We talk a lot about enshittification of technology, so tell me about technology that is getting better!

I personally love the progress of electric scooters. I’ve been zooming around on a 400$ escooter for a year and it works so well. It has a range of around 20 miles and top speed of 15 mph, so it works just super well for my uses, and 10 years ago scooters with that range/speed/price were no where near a thing.

  • totallynotaspy@fedia.io
    0·
    4 months ago

    Surprised it hasn’t been mentioned, but Electric Vehicles in general. I remember wishing for them to be a thing when I used to drive my family’s gas-guzzling vehicles. If you look outside of Tesla, there are plenty of options even affordable ones, it might Leaf you in disbelief.

  • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
    0·
    4 months ago

    Open source NVIDIA drivers (NVK, nouveau, nova) finally being usable for gaming.

    Linux phones, postmarketOS

    RISC-V CPUs becoming more and more viable

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        I’ve tried most of the common options (with the notable exception being the vastly overpriced Librem 5). The best option IMO is the OnePlus 6 or 6T (they’re almost identical) running postmarketOS. It is much faster than the PinePhone Pro with way better battery life and has proper modern GPU support (OpenGL up to 4.x, Vulkan). The main thing preventing daily driving the OnePlus 6/6T is that the earpiece audio doesn’t always work for calls and that it won’t wake from sleep when an incoming call comes in. The PinePhones are better to use for voice calling, but slower, lacking many graphics APIs (no Vulkan, limited OpenGL), and have much worse battery life. The camera doesn’t work at all on the OnePlus phones yet, it is starting to work on the PinePhones but the picture quality isn’t all there.

        At the moment I have both a OnePlus 6 and 6T, but I have stock Android on the OnePlus 6 and postmarketOS on the 6T. I use the Android one as my daily driver with my primary number SIM but got a second cheap Mint Mobile SIM for the postmarketOS one for experiments and mobile data. I prefer browsing on the postmarketOS phone, and I use it for VPN, SSH access, file management, and some coding on the go which are things Linux phone excels at over Android. I mostly use the Android phone for calls, texts, camera, maps, email (GMail), Discord, and casual browsing. If they fix the earpiece audio issue I would probably be fine daily driving the

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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    4 months ago

    Linux is pretty sweet. I haven’t got a new computer in over a decade, and don’t plan to, and this OS just continues to work like a dream.

    • ericbomb@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      4 months ago

      I may become a Linux boy once windows 10 is EOL.

      The enshittification of Windows seems to be accelerating at a crazy rate. Haven’t used linux in like 15 years when I tried using uBuntu, and I’ve heard it’s only grown exponentially better.

  • tibi@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    Lights. 15 years ago, everyone was using incandescent bulbs which were terribly inefficient and neon lights which had their own inconveniences. Today, LEDs have mostly replaced them, can produce better quality light, and use a fraction of the power.

    • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
      0·
      4 months ago

      And they run cool. My office has a fixture that was too bright which would normally take those 4’ fluorescent bulbs.

      I got on a ladder take one out. Turns out they were LEDs. Cool to the touch. I put electrical tape over them and called it a day.

    • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      I miss real neon. but I like that hydroponic grow-lights now only use as much power as a 60-120watt incandescent bulb. I remember when those big metal hallide & sodium lamp setups were a huge barrier-to-entry for indoor growing.

    • golli@lemm.ee
      0·
      4 months ago

      Agreed. I remember when lightbulbs got banned here in the EU starting from 2009 to 2012 in steps. Here in Germany plenty of people were mad and hoarding them.

      Nowadays with the larger focus on energy prices, especially in light of the russia-ukraine war, it seems insane that not even that long ago to light a room one or multiple lightbulbs using 65-100 watts were used. That’s like the equivalent of an office PC running just for some light.

  • Loulou@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Rejuvenation technology!

    They have already rejuvenated an old mouse back to mid life!

    It’s like battery tech though, small small increments.

  • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    LED technology has progressed massively and is now at the state where you can carry a device with the lighting power of a car headlamp but it only consumes 10W, weighs 200g and fits in the palm of your hand. I can ride my bike through the woods at night, as if it were daytime. All we need now is some technology that makes the woods less creepy after sundown and we’ll be all set.

    Another big one for me is Wikipedia and the information sphere in general. I forgot what it’s like to have to physically go to a library to look something up or learn a new skill, amazing power at our fingertips. Showing my age a bit here.

