Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

110 pointsbotolo120 comments

I was born in 1973.

My first exciting thing was my Commodore 64. I loved playing games with friends, I loved typing code from magazines, I loved creating sprites on paper and dreaming of giving them life on my Commodore 64.

My second exciting thing was my first modem and the first connections to the local BBS in my town. I loved chatting with people, I loved downloading JPGs (well, you can imagine what kind).

My third exciting thing was the internet. This was an evolution of my second exciting thing, it was BBS on steroids. I loved visiting my local newsstand and buying the new issue of .Net magazine. The final pages always included a list of cool new websites to try.

My fourth exciting thing was social media. I loved keeping in touch with friends on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc.

My fifth exciting thing was Bitcoin. I got lost in the rabbit hole, having fun mining with my computer (when it was too late to make money), spending hours reading posts on btctalk, buying my first Bitcoin from a guy at a coffee shop for cash, mining with my first Butterfly hardware (again, not enough to make a profit), building my Raspiblitz, staring at Blockchain.info waiting for the next block to be mined.

It has now been quite a while since the last time I was excited about something. The top excitement for Bitcoin was maybe around 2015. Now it's just all about money money money on crypto or developments that are way too complex for me to understand.

What is exciting you nowadays? Any new technology, any new website, any new cool thing going on in the tech world?

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Something I’ve been thinking about is whether the current technological landscape, through positive and negative pressures, can enable a revival of small-scale production. Basically, making more of what you consume at home, in your neighborhood, etc.

I think “human scale” technologies can help mitigate some of the more nightmarish horizons of the technological society we inhabit, though, obviously, neither completely, nor on their own.

My background is in networks, so I tend to think about things from that perspective (e.g., a private U-LTE network for communication with neighbors, mesh nets of sensors to make home food production more manageable and efficient). It’s a very fruitful area for anyone interested in a more communal and family-oriented future.

Obvious difficulties are: Is the efficiency hit one gets from decentralization practically viable, long term? In which cases? How do you get your silicon? Other materials? Are those suppliers going to let you do this? How do you do this in the existing regulatory and political climate? Can this work for the poor? Does it open, unintentionally, new frontiers of technological domination?

All interesting questions; only some have technical solution.

EDIT: Adding also that I am interested in new or revived applications for “low-tech,” if that’s something anybody else knows about and wants to share.

I've been thinking along similar lines - I'd term it "the rise of the micromarket". There are a bunch of technology trends that I think may be converging long-term to erase the era of mass production and mass market consumer goods.

One is that advances in personalization on the Internet haven't carried through to physical goods. When I want to curate my Facebook or Reddit feed, I can very tightly control the information I consume so it fits my lifestyle perfectly. When I want to buy a piece of furniture or shelf on Amazon, I get stuck in this uncanny valley where there are millions of products available but none is exactly the size, shape, color, and material that I want. Why can't I say "I want a double corner wall shelf, 23" on one side and 29" on the other, 8" deep, filigreed supports, made out of pine and painted to match my walls"?

Another is that manufacturing is increasingly labor-free and computer-controlled anyway. In a factory, there's going to be a bunch of CNC machines, computer-controlled sawmills, maybe some injection molds, 3D-printers for prototyping, pick-n-place machines, etc. Most of these are computer-controlled anyway, with humans only needed to feed & adjust the machines. Could you computer-control a home or neighborhood machine instead, so that people only need to download a blueprint from the Internet or make it themselves? Why do we need such big production runs, if computers can reconfigure the manufacturing without any human labor? Why not have people buy plastic filament, scrap aluminum, scrap stainless steel, OSB or plywood or 2x4s, and then just feed the machine with a pre-built software blueprint?

A third is improved new manufacturing technologies, particularly 3D printing and pick & place machines. It feels like these are still stuck in existing paradigms, trying to fit into the mass-market industrial production system rather than experimenting with novel combinations on their own. For example, what if instead of P&Ping just electronic components on a circuit board, you used it to assemble individual plastic, metal, and wood parts that had previously been 3D-printed, and then 3D-printed joints to hold them in place? Could you use miniaturized CnC lathes to smooth down the surface of a 3D-printed part, which has traditionally been one of the big problems with 3D-printing?

Then there are environmental problems with supply chains being fragile and globalization potentially unwinding. That could provide an extra kick to hyper-localize manufacturing again.

Micro-manufacturing is the real Amazon killer, potentially. I can't see them being displaced in retail now. But if we just stop buying manufactured products and start making them ourselves, all of their advantages in supply chain management, bargaining, product selection, and logistics go away.

I'm a physician and I've thought a lot about this in the context of the US healthcare system. Step foot in a hospital and the first thing you notice is that everything is single-use, thousand-dollar widgets. I've been into the idea of open-source medical hardware and software for a while. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the obscene cost of getting FDA approval for even the simplest medical device makes these types of initiatives a non-starter.

The way the marketplace is organizing, most local hospitals are being purchased and re-organized into large regional state-wide networks. At this scale I wonder if it might become economically feasible for a hospital system (or systems) to invest in getting open-source designs through the approval process and then have an in-house engineering department that could manufacture parts for the regional system.

This immediately made me think of a cyberpunk dystopia where there are shiny, pre-packaged widgets for the elite and open-source medicine for the poor masses. But then I immediately remembered that there may just be no medicine for the masses instead.

Open source tools could be a boon to civilization though, especially in developing countries - one problem is materials though. Some optics projects are really clever, like that visual microscope malaria diagnostic kit with the glass ball lens. But then again, you think: hey, are real microscopes really that unaffordable? I really have to read up on how that was financed and why that road was taken.

Some larger hospitals already have this, or had something like this. I know personally of one that had an in-house engineering team and it was slowly dismantled in a process of outsourcing, until the remainder of the team resigned as a group. It caused a certain amount of chaos.

