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

Something I’ve been thinking about is whether the current technological landscape, through positive and negative pressures, can enable a revival of small-scale production. Basically, making more of what you consume at home, in your neighborhood, etc.<p>I think “human scale” technologies can help mitigate some of the more nightmarish horizons of the technological society we inhabit, though, obviously, neither completely, nor on their own.<p>My background is in networks, so I tend to think about things from that perspective (e.g., a private U-LTE network for communication with neighbors, mesh nets of sensors to make home food production more manageable and efficient). It’s a very fruitful area for anyone interested in a more communal and family-oriented future.<p>Obvious difficulties are: Is the efficiency hit one gets from decentralization practically viable, long term? In which cases? How do you get your silicon? Other materials? Are those suppliers going to let you do this? How do you do this in the existing regulatory and political climate? Can this work for the poor? Does it open, unintentionally, new frontiers of technological domination?<p>All interesting questions; only some have technical solution.<p>EDIT: Adding also that I am interested in new or revived applications for “low-tech,” if that’s something anybody else knows about and wants to share.

The race for breakeven fusion is heating up, and it&#x27;s exciting to see. That old adage about reaching breakeven being &#x27;always 30 years in the future&#x27; is actually, finally looking more like 5-10 years. Relevant projects, all tokamaks: The largest ever fusion reactor so far which is being built now -- ITER in France, then there&#x27;s MIT&#x2F;Commonwealth Fusion&#x27;s SPARC (they just demoed a type 2 superconductor magnet that developed 20T in its rather large borehole), China&#x27;s EAST reactor and its recent 200+ million degree temperature and confinement time records, and the venerable JET reactor in the UK, which still holds the Q record of ~0.67 with D+T and they are prepping for another tritium run. These projects are some of the leaders in the field, amongst many others.<p>The stellarators are also fascinating projects though even more geometrically complex than tokamaks are. The Moebius strip-like twist allows them to impart stability to a ring of plasma in ways that tokamaks can&#x27;t. The Wendelstein X7 in Germany and the Large Helical Device in Japan are the largest and most recent examples. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab has a novel stellarator design called NCSX, which interestingly uses coils and arrays of permanent magnets.<p>The advent of type 2 superconductors at scale will contribute greatly to this speed-up to acheive breakeven with tokamaks and stellarators. The much smaller and newer design MIT SPARC (which will use the more recently developed type 2 superconductors) might even beat ITER(which uses type 1 superconductors) to Q=1+!

Cheap solar combined with the electric transport revolution (courtesy of better batteries), and the likely implications towards the architecture of our future power generation and storage.<p>It costs money, but it&#x27;s now possible to live a first-world lifestyle - sports car and all - without burning <i>any</i> fossil fuels. Houses can be made self-sufficient. The biggest impediment to turning that into a massive distributed green power grid is regulatory.<p>We&#x27;ll need that grid, so I&#x27;m confident the walls will come down. Electric cars are widely accepted as the future, with many countries attempting to ban ICE cars completely within a relatively short timeframe, but nobody seems to be strongly considering how on earth we&#x27;ll charge them all. There&#x27;s going to be a rocky period of power shortages, but that will incentivize the construction of off-grid homes, which will incentivize ways of arbitrating their surplus power. The future of this space looks interesting.<p>An offshoot of all this that&#x27;s exciting from a social perspective is the rise of personal electric transport, like e-scooters and e-bikes. We&#x27;re well on our way to eliminating fossil fuels from our cities, and that makes me happy.

I&#x27;m really excited about things from the past that have managed to bubble to the present. Nothing modern has really excited me in a long time. (I&#x27;m hopeful something in this thread will spark that old feeling again!)<p>The Creatures Evolution Engine source code (if anybody remembers the Creatures games &#x2F; Cyberlife) getting released. Now we&#x27;ll know exactly what makes those Norns and their world tick, which is fascinating: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;lc2e-sun-16-jan-2000.tar01" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;lc2e-sun-16-jan-2000.tar01</a><p>All of the Infocom source code and information about ZIL and the stories from the founders.<p>The LambdaMOO server getting forked and modernized with Stunt and ToastStunt. Now there is even talk of the original server getting updated again after 20 years of the maintainer doing nothing with it.<p>Fun stuff!

