumer Electronics? Yes. Or at least there's a debatable transition and cutoff point.
Nah new tech is great. Flippers, steam decks, nano drones. Bluetooth was a joke a decade ago. Now we can do devices over wifi! Much of the tech from that era barely worked and was practically DIY levels of reliability. Rose colored glasses etc..
Which isn't to say that somethings haven't gotten outright shitty (M$, apple products, etc..). But widely, things are much much better. I think it depends how "mainstream" you are shopping. But if you were shopping "mainstream" then, it was just as shitty as it is today.
Not really peaked. More like we entered the era of diminishing returns which btw is great if you are not blinded by the marketing. Mid to low range phones are fairly cheap and more than adequate for almost anything . Do you know how shit even mid range phones were 10+ years ago and how fast they were getting too old to be usable. Right now its more than reasonable to use any smartphone for a 3 to 5 years and probably even longer ( before only champions like samsung Galaxy note 4 could even hope to match that ). Everything you talk about is cheaper and more afforable than ever before( if you do the usual and not buy overpriced brands beacuse of a brand like apple , galaxy phone , roomba robot vacuums etc... ). The only thing thats a shitshow right now are websites and computer prices precisly beacuse right now the current hype is LLM( which makes graphic cards really f expensive and kinda hits website by ricoshet due to the negative LLM influence ).
Actually even as smartphones go there is a progress. Folding phones. Coincidently they are less relaiable and not as long lived . Exatcly as smartphones were 10 years ago.
Also smartphones were something much grander than a simple tech innovation. They were truly a society changing innovation like cars, trains , planes or a computer. They just peaked much faster than cars , trains or planes. In fact they probably had bigger impact on society than computers.
I feel like smartphones + internet peaked about 10 years ago and has now steadily become enshittified. I have never used "google assistant" because it takes less time to just type something in to my phone or tap the setup for my alarm.
So yes, definitely feel that way. Consumer tech had less bullshit masking as improvements ten years ago.
Yes. Name one useful product Google has released in 15 years.
I can think of one (assistant/gemini) but it actually gets worse every minute so it supports the main idea that shits lame for a while now.
I haven't adopted a Google technology since 2010 when I got my first Android phone. They haven't made anything that lasted since; basically everything they introduce is going to be abandoned and shut down in ~3 years because they haven't changed away from their "move fast and break things" era. "Google Wank is now Android Jerk. No Wait, Android Jerk is being sunset in favor of Play Withyourself. Wait no, users are being migrated over to Youtube Crotch." Fuck it I'll use my hand.
What? No. lol. Tech is still improving. You're just thinking of the bad new stuff and good old stuff. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Phone's batteries and resolutions are much better than they were in 2014. Voice assistants never really took off. Smart home stuff is maaaaybe a little better now but there are also a shit ton more brands now and most are crap. But that also means cheaper and more widespread.
Phone screen pixel density actually went down in the last 10 years due to bigger screens.
The thing is that 10 years ago the phone I had was very similar to the one I have now, the laptop I had was very similar to the one I have now, and up until very recently I still had parts from the desktop I used to had back then installed on my current desktop, I also visited lots of the same sites I do now and played some of the same games. But if you go back another 10 years it's very different. In 2004 I didn't had a cellphone, by 2014 I had a Google Nexus, now I have a Google Pixel. In 2004 I didn't had a laptop, in 2014 I had a 8GB RAM 512GB dual core laptop, now I have a 32GB 1TBB 6 core one. In 2004 My desktop had 256MB RAM 10GB single core 1.6GHz processor, in 2014 it had 16GB RAM 1TB 6 core, now it has 32GB RAM 3TB 6 cores.
Obviously my computer now is much better than the one from 10 years ago, bit not by the same amount than the one form 2014 was from the one from 2004. To try to put it in perspective I would need to have around 500GB of RAM for it to be the same leap in RAM amount.
I just got a new phone, and the ai voice assistant is actually good. It's what people imagined it was going to be when they first came out. It doesn't have access yet to a lot of things, so it can't 'act' on things, but it actually gives consistently relevant info.
