Blue LEDs. We had red and green since the '60s, but blue took until the '90s to figure out and the guy who did so got a Nobel prize for it because that finally meant we could use them for white lights and full-color displays.
And yet i am this close to wanting him jailed
Well not him, I guess, just the designers of all those devices that have a blue laser like led in it shining in my eyes at 4 AM in the morning. Fuck all those digital clocks, TVs, etc.
It’s also opened the door to some very interesting synthetic chemistry applications that use blue light, it’s changed the field of photochemistry
I remember when the only color laser pointer was red. Now you have all the colors of the rainbow.
And damn powerful. So powerful you get almost every time wayyy more than allowed/advertised.
so that’s the guy I can blame for blinding LED vehicle headlights?
You can blame The Weeknd
Two income households that still can’t afford a single-family home.
I think a 1970s American would get a kick out these:
- Global warming is real and worse than you think and no it’s not going to be addressed.
- Those gas prices are going no where but up.
- Anyway we decided that all cars will be F350s.
- I hope you like pocket electronics because those are literally the only things that will seem truly futuristic to you. Everything else? Pretty much the same. Yep. We don’t even live longer.
Energy Crisis 2.0
Ah, ah, ah, “we” decided?
I think they’d find 4k OLED TVs impressive too. Maybe generative AI. A lot of other things like Bitcoin, eh, whatever.
1992 born but I’ve said to my mom crazy how nothings changed. Updated to work the same as before but other than that attempts to change everything is a major flaw.
I was born in the early 80s. Things HAVE changed big time. A lot of things that we do not see on a daily basis that have changed majorly. Medical tech is one. most people do not work in the medical field and do not pay much attention to it (I am one of them!) but the sheer amount of stuff that has changed in medicine is staggering.
Like transportation hasn’t changed though. It’s all update to function exactly the same.
Not everything has stayed the same but a few things of our daily lives that we thought were going to be more extravagant or technology driven aren’t and now some of the things that have technologocal advances we wonder why the fuck they need them, like toasters. Why the fuck does a toaster need Bluetooth?
Personally, I’d go with 80s/90s nerds, as it would take a special kind of 70s nerd to understand digital storage enough to be wowed by a 4tb sd card.
Multi-gigabit network speeds being common in people’s homes. 400mbps+ wifi speeds being common too.
4KUHD tvs and on your phone. Small B&W crt tvs were extremely common.
Bluetooth headphones, cords were a pain.
The more I say, the more I think, basically everything.
I just did the math on network speed the other day. I remember our local dial up ISP upgrading to 56k from 28.8 and it blew me away, although I rarely connected above 33.6. I’m currently on 1200 mbps, nearly 23,000 times faster than 56kbps and about 37,000x faster than the 33.6 I actually received.
I can transfer in one second what took about 10 hours before. A movie I just watched would have taken over 95 days to download at 90s speeds.
I regularly work with 800Gbps Ethernet at work
SDR (Software Defined Radio)
Its insane how many things you can do/listen to with a simple cheap USB stick.
Cameras in general. Good quality film cameras took some work and were heavy. Like bookbag heavy. You’d have to carry a little set of filters (thin lens caps that screwed onto the main lens) in addition to another lens or two to get a good range of options. Now, tap, done. Copies? NP. Black and white? Tap. No need to use up the roll of color film and then switch to black and white film.
And modern mid-range photo cameras come with crazy features. Autofocus that can detect human and even animal eyes and instantly focus on those. Lenses with whisper-quiet and crazy fast ultrasonic focusing motors. Image stabilization both in the lens and in the camera.
Oh, and your photo camera can record video, too, because why wouldn’t it?
Remember vid cams way back? On the shoulder with VHS tapes.
Can’t wait for this revolution in wildlife photography.
I don’t think the 4tb micro SD card actually exists. They top out at 2tb which might be the maximum for the protocol. Your photo actually says SDHC which is clearly a mockup since SDHC was 32GB maximum. 4TB would have to be SDUC which is the level after SDXC. Sandisk announced a 4TB card last year but I don’t think it was ever shipped, maybe due to the AI-driven shortage.
Partial AI slop: https://electronics.alibaba.com/buyingguides/4tb-microsd-card-reality-check-(2026)
That image has gotta be fake, right?
SDHC only goes up to 32GB and I’m pretty sure the successor SDXC only goes up to 2TB
I’m not quite sure how a card can be both U1 and U3 too
SD express should be able to surpass 2TB, but I don’t know if 4TB micro SD express cards have been made yet
They can print whatever size they want on it if you’re buying from AliExpress 🤪
Back in early days of Aliexpress, I was looking at a bike frame by Trek. I messaged the shop and ask if they stock Specialized as well. Shop replied “Yes, of course we can put whatever decals you want on it”.
Voluntarily being surveilled and profiled 24/7.
Without any sarcasms… That is some kind of wild shit.
They had that in the 1970s
i might get shade for it, but LLMs.
Nah, in the '70s they expected us to have stuff way better than LLMs by now.
LLMs - you can just talk to your computer. I used computers since the 90s and that has always been the ultimate scifi dream and it’s here.
As much as I have a love-hate relationship with these because of all the negative effects (And there are countless ones), it’s quite impressive what current Frontier models can do at this time, with very little input.
You can talk to dumb chatbots since the nineties. Now they can into grammar, wow.
(I know they are way better now. But the basic fact stands.)
It’s a little bit more than that, I would say at this point.
As I said somewhere else I’m not really into LLMs, so I try to stay neutral…
I’m currently using Astra a little bit more, and it’s really interesting to see how these models work these days. You increasingly feel the (self-)reinforcement learning on these models. They developed an interesting code style (not very human…). Also the way it explores the code (and other stuff) like writing scripts on the fly to either explore or monitor, and even writing scripts to build the sourcefiles. And well, it definitely currently reshapes software development…
I wouldn’t say that’s crazier than a 70’s nerds wildest dreams. In the 70’s they thought talking to your computer was just around the corner. They would more likely be amazed that it took so long.
They did that on ST:TOS.
Even the 1tb ones cost too much now. What, are data centers using those too??
Not related to technology. Walking into an airport to greet or to say Bon Voyage to people at the gate!!! Now, the fucking things are like prisons!
We got most of the tech from the jetsons ppl could envision in the early 1960s (video calls, smartphones, smart watches, smart homes), but still don’t have flying cars, cloud cities, robot maids, and moving sidewalks going everywhere.
flying cars are not going to happen. they’re a menace as they are, we don’t need to give people 6dof. they’re also not really futuristic, it’s just the car brained American vision of the future.
I have a robot maid, it just only vacuums and mops. They have them with an arm that can pick up light objects too, they are just expensive.
They are working on robot maids that basically are controlled by humans and see and record EVERYTHING in your house. Not a good idea.
