that's pretty much the thesis. you don't need to keep reading. it's nothing but depressing shit that won't help anyone. i'm sorry you saw this post but if you don't click read now, you can minimize the harm.
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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:
i was just thinking the other day that silicon valley doesn't make products anymore. i think we gotta stealth brainwash this culture into thinking of socialism as a technology
100% all of this.
Re: ""the people with money try to invent the next thing; then, we all buy it; then, they use the money to invent the next thing.""
In my head something about this has to do with a ridiculous lack of R&D. I think it's a mix of "the people with the money" being software companies, and just general rising inequality meaning more money just fucking sits with the wealthy but not sure on the percentages of each.
that is a big one but do drugs count as consumer innovation?
I submit that Spotify and other streaming music services was a mindblower for me. I had given up on listening to the majority of music, I couldn’t purchase it, I couldn’t even discover it enough to pirate it, maybe if I was lucky something I’d like would appear in the slice of radio available to me or Pandora would stumble upon it or something. Now I can just try anything, to a rounding error basically anything I’d ever heard of. Netflix was of course a lesser degree of that.
Google Street View launched in 2007. I remember before that, some of the most tech savvy colleges had figured out how to put a virtual tour of campus online, and then all of a sudden, you could take a virtual tour of the world.
It’s interesting these are services, right? We didn’t have to buy these. We’re too poor on average for anything truly new to hit serious buy in anyway.
3D printing is a difference-in-kind innovation. Arguably it still hasn’t taken off yet lol. As far as things that actually took off: Air fryers, Keurigs, AirPods…
3d printing is definitely the most hopeful gesture at innovation I can think of recently. It might even lead to synthetic cloned replacement organs through bioprinting, if that research can chug past the corporate barriers of "market viability." Possibly even practical uterine replicators, the ability to gestate children outside a human body, which could be a real social game changer.
I don’t have much to say in response aside from “yeah, I feel you” and it fuckin sucks
I poked around my desk looking for something "new". The best I could find was various USB powered/charged, bluetooth connected things - but I looked that tech up and yep, just as I thought, all developed in the late 90s. USB replacing wall warts has arguably been a good trend of the last 10 or so years but that's a product trend not a technology
yea that's fair;
even stuff being pushed and hocked as innovative now (landing space rockets, reusing space rockets, launching space rockets from planes to theoretically drive costs down) was like. 90s (DC-X), 70s (Shuttle, you can argue 80s but they started work on it while people were still standing on the moon), 90s (Pegasus).
Hell, we had the EV1 two or three decades ago as an EV that was a Perfectly Normal contemporary car that just happened to be electric, before everyone got brain poisoned with "they have to be Luxury" thanks technodipshit
maybe something will come along someday and prove us wrong but it's more just capital squatting on existing technological successes and chasing iterative improvement as if it were as radical as new development
that's not even getting into the ways it tricks us into making things we already had Worse. like selling off the frequency bands used by weather satellites to monitor the earth's climate and atmospheric water vapor to let telecoms make more money on 5g, or just the way things get cost-cut to oblivion as they find every last piece of fat they can trim in making something flimsier, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but still charging as much for a worse device as you paid for a better one that Doesn't Work Anymore because "The Onward March Of Technology" made it obsolete because all these fuckers can do is make new software that leaves perfectly good computers behind
also i guess i feel like stating like, to be clear, i'm agreeing with you 100% and kinda just commisserating?? if that makes sense
AI isn't new either! It's just more bigger numbers.
Neural nets have been known in academia since what, the 60's? The US post office has used AI to read hand-written ZIP codes on literally all letters, since the mid-80's.
Logistics for the entire US military was handled by an AI system written in 6 weeks in 1990. AI defeated Iraq. ChatGPT isn't beating anyone in a war, except via own-goal.
late 40s early 50s for the first neural net designs
I didn't know it went back that far, damn. I guess the main thing is just bigger storage and faster speed to make it plagiarism more better?
My point of reference has been that we've had markov chains and text generators for ages, this is just more coherent thanks to stealing the entire everything and shoving it into a black box.