One thing I've used it for recently is I was in a game and knew there was a secret chest and it could accurately tell me what to do to get it Way better than looking up a video.
I think what OP meant is that there's no new creation of types of devices.
My new phone is objectively and subjectively better than the previous two I've owned over the last 6 years, but it's doing the same tasks.
Feature per dollar possibly yes. Technology itself not necessarily.
The issue is the market was much more competitive 10+ years ago which led to rapid innovation and the need for rivals to keep up.
Today that no longer exists in so many areas so a lot of existing tech has stagnated heavily.
For example, Google Maps was a very solid platform in 2014 bringing in a ton of new navigation features and map generation tech.
Today, the most solid consumer map nav is probably Tesla's map which utilizes Valhalla, a very powerful open source routing engine, that's also used on openstreetmap and OSMAnd.
This is a very huge improvement from 2014 Google Maps.
Except the most used map app is still essentially 2014 Google Maps because Google cornered the market so they no longer have any need to innovate or keep up. In fact it's actually worse since they keep removing or breaking features every update in an attempt to lower their cloud running costs.
You can apply this to a lot of tech markets. Android is so heavily owned by Google, no one can make a true competitor OS. Nintendo no longer needs to add big handheld features because the PSP no longer exists. Smart home devices run like total junk because everyone just plugs it into the same cloud backend to sell hardware. The de facto way to order things online is Amazon. Amazon is capable of shipping within a week, but chooses not to for free shipping to entice you into buying prime, and because they don't have a significant competitor. Every PC sold is still spyware windows because every OEM gets deals with Microsoft to sell their OS package.
Even though the hardware always improves, the final OEM can screw it all up by simply delivering an underwhelming product in a market they basically own, and people will buy because there is no other choice or competition to compare to.
Steam deck: am I a joke to you
3M Steam Deck users vs 100M+ Switch users: Yes.
I actually hope Steam Deck's success does force Nintendo to take them seriously, but at the moment their market share is much less overlapped because the Deck primarily offers PC games, even though Switch emulation is possible too.
Also the $400 entry model price would sound even more appealing if the Switch 2 comes put with a similar price. At that point Steam Deck is a steal lol.
I'm roughly the same age as you and I feel the same. In my adolescence and 20s it felt like some new, life-changing gadget was coming out almost every year. Now I feel like there's been incremental changes at best.
I mean I kept the same gaming PC for a decade before building another. The new one runs the exact same games; the only difference is that I can run them at 4K ultra now instead of 1080p medium. Games look better but it's a subtle improvement at best. Not the major leaps in graphical performance I was seeing every 5 years back in the 90s.
Same goes for phones. 10 years ago they were black slabs running Android or iOS, and today they are the same. Very consistent, unlike the constantly evolving and various designs of the 90s and 2000s.
Other than going electric, cars haven't changed much, either. 20-year-old cars that were well-maintained still look new to me, and can be easily modernized with things like aftermarket parking sensors and stereos with Android Auto.
Well the gaming industry was killed by mobile games in my opinion. They make so much money from micro transactions on shitty games that are just designed to keep us addicted. When the PS2 era was around, even the PS3 era there are games coming out all the time. Now it feels like big games come out every 5 years instead of 3 a year. I'm sure I'm just missing a lot of games because I'm not in the environment that keeps me up to date as much, but I feel like I'd still catch wind of something.
Why make an epic game that with in depth detail and good story lines when you can make 10x as much money having no story and half the work.
The quality required to launch a successful AAA game now just takes more, but the prices don't go up significantly so same staff more work...
The key is to ignore AAA and focus on indie. Look at the last year: Helldivers, Hades 2, Terra Nil, Deadlock, Planet Crafter. Deadlock is the closest to being AAA, but Valve isn't exactly EA.
Other than going electric, cars haven’t changed much, either. 20-year-old cars that were well-maintained still look new to me, and can be easily modernized with things like aftermarket parking sensors and stereos with Android Auto.
Personally I just really love the fact that there are some easily affordable cars that in my very subjective opinion look nearly timeless. Easily affordable only because I live in Europe and do my own repairs: Mostly they are 15-20 year old German cars that WILL bankrupt you if give them the chance. W211 Benz and E60/61 BMW come to mind. W221 too, but I'm a bit scared of that one.