EHR is sort of similar. To me, the roll-out of that was a disaster, and pushed what was in-house in most cases to being managed by EPIC and other EHRs out of the hospital. The mandates were a big mistake in my opinion, as it forced hospitals to scramble to use something being offered by outsiders, instead of collaborating to produce something open-source, or growing EHRs more organically from within the organization.

I personally blame the rise of hostageware in hospital settings partially on this trend.

My broader point is that although I think there's a lot of potential with open source hardware, software, and things like 3D printers, prevailing economic forces are pushing in the opposite direction. Consolidation and mergers, streamlining everything that doesn't contribute to increasingly dense profits as you go up the administrative chain. In this schema, better to outsource everything you can to trim costs. I don't agree with it, as I think it leads to a lot of hidden costs and hidden but lost benefits, but that's the idea.

Unfortunately, the combination of overregulation and profit-driven hierarchical management is creating pressures against in-house, from the bottom up creation of goods and medical services. The talent is there, it's just pushed out from the top.

Sometimes I feel like healthcare and the biomedical area is today driven more by the interests of profiteers than patients/clients/customers.

At least in OSH for Medical Devices, the limiting factor under current 21CFR regulations would probably be Manufacturing and the associated support operations. Design & Development is tedious but doable in an OSH/OSS fashion, and getting through 510k could probably be solved by people donating skills (and someone else donating cash). Don't quote me, but I don't think that the actual fees that the FDA charges to do a 510-k submission are not particularly high, it's just that the work that goes along with it is burdensome and people want to be paid. In an Open Source approach, this could largely go away as long as someone donates the fees.

That gives you a design that the FDA is happy with.

Now you have to build, distribute, service and support that device and no matter how you slice it, you're looking at substantial costs to comply with 21CFR across all these tasks. So this is where the creativity really has to come in: can we spread those costs across a "community" to make it worthwhile, or will we just end up right back at Square One with single use, $1,000 devices?

I don't think there's a path forward (at least in the US) without change to regulations.

The race for breakeven fusion is heating up, and it's exciting to see. That old adage about reaching breakeven being 'always 30 years in the future' is actually, finally looking more like 5-10 years. Relevant projects, all tokamaks: The largest ever fusion reactor so far which is being built now -- ITER in France, then there's MIT/Commonwealth Fusion's SPARC (they just demoed a type 2 superconductor magnet that developed 20T in its rather large borehole), China's EAST reactor and its recent 200+ million degree temperature and confinement time records, and the venerable JET reactor in the UK, which still holds the Q record of ~0.67 with D+T and they are prepping for another tritium run. These projects are some of the leaders in the field, amongst many others.

The stellarators are also fascinating projects though even more geometrically complex than tokamaks are. The Moebius strip-like twist allows them to impart stability to a ring of plasma in ways that tokamaks can't. The Wendelstein X7 in Germany and the Large Helical Device in Japan are the largest and most recent examples. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab has a novel stellarator design called NCSX, which interestingly uses coils and arrays of permanent magnets.

The advent of type 2 superconductors at scale will contribute greatly to this speed-up to acheive breakeven with tokamaks and stellarators. The much smaller and newer design MIT SPARC (which will use the more recently developed type 2 superconductors) might even beat ITER(which uses type 1 superconductors) to Q=1+!

Nice listings by the way

Sabine Hossenfelder recently explained why breakeven fission is much further away than the public generally believes [0]. Without spoiling her explanation, it boils down to how you measure "breakeven".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

Cheap solar combined with the electric transport revolution (courtesy of better batteries), and the likely implications towards the architecture of our future power generation and storage.

It costs money, but it's now possible to live a first-world lifestyle - sports car and all - without burning any fossil fuels. Houses can be made self-sufficient. The biggest impediment to turning that into a massive distributed green power grid is regulatory.

We'll need that grid, so I'm confident the walls will come down. Electric cars are widely accepted as the future, with many countries attempting to ban ICE cars completely within a relatively short timeframe, but nobody seems to be strongly considering how on earth we'll charge them all. There's going to be a rocky period of power shortages, but that will incentivize the construction of off-grid homes, which will incentivize ways of arbitrating their surplus power. The future of this space looks interesting.

An offshoot of all this that's exciting from a social perspective is the rise of personal electric transport, like e-scooters and e-bikes. We're well on our way to eliminating fossil fuels from our cities, and that makes me happy.

Second this, though from a slightly different angle. Never was a car person myself. But do yourself a favor and rent a Tesla for a day. Your life will never be the same again. And neither will the world.

My take on this is that governments should be incentivising power/oil companies to create public infrastructure for electric car charging which would further speed up the move away from oil-based energy.

I'm not particularly well informed but I believe Barcelona city has made some steps on this by incorporating a jointly-held power company to add hundreds of charging points around the city. Public infrastructure achieved but via private investment.

More here - https://www.endolla.barcelona/en/

I'm really excited about things from the past that have managed to bubble to the present. Nothing modern has really excited me in a long time. (I'm hopeful something in this thread will spark that old feeling again!)

The Creatures Evolution Engine source code (if anybody remembers the Creatures games / Cyberlife) getting released. Now we'll know exactly what makes those Norns and their world tick, which is fascinating: https://archive.org/details/lc2e-sun-16-jan-2000.tar01

All of the Infocom source code and information about ZIL and the stories from the founders.

The LambdaMOO server getting forked and modernized with Stunt and ToastStunt. Now there is even talk of the original server getting updated again after 20 years of the maintainer doing nothing with it.

Fun stuff!

Infocom! ZIL! ZSCII! Z-Machine! Inform!

(Yes, they excite me too! Have an upvote!)

Edit: Oh, and having 2,916 front-end frameworks to choose from. Yay.

Anytime I see someone with exclamation marks I'm excited!! Gonna look + see what these are!

