I was hoping that by now technology and education would have helped all the humans to realize how to take care of each other and work together for a better tomorrow.
Instead we got this fucking mess that’s going on right now all around the world.
More of a pet peeve, but I thought IT would be way more stable by now. Everything has so many bugs and it’s just accepted. I’ve grown pessimistic about new tech and I would prefer to wait a couple years before getting it. It’s not novel if it’s broken.
Side thought, I thought we would have hologram phone calls by now.
Phones that can be opened up and have internals replaced, like desktop computers
So like the Fairphone?
That one is still exclusive to a few select countries and won’t ship to mine :/
Computer phones. As in I just connect to screen and keyboard, and phone is my main desktop.
Cheaper EVs.
Working lab fusion.
Like the Motorola Atrix
Too ahead of its time.
Android 16 brings that desktop functionality
If its just for a productivity office type work, samsung phones can do this but it is account locked which is annoying
That’s still weak compared to what a phone could really do though.
EVs are pretty cheap now. How cheap did you think?
As cheap as gasoline cars
Slightly cheaper than fuel by 10% for similar cars (including country of origin)
Compassion, empathy, socialism.
Those thin transparent screens you see in sci fi movies.
Ability to live in balance with the earth
Only after the nuclear winter
I definitely thought we’d have Ar glasses by now
this
Guillotines and a lineup of billionaires in straight jackets
Really fancy guillotines, with Internet Access, Bluetooth, and AI, of course.
“I’m Alan, your Virtual Execution Assistant. I can offer you a choice of a Last Cigarette, or Last Words, which would you like to choose?”
Hoverboards.
I think the self tightening shoes would have been doable. But we still didn’t get those.
Nike actually did make those. they sell them.
I thought we would be able to redo our dna in adults using viruses or other vectors completely. Where we are now I thought we would be in like 2010. So we are making progress but I thought we would be farther along and genetic disease would be a thinf of the past.
Fusion lol.
Better space tech or at least a moon base.
Modular body parts like in cyberpunk
Technically we have modular body parts. They are pretty damn good too. Just not good enough that people would replace them because they are vetter.
LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.
It’s 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments…
I understand that it’s probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.
But it’s still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.
From my experience, what tends to get messed up is the internal wiring. The actual leds will continue working fine, but cheap/shitty wiring will make the lamp stop working
Oh that’s a fun one. Original incandescents lasted a very long time. Too long (over 10,000 hrs, and there are many examples of ones that have been lit for decades!). The various manufacturers actually conspired(spent a lot of money on research and development) to a 1,000 hr operational benchmark. Profits exploded.
This is common (engineered predictable fault.)
The Phoebus Cartel was objectively terrible, but it turns out there are perfectly good engineering reasons to limit them to 1000 hours. It has to do with the chemistry of tungsten. Those bulbs that last forever give off exceedingly little light, and the 1000 hour rule is from a standard that predates the cartel.
That was clearly not an engineer.
Something is wrong with the ones you’re buying, then.
Studies show that they do, on average, last dozens of times longer. Personally I replace them way less often than incandescent.
I suppose the earliest ones were worse and there are definitely garbage ones out there. And even good brands have a did here and there. And if you have poor/inconsistent power, or placing them in hot, enclosed fixtures, they don’t perform as well as they could.
I bought some on clearance about a decade ago, my wife thought I was crazy buying 20 bulbs, I gave 1/4 of them away and I’ve still not run out.
Who were the studies done by? Philips?
The DOE, Energy Star, others
no hot filaments…
There may not be filaments, but heat is still an issue for LEDs.
Some bulb manufacturers basically overdrive cheaper diodes to get extra brightness at the cost of generating extra heat. Some of those manufacturers compensate for the heat in some way, others don’t even bother and produce bulbs with a service life of months instead of decades. Some of these are fly-by-night online sellers that won’t exist anymore by the time their products start to fail. Others are established brands that people will blindly purchase based on a reputation that no longer matches reality. There are some reliable brands out there if you read up on it, but why the fuck should we have to research every little inane item in our life?
