at least when it comes to consumer tech
like i can't even remember the last time i was excited for a new tech thing. maybe my second smart phone, i guess? that one was at least a big improvement from my first one. third was marginally better, and then the fourth, which i'm using now, i feel like i only got because of planned obsolescence (slow down/battery problems etc.)
it's such a stark contrast from growing up in the 90s/early 2000s
The jump to resolutions higher than 1920x1080 have eaten up a shocking amount of tech gains. A 4k monitor has over 4x as many pixels, and every last one of them has a cost to render. For game graphics, I think it's a gross missallocation of resources - you could push 4x as many polygons or a 4x as complicated pixel shader through that and get way more impressive results.
Basically every device now is thermal constrained. You can gut a laptop and put the components in a big case with a fan and see like a 10x performance boost, it's nuts. Almost no software is properly designed around this either - everyone runs periodic polling threads that constantly wake the CPU back up, everyone allocates as many threads to their thread pools as there are cores, games even still use busy loops for timing.
Every kind of software has started using package managers that bring in code recursively and end up creating lots of redundant functions that make cache misses more likely. Also file sizes gigantic.
Also, you know... innovation under capitalism only happens when someone can capture the value of said innovation and gain a monopoly position. Plus there are enough tech monopolies to buy out anyone trying that.
Every kind of software has started using package managers that bring in code recursively and end up creating lots of redundant functions that make cache misses more likely. Also file sizes gigantic.
NPM is by far the worst offender here, which extra sucks because javascript is the language that gets shipped over the network for like every fucking webpage.
This is also why Marxists.org is unironically peak web design
Edit: forgot to rant about this: for the uninitiated, NPM "resolves" dependency conflicts by installing multiple versions of the same package. Say your project requires you to install the package
axiosand the packagereact. If axios depends on the packageleft-padat version 4.20.0 andreactdepends on the packageleft-padat 6.9.0, NPM will install two copies ofleft-pad, one at version. 4.20.0 and one at 6.9.0.Websites often use hundreds of packages, and packages each tend to have at least a handful of dependencies (and can sometimes also have hundreds). Sometimes dependencies include a shitload of extra data, and the developers writing and adding these dependencies tend not to care about or understand the build and deploy process (or often aren't given enough time to care about it) and don't really try to optimize the amount of space these packages take up. I've had to spend weeks trimming down one application's
node_modulesfile because it kept breaking the build server, that shit was several GB when I started and still like 400 fuckin MB after I sunk a bunch of hours into fixing itthe fact that left-pad, a 11 line package managed to get popular enough that removing it broke the web really says something about the quality of most web development
4k for gaming on a 27inch monitor or whatever is definitely a waste, but 1440p/2k gaming is actually a good middle ground. Still get decent framerates and it looks significantly better than 1080p at 27 inch monitor.
Absolutely. Even for general productivity I appreciate what you can fit on a 1440p screen
4k is definitely worth it, if you crank your FOV and play old games at locked high framerates (120-244hz) or with G-sync/Freesync enabled it's almost like having a 1080p gaming setup with 9 monitors and super immersive since you can't see the pixels or screen-door effect anymore
Most console games also still use variable resolution to accommodate new shaders, I don't think it's worth it because so many shaders are temporal and smear. If you play an old game at locked 4k and locked max framerate (and especially black frame insertion at low latency) it's awesome.
are you sure this isn't just a result of becoming left-wing
i see technology advancing all around me all the time---and while some part of my brain can recognise cool applications in some of it--all i see is the ever advancing march of corporate surveillance and profit extraction. technology that doesn't benefit the worker fucking sucks!
