Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities
not sure this counts, but wikipedia always amazes me; I wish we could fashion the world this way, out of voluntary labor that provides commercial or better quality
I’m not sure this fits the bill, but I’m blown away by the depth and breadth of available hardware. Not computer hardware (tho that’s amazing, too), but latches, levers, nuts and bolts. I can go down a McMaster-Carr rabbit hole the way most people can go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. It’s just fascinating to me how many highly engineered, precisely machined, perfect, beautiful solutions exist to specific problems. If there’s ever an apocalypse, I’m seriously going to miss the ability to have brilliant mechanical solutions available at the click of a mouse.
McMaster-Carr is the 8th wonder of the world.
Home automation technology and completely free development tools. Arduino and ESP controllers are amazing nowadays and unbelievably cheap. I just got a little $20 module that's a 3" square 480x480 touch display with an ESP32 on the back of it. I haven't even decided what to do with it yet, but it will probably end up as a wall-mounted indoor display/touch panel controller for the heater and vents in the greenhouse I just built in the backyard. I will add outdoor temperature as well, and maybe weather forecast icons. I was going to just use a phone app, but this thing was so cheap and will be readable from across the room at a glance without pulling out a phone. And totally DIY!
Home Assistant. It's just so good at what it does and makes things like what you are talking about more accessible to people like me.
I've been reluctant to embrace Home Assistant because the config files seem so arcane. I'm using NodeRED at the moment, which hides all that, You just create visual process flows on a drawing surface, and it generates a web UI. It reminds me of block programming languages like Lego Mindstorms lol.
I have a wife and kid and not a lot of free time. I used chatgpt to build like 90% of my home assistant dashboards and configs. Just a suggestion. I have IKEA lights, wiz connected lamps, govee strips, levoit air purifiers, switchbot humidity and temperature sensors, the dreamebot vacuum all integrated into home assistant. It's great. Give it a go
Thanks for the encouragement!
You don't need to touch a config file for much anymore. It's almost all done via the ui
Yes! My ten year old brain would have melted at what's available off the shelf now. A raspberry pi zero is, what, £20 or something? Picos I think are intended to compete directly with Arduino are even cheaper. That's completely nuts
completely nuts... like a fox!!
My cancer medication for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia.
I don't have to have chemotherapy. I take a single pill once daily. There are side effects, sure. My life isn't as full of pep as it used to be, sure. I'm still in pain all the time, sure.
But I've seen cancer, and I've seen how bad it can get and I'm floored at how much of a real life I'm capable of leading while being treated for this disease.
The cost and risk of losing access to it hanging over my head is very stressful, but I can't deny the actual results, which are life-changing and life-saving to say the least.
Amazing the progress that's been made in that area
Progress in the last few decades has been amazing. One of my coworkers died in the late 1990s from some kind of leukemia that today is highly curable.
Smartphones. In the span of a few decades, we've managed to cram literally hundreds of tools and devices into a single, pocket sized notebook, affordably. Its fucking mindblowing you can find full fledged smartphone for 100$. Go back a couple decades and even a rudimentary budget model would be unimaginable
Its fucking insane that my groceries for a week cost more than this ground breaking technology.
Mobile networks.
It used to be absolutely amazing to get 1.5Mbps into your home with bulky equipment, on a dedicated copper line. Now you can get 100x times that bandwidth, while moving, on a device that fits in your pocket.
Batshit.
Diffraction gratings because light is cool, and I like the pretty colors.
Not super modern but you can 3d print in a mold, or even make chocolate, and it will look "holographic." You don't add anything, you just manipulate the surface of the object to have tiny grooves with thickness in the nanometer range. Then light hits it and waves do their thing and we perceive a rainbow effect.
This is from a Reddit post, one of the top homemade "holographic chocolate" posts.
Presumably you could print a hologram-like portrait on chocolate, which blows my mind.
White LEDs. Having a light bulb that can last for decades an consume very little electricity is pretty cool.
I never used to use my phone's flashlight function because it's so bright, I assumed it would suck the battery dry. But recently I had it on for like 15 minutes and it only used up one or two percent. Amazing.
LEDs kind of blow me away in general. People will look back at this period and be like, "they sure did love putting LED lights on top of and on the sides of their skyscrapers just for show".
Smartphones - multi purpose tool in your pocket, flashlight, phone, navigation, gateway to the internet, camera, etc.., also can summon help when you're in danger (although results may vary).
Quadcopters with GPS auto return feature and position hold (aka: "Drones") - I mean, can you imagine just flying through the air?
I mean, sure, there are planes, but most people don't fly in planes everyday. And you don't really get to be in control, yoi're just a spectator.
Imagine just flying though your neighborhood like a bird. That's whag flying around with a drone feels like. Its throught a screen, but its probably the closest thing to getting the view of a bird.