Hard to get excited when I already feel like I have more tech than I need. I feel like we've reached all the low hanging fruits of quality of life before the 90s (health/medical care, electricity, fridges, central heating, running water). Computers are nice, smartphones are convenient, google map is the 8th wonder of the world, but I feel like we're now going backwards, products are becoming more and more unrepairable, unreliable, complex, made to be consumed and discarded. We're in an age of infinitely small incremental updates to existing technologies.

It's also hard to get excited about gadgets when most of the real world issues are social or economical.

When I want to dream a bit I open an old book about medicine/chemistry/woodworking/metalsmithing/1900s inventions. Back in these days a single person could still take giant steps, nowadays progress is extremely slow and requires huge teams if not megacorps with unlimited amount of money.

YouTube and the content creator industry (and the surrounding hardware tech) excites me.

I follow a channel on YouTube called "The Best Ever Food Review Show", a super high-production values travel/food TV channel produced by a guy from Minnesota who bootstrapped the operation himself. Imagine having the camera equipment (anything from Sony RX's to BlackMagic) and computer hardware (PC/Mac) and software (Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, FCP) today that is capable of producing a show that is equal to or exceeds the quality of most network travel TV shows. (he has since hired a team, but still, I'm sure their budget is a fraction of Food Network budgets)

Same deal with MKBHD -- really high quality content and really high production values. (MKBHD uses Red cameras)

I have no interested in producing content myself, but I can't help but be fascinated by the amount of amazing independent content that's out there on YouTube, all enabled by prosumer hardware and software.

I went to YouTube to watch "The Best Ever Food Review Show" and to be honest I thought it would be dumb. I ended up watching a very entertaining episode about the best fried chicken burger. Thanks for sharing.

I am excited about dedicated servers. Yes, dedicated, not cloud servers in AWS or something like that. I am interested in running my own server for decades, but nowadays, since about 2 years, you get extremely powerful and reliable servers for already 40 bucks a month. That is amazing. The power you can deliver today compared to the costs reached a very good ratio. This was unthinkable 5-7 years ago and open a lot of possibilities.

The commoditization of dc space in the last 10 years has been nothing short of amazing. Today you can buy 100G port switches for pennies and run stock linux on them. With kubernetes you can build entire warehouse scale supercomputers on a budget when previously only google and select few could do it.

"dc space"?

dc=datacenter

I am an old sysadmin. I have been thinking recently I should get rid of my server in the roofspace and migrate stuff on it to the cloud. I had to climb the ladder today and reboot it from the terminal. It was like seeing an old friend. The old girl still has life in her. She's not getting put out to pasture yet (costs £3 to £4 a month to run).

me, too

Plus, I really like Hetzner

The cloud is really just the centralized computing paradigm of the old days with a new coat of paint.

This fascinates me because people seem to have forgotten that the reason personal computing was such an incredible thing is that it freed people from that old paradigm. I suspect that, over time, people will lean anew why it was that being freed of it was such a great thing.

Yeah, exactly this! I'm always telling people that "the cloud" is just taking us back to mainframes and dumb terminals. Especially now with things like Chromebooks existing.

The most offensive thing of all is that modern dumb terminals don't have keyboards anywhere near as good as the old days.

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I really hope there will be a layered solution allowing businesses to build their own scalable, resilient yet compact data centers.

This whole bite and switch let-move-on-cloud religion must end.

The fall of Intel.

For my entire life (born in 1972, same timescale) Intel has managed to keep a leash on what personal computers could be. The few times it's slipped have led to exciting advances, but they got them under control again quickly.

The explosion of held up potential that will happen when they shatter should (I hope) make the AT&T breakup look small.

I didnt realize that people felt this way. In what way do you imagine personal computing would change if intel was broken up? I can't even imagine what vision you have in this regard.

If intel had been even just a little less rapacious, things like many alternative architectures might've existed for longer (Alpha was kewl!).

I can't do justice to the examples of bad faith marketing they've indulged in, anti-competitive acquisitions of promising companies that then are buried, architecture choices made for marketing gains that saddle programmers with years of boneheaded bullshit, delightful tricks like "optimized" compilers with "oopsie" slow code paths for non-intel cpus...

Perhaps there's a good intel bashing thread someone could reference?

As to how things will change, we're seeing some of it already; we've got multiple micro-controllers on the market and cheap single board computers that do everything a desktop needs. I'm expecting some backplane bus to take over soon and the definition of what a computer is to become even harder to nail down.

Am I wrong in thinking alternative architectures could make it harder to develop software, and a lot of boneheadedness is a result of backwards compatibility? We already have ASICs for very specific processing applications, so I'm not sure society is suffering a huge opportunity cost. That said; I'm not a computer engineer or architect, or even anything close. Also the 'oopsies slow paths' thing is actually business horse shit, and I have heard that rumor substantiated by quite a number of people.

I'm down for open source architectures, but our manufacturing technology is not ready to support DIY processors yet, even at low speeds. Solving the manufacturing process could go a long way to spurring competitive processor architectures.

I’m also interested in what kind of world you might imagine. If Intel were broken up, I imagine the processor group would remain in-tact. I don’t really feel like Intel really has any other major successful businesses (though I’m pretty ignorant in this space)

In my opinion, this would be terrible. All I envision is walled gardens and no American made chips. Intel fostered an era of truly personal computing where people owned their hardware.

Nothing. At least in terms of "Bits"

Technology as a word has now blended to everything about "bits" or Information Technology. But my background is EE I am always more interested in "atoms". How "bits" should have helped "atoms" to make more interesting things. Instead we have SnapChat that now worth the same as Sony.

I really do believe there are many many sector of our world and business that is not really help by "bits" at all. Anyone who ever touched CRM / ERP discussions might have a sense of how out of far apart technology (bits) and real world business needs are. And that example is only the tip of an iceberg. Tech should be much more than "bits".

So if I were to pick things that excite me most is the potential of Battery Breakthrough, Nuclear Fusion Progress.