i am a luddite 1000000000 smashed self-checkout kiosks
it's partially due to old age, partially due to left wing, but it's also partially true
the rapid tech advances of the 90s and 2000s are over
What they've been able to do in the 2010s was I guess take that same stuff and make it smaller, leading to a smartphone revolution, which again, is itself much less "exciting" than the computing revolution of the 90s/00s
What they're doing now is even less consequential than that. And also in tandem, simultaneously while all this is happening, the goals/forces making these things happen are becoming more privatized/exploitative/profiteering, which makes them worse quality as well (No removable batteries, games as service, bloated websites bc they need trackers and ads and cryptominers etc et al)
rapid tech advances of the 90s and 2000s are over
id argue if you think this the problem is looking in the same places. AI and robotics are getting better quite rapidly and impressively. computing isnt exploding in the same way it used to but lots of technologies settle into steadier, slower progress at some point. trains havent continually been improving at a breakneck pace since their introduction but they certainly had a period of phenomenal improvement back when they were introduced
and not to get moral relativist but the bloat and financialisation and all attached to current 'innovation' is a kind of progress. it doesnt serve social good, its awful for us as non-owners---but figuring out how to do it is a task and involves making technology more efficient at its purpose. some of which is probably useable in not-evil ways should the people get their hands on it
id argue if you think this the problem is looking in the same places.
yea true, but then again I don't know much about AI/robotics so I can't judge. And actually, the reason I don't know much about them is exactly why I'm sort of right--most people will never use a robot, and almost never use an AI. So even if these things are improving at the breakneck pace of the 90s RAM/CPU/Graphics capabilities, basically nobody would notice
Nobody except capital that is, who will then use these AIs to make every website you've ever logged onto worse, and engineer ever-more-convoluted ways to kill poor and non-white people
Basically yea, if you had a value for "tech advances" and then multiplied it by a modifier of "social goodness" it would now be almost zero for the 1st world (although some raw amount of it is still being seen by the 3rd world simply because they were forced to be behind)
you might be using these things much sooner than you think. ive already been forced by some acquantinces to be in the same room as an alexa, we all had fun with that Dall-E shit and the private one is way way better. consumer-side drones have gone from fancy toys to a staple of filmmaking (and surveillance and killing people).
well i shouldnt say 'using' so much as 'be forced to interface with them through their invasions of public space & the workplace'
i think we're just getting old, I don't know. In the first 20 years of my life I went from listening to music on spools of magnetic tape that maxxed out at 80 minutes to a device that plays every song ever made, downloaded in seconds. I can't point to anything after like 2007 to now that's been a monumental shift like that.
yeah streaming and piracy is really cool and I wish it had existed as a kid. I guess piracy back then was copying one of your friend's mixtapes.
i'm a luddite, i still download all my music from soulseek
someday if i have money maybe i'll have something new to share there
i am a luddite 1000000000 smashed self-checkout kiosks
Self-checkout is a blessing in a store that stubbornly refuses to hire anyone at the front.
Fuck your single 15 items or less line. I'll just do this shit myself.
its self-fulfilling understaffing prophecy
lines are too long we need more staff
ill build kiosks to expedite small orders & have customers do the work themselves :porky-happy:
:yes-honey-left: and you'll hire a replacement for the staff you just put on supervising the kiosks, right? right? (they do not)
I mean, I agree in theory. But also, even before the self-checkout, you always have twice as many kiosks as staff on any given day.
the fundamental problem is as you pointed out, a refusal to hire sufficient staff. no matter how much labor saving tech they install/offload labor to customers---they just lower the staff and replicate the same structural imbalance. self-checkout doesn't deliver a smoother consumer-end experience, or alleviate pressure on the workers---it just gives management a reason to not have another checker or two. and a way to put a security camera in your face for analytics/surveillance
Part of the issue is running out of the easy hardware optimizations that gave bigger speed increases in the past, meaning it's harder and more expensive now to deliver performance gains. Yet, companies still have to sell their tech at the same rate to keep profits increasing, so a culture of staying "current" with your tech has been fostered, alongside the more concrete measures of planned obsolescence to promote upgrading.
I would also argue that internet browsing experiences have been getting worse for a while as companies stuff their sites with ads and trackers to monetize as much as they can.
I would also argue that internet browsing experiences have been getting worse for a while as companies stuff their sites with ads and trackers to monetize as much as they can.
yeah it definitely has
search engines are also dogshit now
google youtube and reddit have all gotten more dogshit, and I'm not even talking about the userbase
I remember back in 2018, looking for a reddit post from 2016, and it was not findable.
also google stuff started tanking around 2018/19 and becoming unusable (but I don't know of a better option so I still use it)
youtube stopped showing the dates of certain old videos recently
you might find david graebers essay of flying cars and the declining rate of profit (a slightly extended version from the utopia of rules) to be interesting as it touches on a lot of this really well
the key bit
What it has really brought about is a kind of bizarre inversion of ends and means, where creativity is marshaled to the service of administration rather than the other way around.