I was going to name some Japanese cars too, but I just realized that those are no longer affordable. God damn Fast and Furious movies lol
And the infuriating thing is that there's nothing about electric cars that inherently requires constant internet access. Built-in GPS is easily replaced with a Bluetooth link to the GPS on your phone. Anything else can be enabled when it's actually needed, which is almost never.
Yes you are correct, it's worse now. At first it was creative, innovative products that made things more convenient or fun, or at least didn't harm its users. Now all the new things are made by immature egotistical billionaire techbros: generative AI which has ruined the internet by polluting it with so much shit you can't get real information any more, not to mention using up all our power and water resources, the enshittification of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 that was pure shit from the get-go, IOT "smart" appliances like TVs, doorbells, thermostats, refrigerators that spy on you and your neighbors, shit "self-driving" killer cars that shouldn't be allowed on the roads, whatever the hell that new VR Metaverse shit is, ads, ads, ads, ads, and on and on. It's a tech dystopia.
That was when innovation slowed down and rent-seeking increased, once the big players started exploiting their oiligopolies in earnest.
I've been saying this for a while, and have estimated a similar 10-year time frame.
Most new tech (except for medical advancements) doesn't really benefit the average person. Instead, it just gives corporations and governments more data, more control, and the ability to squeeze more money out of us. They don't represent actual improvements to society as a whole or to individual users.
Tech is better, but content is worse. I have a smart TV from 2014 that I'm gonna use until it's dead. When a new technology comes out, it's all about gaining market trust, so the product is built to last and has cool features (generally) without the ads and data theft. My TV doesn't play ads, but still has all the tech I need. Anything it can't do, my PS4 can.
Content?
What is on said tech. 10 years ago was only 2014. I miss when my ad blocker worked, when I could access news without paying, I miss when tech was stronger... though I'm glad my phone is waterproof though... I keep my phone in my bra and have destroyed like 4 from water damage 😅
I blame the big tech companies. 10-20 years ago they were not that big so they didn't buy every competition to kill them. Now any time we get a new company or product that could change the world, one of the big 3 (apple, amazon, google) will buy them to keep the tech, code, or people for themselves.
Wanna see what not being bought by big tech is like? Look at what FOSS is doing. Look at Home Assistant, Jellyfin, AOSP is doing, it's making huge leaps without big tech.
You're not crazy. I feel that even when the tech is slightly better the trade offs make the overall deal worse.
More RAM but it's soldered in on laptops. More storage on phones but no micro sd slot. No headphone jacks, the overall obsession with inferior wireless audio. Streaming services suck for anything that is not a live event and I think eventually more people will realize that. Especially as they keep hiking prices. Clearnet internet has been destroyed. The gaming industry is a joke nowadays, charging full price to play betas.
What's wrong with wireless audio? I've often had the problem that my audio jack was full of dirt so the jackplug couldn't properly connect anymore. I don't have that problem with wireless. Worst problem is that the connection sometimes stutters when I'm walking through the train station during rush hour
I have never had that issue with a jackplug. Wireless headphones mean stuttering connection and one more thing with batteries that you need to manage. Also, most of the wireless headphones that I've tried have much smaller cups than the wired variety. I haven't found a pair of wireless in-ears that are as comfortable as my preferred IEMs. In general, they might be okay for movies but not for music with an overemphasis on bass that I hate. The few options that don't sound bad are wildly overpriced.
Depending on the surroundings you might have a spotty connection if using Bluetooth to stream your audio from let's say your phone to a plugged in wireless speaker. I've personally had to pair and unpair failed connections and replace several wireless headphones because their batteries don't last longer than 4 or 5 months from unboxing. I'd much rather rely on a high quality pair of headphones that don't need charging and last me years at a time with no issue so long as I keep the headphone jack clear of debris.