And I am increasingly looking into Low tech or No Tech. Back to Mechanical watch, Single purpose appliance, Mechanical engineering, Paper Back Books. As if I am running away from "bits".

I think that would be something well-adapted to our future of conserving energy. Less planned obsolescence, more maintainability. In a perfect world, we could put all our advances in the 'atom' world into appliances that make everyone's life better.

That's one reason why I really like 'simple' engineering projects that aim to translate scientific/technological advances to communities in developing countries (the good ones, there are many well-meant-but-too-high-tech projects). One of the best ones I can think of is the self-made charcoal barrel and based on that water filtration setup.

I predict we are entering (or have entered) a silver age of technology where progress will be slower and less breathtaking. Rather than radical innovation we will see slower and steady progress within existing technologies. Ideally the manic optimism (and pessimism) of the past will give way to a calmer, more humble optimism.

In web development in particular I hope this will lead to a reexamination of lost ideas, such as the hypermedia architecture. I think you are seeing that with things like Hotwire and htmx.

So I would look to ideas from the past, perhaps abandoned today, for things to inspire us.

Taking it a little slower could be great for mental health and social technologies. I love science and science/engineering technologies, but IMO we have been amiss by changing our lives so quickly with technological progress, considering people need time to actually experience 'What is good' and not hop wildly between new technologies.

WASM! Being able to write your own language that compiles to something that can run almost at native speed in the browser (pretty much without js) feels like a magical watershed moment.

Can I ask what kind of languages you're thinking of compiling? I was pretty excited about WASM too, until I realized it was bring-your-own-GC (which makes sense in retrospect I suppose), and libgc's WASM support had heavily atrophied last time I tried it (last year), such that it was freeing memory that was still in use(!!). If there's a high-quality GC for WASM you've used, I'd love to know about it for my own use!

I found this thread quite interesting on that topic:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397

As an OCaml fan, I’m pretty into what grain has been up to: https://grain-lang.org. Mem management ref: https://github.com/grain-lang/grain/pull/768/files

I am currently experimenting with my own language wasp/angle:

https://github.com/pannous/wasp/wiki/

As you pointed out true GC is currently postponed, so no long running processes yet. The hope is to get the language finalized just in time when all wasm 2 features become standardized

I'm mostly interested in the obfuscation advantage that WASM provides. Being able to encrypt the whole thing and embed it in the web page to avoid using fetch is allowing me to deploy apps in a more secure way.

I'm enthusiastic about block chain. Is it in a bubble? Yes, but so is virtually every speculative asset... Blockchain legitimately has potential to solve major social problems equitably, for example, online representative voting with open source software, anonymity, verifiability, higher efficiency and powered by the people.

Otherwise, I'm getting pretty stoked about computer vision techniques. If I had more time I would work on projects for controlling basic things within the home. I saw a Youtube video which demonstrated a volume control system, controlled by a camera looking at the distance between your thumb and index finger. I also think many of the techniques in CV have applications in art which has been completely unexplored.

> Blockchain legitimately has potential to solve major social problems

Blockchain was cool and novel, but the hype should be over already. We’re nearing 15 years of blockchain tech and it is still not magic powder that solves society’s problems.

I think its made remarkable progress, especially now that Proof of History exists and Proof of Stake is widespread, most of the ground work is set for efficiently creating trust-less game theoretic environments. I think developing blockchain techs is a naturally slow process, since it take so much effort to test and start a network. If you are used to thinking of blockchain dev like normal software, you would be correct in thinking that blockchain is unimpressive, based on its velocity.

Its not a magic bullet for society's ills, but its going to be a game changer if people really want the games we play to be more equitable and impossible to hijack.

What excites me at the moment is space - and specifically the advent of space as an accessible, valuable, but dangerous place to be - a perfect place for robots.

I think there is a massively exciting amount of development to be done in space robotics, planning, simulation, hardware, etc.

The other exciting venue I see is bioinformatics. The advent of mRNA as a usable technology combined with AlphaFold is a new development that I see unlocking a lot of possibilities.

The first trillionaire will likely be a result of space. I can see a time when robots mine asteroids and process material on the moon.

I love space, and get excited about seeing BlueOrigin/ SpaceX/ Virgin now flying tourists - but I think I am still missing the actual business case.

Where do you see the value beyond novelty? What's the killer application? Settlements on Mars, or something more short-term? I think I'm still stuck in a 'a computer on every desk - yeah, but why would anyone need a computer!?' stage, and it bugs me to no end! ;-)

SpaceX is Moore’s Law for space - as cost per ton to orbit keeps getting lower, qualitatively different tech starts getting relevant.

- Space tourism: luxury zero G hotels, etc.

- Space construction: robots and materials for building large structures in space

- Mining operations

- Zero G manufacturing (I’m not expert but I understand it makes creating certain materials, semiconductors, biopolymers, etc much easier)

- Communications (every country wants to build their own Starlink now)

- Edge compute (once a billion people are serviced by Starlink-type comms, they need low latency access to stuff which should be colocated in space)

- Base building: moon base, Mars base. Every advanced country wants one, soon large corporates will want them too.

- Military operations (refuelling, cargo, surveillance, etc) - every advanced country needs lower cost access to this

- Next generations of existing tech - as cost per ton to orbit goes down, the appropriate tech for building stuff in space will change. Sort of like software radically changed as CPUs got faster. So eg satellites can start using heavier but cheaper or more performant materials.

Mars exploration. I don't know why, but i get all emotional and ureasonably excited about it.

AR. VR is cool and all, and I was blown away the first time I tested it, but the ability to project information into the real world, to create reality 2.0 (a term I am sure I will regret), is just well, magical.

From everyday HUDs to being able to put a fake fire place into your home, AR would be both cool and useful.

At a lower level, Docker is pretty cool and having practical ARM laptops is fantastic (even if only Apple have great ones right now).

