Microblog Memes

I've been having the same thought lately. I feel like consumer tech has stagnated since the early 2010s. I miss watching announcements each summer as companies announced their new products and new features, and introducing literal new ways of life.

These days, there's nothing new anymore. This year's phone is the same as last year's and the year before that, except now it has more AI. This year's game console is the same as the last one, but now it has even more restrictions on game ownership. This year's car is the same as last year, but now it has a monthly subscription for power steering.

i'll paste my reply from mastodon:

gotta follow FOSS tech, endless wonder ✨

The Steamdeck got me pretty excited to be honest. But uhm, that's about it.

A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more "companies that will grow" not "companies that are doing something cool". But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.

Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:

• Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
• Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
• Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven't done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they're going to crash hard
• Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last "innovation" they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
• Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was "the metaverse", an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
• Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don't care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they're part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they'll keep making money. I can't remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They're also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
• Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they're getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don't see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
• Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they're not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won't crash too hard in the future either, although they're a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they'll take some damage too.

It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn't in the first 10 links, it probably didn't exist on the Internet.. Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn't crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple's iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn't seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they're trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I'm forgetting, I hope!

The only real tech that has gotten me excited lately is the steam deck, framework computers, and these little info displays called trmnl.

Getting open source and fair use products gets me fairly excited nowadays.

I got my new Fairphone 6 with e/os yesterday and it made me giddy to finally degoogle.

I'm building my own home servers, fuck your subscriptions and privacy invading tracking and ads

We need a resurgence in getting excited about manually finding weird stuff in weird corners of the internet.

Tear down the walls of all the shit gardens! Make Internet Feral Again!!!!!

on the bright side, now you can get excited about old tech!

Tech was great when it didn't try to steal your personal information

On the upside, won't spend as much.

You know what I miss? PDAs. 20 years ago I had a PDA with physical keyboard and WiFi running Debian. It wasn't even that expensive. Today those simply don't exists. From time to time something gets released on Kickstarter but it's usually very expensive. What happened? I would expect that with all the advances we would have more gadgets like this today, not less. Is it really matter of scale? I'm sure those old PDAs weren't selling in millions. What is it?

Also expensive

"I miss getting expensive about tech."

🤔

This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.

https://www.emotiv.com/collections/all/products/epoc-x

Who would have thought that a system that rewards creating problems to solve would stifle the tech that addresses real problems?

In the energy space, I'm excited about advanced geothermal (basically using the drilling/fracking techniques developed by the oil and gas industry but applying them to harvesting geothermal heat in places previously not practical). It's dispatchable energy that can fill in the difference between wind/solar supply and overall grid demand in a way that might make carbon emissions unnecessary.

I'm also excited about a bunch of rechargeable battery chemistries that might make grid scale batteries much more cost effective (and possibly safer and more reliable).

Energy policy in the US is kinda screwed up right now, but hopefully the tech can be developed/rolled out elsewhere, or the merits of the technology will still lead to rapid adoption even in a hostile regulatory climate.