Alright I can answer this because with all the shit there have also been a ton of cool tech that isn't fascist, and ton of instances of the community building something awesome:

**Commercial things: **

• Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)

• Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people

• Prusa and Bambu have made 3d printing not just a hobby, but very functional and practical. Now people themselves can replace broken parts, create new functional parts and tools without having to make their entire hobby and personality trying to fix and optimize their 3D printer

• MCUs have blasted off the past 10 years. nRF has revolutionized the Bluetooth space with nRF52 and newer. ESP has brought WiFi to literally everyone in any device they want with whatever processor strength with no antenna design. STM is very friendly to hobbyists and has everything for motors, and NXP makes performance beasts (and all non-US companies doing the great things of course) and they have all become so much more dramatically efficient.

• Multiple MCU companies have switched to open source toolchains that are inter-compatible, more portable, and transparent, making embedded development much less relying on shitty half-baked manufacturer libraries that are incomplete for different offerings.

• FOC motor control and bringing it to the masses have created a huge step in motors and have made implementing efficient servos actually viable for open source projects

• RLCD is an up and comer that gives epaper-like reduced eye strain and outdoor visibility while having an update rate of an LCD.

Maybe older, but still great:

• open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc... Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.

• epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices

**Community Projects: **

• HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every

• Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price

• Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.

• The leaps and bounds made in self hosting software in general is incredible and taken self hosting from a quite risky and very very complicated technical endeavor to do safely to a medium difficulty hobby project that is 100x less of a time sink. Not only that, but commercial software has genuinely good replacements Traefik/caddt, crowdsec, docker, immich, paperless-ngx, jellyfin, mealie, syncthing, nextcloud/opencloud, *arr suite, etc...

• The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don't need to explain the impact

• Gadgetbridge, turning smart wearables spying on you and selling your biometric data to insurance companies to just plain useful local devices for looking after yourself

There is more, but this is already long

Cell phone service.

$25/month for unlimited data at >100mpbs is definitely being taken for granted.

My favorite 3 things of the last decade

Electric cars, Incredible performance, low maintenance.

Steam deck, great fun in a small package, great to play games before bed

Podcasts, seriously there's one that will speak to you.

Bonus: taskmaster, it's entirely free on YouTube, it's a worldwide phenomena, simple low stakes fun, akin to the great British baking show without the manufactured drama (not that there's much in gbb)

I saw recently they've cured Parkinsons for the first time, and I think HIV can be reversed now. So that's pretty cool.

Oh, and I don't know if you've noticed, but they fixed airport and hotel wifi. I don't know why I thought shitty wifi in hotels and airports was something I would have to live with for the rest of my life. It just always was that way, so I thought it would always be that way. But the last time I went on vacation, blazing public wifi at the airport and at the hotel. with video playing. We are the future.

Induction burners for cooking are pretty cool. All the heat of gas with none of the "slowly poisoning you and may explode".

For super duper recent news, the Giant Panda has been moved off the endangered species list and into Vulnerable status.

Andor is arguably the best Star Wars content since the original movies

Heat pump technology has come a long way recently. In locations that stay above 0F (-18C) they're now competitive with fossil gas furnaces for performance and cost (cost results may vary based on local incentives). Many units now work below 0F too, but they get more expensive/less efficient

Personalized mRNA vaccines to prevent pancreatic cancer recurrence after surgery have had some promising early results in clinical trials. This is one of the hardest cancers to treat, so this could be huge.

Batteries are about to get really good. Solid-state is close and that should be huge.

As someone who focus on low/no-tech (edit: and older stuff in a general manner), I must say it's a tricky question. But the answer is still obvious for me: medications.

I should have died many years ago, and if I'm still alive today (nearing my 60s) it's thx to constant innovations in the medical fields and research in pharmaceuticals (and also thx to radical life changing decisions, but those would not have been an option at all without new medications to begin with).

Good thread, since I hate a lot of "new" things. It'll be good to read about the good ones.

I'll add: GrapheneOS (and other custom phone OSes) giving us a choice besides being tracked by the big corpos.

Gaming:

• Steam Deck and Linux gaming altogether
• Solo TTRPGs
• The TTRPG space in general
• Board games

Music making:

• Dirtywave M8
• Synthstrom Deluge
• Elektron Digitakt
• An absolute flood of amazing software and plugins
• Tons of pedals from boutique manufacturers
• Music software for mobile devices
• Import guitars are top notch without breaking the bank

PS: A ten year old GTX 1080ti can still run most modern games at 1080p...which is still a very popular entry level monitor resolution.

Car back up cameras.

Waze

2025 Seadoo GTX models

Many Broadway Plays

Keypad front door locks

Online DVRs

Legalized gay marriage

Legalized pot

protected bike lanes

Love the question! Urban infrastructure. At least in my city. I get super stocked whenever I see a new construction site. Not only because I get the feeling that the tax money is actually being used but also because these projects are more often than not really cool. Wider pedestrian spaces, third places and just safer more pleasant areas. Sometimes they only do it half heartedly and didn’t thought about something but the direction is the right one. Of course this is easily done especially considering how hostile they made city’s after ww2, i’m still happy about it though. :)

air fryer
advances in solar energy

EGPWS - stops airliners accidentally flying into mountains.

Home Assistant - full control over your smart devices, internet optional.

Sierra Leone hospital - their first hospital that has a neonatal unit, already drastically reducing the maternal mortality rate.

PMSM - electric motor that can exceed 95% efficiency.

Proton - allows almost any game to run on Linux.

3D printing - much cheaper rapid prototyping and custom parts. Even used on the ISS.

Id be completely content with time frozen in 2004.

You mean when the US had just invaded Iraq based on lies and greed for oil? Fabricated entirely from a bullshit “global war on terror”?

I do like highlighting things that have gotten better (and thank you for the thread), but rose-tinted glasses and all.

Fiber internet. Cheaper than cable/DSL and faster too.

Webb space telescope

Fully homomorphic encryption doing useful things

Higgs boson detected (oops, 2013)

Solar power and battery storage cheap enough to displace fossil energy and let ordinary people go off grid

New tacqueria in my neighborhood is actually pretty good.

What more could you want?

I think that the TinyTapeout concept is super cool (https://tinytapeout.com/). In the past, it was not really feasible to design and manufacture a semiconductor device as a hobbyist... Unless maybe an extremely wealthy one.

Now, we have open source design tools, open process design kit, and the ability but small part of a manufactured wafer.

There are also now multi-project wafer runs for photonic chips at reasonable prices for startup/academia. I think these developments are pretty cool.

larger hard drives/flash storage, faster/power efficient processors maybe..