I would put it this way: in this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies.
By poetic technologies, I refer to the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life. Poetic technologies in this sense are as old as civilization. They could even be said to predate complex machinery. Lewis Mumford used to argue that the first complex machines were actually made of people. Egyptian pharaohs were only able to build the pyramids because of their mastery of administrative procedures, which then allowed them to develop production line techniques, dividing up complex tasks into dozens of simple operations and assigning each to one team of workmen—even though they lacked mechanical technology more complex than the lever and inclined plane. Bureaucratic oversight turned armies of peasant farmers into the cogs of a vast machine. Even much later, after actual cogs had been invented, the design of complex machinery was always to some degree an elaboration of principles originally developed to organize people.
Yet still, again and again, we see those machines—whether their moving parts are arms and torsos or pistons, wheels, and springs—being put to work to realize otherwise impossible fantasies: cathedrals, moon shots, transcontinental railways, and on and on. Certainly, poetic technologies almost invariably have something terrible about them; the poetry is likely to evoke dark satanic mills as much as it does grace or liberation. But the rational, bureaucratic techniques are always in service to some fantastic end.
From this perspective, all those mad Soviet plans—even if never realized—marked the high-water mark of such poetic technologies. What we have now is the reverse. It’s not that vision, creativity, and mad fantasies are no longer encouraged. It’s that our fantasies remain free-floating; there’s no longer even the pretense that they could ever take form or flesh. Meanwhile, in the few areas in which free, imaginative creativity actually is fostered, such as in open-source Internet software development, it is ultimately marshaled in order to create even more, and even more effective, platforms for the filling out of forms. This is what I mean by “bureaucratic technologies”: administrative imperatives have become not the means, but the end of technological development.
Meanwhile, the greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed on this earth has spent the last decades telling its citizens that we simply can no longer contemplate grandiose enterprises, even if—as the current environmental crisis suggests—the fate of the earth depends on it.
So what, then, are the political implications?
First of all, it seems to me that we need to radically rethink some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of capitalism. One is that capitalism is somehow identical to the market, and that both are therefore inimical to bureaucracy, which is a creature of the state. The second is that capitalism is in its nature technologically progressive. It would seem that Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, were simply wrong about this. Or to be more precise: they were right to insist that the mechanization of industrial production would eventually destroy capitalism; they were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to go on with mechanization anyway. If it didn’t happen, it can only be because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would presumably have come as a complete surprise to them.
Tech was great when it was about how we could use it, it was all about the possibilities.
And that's when the capitalists came in...now it's about money and only money. Spying, addiction, deceit...the grift kills possibility every time. Same thing happened with TV and cable TV.
I had a phone with a fingerprint reader on the back, and it even let me scroll the content on screen with it. That was probably peak smartphone for me. Now it seems like they keep taking on engineering challenges they're really sure are exactly what the consumer wants. Like I really don't want a notch, bluetooth audio still isn't ready, and you really don't need to shove a fingerprint reader behind the display.
Hardware and software are both getting increasingly user-hostile by the day. I want dials and switches and buttons. Fuck touch interfaces for everything :angery:
I’ll never not be mad huawei got banned. It had one of those finger scanners/touchpads in the back and you’re correct: it fucking ruled.
Nice! So many cool phone techs abandoned after partial adaptation. Like is Samsung the only one with those edge screens? Combine that with a back scanner and almost the entire hand would be usable to interface while holding the phone.
Lol u right. Reason I don’t have one is because I broke it.
