You must log in or # to comment.
deleted by creator
This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
When you need something more esoteric than the Oculus Rift and even less user-friendly.
Isn’t that the game that almost took over the Enterprise D?
Relatively Affordable? Maybe. Absolutely Affordable? Hell no.
This is neat!
I’m building my own home servers, fuck your subscriptions and privacy invading tracking and ads
The reckoning is coming, I’m already trying to offline as much as I can.
on the bright side, now you can get excited about old tech!
Literally all these people going back to 1960s with satellites instead of cell towers. Trying to make it a new technology.
A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more “companies that will grow” not “companies that are doing something cool”. But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.
Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:
- Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
- Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
- Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven’t done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they’re going to crash hard
- Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last “innovation” they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
- Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was “the metaverse”, an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
- Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don’t care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they’re part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they’ll keep making money. I can’t remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They’re also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
- Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they’re getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don’t see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
- Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they’re not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won’t crash too hard in the future either, although they’re a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they’ll take some damage too.
It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn’t in the first 10 links, it probably didn’t exist on the Internet… Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn’t crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple’s iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn’t seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they’re trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I’m forgetting, I hope!
I remember reaching out to the Nextlix help desk back in the day just so I could have on record how thrilled I was to have their service.
How the mighty have fallen.
Apple died with Steve Jobs. They went from being a company whose success was based on making things that people wanted to becoming a company that only cares about “maximizing value for shareholders.” Having customers is now just an inconvenience.
Late stage Capitalism in action.
Apple died with Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was a psychopath. He had maybe two good ideas (both of which Microsoft did first) and a ruthless drive to hustle those ideas into the public consciousness. But Apple was, at its heart, an advertising company that made some useful technology. It was so much of an advertising company that Jobs ended up dying from his own kool-aid, convinced he could outsmart the nation’s leading oncologists when he was diagnosed with an easily treatable form of cancer.
I only hope Musk and Zuck suffer the same fate.
It also feels like they’re trying to be like Steve but without any creativity.
I don’t think he’d ever have thought VR was a big deal, for example.
We know that Steve considered AR to be the next major leap in personal technology, but that vision has almost nothing in common with Vision Pro. AR should be able to change and enhance your environment, not separate you from it. Even if you consider Vision Pro a demonstration of the concept owing to the fact that the technology to make it properly doesn’t exist, it fails at even that. It fails at every meaningful use case of AR. AR is not “phone apps floating in space”, it’s about recognizing and augmenting the world around you, the objects around you, and the actual physical space that we inhabit. I’ve given up on ever seeing proper AR in my lifetime, even as a bulky, ugly, expensive proof of concept.
Yeah, and I think Steve would have thrown any VR headset prototype across the room and fired everyone involved.
I agree with you on AR. The power requirements of computing have gone way down, but making a display bright enough to see in daylight needs a lot of power, and making them light enough to last all day would require massive improvements in battery tech.
I’m excited for peer to peer technology, because it brings us closer to what the internet was originally supposed to be like.
I’ve recommended Keet (chat app) a bunch of times on lemmy earlier, which works really well and that is cool, but that is just a showcase of what’s possible with p2p.
Streaming media, sharing files, communication, browsing wikipedia, etc etc - this can be done without spying middlemen or data centres in between. Some cool demos here 09:45 https://youtube.com/watch?v=BTCsSwCpGP8&t=776
One thing that seemed interesting in that vein is the Dat software / protocol, and the Beaker web browser.
The aim was basically to create a distributed, peer-to-peer web. When I saw a presentation on it, I thought “hmm, if this works it will be really cool, but I don’t think this is going to take off”. It seems I was right because the Beaker browser is now gone, and Dat doesn’t seem to be getting updates anymore.
But, I still think there’s hope for a distributed web. It just needs something like a killer app.
Anything that has a chance to break up what the modern web is will ultimately get consumed by one of the larger companies, if not destroyed by them. This is the future of the internet. I don’t like it, but here we are.
I can’t remember [Alphabet] having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded.
Oh come on, they made Google Wave, that was pretty neat! And… Um… That’s it I guess?
There are so many good ideas in the Google back catalog, it feels criminal not to just link to the graveyard.
From AngularJS to Google Cardboard to Project Ara, really can’t express how many genuinely cool ideas they floated and then smothered over the last 20 years.