It is easy to all doom and gloomy, but we tend to forget that we are living in a world so full of magic. We have access to the greatest library in the world[0], millions upon millions of songs in excellent quality, the most complete encyclopedia of all time and an excellent search engine to tie them all together.

We have free video calls of unlimited duration around the world, we have GPS and can navigate from any one point to any other on Earth.

As long as I am lost in a place with cellphone access I can hold down a button and tell Siri to find a way home (or to any other place).

And while we are talking about this: we have completely changed the face of the planet, throwing out night it self with artificial light. I was born in 1987, we had street lights, but flash lights was a special item that you had to bring and they weren't that bright and didn't last that long. Since LEDs became a thing, they became smaller, brighter and lasted forever. These days they are a built in thing in phones that we don't even think about.

Anyway, we have so much to be excited about if we just look around, but we don't because we take everything for granted.

[0]: what scholar of yore had access to a library with a million books? I know of none. Today anybody who can access library genesis has access to over 6.6 million books.

Honestly one of the most stressful things about tech is feeling like you have to "keep up".

So when I have time to toy around, its with something dumb or old. Or its more of a foundational thing/idea that lasts. Dumb things like 'how does a relational DB work' or 'how does bumpy work'.

At my day job, it feels like I always have to push the envelope. Its fun to just relax and fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

I'm excited by the idea that entry level embedded stuff like Arduino and RPi will keep feeding a new generation of tinkerers, in the same way PCs did (speaking as a child of the 80s). With the amount of plug and play sensors and code nowadays, it seems like imagination is the only limiting factor for inventing useful physical things. I suppose this has been going on for a while now, but I'd say we've yet to see the dividends as it takes a generation of kids to start really being creative with the possibilities.

I see those as a "gateway-drug" to the world of tinkering, there are so many lesser known (and less powerful computationally-wise) that are better fits for simple devices like the ESP and some wireless communication chips like LoRa and DASH7 that can really expand the stuff you can achieve. And these chips are low-powered enough that you can combine them with a battery and a decent solar panel to make them self-sufficient.

Like you said, imagination is the limiting factor, and I enjoy seeing these kinds of projects popping up in the wild.

Right now my current off-hours time-consumer is audio-synch’d lights. Specifically I’m working on music sync for Halloween props. This is a lot of warm up for Christmas too. I’m blown away by what’s available in the FOSS space for this stuff.

Do you mind posting some relevant links for us family men? ;)

Happily! I will share what I use - please be aware there are lots of options in the space. Also, including my wife's advice from last year: Start small - one or two props can be make a great show and can be accomplished in a reasonable time frame.

Xlights: Sequencing and Scheduling software. This is what tells your lights what to do. (https://xlights.org/)

Falcon Pi Player (FPP): This software runs on your controller - A raspberry Pi or a Beaglebone are quite popular. This is what you run your sequences on. In my case, I drive my lights directly from my Pi. (https://github.com/FalconChristmas/fpp and https://falconchristmas.com) Also worth noting: A lot of people use dedicated hardware for this, such as the Falcon line of controllers (https://www.pixelcontroller.com/)

WS2811 Strands: These are probably the most popular lights - they're individually addressable, and pretty dang cheap for what they do. Even cheaper if you plan far ahead and order from China. This link is to my preferred brand, but lots of companies make these. The trick is to choose one company and stick with it, as they'll use the same LEDs across their products and you get good color matching (https://www.amazon.com/BTF-LIGHTING-Diffused-Individually-Ad...)

AusChristmasLighting: I live in the States, but for me this is the best of the online forums for lighting. If for no other reason, the UI is substantially nicer thna others I've come across. (https://auschristmaslighting.com/)

My own blog post about getting started and setting stuff up: (https://aaroneiche.com/2020/12/27/holiday-lights-display/)

Good luck, and if you have questions, feel to ping me.

Metal additive manufacturing emerging tech, printed perovskite solar cells, solid state batteries, deepmind going into physics, VR finally passing early adopter phase and getting ready to hit wider population

Among other things, Virtual Reality... specifically 3D stereoscopic interactive imagery makes things very life-like and I am stroked by its possibilities for recreation as well as for training.

The present day headsets are still bulky, but am sure they will become lighter and even more better.

The interface will also improve. In oculus we can already use fingers to navigate and interface with the OS. This will only improve.

This intrigues me. What would be the best device to explore VR now? Oculus Quest 2? Any new model coming out soon?

For $300 the Quest 2 is the product of the decade. Buy one, seriously, just buy one. I paid 2200 for an iPad pro M1, but I haven't spent an hour with it since I got it 3 months ago. The oculus has 100% of my attention. I watch YouTube, browse the web, online shop, socialize, work, play games with it. I have the extended battery and run 2x 5 hour charges down a day. You want to see the future ^ it's for sale.

And the porn, is very different. That's all I'm going to say. (Wow)

It requires a Facebook account and an internet connection, no? All the Quests were bricks for the duration of the Facebook outage.

I bought an Oculus Rift CV1 and it was an insulting experience. Huge amounts of enforced updates, internet connection abuse, and general Facebook shenanigans. Fool me once... I will buy one when it's an open platform or standalone peripheral. Not before.

It doesn't require constant internet connection, most of games run fine offline. It's still scary to have Facebook-owned device with cameras in home.

As for open standalone platform, Lynx will soon become available. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stanlarroque/lynx/

> For $300 the Quest 2 is the product of the decade

Would you also pay double that amount? That's how much it costs where I live and probably in many other places too. And you can say what you want, even $300 is not an amount I want to risk going down the drain because Facebook had yet another wave of "oops you're banned now too bad" events.

I will not even touch anything Facebook for free nowadays, to be honest. It's only a matter of time until great alternatives exist.