It really does seem that the basic form is the only area that still innovates (foldable touch screens for example).
every new pixel phone seems to drop one of the good features that the previous generation had
the 6 no longer has the rear fingerprint reader, it's got a slower under-screen one
the 6a doesn't have a headphone jack anymore (sidenote: anyone who tells you that headphone jack hardware takes up too much space to go in a modern cellphone doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about; 99% of the hardware is still in there to drive the speakers)
using the web seems to be a worse and worse experience every year
google (and duckduckgo tbh) either can't or won't bother to do anything about all of the SEO'd content mill sites that churn out completely useless information
youtube removed dislikes for pretty much no good reason so now it's impossible to tell without watching if a video sucks ass or not
reddit "refreshed" their site design to some ugly mobile-first bullshit that requires like 10 clicks to view all the posts in a thread
twitter sign-up-walls their content (AND FUCKS WITH THE BROWSER HISTORY SO ON MY PHONE I CAN'T USE THE ANDROID BACK BUTTON TO CLOSE THE TAB)
most sites put an obnoxious popup asking you about cookies, especially egregious because 90% of them host only static content and shouldn't have any fucking cookies to begin with
no i don't want to install your app, fuck offYou can get YouTube dislikes back with a Firefox extension, the Twitter thing drove me nuts too but I found out if you hit sign in on the popup you can close it when it shows you the login window
most sites put an obnoxious popup asking you about cookies
Only because the EU started forcing them to do it. They used to just use the cookies without warning or asking.
Love that my wireless Logitech headphones break every 10 months because of sloppy solder at the power switch and not for any actual hardware limitation or wear reasons.
I'm pretty sure RAM requirements haven't really changed much in a decade - now the big thing seems to be display tech
Depends on your use case. For games 4gb was the bare minimum, 8gb recommended. Now I can't imagine running 4gb, 8gb feels like scraping by, and 16gb is comfortable
The Boston Globe (or some Boston new site anyway) had a 32MB load for its front page. The internet is clogged to fuck.
Like 10 years ago I believe.
Edit: I heard it in a Maciej Ceglowski talk but I can't find the exact bit. One website in the talk is 18MB though.
Edit 2 found it: https://youtu.be/iYpl0QVCr6U?t=1718
It was saying Boston.com costs 40 cents worth of bandwidth per page load.
it'd be practically impossible to develop a new web rendering engine from scratch. the set of web standards is gargantuan and keeps getting bigger. it has evolved from a relatively simple document access system to the world's worst app store
You can have adjacent emotes without an intervening space, like so
:mission-accomplished-1::mission-accomplished-2:
I didn't realize it for a while since it just feels like you shouldn't be able to have those colons touching
Silicon Valley (and tech capitalism more broadly) tries to sell us the story that they are the vanguard of innovation and technological development, when in fact they bear the deepest responsibility for stifling innovation. The only innovation which is permitted under this regime are innovations in rent-seeking and psychological manipulation. This is why technology has largely settled into a stalemate of proprietary glass rectangles and monopoly platforms. Nothing new can come unless the political economy undergirding the digital realm changes substantially.
it definitely feels like new smartphone features are being targeted at people who are not me.
who uses stickers? or animoji/memoji? who even cares about AR? do we really need lidar in every phone? how could anyone prefer faceid to a fingerprint scanner?
there are a few recent-ish innovations that I think are really good though:
- 120Hz displays make scrolling so much smoother! unfortunately I'm a firefox fan, and firefox is objectively bad. for some reason firefox's main render view isn't on some necessary whitelist to run at 120Hz, so every single time I install an OTA update I need to fiddle with adb to manually override the global frame rate minimum or else Firefox will run at annoyingly-noticeable 60hz while opera and chrome are buttery smooth...
- machine learning driven features. gmail's compose autocomplete is insane, sms auto-suggested responses can be nice when driving, AI assistants are very useful, and it's nice that my phone can learn things like what brightness I prefer in different environments, what time I wake up (for smarter charging), and which apps deserve more frequent background scheduling (to conserve battery).
- macro lenses on phone cameras
- IP67/68 as default
- 5G (mid-band is fine)
who uses stickers?
There was a Russian bear series that had a bunch of hammers and sickles on it. Strong recommend.
who uses stickers?
Have you heard of a small website called Hexbear? :sicko-hexbear:
sms auto-suggested responses can be nice when driving,
:haram:
this is untrue we have a blahaj emote now
see:
:blahaj:
progress marches on
The past decade of internet innovation looks like someone trying to scrap together a thesis by using parts of their abandoned previous attempts.