I'm 22 and I feel the same way. 2012-2014 PC hardware was better and I do not care what anyone says. It's probably the software that was better but damn nowadays my 6 core 12 threaded CPU feels so ass in any task compared to my old ass Pentium. I have 32 gigs of RAM and shit can still be slow and unresponsive. Games are poorly optimized because they just focus on making it pretty but it barely looks better. Best example is counter strike 2 vs CS:GO. I played csgo on integrated graphics then on a 1050ti game was always smooth and looked good. Now CS2 looks blurry even with taa off. Runs like shit and sure it looks better but not that much better for it to run how it does.
Edit: another example is vermintide 2. I upgraded my hardware since I played the 1st one but it runs way worse than the 1st one.
I used to customize my desktop like crazy with the dumbest 3D effects. I was on a Pentium using Ubuntu 14.04, integrated graphics. Now I can't run discord and 3D effects without noticing the difference in performance.
Software is getting worse. Because it's getting more and more complex. Now even basic things back then are rough to do now.
I don't have proof or know enough to prove it but I can feel it.
I'm young enough to tell you that it's not just nostalgia. Most new tech now is like "cool but impractical" at best and "I'm worrying about how this will be used to make the world worse" at worst. Nothing to make me think it's the future.
Nah, people always think thing "peaked" during their era. Its probably nostalgia. Tech back then is, in my opinion, terrible.
I was born around 2000-2003 (not giving exact year for privacy reasons)
Examples:
When I got my first phone (like around 2015 or so), it was an android phone that didn't have great encryption. You had to manually enable encryption and its not File-Based encryption like in today's android phones, its Full Disk Encryption which mean alarms dont work if you reboot your phone. And it takes like an hour or 2 to first set up the encryption.
Phones have so much vulnerabilities. Stagefright, Blueborne, etc. Luckily, I never got hacked (or at least not that I'm aware of) but it was just unsettling to know your phone is vulnerable, and you're even already on the latest update. Also there was a lot of screenlock bypasses. Updates typically is only 1 year OS update and 2 year security updates, if even that. Updates were also very slow to get rolled out.
Security was so bad, I can root my android phone with a random app I downloaded by searching "Android Root", don't even need to connect to a pc. Like can you imagine a random app being able to just take root privilages on your phone.
Nowadays, phones are much more secure, even the cheapest samsung phone has 4 years of OS updates, 5 years of security updates. With better encryption.
Phone plans were expensive AF, well I was a kid, but the normal plans had those "Unlimited Data" but with a huge asterisk, data slows after like a certain amount like 5 GB or something, I was unlucky, my parents were a bit cheap so the family plan that I was on only had 30MB of 4g internet, then throttled to 128kbps. Unusable unless you are at home and have wifi.
Nowadays, unlimited plans have become the norm, the plan that I was on even got a free upgrade to unlimited high speed data.
Oh and HTTPS wasn't default in most sites, some didn't even have it. And no HSTS as far as I remember.
Back then, there were no such thing as Airtags or Samsung Smarttags that are so cheap and allows tracking misplace items or even your pets. (I mean there are privacy concerns... still, very useful if not misused)
There were no smart watches that can detect a heart attack. (They're not exactly accurate, but still...)
There were no phones that detect a car crash or even use satelites to make a sos call. (I'm talking about the iPhone 14)
I mean yes we have so much enshittification today, but that's not really a tech problem, its a corporate greed problem not doesn't just affect technology.
Technology isn't bad, its just the way we use it.
Like nuclear technology can be use to build bombs to destroy, or used in power plants to create energy.
Older nerd, just fyi: problem is that tech is just keys. They unlock the gates, positive for society or negative, sometimes simultaneously.
It's just interesting how the bags of cash are always behind the "bad for society gate"..
Technology is still evolving at break neck speed. On the other hand, companies are degrading/restricting these new techs to make more money.
Design wise, absolutely peaked in the 90s/2000s. Now everything looks like a copy of each other with uninspired designs across the board.
In terms of what it has to offer, I personally don't think so. Couldn't imagine going back 10-20 years ago and not having a device like my Steam Deck that can play computer games on the go (laptop not included since when are you realistically pulling out a laptop on a drive when heading out for errands?) or having a laptop not as thin as my current laptop or even just the touchscreen feature. I also couldn't imagine going back 20 years ago and not having a 1 or 2 TB portable external hard drive (or if they were out, being a lot more expensive than now).