Double? I'd pay 10x that and still be happy. It's outperforming my $4600 MBP for utility. I don't understand why you need to pay double is that import tax? I could relay ship you one potentially.

No one mentioned machine learning yet so I will. Recent language models are incredibly impressive, I’m really excited to see where we go next.

I quit my principal engineer job in the spring to deep dive on Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Was a 3d production pipeline developer for decades, and then facial recognition dev more recently. Getting a formal education in the area I've been working has been a pure joy, and Machine Learning is so close to low level graphics programming, I'm picking it all up surprisingly easy. I practically have to force myself to bed every night, what I'm learning and doing has my juices gushing.

Ha I love it, I followed a similar path quitting a staff role to do ML and it is such a fun and interesting field.

Computer Architecture is exciting. Non Volatile memory, dark silicon, FPGAs, etc are gaining serious traction. Also integrated photonics.

After trying Half Life: Alyx on a quest 2 I am absolutely convinced that VR is going to be huge for the general public in the future.

I saw a comment that said it feels like a game from 5 years in the future and I agree.

VR/AR in general feels like a young field with lots of room for innovation.

Linux Gaming is exciting - because it's been progressing from virtually nothing 10 years ago to being a tangible Windows alternative in 2021. And it keeps getting better.

This is indeed a great development. I use macOS these days, and it seems that many titles now are available for both Windows, Linux and macOS. Very nice!

Quantum computing. It's in very early stages still, but the potential of what it could revolutionize is huge.

Technologies that help us take better care of the environment, slow down climate change, make agriculture sustainable and environmentally friendlier, etc.

And the obvious: space exploration, deeper human-computer interfaces (as much as I'm creeped out by Neuralink, it is inevitable).

Perhaps you’re feeling like everything has been done before. Consider a particular area and imagine how it could be if only a few things are changed. For example, we know where social media got us. How did it evolve to get to this point? Is there a better alternative? Build a better experience or work with others to cut a new path of least resistance.

You may have enjoyed mining Bitcoin, but there’s more to blockchain technology than that. I’m surprised you didn’t mention NFTs or dapps. Search for Web3 if you’re into playing buzzword bingo.

A part of Oculus may have sewn the seeds of fascism that we recently witnessed and are experiencing the effects of as we attempt to squash it back under the rock it crawled out from, but their corporate overlords still feel strongly enough about it to announce they’re dropping a considerable chunk of cash to swindle everyone into thinking they’ve created a “metaverse” instead of another walled garden. There’s a ton of work happening in the VR/AR/XR space that is approachable. Look beyond gaming to AEC and manufacturing applications.

The new 5G phone books are coming! Get ready for that.

Solar and alternative power is only getting bigger. We’ve experienced some technical difficulties getting a certain segment of the population to transition away from fossil fuels, but if we can get an electric car into space, we can hopefully get one in NASCAR.

And I’m sure you’ve seen all the robots, right? The Roomba folks have a nice platform, but there are many others out there. Add a camera, a laser, and a bit of deep learning into the mix and you’ve got yourself hours of entertainment.

Go back and watch Douglas Engelbart’s mother of all demos and you’ll see that some things have progressed further than others. Why is that?

Find what interests you and dig deeper. Make something that works for you and show others the way.

I have to second watching the “Mother of all Demos”.

In fact, in general, make it a habit to revisit 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s technology. Look up old computer magazines, read some articles.

There are TONS of ideas that were pioneered back then that have either been forgotten, have not fully evolved to reach their potential yet, or have evolved in negative ways such that they “lost the thread” (and therefore, provide fertile ground for revisiting and iterating upon).

One of the most monumental mindset shifts I’ve had in my career was looking into the whole Xerox Parc Smalltalk stuff. The concept of a live environment that you can change anything about it, right then and there, was a magical lightbulb that got me thinking about the UIs I build and the data behind them in new ways. It shifted my mind towards user empowerment rather than tight controls and structures.

Rediscovering some of these core ideas in their pure, early forms can be really inspiring.

GNU Guix and reproducible builds. That software can be bitwise reproducible and explicitly declared feels like an exit ramp from the relatively brittle systems that are standard. It feels insane to me that only now these concepts are coming to fruition. Afaict, Guix and Nix invalidate the need for things like puppet, ansible, etc.

The C/C++ replacement landscape is getting more attention than ever.

Odin, Zig, Jai, and Rust all seem promising in their own respects.

Today is like a better version of the 1960's.

Two things:

1) The new space age, really aiming far to the Moon and Mars.

2) The altered state of mind that wide acceptance of Psychedelics is going to bring to the masses.

I have never gotten any benefits from psychedelics whatsoever. Sure they are fun and mind blowing but I have never experienced a tangible improvement in my mental health. Actually I had a bad trip and that has had a negative impact on my mental health I had depersonalisation and anxiety for months after.

I think the current trend is micro-dosing, and having never had a "real" psychedelic I'm very keen to try micro-dosing.

I'm not interested in "new" usually (but I do enjoy anything Heidi Howard releases in her research). I like distributed systems, highly available services, and operating at scale. I like thinking how we can improve systems to make customers happier and grow the bottom line. Sometimes, I'd probably keep optimizing a given service, but I also like monitoring services and determining ways to know if the service is meeting customer needs, and I let that guide or influence "good enough to delight customers." I like ownership. I want to own my services from data layer to public API, and to promote devops culture.

Not sure if this is the spirit of your question. I like moving products forward, and the tech is usually an implementation detail.

Obviously the technology in question is mostly about software related developments. There is a lot of exciting technology out there about emission reduction, renewable energy or CO2 capture. Judging by the comments not really a matter of interest, or is it?

CO2 capture is of interest; I mean Im interested in the survival of the species, think others here are too.

Large scale and efficient carbon capture already exists, they are called trees. The possibility of finding something significantly more efficient than trees is like the possibility of finding cold fusion or super battery tech, it would be exciting if it actually worked but all the claims made in those articles never seem to materialize so it quickly becomes completely unexciting.

