I know, I know, it's getting boring, but...Linux.
Nowadays you install it by clicking "next" a few times, and when you're done, the latest updates are already installed, the firmware for your hardware is installed, your wifi is connected, your networked printer/scanner combo is already recognized and set up, storage media or devices you plug in are auto-mounted, most games work out of the box, bluetooth works, MS Office files can be opened without becoming a garbled mess, touch screens work, touchpads work better than on Windows, ...

It didn't used to be this way. 20 years ago, Linux ran only on desktop PCs with Ethernet cable connection, all games had a penguin as the main character, shopping for a printer made salesmen look at you like you're from Mars, and when someone sent you a .doc file, you sent back a reply to please use a free format or PDF.

Open source software in general. Seeing Blender become an industry standard was awesome, and it looks like the Godot engine may do the same for gaming. Krita has evolved into a truly wonderful painting program (and not half bad as a Photoshop replacement), and Linux itself has come so far, having become a genuine gaming platform.

Quite happy about all of that. :)

Active noise cancellation. It's a bit like magic. Don't be a wanker and say "Um actually, all you have to do is emit an inverse waveform." I think it took a hell of a lot of work to get this right, especially integrating it into relatively inexpensive consumer devices. Thanks, scientists and engineers. Well done.

This will sound a little mundane but, FLASHLIGHTS! Particularly bicycle head lights. The prices before LED's were just STUPID. Hundreds of dollars for small amounts of light (which to be fair was the best you could get at the moment). Which were being used for night mountain biking. But all I needed was to get to and from work safely at night, I didnt have $400 for a headlight that would actually let me see the ground in front of me.

BUT, then came the revolution. China started putting out these LED lights that blew everything else out of the water ... FOR CHEAP! In two years light prices went from $400 to $100 for top of the line lighting. US bike light companies were a year or two out before they could re-tool to match the lumens coming out of china. Mind you, the Chinese lights were not always the most reliable. BUT they were 1/4th the cost of a name brand light. So even if it died, you could still buy ANOTHER one for less than the price of a high end name brand light.

And since the LED revolution, things have not changed much. Prices either go down or stay the same and the lumens increase OR the burn time increases. Its just a win win for customers/consumers.

Insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. But that's boring: flashlights these days are AMAZING!

Lights. 15 years ago, everyone was using incandescent bulbs which were terribly inefficient and neon lights which had their own inconveniences. Today, LEDs have mostly replaced them, can produce better quality light, and use a fraction of the power.

I'm excited to see the progress of 3d printers becoming more user friendly, reliable and inexpensive. I've been keeping an eye on the development of consumer printing and there are so many types of materials to print with at higher and higher details with less troubleshooting needed. I'm thinking I'll finally jump in this year but I've had very little time for hobbies lately.

Medical things, mostly. Everyone experienced the speed that mRNA vaccines can be developed and deployed at scale. A lot is coming from that tech. One of the objectively good uses of AI is protein folding and discovering new compounds. Just being able to target a virus’s weak point is so new, stupid people are freaked out by it.

Consumer tech stuff like batteries and whatever the hype cycle is promoting — crypto or LLMs — gets all the attention but the life sciences field marches on. There are things that are going to revolutionize the way we think about certain diseases. In my lifetime, AIDS went from death sentence to something more like expensive diabetes.

And with emergency care, there are things that even an ER doctor with $200,000 in equipment can only hope to triage today that will be something an EMT can begin to triage on the way to the hospital with something simple. (NARCAN exists now but it’s an example of slow and steady progress. Imagine a NARCAN for heart attack or stroke where we just keep it in our first aid kits.)

E-books

I love having the physical thing in my hands, but love that we've gotten to a point where I can log on to Libby and just download one too, or back up digital versions of my favorites on my hard drive so I hopefully never lose them.

LED technology has progressed massively and is now at the state where you can carry a device with the lighting power of a car headlamp but it only consumes 10W, weighs 200g and fits in the palm of your hand. I can ride my bike through the woods at night, as if it were daytime. All we need now is some technology that makes the woods less creepy after sundown and we'll be all set.

