Casual Conversation

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lossless compression Even after reading how it works, it still seems like magic to me.

White LEDs. Having a light bulb that can last for decades an consume very little electricity is pretty cool.

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

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

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 😓

The evolution and utility of drones.

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!

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).

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.

COVID antiviral medication.

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.

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.