Ask Lemmy

I sure hope not. Building a new PC this weekend.

Tech has advanced technically (for lack of a better word) but yeah, it's being used against us more than to our benefit a lot of the time.

I blame the big tech companies. 10-20 years ago they were not that big so they didn't buy every competition to kill them. Now any time we get a new company or product that could change the world, one of the big 3 (apple, amazon, google) will buy them to keep the tech, code, or people for themselves.

Wanna see what not being bought by big tech is like? Look at what FOSS is doing. Look at Home Assistant, Jellyfin, AOSP is doing, it's making huge leaps without big tech.

Nah, people always think thing "peaked" during their era. Its probably nostalgia. Tech back then is, in my opinion, terrible.

I was born around 2000-2003 (not giving exact year for privacy reasons)

Examples:

When I got my first phone (like around 2015 or so), it was an android phone that didn't have great encryption. You had to manually enable encryption and its not File-Based encryption like in today's android phones, its Full Disk Encryption which mean alarms dont work if you reboot your phone. And it takes like an hour or 2 to first set up the encryption.

Phones have so much vulnerabilities. Stagefright, Blueborne, etc. Luckily, I never got hacked (or at least not that I'm aware of) but it was just unsettling to know your phone is vulnerable, and you're even already on the latest update. Also there was a lot of screenlock bypasses. Updates typically is only 1 year OS update and 2 year security updates, if even that. Updates were also very slow to get rolled out.

Security was so bad, I can root my android phone with a random app I downloaded by searching "Android Root", don't even need to connect to a pc. Like can you imagine a random app being able to just take root privilages on your phone.

Nowadays, phones are much more secure, even the cheapest samsung phone has 4 years of OS updates, 5 years of security updates. With better encryption.

Phone plans were expensive AF, well I was a kid, but the normal plans had those "Unlimited Data" but with a huge asterisk, data slows after like a certain amount like 5 GB or something, I was unlucky, my parents were a bit cheap so the family plan that I was on only had 30MB of 4g internet, then throttled to 128kbps. Unusable unless you are at home and have wifi.

Nowadays, unlimited plans have become the norm, the plan that I was on even got a free upgrade to unlimited high speed data.

Oh and HTTPS wasn't default in most sites, some didn't even have it. And no HSTS as far as I remember.

Back then, there were no such thing as Airtags or Samsung Smarttags that are so cheap and allows tracking misplace items or even your pets. (I mean there are privacy concerns... still, very useful if not misused)

There were no smart watches that can detect a heart attack. (They're not exactly accurate, but still...)

There were no phones that detect a car crash or even use satelites to make a sos call. (I'm talking about the iPhone 14)

I mean yes we have so much enshittification today, but that's not really a tech problem, its a corporate greed problem not doesn't just affect technology.

Technology isn't bad, its just the way we use it.

Like nuclear technology can be use to build bombs to destroy, or used in power plants to create energy.

For some, yes. Automotive is one that comes to mind. I miss dumb TVs. I'd say laptop, but then I'm rocking a decade-old Thinkpad, so I might be a bit biased here. I also miss phones that aren't as locked down. I hate what the current streaming service industry have become, and how social media is filled with AI trash.

I'd say that our personal needs for shear computation power have peaked within the last ten years. Yes, people have been saying this since the dawn of personal computers. Yes, servers keep getting more powerful. However, the fact that some schmucks just released a thousand dollar laptop with more or less the same RAM & CPU specs as my decade old Thinkpad kinda proves that.

Other than that, a lot of things are getting better. As an open-source enthusiast, I see things keeps improving, FreeCAD 1.0 just got released, more improvements to Linux kernel, LibreOffice handles MS Office files better, etc. Manufacturing techniques keeps getting more advanced, like 3D printing metal, and for us mortals, faster FDM printing with better plastic material that's more UV resistant. Radio technologies comes to mind; with SDR, one can achieve what people from last decade would need expensive specialized equipments for, yes you can get your hands on these for cheap.

Last but not least, don't forget this very platform where you're reading this very comment ;)

No. You mean AI has not at least wowed you?

Nah new tech is great. Flippers, steam decks, nano drones. Bluetooth was a joke a decade ago. Now we can do devices over wifi! Much of the tech from that era barely worked and was practically DIY levels of reliability. Rose colored glasses etc..

Which isn't to say that somethings haven't gotten outright shitty (M$, apple products, etc..). But widely, things are much much better. I think it depends how "mainstream" you are shopping. But if you were shopping "mainstream" then, it was just as shitty as it is today.

I might be simple to please but I think 1080p or 2160p is just peak to me. I find it very difficult to notice differences between 1080p and 2160p but moreso with 2160p and 4K. When Blu-Ray came out, they were of course hamming up Blu-Ray as the shit and DVD was now seen as inferior. I never really cared for what Blu-Ray had to offer at the time of it's debut. Because DVD quality was more than efficient to me, better than VHS which the comparison between VHS and DVD was night and day.

People tend to like tricking others into going into the more premium and expensive options of the latest tech with dishonest comparisons. You see this all the time with graphical comparisons with games and movies. Where they'll deliberately pixelate what they see as an inferior visual and sharpen the later options. It's just dishonest and operates on an extreme bias.

Does anybody else

Yes, pretty much always.

yep, and then tech companies began the big cull, taking all the free services and beginning to squeeze, at every level, all the time

It all went downhill when the expectation of an always-on internet connection became the norm. That gave us:

• "Smart" appliances that have no business being connected to the internet
• "Smart" TVs that turned into billboards we pay to have in our homes
• Subscription everything as a service
• Massive zero-day patches for all manner of software / video games (remember when software companies had to actually release finished/working software? Pepperidge Farm remembers)
• Planned obsolescence and e-waste on steroids where devices only work with a cloud connection to the manufacturer's servers or as long as the manufacturer is in business to keep a required app up to date
• Every piece of software seemingly sucking up all the data it can about you and feeding it back to the mothership so you can be profiled and sold to advertisers
• Pretty much everything Apple does is designed to further lock you into their ecosystem and/or remove a port that's standard in order to pocket the savings and sell you a dongle for $29.99
• Dwindling / disappearing availability of physical media you effectively own forever in favor of digital libraries that you only have a flimsy license to access at the company's whim (even though you "bought" the title for the same price it would have cost on physical media). Those have been ruled non-transferable (e.g. if you want to leave them to someone in your will) and the company going under leaves you with no rights or ability to get a refund or physical copy of things you supposedly bought but can no longer access.

Other than hardware getting more powerful and sometimes less expensive, every recent innovation has been used against us to take away the right to own, repair, and have any control over the tech we supposedly own.

Edits: I keep thinking of more things that annoy me lol.

You grew up in a time of huge technological innovation, so you see anything else as unusual

Boomers grew up in stagnation, and expect tech to keep progressing at the same rate.

Both are 100% normal ways for our brains to expect shit to go, but neither fit modern society.

Its called enshitification. Its a process that's been happening in all areas of tech for a while now.

Your BS radar has simply improved I'm guessing. Go through a few hype cycles, and you learn the pattern.

Hardware is better than ever. The default path in software is spammier and more extortionist than ever.

To quote one of my favorite authors:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

I think new tech is still great, I think the issue is the business around that tech has gotten worse in the past decade