Yeah, absolutely. It sucks. Only genuinely new feeling thing to me is Bluetooth connectivity. Wireless headphones and being able to pair my phone with my mirrorless camera to see an instant preview feel like the height of useful technology rn (when they function)
Maybe the optimist's way of looking at this would be that the previous decades' inventions were only canonized after the fact based on what had long-term usefulness, so that's why we can't think of any for the last 15 years. We just don't know what will be still with us in the long term. But even that falls apart a little bit because products live and die in five years or less now so we should know what's sticking around.
my understanding/assumption is that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) used to be a lot more interesting than it is now, because it used to be that you were actually witnessing all the good and bad of period of wild innovation. but now everything’s on your phone, so it’s all either apps or juicero? or more blatant grifts like speculative blockchain assets.
capacitative touch screen was 2007 with public availability happening w iphone in 2008, but i get your point
as someone who was training very hard to be one of the guys who Make Thing, I think the thing that upsets me most is that all the equipment used to Make Thing got chipped for gold scrap or put on ebay to get passed around by hustlebeasts because Business Boys decided their third mansion was more important than the continued worthwhile existence of everyone else!!!!!!!!! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
it's hard to fully state the utter catharsis, the pure and uncut agency of taking a complex idea in your head and willing it into existence out of dinosaur juice, poison and literal sand. The feeling of bending reality to your will like that is wonderfully, terribly addictive. But then 2008 happened and that was p much the end of the world. Mine, at least. lol.
I really don't think we're done inventing, it's just the means and maybe even capacity to do so have been put so far out of most people's reach that it's just not going to happen outside some lab somewhere, and even then, unless it is in fact immediately world-shatteringly successful, nobody with the money is gonna care because it's not going to show results on the quarterly. Or worse, it happens in some lab and some dickhead with money decides it's bad for his current business and kills the thing! Nothing matters except immediate money! wooooo!!!
There's also the attitude that, oh, I don't need to actually build this I can just go on Amazon or Alibaba or Wish and get it for cheap why would I pay any more than I have to I'm a job creator so you can't be mean to me!!! later: oh no my supply chain how could this have happened!!!
anyways I'm pretty nihilistic about this.
What I've lost hope for is corporations, but not invention. Corps make real advancements seem so small by making whatever crap they're already making bank on seem so much bigger, but the gradual progress is real and there. I believe we haven't gotten far enough from the 2010's to properly speak to its historical worth yet, as so much integral technology of the past was deemed "useless for 95% of people" when it "suddenly" appeared, rather than only the first visible stepping stone to a new standard after decades of refinement.
Someone is always believing in making things better, even when they're trampled over by people who just believe in moneymaking. But maybe you're right, that what we've lost are the days when we uplifted people tangibly improving quality of life - not celebrity "engineers" or silicon valley "realists", who just want to sell solutions by creating problems. I think defeatism is the first way to hand them the victory for sure, though.
i do think that the VR gaming hopium from like 2016 has aged horribly. VR gaming is still expensive and niche and impractical and disappointing.
The one thing we can do today with 2010+ tech we couldn't before is distribute high-quality disinformation to essentially any arbitrary group of people for essentially no cost; the CIA would've killed (more) for the ability to use deepfake video/audio in latin america in the 50s/60s/70s
What about 3D printing and rapid prototype? Being able to print your own electronics, technically? Bioprinting?
feels like the focus nowadays is Data Collection and companies don't want to involve the public with that
It's not real innovation, purely a more-numbers thing enabled by wide broadband access, and not good enough to really be considered an alltogether improvement (imho in a sense it drives a lot of modern-day consumer dystopia), but it is something that has happened in those 15 years and resulted in a qualitative change: The disappearance of physical media for things that aren't music. (excluding music because by 2005 mp3s had already largely replaced CDs)
- When you wanted to own a video game in 2007, you went to the store and bought it. Except when it was half-life 2 or whatever the first steam-exclusive title was (which resulted in a minor outrage).
- In 2007 I'd wager when people watched a movie at home, the go-to way to do that was to buy the DVD/bluray and put it in the player you naturally owned.
- Tangentially it used to be that videogame size or movie resolution was limited by how much data you could put on a disc. No longer. GTA V is > 90Gigs.
The only things left to invent are huge fields of technology that could radically reduce the amount of electricity or steel or plastic or concrete we use and tie our broken splintered communities into resilient social networks and that is directly the opposite of what the dying machine was built to invent.