The PSP is 20 years old now. Absolutely massive game library, and definitely on par with the console and PC games at the time.
The game library is well worth revisiting on something like a retroid pocked with upscaling.
TV resolution peaked about 10 years ago with 1080p. The improvement to 4K and high dynamic range is minor.
3D gaming has plateaued as well. While it may be possible to make better graphics, those graphics don’t make better games.
Computers haven’t improved substantially in that time. The biggest improvement is maybe usb-c?
Solar energy and battery storage have drastically changed in the last 10 years. We are at the infancy of off grid building, micro grid communities, and more. Starlink is pretty life changing for rural dwellers. Hopefully combined with the van life movement there will be more interesting ways to live in the future, besides cities, suburbs, or rural. Covid telework normalization was a big and sudden shift, with lasting impacts.
Maybe the next 10 years will bring cellular data by satellite, and drone deliveries?
Strong disagree about the 4k thing. Finally upgraded my aging 13 year old panels for a fancy new Asus 4k 27"and yeah it's dramatically better. Especially doing either architectural or photographic work on it. Smaller screens you've got a point though. 4k on a 5" phone seems excessive.
3D gaming has plateaued as well. While it may be possible to make better graphics, those graphics don’t make better games.
I haven't played it, only seen clips, but have you seen AstroBoy? It's true that the graphics aren't really too much better than the PS4, but there's like a jillion physics objects on the screen with 60fps. It's amazing. Graphics are still improving, just in different ways.
Astro Bot looks pretty cool, but I think the same gameplay experience was totally possible 10 years ago albeit with fewer pretty reflections, and lower polygon counts.
I think the next breakthrough in gaming and/or VR will be when somebody figures out how to generate Gaussian splatting environments. It’s fundamentally different from the polygon approach and it feels so much more photo realistic.
Sorry to make you feel old but 10 years ago 4k was already mainstream, and you would have already had difficulty finding a good new 1080p TV. That is roughly the start of proper HDR being introduced to the very high end models.
Also, maybe you've only experienced bad versions of these technologies because they can be very impressive. HDR especially is plastered on everything but is kinda pointless without hardware to support proper local dimming, which is still relegated to high end TVs even today. 4k can feel very noticeable depending on how far you sit from the TV, how large the screen is, and how good one's eyesight is. But yeah, smaller TVs don't benefit much. I only ended up noticing the difference after moving and having a different living room setup, siting much closer to the TV.
I wouldn't call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.
I didn't have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we'd gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a "dumb" TV.
Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I'm almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.
My lower back makes me feel old, not TV resolutions. My TV is a 2020 LG OLED, 55”. I do notice the difference but I just don’t think it’s a big deal, because 1080p is sharp enough. I wear glasses when I watch TV correcting to 20/15. Or another way of saying it, is that my old eyes don’t care for big screens. The experience is the same.
In my opinion, technology keeps improving, however that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s getting better. I think innovation in technology peaked from the 2000s to the early 2010s, after this period however, it has continually become more and more “enshitified,” meaning that features no one wanted suddenly being added. For example, “ai coffee maker” (this is real), like who asked for this? Not to mention, not only is everything more bloated, but levels of privacy have decreased significantly; every aspect of your digital life is capitalized on for advertising. The early 2010s were simpler times.
I just had to book a flight.
Frontier forces you to download an app now to check in (there is a well hidden option to do it on web, but the page never loads on laptop nor mobile in multiple browsers).
I tried to rent a parking spot, and 2/4 places would not load quotes at all (again web and mobile and multiple browsers). I probably would've used one of the two that didn't load if their sites had worked. Their loss I guess.
I’d just like it to not feel like each interaction I have with technology, and I guess by extension the world, is becoming increasingly adversarial. The tech itself seems to keep getting better though.
Tech has advanced technically (for lack of a better word) but yeah, it's being used against us more than to our benefit a lot of the time.
- Bang. We needed to stop right effing there!
I somewhat agree: tech peaked just when it was high end and absolutely not relying on manufacturer's cloud / subscription / customer portal enrollment ... 😓
Facebook's AR glass prototype is fire. It's too expensive to release to the public but in a few years...
