I feel as if technology has stagnated, all that are left are grifts or just make everything terrible, like AI. I was thinking Zoom calls maybe? The tech has definitely improved since Skype.

  • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    As someone who works in IT, I don’t think anything has. I was thinking SSDs, but they became good by ~2013 really. Phones are still garbage in my experience. AI is probably the closest to being slightly useful, at times. Honestly, as someone who used free Skype extensively back around ~2010, I don’t find Zoom to be meaningfully better (and I’ve yet to find anything beat Skype’s original noise-cancelling algorithm).

    No, I’ve really thought and genuinely have nothing else. If technology regressed 10 years I think I’d personally be unaffected (and happier, I could avoid upgrading my hardware for so long).

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      4 days ago

      And as they say, hardware being ever faster is balanced by software being ever more bloated. The only exception is SSDs which makes booting a lot faster and solves a lot of issues inherent with HDDs being electromechanical instead of being pure electronics, but I don’t see a major difference in SSDs between 2015 and now outside of them becoming cheaper.

      • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        hardware being ever faster is balanced by software being ever more bloated

        This is the key, really. I get that for a while, developers spent a lot of time and effort on optimising stuff to a tee, but we very much now go the other way, and developers will increase software size 10-fold before they spend a couple days work to make it actually efficient.

        Games nowadays will just include a 4GB texture for every dirty brick wall before they think about coding a shader for a prettier, smaller, less GPU-load, effect.

        Adobe Acrobat Reader is now about a gigabyte. To read PDFs. Yet far as I can tell outwardly the PDF format hasn’t changed in two decades, when the Reader was more like 10MB.

        So many modern days programs package in whole-ass web browser engines for like, one screen.

      • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        Yeah they’ve improved in every aspect since the early SSDs. Cost, physical size, storage size, read/write speed, and longevity. SSDs have existed for a long time, but they’ve improved a lot too.