Aside from corporate greed, though, there are other reasons heat causes early LED bulb failure. Two common ones are incompatible devices on the same circuit (like light dimmers), and installing the bulb in an enclosure without adequate heat dissipation (like a ceiling ‘boob’ light).
I’ve been all LED for well over a decade, and have had a good experience so far. I personally tend to buy smart bulbs that can put out way more light than I need, and run them at 20-50% brightness most of the time. Feit Electric and Govee’s basic smart bulbs have been pretty reliable for me, but I admit I’m a pretty small sample size. I know I’m paying a premium for that approach, but it’s not unreasonable and I do prefer not having to worry about it.
I was there for the transition period between incandescents and LEDs: The CFL.
Buy dimmer, filament style LEDs. They don’t burn themselves out hy heat at least.
Otherwise you’re facing planned obsolescence.
Good music. Why does music in the 21st century have to suck so bad? It’s not that much different than what we had in the 20th century, the quality just steadily decreased instead of increased. It’s all divas screaming, really boring rap, or just dull, art-less rock.
Today, even young people are discovering that the Classic Rock era had very cool music. It would have been like my generation discovering the music of the pre-war 30s.
If you’re talking about modern pop, I completely agree. But there’s so much amazing music coming out every year, way better than anything before it imo. My guess is if you really do want to find great new music, then you’re not exploring enough. Or maybe you’re happy with what you already know.
I am talking about Modern Pop, and Rock.
A lot of the problem is that most men grow up listening to rap, and women grow up listening to divas, and if they don’t listen to those genres, then they listen to country. So many young musicians are growing up listening to mediocre quality music, and they tend to slip into genres that are somewhat less competitive, artistically, like Rap or Country.
That leaves fewer musicians to carry on the Classic Rock tradition. Besides, what’s the point? The fact is, the Classic Rock era turned out the best popular music of all time. That sound like a wild statement on its face, but it really is true. What band emerging now seems like it could be the next Beatles, or Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd? I can’t think of a band that threatened to have that kind of influence since Nirvana.
There have been a few worthy artists, like Adele, and a few truly great singers, like Ariana Grande, but there are no other superstar Rock artists whose talents are undeniable, like Michael Jackson, or Prince.
Bruno Mars and Adele and Ariana Grande are about all I can think of, and that is over about 30 years. Compare that with the 60s or 70s, or even the 80s, when artists were establishing MASSIVE careers that would last decades, on a monthly basis. At the end of the year, you were listening to a dozen classic albums by bands you hadn’t heard of a year ago, and another dozen classic albums by your favorite bands. GREAT music was just pouring out, and it became popular not because of an enormous marketing campaign, but because the music was great, and the word spread. Hardly any of Pink Floyd’s music was ever on the radio, and yet they established a career and a catalogue that sells to this day.
So why bother re-inventing the wheel? There is already about 50 years of AMAZING music that young people today have never heard. I always get downvoted when I say this, but they are from people who don’t know what they are missing, and think today’s music is perfectly acceptable.
The music of the 60s and 70s inspired my to pursue a life and career in music. Today’s music would not have inspired me at all.
There is very good 21st century music, which wouldn’t have come had it not been for 20th century music.
Thinking igorrr, emergence of gqom (that’s very pop for gqom), post rock emerged in the 20th and has a reminiscence of tripped out 70s rock bands, but bands like thee silver mount zion are also very early 21st century.
It’s also not surprising we are hitting a barrier after electroacoustic music sort of enlarged the field a lot, the last major innovations were sunths, electronic soundFX and DAWs and these are all 20th century changes. The 20th century saw more innovation than the previous centuries. Fusion of styles, while older, has given interesting merges in the 21st century as well.
But the 20th century will be hard to surpass, pretty much as by the end of the 19th century classical music was running circles.