I never used Google wave, but it really didn’t seem all that useful to me. But maybe it was innovative? I dunno.
Saving this post because it sums up exactly how I feel
Is (non-neuralink) deep brain simulation interesting because I know some doctors and they probably know some companies. Never asked to get dad’s cyborg parts back when he died for some reason.
It would be interesting if it actually works. It’s really promising, but it still seems like it’s something that will be cool when it happens at some point in the future, rather than something that is happening now.
i mean it worked in my dad. he was part of a trial to install DBS on moderate parkinson’s patients rather than waiting until the patients had severe parkinson’s. Short story, gave him ten extra years he could work. A bit longer and more details, he was able to manage nearly all of his dyskinesia through the implant rather than via medication (some kind of levi/carbidopa). It was a really neat device, the MDs who put it in were the best at what they do (and, as a professional patient I’ve gotten good at evaluating that) and provided us with all the support we needed up until dad died. So our experience was nothing but positive. I think the charger is in the garage and I can dig it up tomorrow to find out what company built his computer if you want.
Getting open source and fair use products gets me fairly excited nowadays.
I got my new Fairphone 6 with e/os yesterday and it made me giddy to finally degoogle.
Its £500 though. If they made one for like £50 I might be interested in actually buying a new phone but at that price not a chance.
I’m on the framework laptop bandwagon, it’s pretty cool~
omg I’m so jealous 😭
The Sindene Light Guns and Flipper Zero are two products that made me excited for new tech. The big tech companies are just boring and shitty as is tradition.
The only real tech that has gotten me excited lately is the steam deck, framework computers, and these little info displays called trmnl.
Tech I am excited for:
Better and larger color e-ink. I’m not excited for the software in this particular case, but the hardware is excellent.
The NocFree &, the only wireless, split, 75% staggered column keyboard I’ve been able to find (I would have preferred a full keyboard but I’ll take what I can get) It should be great for disability accommodation.
Sony A9 III While the A9 III is way too expensive for me, this camera basically promises that eventually global shutters should make their way down to mid-level prosumer cameras, and I’ll eventually get a used one or something. I just wish Sony didn’t artificially handicap third party lenses.I have a Framework 16 and I love it.
Already have a stream deck, the framework computer and trmnl look really cool!
… What other cool stuff don’t I know about??
I’m pretty hyped for the new Seagate HDDs with dozens of TB on a cheap external drive.
Oh yeah true. I almost pulled the trigger on there 26tb drives that are shuckabke for an extension on my nas
I’m currently hemming and hawing over upgrading the drives in my server. I’ve got a pair of 4TB drives are are mostly full, and it looks like I could upgrade to 10-12TB for less than $300 (I also have a new chassis that I might put into service at the same time which can hold a lot more drives, plus my wife’s old CPU and MOBO would be a decent side-grade, so maybe I’ll also shift to RAID-Z1 with 3-4 drives over time and an external backup drive via PBS now that it officially supports external drives)
I’m gonna buy like 3 of these soon if nobody stops me lol
Oh shit, that price seems too good to be true. My NAS has a couple of 12TB drives in it that cost more than these.
I remember when that was the price for a 1 gb full sized sd card.
Reminder to book your colonoscopy :p
Be me, still waiting for the Deckard…
That’s valve’s rumored new vr headset right? I had the index but didn’t use it enough so I sold it. VR is cool though.
It is! I have an Index myself that I once used to use quite a bit, but I find I avoid it lately because of how cumbersome it is. I really want an inside out all in one VR setup, as I think it would help me overcome those hurdles, but no way in hell am I buying a Quest from Meta.
Add the new Pebble watches to that list and, yeah, same. I’ve preordered the Time 2 and it’s the first time I’ve been excited for a new gadget in years.
Nice! I actually had a preorder but canceled it. Had the original plastic pebble so they have a special place in my heart, but I’ve gone back to a dumb watch and have been enjoying being more disconnected.
Tech was great when it didn’t try to steal your personal information
Also expensive
“I miss getting expensive about tech.”
🤔
You know what I miss? PDAs. 20 years ago I had a PDA with physical keyboard and WiFi running Debian. It wasn’t even that expensive. Today those simply don’t exists. From time to time something gets released on Kickstarter but it’s usually very expensive. What happened? I would expect that with all the advances we would have more gadgets like this today, not less. Is it really matter of scale? I’m sure those old PDAs weren’t selling in millions. What is it?
