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Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

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Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#61

Post by aaron695 »

You are in a golden age, everything is exciting. Pick an object and look how it's changed since the internet.

Just the other day I was talking farming gate latches. 30 years ago they were all unique. Now they are all the same.... Sure that's sad in a lot of ways. But also it's exciting we are hitting peak everything. It's a bad example because there was a lot of art in a gate latch.

But I think war drones are exciting.

They will kill a lot of people but now small states and groups can have a lot of power. The world will fragment a lot. Which is interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#63

Post by Loeffeldude »

da-x wrote: post #34

Today is like a better version of the 1960's. Two things: 1) The new space age, really aiming far to the Moon and Mars. 2) The altered state of mind that wide acceptance of Psychedelics is going to bring to the masses.

I have never gotten any benefits from psychedelics whatsoever. Sure they are fun and mind blowing but I have never experienced a tangible improvement in my mental health. Actually I had a bad trip and that has had a negative impact on my mental health I had depersonalisation and anxiety for months after.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#64

Post by cdaringe »

remexre wrote: post #40
singularity2001 wrote: post #38

WASM! Being able to write your own language that compiles to something that can run almost at native speed in the browser (pretty much without js) feels like a magical watershed moment.

Can I ask what kind of languages you're thinking of compiling? I was pretty excited about WASM too, until I realized it was bring-your-own-GC (which makes sense in retrospect I suppose), and libgc's WASM support had heavily atrophied last time I tried it (last year), such that it was freeing memory that was still in use(!!). If there's a high-quality GC for WASM you've used, I'd love to know about it for my own use!

As an OCaml fan, I’m pretty into what grain has been up to: https://grain-lang.org. Mem management ref: https://github.com/grain-lang/grain/pull/768/files

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#65

Post by gremloni »

h2odragon wrote: post #16

The fall of Intel. For my entire life (born in 1972, same timescale) Intel has managed to keep a leash on what personal computers could be. The few times it's slipped have led to exciting advances, but they got them under control again quickly. The explosion of held up potential that will happen when they shatter should (I hope) make the AT&T breakup look small.

In my opinion, this would be terrible. All I envision is walled gardens and no American made chips. Intel fostered an era of truly personal computing where people owned their hardware.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#66

Post by ksec »

Nothing. At least in terms of "Bits"

Technology as a word has now blended to everything about "bits" or Information Technology. But my background is EE I am always more interested in "atoms". How "bits" should have helped "atoms" to make more interesting things. Instead we have SnapChat that now worth the same as Sony.

I really do believe there are many many sector of our world and business that is not really help by "bits" at all. Anyone who ever touched CRM / ERP discussions might have a sense of how out of far apart technology (bits) and real world business needs are. And that example is only the tip of an iceberg. Tech should be much more than "bits".

So if I were to pick things that excite me most is the potential of Battery Breakthrough, Nuclear Fusion Progress.

And I am increasingly looking into Low tech or No Tech. Back to Mechanical watch, Single purpose appliance, Mechanical engineering, Paper Back Books. As if I am running away from "bits".

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#67

Post by caffeine »

What excites me at the moment is space - and specifically the advent of space as an accessible, valuable, but dangerous place to be - a perfect place for robots.

I think there is a massively exciting amount of development to be done in space robotics, planning, simulation, hardware, etc.

The other exciting venue I see is bioinformatics. The advent of mRNA as a usable technology combined with AlphaFold is a new development that I see unlocking a lot of possibilities.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#68

Post by alpaca128 »

nottaylorswift wrote: post #25
botolo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This intrigues me. What would be the best device to explore VR now? Oculus Quest 2? Any new model coming out soon?

For $300 the Quest 2 is the product of the decade. Buy one, seriously, just buy one. I paid 2200 for an iPad pro M1, but I haven't spent an hour with it since I got it 3 months ago. The oculus has 100% of my attention. I watch YouTube, browse the web, online shop, socialize, work, play games with it. I have the extended battery and run 2x 5 hour charges down a day. You want to see the future ^ it's for sale.

> For $300 the Quest 2 is the product of the decade

Would you also pay double that amount? That's how much it costs where I live and probably in many other places too. And you can say what you want, even $300 is not an amount I want to risk going down the drain because Facebook had yet another wave of "oops you're banned now too bad" events.

I will not even touch anything Facebook for free nowadays, to be honest. It's only a matter of time until great alternatives exist.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#69

Post by oriettaxx »

Aldipower wrote: post #9

I am excited about dedicated servers. Yes, dedicated, not cloud servers in AWS or something like that. I am interested in running my own server for decades, but nowadays, since about 2 years, you get extremely powerful and reliable servers for already 40 bucks a month. That is amazing. The power you can deliver today compared to the costs reached a very good ratio. This was unthinkable 5-7 years ago and open a lot of…

me, too

Plus, I really like Hetzner

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