These days, drones are just like $300 to $1000, basically the cost of a smartphone.
Very fun stuff.
I'm honestly kinda afraid that governments are trying to ban drones because of perceived "national security threats". Politicians always ruining every fun thing 😓
Lossless compression Even after reading how it works, it still seems like magic to me.
Honestly the lossy compression algorithms are some real magic. The way video can be streamed over wireless networks at all is pretty astonishing and requires many orders of magnitude of compression.
If you ever have time, read up on how JPEG compression works.
Even more magical is the lossless Zstandard ~is~ ~this~ ~a~ ~name~ ~drop?~. It does so much stuff, it's awesome!
So kool. lol
Name dropping's fine lol, I just wanted to discourage obvious spammers away from top level comments
It might not be current-current, but there's an online encyclopedia where you can literally just hit the front page, click any of the featured articles, and go down a rabbit hole for hours and hours and hours. It's absolutely incredible.
bittorrent
You know what's wild about the protocol?
Some super nerdy smart autistic dude literally woke up one morning and it's like I'm going to make this.
Programmed it, took a shit and was done for the day.
A little bit of poetic license here but not far from the truth!
poetic license
For sure, you left out all the paperwork - he'd had Taco Bell the night before.
That magnet stuff is like magnets - almost magic.
Magnets are magic. They're concentrated magic. Almost absolutely everything we interact with is the electro-magnetic field (besides gravity).. why we see things, why we touch things, how that touch signal reaches our brain, how our brain even processes it.. all electro-magnetic! It is really hard to not see it as infused with something of the essence of reality. The strangeness of reality is everywhere and in feeling one magnet repel another we're just toying with that magic concentrated in one place.
VR. Both the good and the bad blow my mind. The good in that it's actually useable now. I tried it in the 90's as a kid and it was straight garbage, not to mention the way I experienced it wouldn't be possible at home (fucker was huge and needed to be suspended by bungee cords). The bad in that it blows my mind that the adoption rate is super low and there's not a helluva lot of good software for it, and it's not even necessarily a price thing; people just don't wanna deal with Meta (which is understandable).
The evolution and utility of drones.
Why are they called drones instead of remote-controlled whatever? What's the difference between a drone plane and the remote-controlled planes flown by hobbyists at the park?
The name being applied to aircraft supposedly comes from the engine noise from unpiloted target drones that used a jet engine. The term originally comes from the insect world, I bee-lieve.
I don't think they meant "blows you away" as in "dropping a grenade on Russian infantry."
works for me tho
Large Language Models.
While it’s trendy to hate on them and nitpick every single flaw, I still have a vivid memory of how terrible chatbots were just a few years ago. The fact that I can now have an actual, insightful discussion with a computer still amazes me. I hope they continue to improve to the point where it’s impossible to tell them apart from a real person.
If it's your thing 3Brown1Blue do an excellent deep dive on neural networks including LLMs that's really informative
I see a lot of hate for them on Lemmy, but I find hem quite helpful with earning how to work with computers and also summarizing general info I search for on the internet. Rather than spend 20 minutes reading thru various websites on a topic know nothing about, I can simply ask an LLM. Eve if they are known to make mistakes, I can accommodate that possibility if the stakes are high enough by looking into it further.
A programmer friend of mine uses AI constantly now in his work. Once during a D&D game he had ChatGPT write database code for a character generator or something, I forget the actual goal, just while sitting there between turns. It churned out the tedious routine crap you always have to write for tasks like that. He said he's had it refactor his own code, and it has come up with interesting approaches he wouldn't have thought of. Pretty amazing for software that essentially just reshuffles material it's already seen to create something that looks like what a human would produce, without actually understanding what it's doing.
It's funny, because what makes them more like a real person is their inability to be consistent.
Like genuinely, LLMs are indeed cool, but in many ways all we've done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.
It lies with the same confidence that it uses to tell the truth, mostly because it can't actually make distinctions between the two.
in many ways all we've done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.
What we have done is even worse because by and large the marketing around AI has worked and people categorically trust what a single AI will tell them after asking the question only once and if that doesn't terrify you, you aren't paying attention.
If there is a future for ai it is in "ensembles" where you ask several independently trained and developed LLMs the same question, preferably at least checking some of the LLMs for consistency/indepth correct knowledge by asking them the same question twice in two different sessions. Then you evaluate from the ensemble of answers what you think the real answer is.
Sound tedius compared to just using a search engine that works?
...and to that question I respond emphatically - Yes, very much so!
What better way to demonstrate international simultaneous television broadcasting than with an annual song competition? It's quite literally the only reason why I turn on my telly anymore.
The only thing I hate about it is the fact that it can get quite political, and it certainly results in often very depressing controversy. Last year was a prime example of this.
But still, the tech behind it was and continues to be just so cool. Thanks, Switzerland.