You can get a GPD pocket and it’s basically a PDA.
In the energy space, I’m excited about advanced geothermal (basically using the drilling/fracking techniques developed by the oil and gas industry but applying them to harvesting geothermal heat in places previously not practical). It’s dispatchable energy that can fill in the difference between wind/solar supply and overall grid demand in a way that might make carbon emissions unnecessary.
I’m also excited about a bunch of rechargeable battery chemistries that might make grid scale batteries much more cost effective (and possibly safer and more reliable).
Energy policy in the US is kinda screwed up right now, but hopefully the tech can be developed/rolled out elsewhere, or the merits of the technology will still lead to rapid adoption even in a hostile regulatory climate.
I don’t think we need new battery chemistry for grid scale deployment of batteries, the gravity based ones would be sufficient and much more ecologically friendly. Byecause Dr.Goodenough(not joking that is the guy who practically invented current lithium based batteries) deserves some rest.
I don’t see how gravity storage could possibly scale. Pumped hydro was the dominant storage tech, but is severely limited in geography, so there’s no easy way to scale that. Solid weight gravity systems might come online at some point, but nothing about the trajectory of their development suggests they’ll leapfrog chemical batteries in overall adoption.
And the battery chemistries I’m most excited about don’t involve lithium at all. Sodium batteries are starting to come online, and some metal-air systems seem to be ready to hit the market soon.
To add to my initial thoughts on gravity storage, the formula for potential energy in a gravity battery is basically mass x height x 9.8 m/s^2 . The sheer amount of weight and distance necessary to store a reasonably useful amount of energy makes for very large scale engineering projects.
The typical cell phone battery holds about 4000 mAh in a 3.7V battery, which translates to about 14.8 Wh, or 53.3 kJ. In order to get the equivalent storage in a gravity systems with a 1000 kg (1 tonne) weight, you’d need to raise it about 5.4 meters, with 100% efficiency.
A Tesla battery capacity is 75 kWh for some of the long range models, which translates to 270 MJ. To store that amount of energy you’d need to raise a 1-tonne weight about 27.6 km, about 3 times the altitude of Mt Everest and more than double the typical cruising altitude of commercial passenger jets.
So the most practical real-world projects they’re pursuing tend to use weights of around 20-25 tonnes in abandoned mine shafts as deep as 3km, and can recover the energy at something like 80% efficiency. Each weight can therefore store something like 735 MJ or 204 kWh (aka 3 Tesla batteries). But obviously these types of projects are very expensive and complex, and require enormous scale to be cost effective.
Gridscale batteries also have the benefit of being a very good place to reuse tired automobile batteries that otherwise would just be dumped. If we can get batteries that last 10-15 years in an automobile then another 10-15 in a grid scale deployment that’s far better than just lasting 15-20 years in an automobile. It also sucks that batteries completely die and have to be disposed of somehow because that’s not sustainable at all, but maybe there will be advancements in the future that make that less of a problem
I’m not sure about technological advancements, but there might be economic developments where the price of lithium rises to be high enough that recycling the materials in old batteries becomes a no-brainer and pays for itself. Some are working on scaling lithium battery recycling, and there are serious engineering challenges involved, but the long term trends on lithium prices makes R&D in recycling a pretty attractive investment.
Well, he is resting in peace since 2023, so he’s not going to be working as part of further advancement.
Fuck really? Dude did so much to advance portability. What are the kids saying now? Rip in peace?
We need a resurgence in getting excited about manually finding weird stuff in weird corners of the internet.
Tear down the walls of all the shit gardens! Make Internet Feral Again!!!
recently my partner got back on tumblr and it reminded me of the old internet. i was never a user but i’d stumble upon it from time to time back in the day and it seems to my outsiders eyes very much as it did then. seeing the way people interact with posts and have conversations is distinctly different from most modern social media platforms. and now after writing that i’m just thinking about stumbleupon and all the chaotic and random rabbit holes you be sent down from there. i miss the old internet
Yeah, I was reminded of webrings earlier this week. Which was an idea that was so short of accomplishing the goal of web discovery before search engines, but at scale today would be something worth looking at again. Basically decentralized internet tribes. As long as there’s activitypub plugins, it’s even federated.
Who would have thought that a system that rewards creating problems to solve would stifle the tech that addresses real problems?
