HIV prevention drugs that last 6 months were just invented this year. We could end HIV transmission globally.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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This is one of the best answers in this thread I think
CRISPR gene editing is a huge medical breakthrough. Also we can 3D print organ tissue and someday we might print entire replacement organs.
Hexbear.
Accessible game development tools have seen a lot of improvements, it's really good for indie devs (except for Unity ofc, fuck Unity, Godot ftw)
China is doing cool things with 5G networks and drone technology. Respectively, remote surgery and pesticide deployment are the two uses I can recall, but there are many other useful implementations as well.
The James Webb telescope, quantum computing breakthroughs, sustained fusion reactions, almost ready to deploy thorium reactors, and AI even if you only see the dumbest applications of it right now.
My sun lamp/alarm clock wakes me up to artificial sunlight every morning at 5am. Is it actually a technological breakthrough from the last decade? Probably not. But in that timeframe, it's become mainstream enough to be consumer-grade affordable.
Gigantic microsd cards allow me to watch series and movies on my phone
Voice recognition for things like text to speech (TTS) has improved quite a bit.
My smartwatch has helped me work out more regularly and keep to a regular bedtime. I like knowing that I have a history of vital statistics like heart rate, O2, sleep quality which can be directly sent to my doctor if needed. Having data from when I’m healthy is useful for catching trends early or confirming whether a problem is new, if and when one does arise.
It’s not life changing but I do enjoy the improvement in phone cameras, even cheap ones.
I agree with the overall point that tech has stagnated with regard to functional life changes. It has progressed a lot in terms of refinement and improving speed/size/cost. Those aren’t dramatically different in daily use but they change the use cases. SSDs have been around forever for example, but their recent cheapness and small size makes them usable in many cases they would not have been 10 years ago.
3D printers, hands down. These used to be ridiculously expensive, janky pieces of technology that fought against you every step of the way and gave you shit results. Nowadays you can just buy one, put the parts together, plug it in and start printing straight away. They've come a really really long way in the last ten years.
As for how they've improved my life, I don't even know where to start lol I've made countless woodworking jigs which would have cost me a ton of money. I've made several replacement parts and adapters for things that I use at home. I've made a ton of fidget toys to keep my ADHD ass entertained during video calls.
3D printers are cool and you should make sure that you have one if there's ever a healthcare insurance shareholder conference in your city.
what kinds of things are you making?
mine sits gathering dust in a shelf for 90% of the time, until i need the occasional tiny part for a project.
Well, I mostly use it for woodworking tools, here's some of the stuff I made for the workshop and home:
- I copied the whole Matchfit line of woodworking jigs and fixtures for pennies (these are ridiculously expensive where I live)
- I made dust collection adapters for pretty much every single tool I have
- I made small try squares and can make them in any angle I want with a very good level of precision
- Several tool holders to organize my hand tools
- Infinite pegboard hooks for lightweight tools
- Incredibly accurate templates to work with a router and flush trim bits and to mark spots for drilling holes
- A million different little tools that would otherwise add up to way more than the cost of the printer
- Replacement drawer pulls
- Bottle cap collector for recycling
- Coffee filter holders and organizers
- An insane variety of fidget toys
- An adapter that allows me to connect an external power socket to the very non-standard hole in the brick wall in my room without having to drill any additional holes
- A plurality of cat toys
- There was a day when I needed to replace my shower head and didn't have the right size of wrench to unscrew the old shower from the wall. It was a weekend and I couldn't go to the hardware store, so I took measurements and two hours later I had a single-use tool that worked a charm and allowed me to take a shower that day.
The list goes on. A 3D printer is only useful if you have that spirit of always trying to be crafty and resourceful, even when you don't know what the hell you're doing. I mostly use it to support my woodworking hobby, and I find that it really shines exactly like that, as a tool that synergizes with other DIY activities that you enjoy and provides you with an alternative to buying another single-use tool. Of course, I wouldn't use it to make something that my life depends on, it's often going to be a slapdash solution that's only good enough, but it can really help in a pinch for stuff that's not very critical.
Also, if you do get one, it's not necessary but highly recommended that you also learn how to do basic 3D modeling with Fusion 360 (the one I use), Onshape, TinkerCAD or Blender and ZBrush if you want to get into stuff like sculpting for high-res resin printers. I only know how to work with an FDM (filament) printer. If you (or anyone else reading this for that matter) want some recommendations on where to start, let me know!
The proliferation of electric bikes 
And Linux software, the Proton wrapper for games on steam changed a lot of the statistics around Linux adoption
I'm a longtime Linux user now but I still remember the day Proton dropped, seeing 95% of my games suddenly run on my system was kind of amazing.
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what the fuck is this thread half of y'all apparently do not know how long a decade is....
why are you putting down GPS and epub/eReaders both of these technologies were basically solved by 2015. In fact I'd go so far as to say ereaders have stagnated in the past decade because they keep throwing shit at the wall hoping it'll stick (what if you could...use your ereader as a digital notebook?? if you use our $800 ereader you can do that!! What, you're just looking for an e-ink that isn't going to display ads at you 24/7 like the Kindle? China has been making some great things and it has taken Amazon years to catch up. Oh there's a new color e-ink kindle out this year? wow the Boox Poke 2 came out in like 2011
Ebikes is like...ok sure I guess, various startups like Lime didn't really get rolling til 2015 or so...NYC's Citibike didn't start until 2013 so this is one of those threshold cases...