I like music from the decade before my birth and swing became big at one point and many folk discover there is a lot of classical music they like. I get what your saying but like there is a lot of historical crap pop to which is kinda always around.
Cool, I have a degree in Music History, and you are 100% correct, there is a LOT of bad historical music. Luckily, we don’t have to deal with it much, because most of it has been filtered out over time.
There’s a loose rule in all Art, that 95% of art is mostly mediocre. Only about 5% is worthy, and only about 1% is truly good, or great. When youre in the midst of it, most of what you are hearing is junk, and you have to be the filter, and it can be exhausting.
But if you go back to the old stuff, it’s basically been curated by critics and fans over the decades, and mostly the best stuff has survived, so it’s easier to find great, satisfying music.
And if you’re ambitious, you can sort through the debris, and find the odd forgotten classic rock gem, like Shoes:
Or Yaz:
Or Bread:
I wonder about that in the modern age though. I mean there has to be a factor of how easy it is to copy and store. So likely a lot was lost before performance recording capability. In the car I mostly listen to npr but when I don’t care for whats on I will just sorta jump between stations and there is a thing now for stations to kinda take a time period but they don’t seem to be very discriminatory about it. On the other hand now that we can call up any song we want likely you will see the cream come up to the top on what gets asked for a lot. I have one particular gripe though because my fav band tull had this album crafting they did where the position of songs, especially the first and last, were real important. They have these special editions they kinda just tacked songs on them and it ruins the flow. Its impossible, at least with amazon, to get the device to do the original vs the special edition that it defaults to.
Yeah, one of the cool things about the Classic Rock era was how real artists would program their albums for flow. The Beatles were really the first to do that, and they completely changed music industry sales from a single format to an album format, which was far more profitable for both artists, and record companies, which only encouraged more people to become musicians, and record companies to make more albums.
So, yeah, when you get some special edition, and they start inserting alternate or demo or live versions INTO the original program, it totally fucks up the artist’s intentions.
Luckily most of the time, they give us a nicely remastered version of the original on a disc alone, and all the other stuff on a separate disc.
But that’s only if you use CDs, which more and more people are going back to, fortunately. I never left, I still have my original CD collection, about 5000 of them. Don’t get excited I was in the music biz for years, a LOT of them were free, but still good. Got a killer discount, too, basically manufacturing cost, so about $3 a CD, back in the 90s. I would buy the entire catalogue of a band like Led Zeppelin, or Prince, or Talking Heads, or the Eagles, etc.
As for music from before recordings, I don’t even like to think about it. Many of the great composers, like Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven were known to be astonishing virtuoso keyboard players, who could improvise incredibly complex music on the spot. At a concert, the guest of honor, usually some local VIP, would supply a tune, and they would play it on the piano, and then build an entire work out of thin air in front of the audience. Can you imagine hearing a recording of that?
When I was a kid in the 80s I thought we’d absolutely have some kind of moon base by now. More space stuff in general. What is more “future” than space?
Green energy is maybe 10 years behind where younger me would have wished it to be, it feels we’re close to some big breakthroughs. I’m still hopefully to see some game changing things in my lifetime.
There’s just really not a very useful reason outside of “because we can”, so it hasn’t really been a priority. Still, that’s kinda the point of the Artemis program, so we’re getting there.
Usefulness is no fun. Those 80s and 90s attitudes wouldn’t worry about something like that. We’d have done it just show off and/or to keep the Soviets from doing it first. Don’t tell us we have rocks at home, I want space rocks. I want a bucket full of ice from the rings of Saturn. I want a slab of something that got melted by Venus. That stuff is cool.
I hope they do something fun with Artemis. It doesn’t feel like most people are excited for space anymore and that bums me out.
For All Mankind is coming back in a few days, so that will have to do for now.
Eh, the 80s and 90s were a marked shift towards usefulness. Gotta maximize shareholder value, dontcha know.