Another big one for me is Wikipedia and the information sphere in general. I forgot what it's like to have to physically go to a library to look something up or learn a new skill, amazing power at our fingertips. Showing my age a bit here.

What else? Computer aided engineering tools, cordless power tools, phones and computers in general, lithium ion batteries, my automated coffee maker kills it, drug technology, I like it all.

Linux is pretty sweet. I haven't got a new computer in over a decade, and don't plan to, and this OS just continues to work like a dream.

Open source software in general is getting incredibly complex. While big companies mopolized the software industry at the end of the century, now the most widely used technologies are completely open source (kvm, linux, docker, apache, ssh, c++, rust), which means that everyone has access to it and can use it for personal or light commercial use without too much cost and hassle. Sure, companies still monopolize, but only because they offer hardware and services at a big scale, if you want to have an indipendent space on the internet, this would be the perfect time

Self hosting is pretty great right now. Immich, Tailscale, truenas, docker, vaultwarden - you can solve so many of your own problems with any old computer you have lying around

Battery tech and self-sufficient energy solutions for a home in general. Being able to provide your own energy and store it for later use is just excellent.

I'll catch downvotes, whatever.

Is there too much hype in the AI space? Yes. Is it still absolutely incredible, the advancements we've made since 4chan made gpt2 racist?

We got LLMs that can one-shot code up simple games like snake and minesweeper. I can throw 12 pdfs at a single prompt and ask which of them talks about an idea that might not be explicitly mentioned in any of them and not only can it identify it, it can summarize it and expand on it.

Am I sick of seeing it shoved into everything? Yes. Is it basically magic? Also yes.

Guitar tube amplifier emulation.

I love it because as absolutely horrid as it was when it was emerging tech, those sounds along with every other link in the chain comes with certain nostalgia for music that was created using it in whatever intermediary period it was at in that time. Today we've basically hit endgame in that the emulations of today's tech are so close to the real thing that they're basically indistinguishable from the genuine article. We have access to the full range of sounds from Boss DS-1's to the old Line6 Pods to modern Kempers. If you're a guitar player who likes experimenting with the over all sound of your rig, this is the good stuff.

E-Ink and Ebooks in generell. Maybe not all the shitty Software/DRM that often comes with them but the technology itself is amazing.

Open source NVIDIA drivers (NVK, nouveau, nova) finally being usable for gaming.

Linux phones, postmarketOS

RISC-V CPUs becoming more and more viable

Surprised it hasn't been mentioned, but Electric Vehicles in general. I remember wishing for them to be a thing when I used to drive my family's gas-guzzling vehicles. If you look outside of Tesla, there are plenty of options even affordable ones, it might Leaf you in disbelief.

Storage. SanDisk recently announced an 8TB SD card. I remember back when all I had was 1.44MB floppy disks in like the 90s.

https://www.techradar.com/cameras/camera-accessories/sandisk-announces-the-worlds-first-8tb-sd-card-the-biggest-memory-card-weve-ever-seen

Batteries. That's the next stage in human advancement. Different battery technology

Battery tech is making a lot of things better/possible. E-mtb for example. Drones, camper van power, etc.

I know it's dumb, but cellphones. They went from bricks to pretty much super computers. I'm amazed at the stuff I can do on my phone. Music, games, drawing, texting, phone, video call, camera, recorder, ebook, audio book reader, etc.

Headphones. I'm not an audiophile so I'm sure there are varying qualities, but there are so many different headphones now, almost all Bluetooth. Most are pretty good because the base standard seems higher overall. I remember getting cheap headphones and having then sound awful. Now I buy cheap headphones and it's really not that bad. And now there noise canceling? Like magic. Hell, getting my first Bluetooth headset made me feel like I had made it (I in fact did not make it, they just became lower in price).

