Asklemmy

Does the Evercade family of consoles count?

The original Evercade portable.

The Evercade VS home console.

They’re coming out with new hardware too!

Atari makes good retro consoles too and recently released the 7800+ that comes out later also.

I have driven manual shift cars for my whole life, and the transmission in my new (ish, about 10 years) car is incredible.

The first one was a 3 speed Mustang without hydraulic clutch. It was so hard to shift I only let one other person drive it. 1st speed so rough, 2nd at like 10mph, 3rd at about 30, that was it. It was just springs and chains and gears.

This one? Smooth as silk, there is enough overlap between gears that it is so easy to shift, 6 speeds, the 6th gear I can drive 90mph and it is cool and comfortable. It's ridiculously easy to drive and so much fun.

Distributed computing. Its amazing to see things go from isolated PC to things like p2p torrenting and BIONIC to block chain and IPFS to kubernetes to the fediverse and Matrix and Tor.

All filling wildly different niches of trust and capability.

Want to run a secure shared virtual reality space in p2p way? Check out 3rd space built on the matrix protocol.

Want to build a highly secure computer system spanning regions and dataceneters? Check RKE2!

What about just a secure little thing in your house or across friends and family houses? Not gonna believe it but rke2 or its simply brother k3s.

Just need to store public data? Chuck into IPFS and share it in a highly cooperative way.

Want to push it out in a pub/sub fashion or sub to others info? Check out ActivityPub. Great for medium trust networks since you can choose who you publish too or subscribe from.

Maybe you want to share just metadata between private servers but real time data between users, check out matrix.

Maybe you want to share data publically but what hard incentives to keep the compute and control of that distributed. Check out block chains and pick your poison of incentive models (e.g. pow or pos or maybe look at the wierder ones). With current pick of creating a limited supply digital asset to act like currencies do.

Maybe you just need a VPN you can trust, maybe try a distributed network of volunteers using layers of obfuscation to minize info leaked about your network.

Plenty of human problems around all of these but still super cool how far we've come.

Even in my lifetime power tools have come a long way.

I remember the first cordless electric screwdriver I ever saw. You're better off using a normal screwdriver, the thing had no speed and no torque. I guess it could take the screw out of the battery door on the remote if your wrists hurt.

When I was in high school, long about 2002, my father bought a Black and Decker cordless drill. 12v, they don't make the batteries for it anymore, might have been ni-cad at the time, and it could pretty much drill a pilot hole into a 2x4 and then run a wood screw into it.

Twenty years later I've got an off the rack homeowner grade cordless drill that will pull the lug nuts off of my truck. I used the damn thing to drive a quarter inch lag bolt through plywood and pine without a pilot hole and it wasn't even working hard.

The one that really impresses me is my cordless router. Takes a 20 volt drill battery and will easily turn any 1/4" router bit I chuck in it. It's fairly rare that I use a router that isn't mounted in my router table or that little cordless job.

Machine Learning or as the non-techies call it, AI. It's incredible what open source models can do these days.

Gaming mice, in particular those designed for FPS players, have improved a lot within the last decade. They are incredibly light now and wireless mice are as responsive as wired ones. You can get well built mice with great sensors for very cheap, and there are loads of different shapes and sizes to choose from. It's actually getting really difficult to buy an objective bad mouse now.

Said like 80 times in this thread already but, Open Source & Free software (papa stallman will murder my family if I don't make the distinction)

Fifteen years ago when I first got into it, Linux was a programmer/sysadmin's OS that could cover one's web browsing needs and run some media players and retro console emulators.

Nowadays it is a reasonable daily driver for high-end gaming, it can cover 85% of the creative tasks I do for work, plus all the shit it did back then, all the while being faster, lighter, and comfier than windows.

There's good libre applications for pretty much everything I care about.

And now we even have open-source powered social media (hi we're in Lemmy)

Fuck, even if I'm this close to butlerian jihad thinking in regards to the whole concept, I'll give it up for the advancement of open source AI models. I might think the whole invention is poison, but better for it to be a public, shared, community built poison than one under the thumb of three megacorps.

NZB360. Lovely piece of software :)
Also uBlock origin