Ask Lemmy

When the wildfire smoke turns the air orange.

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 😊

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 symbol~~qr 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.

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they downright make scifi gizmos like dataslates, or comunicators seem outdated.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 planning

a 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

honestly just modern medicine and indoor plumbing/water treatment

the amount of not dying from random infections we do these days, no wonder there are so many humans

Everyone walking around with digital cameras

• We have video and photo evidence of nearly every single event because there are multiple people with cameras nearly everywhere there are people.

Global interconnection

• I can instantly communicate with someone in Germany from the US. I can even share a picture or video with someone in a matter of seconds.

Medicine

• Whenever I do something risky or worry about becoming sick or ill, I recognize how lucky I am that I can just go to a doctor and it will likely be addressed without issue. This goes especially for bacterial infections.

My cellphone. Every day. Every time I'm at my computer and transfer a file to my phone over KDE Connect I kinda just sit there for a second marveling at the fact that the transfer happened and it just feels like magic.

I understand the underlying processes that make it happen, just sometimes I find myself ignoring the details and just appreciating it for a moment.

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.

There's an app for everything.
And everything requires an app.
It's not a good future.

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".

Given the heat lately, air conditioning. Sure, AC has been around for a long time but it’s becoming ubiquitous (at least in the us). Mine is controllable over Alexa, outputs data graphs, makes intelligent decisions to save money, etc.

Now that we daily experience the results of global warming, we all hide our heads in the ~~sand~~ AC

Everyone spying on me, listening to everything I say and tracking everywhere I go.

That and instant pots. You just put in ingredients and out comes food. It also makes rice way better than you ever could on a stove.

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.

This comment. The internet is wild.

The fact that I can go on eBay and get an actually usable laptop for $40

Like, I was playing around with freecad on it a couple days ago. It just works. The fact that I can get a fully functional personal computer for cheaper than 8 hamburgers is crazy.

Watching the movie Idiocracy.

Wait people like automatic bathroom fixtures?? Every time I go into a bathroom with them they make my life so much harder than it needs to be. Especially automatic toilets, those things are genuinely one of the most horrible things to ever be invented

We pay for things with plastic.

The dystopian novel vibes.

My Steam Deck!

Jesus Christ, it is SO GOOD!

The building across from me has a second story rollup door. I like to pretend its for flying cars. Edit:

Modern ice trays.

Those fancy sinks you can't fit your hands in and just splash water everywhere. We have peaked as a race, its all downhill now.

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.

Everything's connected, there's a vast collection of human knowledge available at a few clicks, smart homes, and the future is looking very hopeful!

USBC-PD and the rise of energy efficient dc appliances. the ability to to toss out ac power bricks and power most of my DC appliances with an electrical grid I wired together with solar panels and batteries. The sun powers most of my convinence and luxuries without burning fossil fuels.

24" TV, desktop vaporizer, video game console, laptop, and led lamp are all run from my offgrid dc electrical system and can use under 50 watts when all are on at once. I can process a load of laundry with a travel sized washer and spin dryer combo. I can brew a cup of coffee, I can get running water with a usb pump/shower head, I can run a small fridge, run a fan, I have a usb electric blanket/ heated jacket poncho that will sip on 10 watts of power and keep me warm on cold nights. If thats not enough I can get a jacket or blanket that runs on dewalt power tool batteries. Even charge a small electric bike.

I can do all of this with a cheap power station and 200w of solar. Just about the only modern convinences that are still hard to do on a 200w dc system is air conditioning(sadly seeming to be more a survival requirement in the coming years during summer) and cooking appliances. In those cases a tank of propane and dual fuel generator are great backup options especially if you can't afford more solar and batteries to run a 1000+ watt appliance. Fortunately most 5000btu window units only consume 400-600 watts after startup surge or with soft starter so you dont need that much solar and batteries if you have a small space to be conditioned.

All of these things either weren't possible or gave our ancestors a laborious manual workload 100 years ago. Most of these things required an industrial sized machine and or massive amounts of wattage 50 years ago. Now this is all possible with cheap affordable technological magic that sips power. Solar panels are getting cheaper and more efficent, and so is most consumer technology that power our lives. Its a shame that our generation and future generations will have to pay for the sins of our fossil fuel burning fathers but I am confident that more and more people will be moving towards more sustainable options especially as their homes/enviroments burn down from the ever increasing dry droughts and they are forced into being nomadic vandwellers.

My appliances.

The only "smart" appliance I own is a TV, and the ability to just press a few buttons instead of swapping inputs/cords to watch basically anything on it feels pretty futuristic. Even my dumb appliances have features now I never saw even in the rich kids' houses as a kid in 90s. My toilet has a lid that is engineered to close slowly on its own with gravity instead of slamming. I can use the internet anywhere in my home from a handheld rectangle, man.

I'm dating myself hard with this comment, I know, but as a guy in his mid 30s I'm pretty routinely struck by the thought of how sci-fi some of my commonplace stuff really is compared to what I thought shit would look like as a kid/teenager.

Bad news, tires are the biggest source of noise from cars in movement unless you change the exhaust to something barely legal on a gas car.

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.

Nothing made me feel like the future was now as Orbitz and freeze dried pizza from the Challenger Space Museum.

They don't make Orbitz anymore tho :(