Video games. There are a llllooootttttt of issues with the gaming industry, but the variety, accessibility, and quality is nuts. My first console was a my grandma's SNES. My first handheld device was a Gameboy. Not game boy color, just game boy. I've watched my grandma and I go from black and white / basic graphics, to being able to see the peach fuzz on someone's face. I was playing a game and felt the rain from the vibration in my controller. I thought VR was something I might be able to see towards the end of my lifetime, not pretty much at the start of it. I also think how easy it is to connect and play with people is amazing. I can play with my friend across the country, and speak with her, and share my screen, and have her play like she was on the couch with me.

Displays/screens, especially OLED these days. My phone screen uses this technology, my smartwatch, my tablet and my Alienware ultrawide PC monitor for gaming and movies.

The advances in material science and manufacturing in sports equipment in the past 15 years has been amazing.

That means boots, bindings, and a snowboard that would have seemed like alien technology to me when I started riding. Same goes for all the saftey gear, knee pads, helmets, integrated wrist guards in gloves.

The performance, comfort, and saftey offered by modern equipement means I can still enjoy my favorite sports at 50. The thought of getting on a hill with gear I had just 15 years ago makes me shudder.

Displays. Even the cheap TVs and monitors look incredibly good.

Said like 80 times in this thread already but, Open Source & Free software (papa stallman will murder my family if I don't make the distinction)

Fifteen years ago when I first got into it, Linux was a programmer/sysadmin's OS that could cover one's web browsing needs and run some media players and retro console emulators.

Nowadays it is a reasonable daily driver for high-end gaming, it can cover 85% of the creative tasks I do for work, plus all the shit it did back then, all the while being faster, lighter, and comfier than windows.

There's good libre applications for pretty much everything I care about.

And now we even have open-source powered social media (hi we're in Lemmy)

Fuck, even if I'm this close to butlerian jihad thinking in regards to the whole concept, I'll give it up for the advancement of open source AI models. I might think the whole invention is poison, but better for it to be a public, shared, community built poison than one under the thumb of three megacorps.

Even in my lifetime power tools have come a long way.

I remember the first cordless electric screwdriver I ever saw. You're better off using a normal screwdriver, the thing had no speed and no torque. I guess it could take the screw out of the battery door on the remote if your wrists hurt.

When I was in high school, long about 2002, my father bought a Black and Decker cordless drill. 12v, they don't make the batteries for it anymore, might have been ni-cad at the time, and it could pretty much drill a pilot hole into a 2x4 and then run a wood screw into it.

Twenty years later I've got an off the rack homeowner grade cordless drill that will pull the lug nuts off of my truck. I used the damn thing to drive a quarter inch lag bolt through plywood and pine without a pilot hole and it wasn't even working hard.

The one that really impresses me is my cordless router. Takes a 20 volt drill battery and will easily turn any 1/4" router bit I chuck in it. It's fairly rare that I use a router that isn't mounted in my router table or that little cordless job.

Synthesizers and music technology in general.

I could write an essay or two about how much has changed in the past fifty years. Most of it for the better.

Machine Learning or as the non-techies call it, AI. It's incredible what open source models can do these days.

I'm no expert on the technology but God I love our battery powered lawn mower. Our lawn, front and back is mostly temporally embarrassed grass (weeds) but keeping it down is critical in Australian snake season. Plan is to get rid of most of it and do the native plants and minimal grass thing.

In the meantime, no fumes, no refueling, the dog isn't scared of the noise, and it works a treat. The batteries and how to recycle them in the future is certainly something to worry about, but in the meantime it's vastly superior to our old stinky, do a rotator cuff turning it on, 2 stroke option.

Beyond the obvious answer of FOSS, there are some nonfree software out there that have powerful APIs and extremely rich third-party plugin/extension ecosystems. The two that immediately popped into my mind are Obsidian and FoundryVTT. Both are incredibly powerful tools that are only made more powerful by the huge amount of plugins available. Maybe it's because I've been running D&D a lot lately that those two stick out in my mind.

Do you use the escooter on sidewalks? What are the laws on that where you are?

Oh to answer your question: ebikes, pedal assist electric bikes. I think they really have the ability to change transportation.