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.
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.