For the thing that keeps exciting me, has been for about 5 years now, is single board computers. At first the Raspberry Pi and the forks of it were exciting to me. But as time as has gone on more CPU power, memory and even graphics have been stuffed into these boards. Sure, they don't 100% replace a beefy desktop but considering they give some desktops of the 2000-2015s a run for their money is exciting. Not only that but the size too. Just the power/size and general usability is exciting to me. Then there is the whole connection headers for programming the board as a microcontroller for robotics or whatever.

AI (GPT-3 and similar technology). It's spawning a new generation of games, probably similar to roguelikes in that the effort bar is low enough that someone of generic skill can build one on their own. Games have the potential to be far more emergent than they ever were. AI Dungeon is like the Zork of today.

AI dungeon struck me the same way Eliza did in the mid-90s, trite. It wasn't really interactive, in my estimation. Maybe I just have a poor imagination for that style of game.

Like looking or examine an object twice would give contradictory accounts. Now, unreliable narrator is a valid storytelling device, but it just seemed ... Eliza.

On a social level: open source and how easy it is nowadays to develop something.

People may say the same about the computer platforms of the old days, but i think that we're still seeing a pretty good period of time before the larger walled gardens have taken over. You can have a server in the cloud up and running in minutes. There are even managed services or PaaS offerings, if you'd prefer to use those and don't fall in the SaaSS trap: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

Want to do embedded development? Arduino and the compatible platforms are lovely! Need something more powerful? Raspberry Pi and the compatibles have got your back! Even more so? Just get a low power x86 CPU like 200GE and it'll be more than you need for the near future! Of course, you can also do your part in decreasing e-waste and use cheap refurbished hardware as well, perhaps even buying professional grade stuff, like the people over at https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ community often do.

Need a software library or a language to help you with a particular task? It probably not only exists, but also has documentation and even tutorials available at a whim! You don't need to read magazines or manually copy code, you can download ready to run examples from GitHub, or even view them without leaving your browser! And the variety of languages is also lovely, anything from Python with its rich ecosystem, Ruby and PHP for simple webapp development, to Java, .NET for more serious platforms, Go and even Rust for working at a lower abstraction layer.

Need a larger piece of software? There are self-hosted platforms for blogging, sharing files, even e-commerce stores that you can host on your own. Most of those are also open source and free. While the licenses vary, in most cases you can modify the software to suit your needs, or to even offer fixes that may benefit thousands or millions across the globe. And on the opposite side, you also benefit from the work of others as well! As for the complicated domains, there are businesses to address your needs. Want to take payments? Stripe or Paypal has got your back.

And even within these walled gardens, things are mostly acceptable for now: you can host videos on YouTube, reach your audiences on social media or even use platforms for app delivery. That's not to say that they're perfect, but 20 years ago you simply didn't have anything like that. I recall one of the GDC talks about how back in the day people had to order video games from a small company by phone, which nowadays seems as curious, as it does unnecessary.

Oh, and also the FOSS and open source movements in general are amazing to behold. You get entire production ready operating systems like Debian or FreeBSD for free. They even probably run on the hardware that is in your home! And they can scale from a laptop to a server farm with few to no issues! Even driver support is improving and you also get a whole bunch of amazing free software: everything from LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Krita, Blender, Audacity, kdenlive, VSCodium/NetBeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ (though personally i pay for the package of all JetBrains tools) to even game engines like Godot.

On a technical level: containers and software that compiles to small static binaries. In my eyes, both of those approaches are good for achieving higher levels of environment independence and if software is written with 12 Factor App principles (https://12factor.net/) in mind, or just follows some of the UNIX best practices, then it's likely that it'll be reasonably easy to configure and run.

For example, in my homelab, i run about 90% of the software in containers, giving everything resource limits, being able to redeploy stuff based on changes to a text file or two, but besides that i can also escape the clutches of the *nix file system structure which every piece of software treats differently and can achieve something like keeping all of the data that i care about within the system under a separate/common directory, "/docker" in my case. This leads to a simple directory structure, like "/docker/nextcloud/data/mysql/..." and also really simplifies backups.

It seems like someone looked at how we run software, and instead of trying to implement it from the bottom up, instead decided to create it from the top down - focusing on an easier Ops experience, and it shows! Similarly, even static binaries need to be built more often to keep up to date with their dependency updates, at the same time when you get that binary, you'll be pretty sure that it'll work to the end of time in a trusted environment with trusted data. It's much better than CentOS 8 breaking the xrdp package for some reason, or similar things happening with updates.

Oh, also, i cannot overstate how nice things like Let's Encrypt are - now you can secure your sites for free and automate certificate renewal. And with web servers like Caddy, a lot of things that used to be really hard are getting easier to do. Same for using Docker Swarm and Portainer for managing small container cluster deployments (though some people also say lovely things about Hashicorp Nomad, which optionally also integrates nicely with their Consul service mesh and Vault credential system).

In summary: Things aren't necessarily perfect, but they definitely could be a lot worse! If you look at the positives, it seems like there are a lot of advancements happening and maybe even mobile devices won't be so vendor-locked in about 20-40 years, given how ARM seems to slowly be gaining more and more ground! Similarly, i'm curious to see where FOSS will go.

Nice Write-up!

Unreal Engine, Tesla, techno music.

Basically all the things that EM's companies are working on: spaceships & solar system exploration, neuralink, humanoid robots. EM has perfect taste for what's cool and important in tech/engineering/applied science

Everything else is meh

Hm… This excites me: Go. Containers. The Linux kernel. Static site generators (pick your desired flavour). AWS Lambda. Laurent Bercot’s s6/s6-rc (the former is a suite of programs for process supervision, the latter is a service manager).

Pretty excited about Algorand's AVM 1.0 release and new features. But I am biased since that is what I have been working on recently.

