The funny thing about 3D printers is that they're making a bit of a comeback. The early ones managed to get the capabilities right - you can print some really impressive things on the older Creality printers, but it required fiddling, several hours of building the bloody things, cogged extruders, manual bed leveling and all sorts of technical hurdles. A very motivated techy person will persevere and solve them, and will be rewarded with a very useful machine. The other 99.99% of people won't and will either drop it the moment there's an issue or will hear from others that they require a lot of fiddling and never buy one. If things ever get more complicated than "I see it on a website and I click a few buttons" (incl maintenance) then it's too complicated to gain mass adoption... which is exactly what newer 3D printers are doing - the Bambulabs A1 Mini is £170, prints like a champ, is fairly quiet, requires next to no setup, takes up way less space than the old Enders and needs almost no maintenance. It's almost grandma-proof. Oh, and to further entice your grandma to print, it comes with all sorts of useful knick-knacks that you can start printing immediately after setup. On the hype cycle curve I think 3D printers are almost out of their slump now that we have models that have ironed out the kinks.
But for VR I think we're still closer to the bottom of the curve - Meta and Valve need something to really sell the technology. The gamble for Valve was that it'd be Half Life: Alyx, and for Meta it was portable VR but the former is too techy to set up (and Half Life is already a nerdy IP) while Meta just doesn't have anything that can convince the average person to get a headset (despite me thinking it's a good value just as a Beat Saber machine). But they're getting there - I've convinced a few friends to get a Quest 3S just to practice piano with Virtuoso and I think it's those kinds of apps I hope we see more of that will bring VR out of the slump.
And then LLMs I think their hype cycle is a lot more elevated since even regular people use them extensively now. There will probably be a crash in terms of experimentation with them but I don't see people stopping their usage and I do see them becoming a lot more useful in the long term - how and when is difficult to predict at the top of the hype curve.
Like I said, 3D printers have gotten incrementally better. Buddy of mine makes high-quality prints on one that’s way cheaper than what I owned back in the day.
And yet nothing has really changed because he’s still using it to print dumb tchotchkes like every other hobbyist 10 years ago.
I can foresee them getting better but never getting good enough to where they actually fundamentally change society or live up to past promises
Not necessarily. While accessibility is far better, it comes at the cost of having monocultures, mass farming, and heavy importation during off-seasons. This has made, say, the average tomato cheaper and more accessible year-round but substantially worse than the seasonal tomatoes you would have 40 years ago.
> Houses are larger...
But more and more people live in cramped apartments in big cities so that point is moot.
> Healthcare...
And is it more important that a poor 25 year-old young person with their whole productive tax-paying life ahead of them can seek care appropriately Vs the hospitals keeping 80+ year-old fossils alive with their "better healthcare". The only exception is ozempic and the likes but that didn't use to be necessary before cars killed most public spaces.
> Car reliability/safety...
By turning them into huge monstrosities and widening roads, again destroying public spaces and walkability. The only major breakthrough here is lead-free fuel.
> Compute power. The average person has the knowledge of the ENTIRE world at their fingertips. But totally no progress has been made???
I'll give you that one but it's at the cost of turning a computer into an addiction machine. I still think it's a net positive but it isn't so clear cut.
> We have weather satellites
True but now we're have much more extreme weather thanks too climate change.
> We can talk to family whenever we want...
We can but when do we? I keep in touch with family often but it definitely feels less special than how it was even in the 00s.
> We have vastly more free time...
Assuming you have the same sized family and roles. Now's your need both parents in a family to work to make ends meet for the average young person so the freed time has mostly gone to the older generation.
Overall zoomers and gen alpha definitely have it worse than their parents. And this is coming from someone with a middle class background who now gets paid well to program -everyone I know my age feels this way. The main lifestyle change we got recently is cheap travel which is amazing but the basics are definitely harder (and this is why birthrates are down).
Wow, cheaper food is bad? I want people to be fed.
People live with more square footage than they did in the past. In the 1980s a lot of people still lived in 'Hotel' style places in the city with roommates and the bathroom down the hall shared by the floor.
Keeping fossils alive? Like with your food comment, not seeing a lot of compassion for others. The general wellbeing has been lifted, sorry it's not to your liking.
Monstrosities that keep people alive. Again, huge lack of compassion in your argument. Did you know that incest was reduced in huge part by general availability of automobiles?
I mean I was a latch key kid, zoomers and alpha have it way better than we did. They can at least keep in touch with others while they are locked away at home. Sorry you don't want to connect. I still find it awesome I can call my kids whenever without having to think ahead/plan it out/coordinate, and if that call is missed wait another month.
This entire post sounds like a pitty party and not a rational comparison to reality. I was born in the 70s, live through a lot up until now, things are WAY WAY better. Yes they need to improve even more, but you won't get there with a 'the world is just crap and nothing gets better' attitude, especially when it's just factually incorrect.
