Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

The last two decades seemed to have progressed glacially slow.

We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops.

3D printing has come a fair way, but we're still not printing cars at home. (I totally would download a car.)

Now all of a sudden we have AI/ML, self-driving cars, high fidelity consumer mocap, AR/VR. The types of things coming out now seem way more sci-fi, cutting edge, and optimistic. A return to the imagination and dreams of the 1950's - 1990's.

2000 - 2020 was a speed bump.

View on HN

From 2000 to 2010 we progressed from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.

The point is more - today's smartphones are the first iphone with a better camera and faster data connection.

That said in other areas there's much more improvement, for example EVs, solar panels, intelligent search engines. Remember the days when we used scripts that would parallelize searches over lycos, yahoo, webcrawler, altavista, alltheweb, ...

The counter point is that the innovation never stopped, it just moved down a level. We 'optimized' the hardware (as in gave it sufficient form to fulfill necessary functions) then did the same for the application space. Twitter, Facebook, Google, music streaming, all solidifying their phone presence over the past ten years.

Just as the application space has begun to stagnant, suddenly our data is speaking back to us through LLMs. Such models will be the next space we'll 'optimize', but these models will also be optimizing themselves. Strange loop.

> Twitter, Facebook, Google, music streaming, all solidifying their phone presence over the past ten years.

I would argue these are all worse outcomes than I'd hoped for.

I dreamed we'd have utilities based on RDF and bittorrent that could pull down any data we liked. Track any authors across the internet, highlight all content about topics we liked, pull in all new astronomy photos. Automatic ranking and scoring to fit our preferences. Better collaboration, much higher signal, much less noise.

I thought we'd control the data, the pipes, the routing, all of it.

We have a product manager internet, not a magical utility knife internet.

In 2001 you could get the Kyocera Palm phone, which is a more valid comparison. But yes.

Nokia also released 9210 about the same time as 3310. From that perspective iPhone was even less of an improvement and a step back in some aspects.

> We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops.

For the past few years they've been experimenting with foldable screens, with hints of rollable screens maybe coming soon, so that's something at least.

I feel like you must be intentionally exaggerating for a reason.

Between the processing power, battery life, storage space (100x), ram (50x), screen resolution (20x pixels) and refresh rate, not to mention network speed…

I can record 4K video at 60fps. On my phone. How is that an incremental improvement?

I consume a huge amount of the web on my phone (and not hate myself or constantly zoom in and out), can type meaningfully fast with swipe/trace, copy/paste to/from my laptop, can use my phone as a webcam (realtime), useful realtime navigation, I pay for the majority of my purchases by holding my phone to a sensor, I put completely wireless incredibly light earbuds that last hours in my ears for listening and talking that actively cancel noise.

Today's phones are incredible.

On the other end of the spectrum, the cheapest smartphones can be purchased for less than $10.

Most of what you've listed is "take this number, make it larger", same as the past century. Foldable and rollable screens are actually something new.

I totally would download a car.

Underrated reference. Well done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com