this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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Or at the very least less common attachment because they grew up outside of a monoculture.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

You may be looking at the wrong things then:

  • While SSDs have been around for a while, they have only been commercially viable (for both home and enterprise use) for maybe 10-15 years.
  • Today, even a 300 dollar desktop 3d printer (especially a resin printer) will beat even the best industrial printers from just a decade ago.
  • For less than 50 bucks per month I can get an internet connection at home that's 16000 times faster than what I had in 2004. Back then, I had to wait minutes to load a single photo, today I can stream three dozen 4k videos at once and still have bandwidth to spare.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated vaccine research a lot. We finally got mRNA vaccines to work and are now applying them to other diseases as well.
  • Ten years ago, the idea of fully reusing rockets was laughed at. The first time a first stage was reused was in 2017. Today, most new rocket designs are planned as fully or at least mostly reusable.+
  • First mass market VR headsets came out in 2012. We are are just now at a point where untethered headsets are reaching usable resolution and framerate. New headsets add features like eye tracking, finger tracking, external cameras for augmented reality...

And so on...

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

And those are big changes, but consider some of the changes from 1994-2014:

  • Laptops went from a premium item for classy business people to a common household item
  • most households didn't even have an internet connection in 1994, in 2014 most households had broadband
  • wifi
  • the birth of online commerce
  • the birth of social media
  • literally Google
  • we went from CD Players to iPods to having all the functionality of an iPod in everyone's phone, to streaming any music we want from cloud-based services
  • we saw the birth and (relative) death of internet radio
  • while we're on that topic, podcasts came into existence
  • we went from independent video stores to Blockbuster to Netflix DVD to Netflix streaming and Hulu as a competitor
  • furthermore, video streaming over the internet did not exist in 1994. Hell, we hadn't even started pirating music online at scale yet. You still had to record the radio with a cassette deck in '94.
  • video games went from SNES and Genesis to PS4, XBOne, and WiiU. We're talking Super Metroid vs Dark Souls II, or for handhelds, compare the Gameboy/Game Gear to the PS Vita/3DS. If you look at 2004 vs 2024 you'd be looking at KOTOR vs Dragon's Dogma 2. It's a much smaller contrast. Likewise if you look at 1984 vs 2004 it'd be from King's Quest I to Halo 2. And just for fun, 1974 to 1994 would be dnd to Final Fantasy VI
  • hybrid cars were invented
  • hydrogen fuel cell powered busses came into existence
  • video calls went from highly expensive, borderline sci-fi (see, e.g. Back To The Future Part II and the Pokemon anime) to being built into peoples' smartphones, tablets and laptops
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Ten years ago the falcon 9 was running flights to the ISS. 9 years ago was the first successful booster landing.