    What else? Computer aided engineering tools, cordless power tools, phones and computers in general, lithium ion batteries, my automated coffee maker kills it, drug technology, I like it all.

    • ILikeTraaaains@lemmy.world
      0·
      4 months ago

      cordless power tools

      Each tool had their own battery, it discharged so fast and degraded even faster, and forget buying new batteries because the manufacturer decided to change the design again and either you’re stuck with a drill that only works for five minutes or buy a new one.

      Now batteries last an eternity, and because each brand has their own ecosystem, as long as you buy tools from the same brand you can use the batteries you already have. And also the brands has no incentive to change the design and break the compatibility of the batteries, it would alienate the costumers who spent a lot of money on the tools and would go for another ecosystem.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
            0·
            4 months ago

            Usually that’s less to do with the battery and more to do with all of the apps on the phone. Try factory resetting or running in safemode and see how long the battery lasts in comparison

              • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
                0·
                4 months ago

                On android its actually weirdly difficult to tell what apps are or are not causing battery drain, especially on Android 8 and newer (android 7.11 had the best battery usage graph of any android version, it would even show all of the “wake time” in comparison to screen time so it was very easy to tell if it was doing stuff in the background a lot) My understanding is that if the apps are going through the Google Play Services APIs to do stuff it won’t show up on your battery usage graphs.

                It also doesn’t help that the square button just shows you the “recent apps screen” where it shows apps which you’ve used recently in chronological order and may or may not have a state saved in memory/swap and may or may not currently be running in the background.

                So basically, Android annoyingly just does stuff and you have to trust it. And if you’re getting extra battery drain, seriously try Safemode and see if it drains noticeably slower in Safemode. Or factory reset and be slow about reinstalling apps to see if you notice a change when one gets installed

  • Vinny_93@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Battery tech and self-sufficient energy solutions for a home in general. Being able to provide your own energy and store it for later use is just excellent.

  • NONE@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    My family has a history of blood pressure problems, so my mother, in order to keep control, has had to buy a couple of devices to measure her blood pressure, which she also uses with my father and grandmother.

    I just think it’s fantastic that such devices already exist and are so affordable. It makes me wonder if maybe in a handful of years we will have the ability to do x-rays at home and things like that, it would be great.

  • RBWells@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I have driven manual shift cars for my whole life, and the transmission in my new (ish, about 10 years) car is incredible.

    The first one was a 3 speed Mustang without hydraulic clutch. It was so hard to shift I only let one other person drive it. 1st speed so rough, 2nd at like 10mph, 3rd at about 30, that was it. It was just springs and chains and gears.

    This one? Smooth as silk, there is enough overlap between gears that it is so easy to shift, 6 speeds, the 6th gear I can drive 90mph and it is cool and comfortable. It’s ridiculously easy to drive and so much fun.

  • Phenomephrene@thebrainbin.org
    0·
    4 months ago

    Guitar tube amplifier emulation.

    I love it because as absolutely horrid as it was when it was emerging tech, those sounds along with every other link in the chain comes with certain nostalgia for music that was created using it in whatever intermediary period it was at in that time. Today we’ve basically hit endgame in that the emulations of today’s tech are so close to the real thing that they’re basically indistinguishable from the genuine article. We have access to the full range of sounds from Boss DS-1’s to the old Line6 Pods to modern Kempers. If you’re a guitar player who likes experimenting with the over all sound of your rig, this is the good stuff.

      • Phenomephrene@thebrainbin.org
        0·
        4 months ago

        All of the above depending on what your budget is.

        Many software emulations are more than serviceable, and again depending on your budget can offer some really advanced parameter controls to mimic different types of speakers in differently sized cabinets being recorded with different types of mics in different recording spaces.

        Pedals can still vary widely in quality, but there are some really good ones out there that can serve as a backup in case there’s any on-stage technical problems, or even serve as a completely fine fly rig in and of themselves.

        Kemper makes the top of the line stuff these days (so far as I know, it’s been a couple years since I payed very close attention to cutting edge tech). Their profiling amps allow you to make complete profiles of real amps and cabs through recording a series of signals through that rig. These profiles can be shared online and downloaded straight onto their “heads” which can be rack mounted in a studio setup. For stage use they have versions that serve as a typical amplifier head would, or use the form factor of those multi-effect floor units. They sound incredible.