Zoom - have you fucks never heard of Pidgin or MSN Messenger?? Both were offering video calls exactly like Skype and subsequently Zoom. Don't you even think about Discord it has built its empire upon the bones and corpses of the great ones before it like Trilian and Teamspeak & again - it is not a breakthrough to release a 'easier' or more user friendly messaging app.
dunno why i got titled reading the comments on this post i think i didn't get enough sleep last night.....
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advances in medical technology definitely
theres a lot of "niches" in medicine where the tech and research advances really quickly and its not really talked about
Cancer treatment is getting very, very effective. So many cancers are increasing in survivability and even later stages are getting more manageable.
Hard drives are a lot bigger and cheaper. Internet a lot faster and cheaper especially in developing countries thanks to cheap fiber
Not sure this qualifies as a breakthrough and I'm not sure what the silicomancers did to accomplish this, but I have a 1tb flash drive the size of my index finger with a chunk of my movies and my entire audio library in high bitrate mp3 and a good subset of my flacs
Slippi/rollback netcode for melee is an incredible technological achievement (which nintendo could not engineer in more "sophisticated" implementations of smash that had access to entire teams of developers) that allows me to continue to play melee even though due to covid I can't really participate in that community in person the way I could prior to 2020
The only other breakthroughs I think I encounter these days are subtle. My laptop isn't much faster or more powerful than the one I had in 2015, but the battery lasts 3x as long doing the same tasks. My ereader has a backlight and only needs to be charged once every 2 weeks.
That said, the grifts are pervasive and it definitely feels like we're not making the same kinds of qualitative leaps in technological capability that we were even 20 years ago.
Adblock
Signal and Telegram (not fucking META chat apps, tho)
Google translate has gotten very good. Also open source AI translation & subtitle software is much better if you know how to do command line stuff.
I might be wrong, but it feels easier to get into Linux now.
Adblock
Adblockers have been around at least since the 00s, if not earlier. It's a cat-and-mouse game between ads and adblockers, and adblockers are losing imo. Stuff like adblockers and noscript are ultimately attempts at debloating webpages which are reactive measures against webpages being ever more bloated.
I might be wrong, but it feels easier to get into Linux now.
This is 100% true. There's a huge difference even between Linux now and Linux 5 years ago.
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Wireless headphones becoming mainstream (both like fully wireless or the ones that sit on top of your head) have been a game changer for me. The sound quality isn't amazing, but I used to suffer cables tangling, one of the headphones dying and not justifying buying new ones until they died for good every few months. When you have sensory issues and didn't realize you had them, it has really helped.
I've had the same fully wireless headphones I use everywhere to minimize sensory overstimulation for four years and they're fine.
Wired headphones have gotten amazing at various price points. If you know where to look, you can get something quite good for $18. Moondrop Chu II comes to mind for earbuds, for example.
Yeah definitely. A friend got some IEMs for very cheap and they sound amazing. I'm just grateful I don't have to bother with cables tangling and breaking anymore, and when I want to really listen to something i do use wired.
Definitely noise cancelling has improved significantly within the last decade, and it's been super handy for me. I love being able to just turn off the noise when I'm on a plane, or the loud person on the bus or train.
Mics on the same headphones seem much better too; in all the cases where i'd previously need to check on the phone "can you hear me!?", now they just always can.
And as pointed out somewhere else in the thread, it's gotten cheap, too. I got some over-ear headphones I wear on planes or on the train, and they have really good noise canceling, for under 50 dollars when I bought them. They're not as good as Sennheiser or Sony, but they're 1/6 of the price so pretty good ANC is more than plenty.
BTW, love the username and profile pic. Petrodragonic apocalypse is maybe top 2 KG&LZ albums to me.
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Guitar plugins have gotten really nice. Instead of paying a small fortune for an amp, cab, pedal board, mics, etc. you can just get an audio interface and a NeuralDSP plug-in for 150 bucks together and just plug in your guitar and play. Fantastic for poor people like me.
I upgraded to SSD in this time period. They're fast.
I like my airfryer? lmao
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It easily feels as though technology is stagnating when capitalism cannibalises everything that can be used to alienate and placate workers.
A few big ones:
Solar technology is now cheaper and more efficient both economically and materially than fossil fuels.
MRNA vaccines went from theory to revolutionising vaccine research with implications across diseases we've already created therapies for.
Neural networks have genuinely done good things for medical sciences, physics, engineering.
3D printing has made our appliances and devices more repairable than ever, and allows partisans to subvert the state's monopoly on violence in new and ingenious ways.
Modern communication software and the encryption behind them has given modern socialist movements secure and anonymous communications that even the most powerful intelligence services cannot penetrate without social engineering.
that's all stuff that helps me but there's many more I bet
Modern communication software and the encryption behind them has given modern socialist movements secure and anonymous communications that even the most powerful intelligence services cannot penetrate without social engineering.
Danger. They don't need social engineering, they can hack you. They can hack your iphone, your carrier will help them. They can hack your computer, your ISP will help them. Are they doing this all the time to everyone? No, it's not practical and more use raises more chances of your tools and methods being detected. Should organizers be wary of the limits of their abilities to secure their electronic communications on devices that are likely compromised with backdoors at the hardware level? Absolutely. Even regular cops can use zionist cyberweapons they purchase to hack racial justice organizers, what the NSA and CIA have are even nicer but totally classified.
Do use encryption, do make it so your data can't be easily subpoenaed or siphoned up in bulk collection. Do make it harder on them. Do force them to burn expensive methods if they ever try and produce anything they have in court. But do not think it makes you totally invulnerable if you get on their radar and they want to get that info as it does not.
Meh, encryption hasn't really changed much in the past decade. Most data is still encrypted using AES, which has been around since 2001. RSA and elliptic curves have been in use for decades as well.
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