I just had an experience with a auto soap dispenser, sink, towels and dryer set in the same place in a public restroom, didn’t have to walk to a shared dryer
Plus if electric cars become the norm, the streets will be quiet for the first time since the industrial revolution
When the wildfire smoke turns the air orange.
I want to go back 100 years and show people this picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
Also, places like Pittsburgh were running coal burning factories 24/7, plus there were still plenty of working horses doing deliveries.
Ebikes have transformed where I live. It’s mountainous so the only cyclists you’d see were skinny lycra-clad guys on 5 grand bikes.
Now virtually everyone has a bike, from kids to octogenarians, and the only difference between the lycra-clad cyclists and the shorts n t-shirt cyclists is the fact the ones on the ebikes are all smiling 😊
Lime bikes and scooters, too. Totally transformed our city after we finally started installing protected bike lanes (and light rail), and a ton of people use them instead of cars. I bought an ebike and use my car like, once a month to grab something like a heavy AC unit.
totally this, such a simple idea but it’s transformative in so many ways
I have a magic little box sitting in my garage that allows me to dream up a weird little device, create it on a computer, convert it to a big pile of computer code automatically, hit “go” on the magic box, and come back in 4 hours to a hunk of plastic in the exact shape I dreamt up only a few hours before. A shape and functionality that had never before existed on the face of the earth.
Ya, 3d printing feels pretty futuristic.
Electric cars will certainly be quieter at low speed but they will still be noisy at higher speed due to tire noise dominating. Lower speed limits in cities would help here significantly.
Also, even ICE car can be very quiet in low speed, the insulation and exhaust muffle help a lot. I work with car a lot and often time the noise came from the radiator fan, without it running it’s quite hard to tell if the engine is running or not. The only thing electric car ever gonna solve is the tailpipe emission, which is good, but not quite enough.
The dystopian novel vibes.
Technology that is so ubiquitous that younger gen’s don’t know how to troubleshoot them at all.
I grew up with many examples from mag tape media to 802.11b that was basically only useful within a clear line of site to the router.
Nothing made me feel like the future was now as Orbitz and freeze dried pizza from the Challenger Space Museum.
They don’t make Orbitz anymore tho :(
Orbitz went to heaven so you could have boba.
That was a bad trade! Did anyone call “no backsies?”
smartphones are pretty damn impressive.
they downright make scifi gizmos like dataslates, or comunicators seem outdated.
gps navigation arround the world,
even without cellula reception if you have offline map data.
and automatic navigation / route planninga vast array of communication services be it text sound, or video,
one on one, as a group, or in a public forum.a vast sea of information on every topic immaginable.
ever improving camera & sensor tech.
and smartphones do it all in one device small enough to fit in your pocket.
and i didn’t even mention the computing power & storage that oveshadows some room sized supercomputers of the past
Yep! That was my thought as well, especially that we can carry the internet around and talk to pretty much anyone anytime.
Everyone walking around with digital cameras
- We have video and photo evidence of nearly every single event because there are multiple people with cameras nearly everywhere there are people.
Global interconnection
- I can instantly communicate with someone in Germany from the US. I can even share a picture or video with someone in a matter of seconds.
Medicine
- Whenever I do something risky or worry about becoming sick or ill, I recognize how lucky I am that I can just go to a doctor and it will likely be addressed without issue. This goes especially for bacterial infections.
Being addicted to the internet
Playing with my own AI models is interesting.
The hopelessness.
My cellphone. Every day. Every time I’m at my computer and transfer a file to my phone over KDE Connect I kinda just sit there for a second marveling at the fact that the transfer happened and it just feels like magic.
I understand the underlying processes that make it happen, just sometimes I find myself ignoring the details and just appreciating it for a moment.
Aeropex - bone-conducting earphones
Coolify2 - Personal neck AC/heating with peltier technology
GrapheneOS - Able to use a smartphone to its full potential, without the tracking/bloat/handholding of other default OS choices.
I really like how those first two are basic science, but somebody was actually able to innovate them into doing something useful.
I wish more technology was like this, and not whatever the crypto/metaverse/NFT/AI people are doing (mostly mistaking fluff for innovation)
Like the progression of LEDs over the past 40 years, an outstanding increase in brightness and colours.
Also, listening to
Kool Keith - Earth People
Bad news, tires are the biggest source of noise from cars in movement unless you change the exhaust to something barely legal on a gas car.