Ooh, one thing that can be very useful for this is sending USB wakeup packets. I have an HTPC under my TV and game controllers (PS4, Xbox) at my coffee table and there is no way to wake up the PC with those over Bluetooth so I have to keep it on and idling at all times, wasting electricity.
If you have a wired connection to the box you should be able to use wake on lan from a phone (this is what I used to do, now homeassistant took over this responsibility).
In my experience my Airpod Pros and Huawei Freebud Pros achieve 95% of the audio and noise cancellation quality of my Sony XM3s that I just barely use the big headset anymore. I understand that they are technically different categories of products but for me and a lot of other non-audiophiles I know switched to TWS earbuds once they got half decent ANC.
Huh? Last I checked you can still order them off AliExpress without an issue. And I highly doubt that Nintendo would go after the thousands of people who bought one after the big MIG Switch announcements.
they're not "going after" MIG Dumper customers, I didn't say that. Remember what people actually say vs. what you imagine them saying when you want to argue with them.
Nintendo seek customer information in order to inform those customers that they are in possession of illegally obtained copyrighted material.
> Last I checked you can still order them off AliExpress without an issue.
Copyright is barely a thing in China, and is almost never enforced. And certainly the tech culture there is very much pro-copying.
The issue is that underfunding the NHS has become so bad that even very serious cases can't be handled appropriately. I know it's an anecdote, but I've had a fairly bad experience recently after a serious bike incident in the middle of a workday, and they took over an hour to send an ambulance, about an hour to be checked, and over 7 hours in the Royal Hospital waiting for treatment.
Legitimately was a worse and slower service than I would have had at my grandparents' place in Eastern Europe, it's a disgrace. It still makes me angry that it's the experience I get after paying 1000s of £ in NHS contributions.
I think that the fragility of Blu-Rays is a great way to teach a kid responsibility. You only let your kid have access to their Blu-Rays and if they scratch them or break them it's over - no more movie. They'll learn after they break a few.
My kids did not learn, perhaps because new kids kept coming to learn the lesson. And they generally can't connect a non-working disc to a specific act. Instead, a disc stops working after dozens of cumulative actions. We never replaced any broken discs either, and just slowly saw our collection dwindle from 20 working discs to something like 2.
My favorite example was the kids using dvds as roller skates to slide around the room.
> iOS also supports ambient song identification, with history, which I use frequently.
Does it? I can't find any info about this online and all I can find seems to indicate that you can run Shazam and it scans for some amount of time afterwards but iOS kills it to save battery. It doesn't seem like you can get Google Pixel-like "Now Playing" which I sorely miss on my iPhone 15 Pro.
Right, the person saying "they use it" as opposed to "refer to it" is an indicator. It's a great feature, using on-device "AI" (privacy preserving), and available since Pixel 2 (2018).
The difference though is that Swiss' coverage is only from Switzerland, a very wealthy and well-managed country, to other major business and tourist destinations and can arguably run at a loss since it's a national carrier. Not every country can afford that - the only flights I can get from my small hometown of ~350000 are with budget airlines because the national carrier simply isn't competitive enough to be able to run profitable flights from there. Before they showed up the airport was effectively dysfunctional. Budget airlines have tremendously improved connectivity for less popular and less wealthy of the continent.
Not disagreeing here, not at all. And don't overestimate how well organized Switzerland is.
Our closest airport (Geneva) is much better served by Easyjet than its own Swiss airlines, who have top priority Zurich and then nothing for a looooong time. They are absolutely uncompetitive here, almost no direct flights and you need to fly 200km and change in Zurich (so adding risks and flights take 2-3x longer, sucks with small kids), compared to Easyjet who offers direct flights to tens of destinations on 3 continents for comparable or lower prices.
Not sure when was the last time I flew Swiss, few years ago. Easyjet? 4x this year, once to Africa. But this is about Ryanair, for some reason they positioned themselves as the worst budget airlines and they don't even fight their image. Suffice to say, I've never flown them.
It is difficult because having attendants print boarding cards or working with an airport to maintain ticket printers costs money that eats into their margins and increases prices. It's not like they don't warn you that checking in at the airport is paid. I'd much rather save 1€ and check in the way I usually would, even if it means someone who can't read a few warnings has to pay a fee.
But for VR I think we're still closer to the bottom of the curve - Meta and Valve need something to really sell the technology. The gamble for Valve was that it'd be Half Life: Alyx, and for Meta it was portable VR but the former is too techy to set up (and Half Life is already a nerdy IP) while Meta just doesn't have anything that can convince the average person to get a headset (despite me thinking it's a good value just as a Beat Saber machine). But they're getting there - I've convinced a few friends to get a Quest 3S just to practice piano with Virtuoso and I think it's those kinds of apps I hope we see more of that will bring VR out of the slump.
And then LLMs I think their hype cycle is a lot more elevated since even regular people use them extensively now. There will probably be a crash in terms of experimentation with them but I don't see people stopping their usage and I do see them becoming a lot more useful in the long term - how and when is difficult to predict at the top of the hype curve.