Tech in general isn't accelerating as fast. Drives aren't twice as big every year at half the price. Processors aren't twice as fast. 2024 stuff is still better than 2021 stuff, but it's not twice as good. A few things have take a couple steps backward as they try to wrangle AI data capture into our lives. Up until recently, we've been able to scale thing down, so the same thing, only smaller and faster, but we're hitting the limit of that, which is why people are latching on to ML to distract us from the fact that our gaming system from 6 years ago is still fine.
For some, yes. Automotive is one that comes to mind. I miss dumb TVs. I'd say laptop, but then I'm rocking a decade-old Thinkpad, so I might be a bit biased here. I also miss phones that aren't as locked down. I hate what the current streaming service industry have become, and how social media is filled with AI trash.
I'd say that our personal needs for shear computation power have peaked within the last ten years. Yes, people have been saying this since the dawn of personal computers. Yes, servers keep getting more powerful. However, the fact that some schmucks just released a thousand dollar laptop with more or less the same RAM & CPU specs as my decade old Thinkpad kinda proves that.
Other than that, a lot of things are getting better. As an open-source enthusiast, I see things keeps improving, FreeCAD 1.0 just got released, more improvements to Linux kernel, LibreOffice handles MS Office files better, etc. Manufacturing techniques keeps getting more advanced, like 3D printing metal, and for us mortals, faster FDM printing with better plastic material that's more UV resistant. Radio technologies comes to mind; with SDR, one can achieve what people from last decade would need expensive specialized equipments for, yes you can get your hands on these for cheap.
Last but not least, don't forget this very platform where you're reading this very comment ;)
no
It really depends. Google as in the search engine is getting worse every year. Websites went from being fun and exciting to just a vehicle to show ads.
That's the classic example of enshittification.
true the internet as a tool has declined in usefulness
Absolutely no. 2014 can eat my multiple TBs of SSDs’ asses.
No, I prefer my 2020 phone over my 2014 one... But maybe that is not entirely what you want to mean in your post.
You don't need to upgrade your "tech" yearly though.
You grew up in a time of huge technological innovation, so you see anything else as unusual
Boomers grew up in stagnation, and expect tech to keep progressing at the same rate.
Both are 100% normal ways for our brains to expect shit to go, but neither fit modern society.
Every dog has its day, I suppose. Smart phones were exciting when they first emerged on the market and no one knew where the tech was going. Today, they're an every day appliance and a bit more ho-hum as a result.
At the moment, my tech junkie sights are set on micro-mobility. There's all sorts of fun stuff coming out of ebikes, scooters, and other contraptions, and the sector is still innovating hard and experiencing some growing pains and backlash because it has yet to move past that disruptive tech phase. In other words, it's awesome!
Yes.
Computers are the worst in my opinion, everything is tens to hundreds of times faster by specs and yet it feels as slow as it did in the 90s, I swear.
Network speeds are faster than ever but websites load tons of junk that have nothing to do with the content you're after, and the networks are run by corpos who only care about making money, and when they have no competition and you need their service, why would they invest in making their systems work better?
This is industrialism. All tech does this. You may have also had some rose colored glasses about business.
I work in VR and AR. I traveled to a conference this week to showcase demos of my work.
I have in my backpack a headset that’s costing few hundred bucks and can spawn in front if your eyes 3D models you can directly manipulate with your hands or a pen.
It just works.
I even use it offline while flying.
This didn’t exist 10years ago. It’s amazing.
It always amazes me how much professional uses VR/AR has, and what kind of stuff has been created for it by all sorts of industries. Some see it as a failure because the consumer variants have not seen revolutionairy improvements over the past years, but the industry around it is quickly growing. So many companies use it, that the technology doesn't need games to survive.
the consumer variants have not seen revolutionairy improvements over the past years
They probably haven't tried a Quest 3 (overall trade off) or a Vision Pro (resolution and eye tracking, arguably not for consumers though based on the price... but compared to gaming PC + VR kit few years ago I'd say it is comparable) because even though IMHO the biggest revolution has been going from 3DoF to 6DoF recently, just the improvements (resolution, inside-out tracking, hand tracking, BT support with a ton of peripherals, etc) is actually providing an experience different enough that people who had doubt few years ago, say on a Valve Index, are reconsidering "just" based on form factor and thus convenience.
