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Without unnecessary brand name dropping, what current technology blows you away? (self.casualconversation)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by FourPacketsOfPeanuts to c/[email protected]

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I was listening to the New Year's Day concert by the Vienna philharmonic and wondered who one of the composers was so used a popular song recognition app. (I expected it would make some fuzzy match on the piece and give me the name + composer). To my amazement it did give the name and composer but as played by the Vienna philharmonic in 2005 in the same location. The orchestra does not have the same members as 19 years ago, nor was it the same conductor, so it seemed the piece was matched on the acoustics of the Musikverein where they were playing, which I found astonishing.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Man, I'm still hyped that I have a device that fits in my pocket, can carry an entire book library, a giant collection of music, plus selected videos, and if that was all it could do, it would still be a sci-fi dream come true, but it does more than that too.

[–] Krudler 4 points 4 days ago

I started my game development career in 1996 and we were developing for a brand new system that used "the internet" for touch screen terminals.

At that time of my life, if you told me you could have something the size of a pack of cigarettes that could render 3D video faster than my entire rendering farm, let me talk to any human on the planet like a Star Trek communicator, tell me the upcoming weather... I would have told you you are insane and this will never happen

[–] LovableSidekick 1 points 3 days ago

Yeah I think our little pocket supercomputers are the most amazing devices created in my lifetime. Still calling them "phones" reminds me of Star Trek TOS when they called their little solid-state data slabs "tapes". If only they knew the real thing today would be the size of a fingernail.

[–] Resol 3 points 4 days ago

"An iPod, a phone, and an internet communications device."

That quote never gets old.

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts 2 points 4 days ago

I try to remember to appreciate it the way ten year old me would have (when still loading computer games from tape). It's so much more satisfying.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Broadband satellite internet. The proof of concept was HugesNet, but was so awfully slow as to be virtually unusable nowadays.

With the proliferation of LEO satellites (and acknowledging the problem this brings to astronomers) we can now have broadband connectivity even in the middle of the ocean.

That we came from 14.4kbps hard-wired connections shared by residential phone service to space communications which can be used in the palm of our hands amazes me to no end.