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
When I was a kid, I had to reference several manuals and carefully assemble a double handful of parts in specific order to connect two computers to eachother. I’d have to fiddle with protocols and speeds and obscure features and traits to make the stars align. Transferring 200mb would be an overnight task. If I wanted to show pictures from my vacation on a big screen, I would have to have them printed on cellulose and insert them in tiny frames to project on a thick screen with a huge machine.
Yesterday, I went to a friend, pointed my phone at a
magic symbolqr code and sent a full movie to their PC in a few minutes. Then I pushed a button to make the photographs on my phone appear on their TV.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.
my job is basically design and manufacture, the dependencies of 3d printers make my job wouldnt exist 10 years ago.
The dystopian novel vibes.
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.
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.
As a very curious person with very wide interests, it is so easy to access really hard-to-find information. In the past five years I’ve satisfied my curiosity more than adequately on hundreds of topics I’d wondered about all my life … from home. One plus side of Covid.
On the darker side, there were plenty of predictions (from science and fiction) in decades past that are becoming very real. Too many heads buried in sand.
Some of the job titles of people I know would sound insane to people in the 80s.
Yeah but one of my favourite things is when watching quiz shows, see who can come up with the most fucking pretentious phrase for “I’m a salesperson”
Hi my name’s Lorna and I’m a client communications solutions engineer
Ya hi my name’s Kyle and I’m like a future business outreach manager ya
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.
Being addicted to the internet
Plus if electric cars become the norm, the streets will be quiet for the first time since the industrial revolution
The sound of hooves on cobblestone is incredibly loud and annoying!
What really baffles me is modern computers. The whole assortment from mainframe batteries, desktop PCs, laptops to smartphones, watches, wireless earbuds, microcontrollers, miniaturised sensors, etc. Even the cheapest modern microcontrollers have insanely complex and tiny patterning that really speaks volumes for the amount of process control and precision in semiconductor fabs. Truly, I would call the modern IC a miracle if I wouldn’t know better. It is physics, materials science and chemistry at their best.
honestly just modern medicine and indoor plumbing/water treatment
the amount of not dying from random infections we do these days, no wonder there are so many humans
If it weren’t for modern medicine, I’d have been dead over a decade ago since I have an autoimmune disorder that is treated with a weekly injection. Whenever there are discussions about societal disorder, my first thoughts are wondering how long I would last without the medicine.
:(
no way for you to be prescribed an emergency supply and get self injection training?
Unfortunately, the medication lasts about a year before it expires. However, that’s in the fridge. At room temperature, the medication only last 14 days before it goes bad.
I appreciate your concern so much tho! I’m having a terrible day, so your care made it a bit nicer. Thank you very much 🥹
I hope you have some better days soon. You deserve good days <3
The hopelessness.
Playing with my own AI models is interesting.