I've certainly had the feeling that things aren't improving as quickly anymore. I guess, it's a matter of the IT field not being as young anymore.
We've hit some boundaries of diminishing returns, for example:
- A phone from 5 years ago is still easily powerful enough to run the apps of today. We have to pretend that progress is still happening, by plastering yet another camera lens on the back, and removing yet another micrometer of bezel.
- Resolutions beyond HD are not nearly as noticeable of an upgrade. It often feels like we're just doing 2K and 4K resolutions, because bigger number = better.
- Games went from looking hyperrealistic to looking hyperrealistic with a few more shrubs in the background.
Many markets are now saturated. Most people have a phone, they don't need a second one. Heck, the youngest generation often only has a phone, and no PC/laptop. As a result, investors are less willing to bring in money.
I feel like that's why the IT industry is so horny for market changes, like VR, blockchain, COVID, LLMs etc.. As soon as a new opportunity arises, there's potential for an unsaturated market. What if everyone rushes to buy a new "AI PC", whatever the fuck that even means...?Well, and finally, because everyone and their mum now spends a large chunk of their lives online, this isn't the World Wide West anymore. Suddenly, you've got to fulfill regulations, like the GDPR, and you have to be equipped against security attacks. Well, unless you find one of those new markets, of course, then you can rob everyone blind of their copyright and later claim you didn't think regulations would apply.
yep, and then tech companies began the big cull, taking all the free services and beginning to squeeze, at every level, all the time
Virt-a-Mate, in case anyone is wondering about adult VR apps.
I sure hope not. Building a new PC this weekend.
Does anybody else
Yes, pretty much always.
I dunno, did they have those alarm clocks you have to chase around 10 years ago?
Maybe? I remember seeing an alarm on Think Geek back in the late 00s that would fire off a helicopter that you'd have to bring back to the base station to turn it off. I was debating between that and the ninja boom alarm clock (which I think had a disk to vibrate the whole damned bed) for a good while.
They had them 20 years ago
2016 baby
No. You mean AI has not at least wowed you?
We had a chatbot based on Markov chains like 20 years ago in a friend’s group chat that ran on a potato, so no. LLMs are mostly the same thing only wasting astronomically larger resources.
And those principles were formulated at the start of the 20th century and partially in the 19th.
Markov chains are way worse and nearly always fail to preserve the illusion of reasoning. Markov chains also haven't generated them deepfakes.
I suppose my intent for this question was a little more nuanced than what I posted, so my bad. Generative AI wowed me initially, but it very quickly lost its appeal to me the more it became anti-consumer. As I learned more about the models and saw how it just aggregates and plagiarizes human created content it all really soured on me. I suppose it's still technically impressive, but I really struggle to see how the benefits outweigh the cost.
Not really, one of my favourite games of all time came recently and it wouldn't be possible to exist without more current tech plus I like modern phones more and more
Have you heard the good news of selfhosting? Tech is better than ever, especially the free open-source stuff. The big corps behind it are what have gotten worse.
We just had an AI boom and now my computer can write text and code. It can generate images, voices and music almost as well as a human. This is in the last two years, I don't understand the feeling. I was personally blown away the first times I used things like chatgpt, stable diffusion, elvenlabs and udio.
My current phone has less utility than the phone I had in 2018, which had a headphone jack, SD card, IR emitter (I could use it as a TV remote!), heartrate sensor, and a decent camera.
My current laptop is less upgradable than pretty much anything that came out in 2010. The storage uses a technically standard but uncommon drive size, and the wifi and RAM are both soldered on. It is faster and has a nicer screen, but DRMs in web browsers make it hard to take advantage of that screen, and bloated electron apps make it not feel much faster.
Oh but here's the catch! Now, thanks to a significant amount of stolen data being used to train some autocorrect, my computer can generate code that's significantly worse than what I can write as a junior software dev with under a year of job experience, and takes twice as long to debug. It can also generate uncanny valley level images that look about like I typed in a one sentence prompt to get them.