      • john@lemmy.haley.ioEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        Honestly the apps on my phone that do this are amazing. I bought an adapter that adds a 1/4” and an 1/8” jack so I can listen to it through headphones and it’s beyond anything we had just a few years ago.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    0·
    4 months ago

    I know, I know, it’s getting boring, but…Linux.
    Nowadays you install it by clicking “next” a few times, and when you’re done, the latest updates are already installed, the firmware for your hardware is installed, your wifi is connected, your networked printer/scanner combo is already recognized and set up, storage media or devices you plug in are auto-mounted, most games work out of the box, bluetooth works, MS Office files can be opened without becoming a garbled mess, touch screens work, touchpads work better than on Windows, …

    It didn’t used to be this way.

    • neidu2@feddit.nl
      0·
      4 months ago

      I wholeheartedly agree with you, but I feel like ranting about the debian 12 installer a bit and its inability to accept that, yes, I do in fact want to install grub on two separate hard drives at once, so that I have two sets of /boot/EFI

      The OS itself allows installation on mdraid, but grub does not. So in the end I had to set up one /boot/EFI partition on one drive, and reserve an identically sized partition on the other drive so I could manually duplicate it grub installation afterwards. Took me a few hours of hair pulling and way too much coffee to figure that one out.

        • neidu2@feddit.nl
          0·
          4 months ago

          I haven’t used a windows installer in a decade, so no. Does windows even allow basic partition8ng during install?

          • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
            0·
            4 months ago

            Basic, yes. But windows still assumes it knows better than you and does whatever it wants anyway. But you can set up separate partitions for C:\ and D:, etc

    • christophski@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      I just used Virtualbox’s auto install feature yesterday and it was insane. Literally just put in name and password and iso and it did the rest.

    • Toribor@corndog.socialEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Linux has been easier to install than Windows for a while now, particularly with all the goofy hacks you have to pull out just to make an offline account on Win11.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    E-books

    I love having the physical thing in my hands, but love that we’ve gotten to a point where I can log on to Libby and just download one too, or back up digital versions of my favorites on my hard drive so I hopefully never lose them.

  • socialhope@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    This will sound a little mundane but, FLASHLIGHTS! Particularly bicycle head lights. The prices before LED’s were just STUPID. Hundreds of dollars for small amounts of light (which to be fair was the best you could get at the moment). Which were being used for night mountain biking. But all I needed was to get to and from work safely at night, I didnt have $400 for a headlight that would actually let me see the ground in front of me.

    BUT, then came the revolution. China started putting out these LED lights that blew everything else out of the water … FOR CHEAP! In two years light prices went from $400 to $100 for top of the line lighting. US bike light companies were a year or two out before they could re-tool to match the lumens coming out of china. Mind you, the Chinese lights were not always the most reliable. BUT they were 1/4th the cost of a name brand light. So even if it died, you could still buy ANOTHER one for less than the price of a high end name brand light.

    And since the LED revolution, things have not changed much. Prices either go down or stay the same and the lumens increase OR the burn time increases. Its just a win win for customers/consumers.

    • eightpix@lemmy.world
      0·
      4 months ago

      By the same token, and I consider these a different category, headlamps. Camping got a whole lot better with a solid headlamp setup. The red light is crucial.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
      0·
      4 months ago

      I have an obsession with light. Love the golden and blue hours and I don’t want to know why, it’s just so beautiful to watch. Being like this I’m pretty conscious of lighting and, in general, it has become just wonderful to have that precise dim and warmth in every space for a reasonable price. Not only this, less-intrusive lighting had become something urban ecologists quietly succeeded on spreading all over the world (bat-friendly lighting, for example) thanks to the available technologies.

      So, yeah… not mundane at all.

    • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right. When I was growing up, incandescent bulbs and massive short-lived batteries made flashlights suck. Now flashlights are tiny, throw a tonne of light, and last a really long time.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      I’ve been biking at sunset after I get the kids to bed and have super cheap lights on my bike to blink for visibility. Each light is powered by 2 CR2032s (BIOS batteries) I forgot to turn them off one day after my ride recently and left it in the garage blinking away, came back the next day to no visible decline in light output after running them for over 24 hours. Honestly those lights are probably approaching 24 hours of actual usage time not counting leaving it blinking in the garage