HIV prevention drugs that last 6 months were just invented this year. We could end HIV transmission globally.

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)

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.

The proliferation of electric bikes

And Linux software, the Proton wrapper for games on steam changed a lot of the statistics around Linux adoption

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.....

EPUBs and eReaders, but not fucking Kindle

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

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.

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.

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

wireless and small continuous glucose meters.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon covers this thesis more broadly, that "tech" has stagnated and will never repeat the amazing productivity gains and life improvement we saw in the early 20th century because the jump from like computer to faster computer has no meaningful impact on somebody's life compared to like getting indoor plumbing and electricity. Really well researched and convincing imo.

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

I was going to say Instant Pot, but that came out in 2010. Linux got better, but that's mostly incremental changes rather than a really big change on top of Windows getting a lot shittier. I guess there's RISC-V CPUs, but those aren't commercial products, so at best, you can say that RISC-V CPUs can be the technological breakthrough that we're missing.

As someone who works in IT, I don't think anything has. I was thinking SSDs, but they became good by ~2013 really. Phones are still garbage in my experience. AI is probably the closest to being slightly useful, at times. Honestly, as someone who used free Skype extensively back around ~2010, I don't find Zoom to be meaningfully better (and I've yet to find anything beat Skype's original noise-cancelling algorithm).

No, I've really thought and genuinely have nothing else. If technology regressed 10 years I think I'd personally be unaffected (and happier, I could avoid upgrading my hardware for so long).

For me currently, probably portable vegan food since I am currently a delivery driver and I get no breaks because I need to deliver 300 packages in 10 hours.

The cybertruck has been an incredible source of entertainment

GPS and maps on phone along with train and bus tracking wherever i am and easier taxi booking. This enabled me to do things i otherwise never would have done and afforded a degree of spontaneity that helped me build a lot of friendships. Without this I probably wouldn't have ever gone outside. I know this stuff is a bit older than a decade but i didn't get a smart phone until quite late lol

As someone said before: e-bikes. I don’t have one but I still think they’re cool.

Zoom calls are great, they’re almost everything I liked about the video call technology you see in the pokemon anime.

This is a big one since I live way out in the boonies and it’s the most accessible to me: I also like some of the improvements to vegan food, I’m following perfect day dairy right now because I really want to see animal-free cheese in my lifetime. Not just because it’s kind to animals but imagine abundant organic cheeses that’s affordable to the masses. I’ve even noticed that some plant-based meat has evolved to be better than nutrislop you see right-wing comics fearmonger about.

It’s a small thing but animation technology has improved and hasn’t taken the love out of some of my favorite animation: Spy Family is gorgeous and Pixar’s Luca was really colorful and well designed.

I’ve seen a couple kinda cool smart mirrors and I wish I was better at coding so I can make one. But I seem to just be horrible at coding lmao.

Every so often I have to tell myself I’m not a Luddite, I don’t hate tech I hate the “why” behind most tech.

NVMe storage

Gene therapy & mRNA vaccines seem to have kicked off in the last decade.