Buying shit products doesn't mean technology isn't advancing. My phone still has all the things you said and it was one of the cheaper models. Talking about sd cards, a 500 gb one is 20$. They didn't even exist in that size a decade ago if I'm not mistake.
Is this about technology advancing or if it's doing it morally? Your personal opinion on technology doesn't change its merit. And seriously, if you can't see the leaps and bound gen ai has done and how little of that uncanny feeling is left, you are just sitting there with your head in the sand.
Fact is, if I would have asked you three years ago how much time it will take for technology to advance to such a level where consumer computers can generate realistic images out of individual pixels, you would have straight up laughed at me. I bet you would have confidently told me it was impossible.
If you think an AI can do those things almost as good as a human, you should find more capable humans to hang out with
If it was shit, people wouldn't be complaining about having to compete with it.
It really depends on what we mean by "better than a human". Can AI draw better then the average human, yes. Can AI draw better then the best 10% of artists, no.
In any case, this is a tool. It helps me make up for the skills I don't have either to entertain me or help me. It just needs to be better then the human I can afford to hire, but I'm broke so the bar is low tbh.
And let's be honest too, the average human is kind of shit at most things, half of America can't even think for itself apparently, the bar isn't very high on what they can do either.
I'm in an area that uses Waymo a lot. My head exploded last year when I watched a driverless car make a left turn in front of me. 100% impressed that day.
SpaceX catching the super heavy rocket -that was also mind-blowing. Space tech tends to be what spurs in the tech we use ourselves, so I think the privatization of space travel has been a net good. We'll have another explosion of tech over the next few years because of it
Hell no. Fuck that shit
We had like 500 form factors for phones, now it's standardized
Resistive touch screens? Ewww
Like a billion mp3/MP4/ipod clones? Just to listen to music? A thing which now we can do easily on our phones?
Slow ass ssd/nand memory chips?
Freaking 1 core processors on phones, PCs and laptops?
Seriously someone misses their devices behaving like slowpokes?
Wireless audio devices that worked like shit unless they were extremely high end? Oh yeah wired worked great, but we were flooded with a ton of clones of those too. So no great quality from those "Skeleton Sweet" or "earpods".
Batteries that were in dire need of charge at least thrice a day?
Wireless routers that with any luck had gains that allowed to step out of the room?
Car wise, no stability control? You seriously fucking with stability control? That shit avoids like 25% of all car accidents globally
Medical wise, CRISPR? gene therapy for muscular dystrophy? Vaccines that can be whipped out in months?
Innovation slowing down? In what planet do you fuckers live on?
I'd say more but I think you get my point
I don't understand the downvotes. The tech may be less revolutionairy from the perspective of a user, but we absolutely made a lot of progress.
10 years ago was 2014, not 2004.
The samsung galaxy s5 was released at the start of 2014 with a capacitive 1080p amoled touchscreen, a quad core snapdragon 801 processor, 21h of 'talk time' battery, wireless charging, a fingerprint sensor, NFC, dual band 802.11ac wifi support, and emmc 5.0 storage (250 MB/s sequential read).
New cars were mandated to have ESC in the US and the EU by 2014.
There have definitely been many innovations since 2014, but most consumer technology upgrades have been iterative rather than innovative.
Highly disagree, everything is better now, and the things that have not changed a lot are instead refined. Stuff doesn't need to change just for the sake of change. A good example of this is smartphones, we've found a good basic model that the vast majority of people are comfortable with, all that needs to be done is to update the various parts as the years go by. Obviously smartphones aren't as exciting as they were, but that's not a bad thing at all. So much stuff was so bad in the early days, people are great at not remembering that. Try going back to like an iPhone 4 and you'll quickly realise how bad it is compared to what we have now. Bad screen, shitty camera, worse UI and UX etc. And the stuff that was top of the line and most expensive then is now mostly worse than even budget models of what we have now.
I really doubt you put even a second of thought into this post, you just felt nostalgic and remembered only the good parts. If you did sit and think about it for a while, I got bad news about your basic comprehension, critical thinking and memory.
Lol what? You're dumb
I didn't know gen Alpha was on Lemmy.