Looking forward to more comfortable lighter weight VR/AR glasses. Think that upcoming displays will be 10X more comfortable and use optical wave guide instead of phone on face and that will make a huge difference.

Looking forward to Neuralink and that type of thing, ie brain computer interfaces.

Artificial muscles have come a long way. Especially promising are the high voltage types which I can't remember now, HASEL or something. 3d-printed artificial muscles and limbs could be a real thing.

Probably nothing. I think we peaked in early 2000s and now we're floating on a plateau. I don't think progress will be restored during my lifetime unless we first meet a shared catastrophe on the level of WW2.

In a weird bleak way I was hoping that Covid would be a catalyst for the next big reset, in the way WW1 and WW2 were, but it would have needed to affect our daily lives greatly for at least 5 years for that to happen. It only managed to cripple us for 18 months, and for many it is life back to normal. Again we have used technology to preserve the status quo, and not for the betterment of the human race.

Nothing.

I think people confuse interesting with exciting. Excitement was when I first got my driver's license; when I got my Atari 800 for Christmas; the first time I drove a 1998 BMW M3, whew! that car made me smile every time I drove it! Things like those excited me, not another web framework or programming language, or cloud services, or another phone, or saving the world somehow.

But I do have interests like programming a TI calculator, living off grid, making a rogue-like game, repairing and restoring classic arcade games from the ground up, such as Pacman and Defender.

Excitement only comes every once in a while.

Battery technology, specifically non-lithium. I see the efforts to get rid of gas powered cars, but I see battery technology as a potential blocker.

Decentralized Finance - seems some very interesting things could come out of this.

3D printing in the consumer space. I have heard they print jet engine parts now. I can only imagine what people who tinker at home can come up with as the technology improves.

Hardware based ML models, imagine having a gpt-3 model on a chip that fits in your pocket? This would be something right out of a William Gibson novel.

That we will one day be able to communicate telepathically via BMIs

3D-scanning of, places....

All the trend of VR usually forgets that until now it was very difficult ( & costly) to have the 3D scan. Of shops, malls, indoor homes, cities, so we can get web users to immerse into. This excites me because it is happening now.

Examples : Matterport, Unity, free-visit ( https://bit.ly/3BIMfwl )

Nothing specific but I think that products and services adding a layer of simplification, discoverability and aggregation on top of existing solutions has a bright future.

Too many well meaning, yet messy, complicated, risky and buggy services each try to drag potential customer into their swamp.

Each has a gold nugget and we need layer that aggregate, filters and simplifies whatever exists for end user.

Inverting the web.

Imagine web technologies that are inherently private, no third parties or servers, and yet more social than current social networks.

The goal of such a technology is to be divisive. Separate the population that wants to broadcast or silently lurk from those that wish to share and engage.

It's sad, but... nothing.

The things that I do find interesting are usually expensive, which crushes any interest. I hate my job and mostly see technology as torture due to it. Even if I want to work on an idea, I don't feel like staring at a screen after working my regular job.

Honestly nothing I’ve seen lately sadly. There have been a few more recent technologies that piqued my interest, but sadly I can never get involved with them. Im also pretty young and missed / was too young for most of the revolutionary developments in tech.

Seeing all those comments about low tech being exciting to people here has really made my day. It's something that I've been increasingly interested in over the years, but I thought I didn't have much company in that.

Remote learning technology is what I would like to dig deeper in.

I imagine software development skills becoming as widespread as math skills worldwide in 50 years. Its impact will be exponential.

Photonic computing and the return of Fortran. These are two separate things but to some degree they're both boosted by the rise of heterogeneous computing.

Electrons are photons, aren't they? I'm guessing you mean computing with light instead of voltage, but even then, aren't a lot of the same restrictions there, clock fanout and speed (6ghz or whatever)?

> Electrons are photons, aren't they?

They’re not

electrons pop into higher energy orbitals when they absorb a photon, but electrons’ energy is represented as a voltage, while a photons energy is expressed as its frequency.

im no photonics engineer but iirc the attractive part is, you’re not dealing with charged particles anymore, so you can go even smaller with your “transistors” without getting interference.

I'm curious about the Fortran aspect - I've never worked with it (though I've always been a little curious). Care to elaborate?

Fractional lightspeed orbital dock laser foil space trams and planetary exploration in nearby solar systems.

mRNA vaccines, for me. I'm sure most people read this fantastic write-up of how the covid vaccine works back in December: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

It really opened my eyes to how far we've come over the years in learning to game our immune system. And the existence of printers for custom DNA blew my mind. I can't even get printers to reliably put ink on paper, let alone create the building blocks of life.

Truly exciting time. That we now have an mRNA vaccine for malaria, a disease that kills millions is truly understated.

audio-based apps, AirPods, voice assistance - especially promising progress on the horizon with using OpenAI's Codex

DeFi.

It's an ugly callous teenager as of now, but it grows quickly and is ingenious.

(Edit: I am about the same age as you)

homomorphic encryption & zero trust servers

Oculus quest 2. Reminds me of the first iPhone. So much potential, and they finally have the basics for the platform right.

I am replying to my own post to share something that gives me some excitement. Nothing compared to the major revolutions I mentioned in my post, but definitely something that shows some potential.

AR - I was blown away by the AR comic book reader developed by VeVe for their NFT comic books. I still think that NFTs are lame (at least their current format), but being able to see through your iPhone an old comic book sitting right there on your table and flipping its pages was something magical. Never before I wanted so badly to have AR glasses with me and just being able to read a comic book collection in this way, without the need of my iPhone.

Robots - I was initially excited about the Amazon Echo, but I ended up using it only to set a timer when I cook. The new Amazon Astro is exciting. Way too expensive right now and I am just scared it might be a huge disappointment, but the idea of having a robot in my house that follows me, helps me, etc. sounds like super fun and very exciting.

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