Hard to get excited when I already feel like I have more tech than I need. I feel like we&#x27;ve reached all the low hanging fruits of quality of life before the 90s (health&#x2F;medical care, electricity, fridges, central heating, running water). Computers are nice, smartphones are convenient, google map is the 8th wonder of the world, but I feel like we&#x27;re now going backwards, products are becoming more and more unrepairable, unreliable, complex, made to be consumed and discarded. We&#x27;re in an age of infinitely small incremental updates to existing technologies.<p>It&#x27;s also hard to get excited about gadgets when most of the real world issues are social or economical.<p>When I want to dream a bit I open an old book about medicine&#x2F;chemistry&#x2F;woodworking&#x2F;metalsmithing&#x2F;1900s inventions. Back in these days a single person could still take giant steps, nowadays progress is extremely slow and requires huge teams if not megacorps with unlimited amount of money.

YouTube and the content creator industry (and the surrounding hardware tech) excites me.<p>I follow a channel on YouTube called &quot;The Best Ever Food Review Show&quot;, a super high-production values travel&#x2F;food TV channel produced by a guy from Minnesota who bootstrapped the operation himself. Imagine having the camera equipment (anything from Sony RX&#x27;s to BlackMagic) and computer hardware (PC&#x2F;Mac) and software (Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, FCP) today that is capable of producing a show that is equal to or exceeds the quality of most network travel TV shows. (he has since hired a team, but still, I&#x27;m sure their budget is a fraction of Food Network budgets)<p>Same deal with MKBHD -- really high quality content and really high production values. (MKBHD uses Red cameras)<p>I have no interested in producing content myself, but I can&#x27;t help but be fascinated by the amount of amazing independent content that&#x27;s out there on YouTube, all enabled by prosumer hardware and software.

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 possibilities.

The fall of Intel.<p>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&#x27;s slipped have led to exciting advances, but they got them under control again quickly.<p>The explosion of held up potential that will happen when they shatter should (I hope) make the AT&amp;T breakup look small.

Nothing. At least in terms of &quot;Bits&quot;<p>Technology as a word has now blended to everything about &quot;bits&quot; or Information Technology. But my background is EE I am always more interested in &quot;atoms&quot;. How &quot;bits&quot; should have helped &quot;atoms&quot; to make more interesting things. Instead we have SnapChat that now worth the same as Sony.<p>I really do believe there are many many sector of our world and business that is not really help by &quot;bits&quot; at all. Anyone who ever touched CRM &#x2F; 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 &quot;bits&quot;.<p>So if I were to pick things that excite me most is the potential of Battery Breakthrough, Nuclear Fusion Progress.<p>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 &quot;bits&quot;.

I predict we are entering (or have entered) a silver age of technology where progress will be slower and less breathtaking. Rather than radical innovation we will see slower and steady progress within existing technologies. Ideally the manic optimism (and pessimism) of the past will give way to a calmer, more humble optimism.<p>In web development in particular I hope this will lead to a reexamination of lost ideas, such as the hypermedia architecture. I think you are seeing that with things like Hotwire and htmx.<p>So I would look to ideas from the past, perhaps abandoned today, for things to inspire us.

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.

I&#x27;m enthusiastic about block chain. Is it in a bubble? Yes, but so is virtually every speculative asset... Blockchain legitimately has potential to solve major social problems equitably, for example, online representative voting with open source software, anonymity, verifiability, higher efficiency and powered by the people.<p>Otherwise, I&#x27;m getting pretty stoked about computer vision techniques. If I had more time I would work on projects for controlling basic things within the home. I saw a Youtube video which demonstrated a volume control system, controlled by a camera looking at the distance between your thumb and index finger. I also think many of the techniques in CV have applications in art which has been completely unexplored.

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

Mars exploration. I don&#x27;t know why, but i get all emotional and ureasonably excited about it.<p>AR. VR is cool and all, and I was blown away the first time I tested it, but the ability to project information into the real world, to create reality 2.0 (a term I am sure I will regret), is just well, magical.<p>From everyday HUDs to being able to put a fake fire place into your home, AR would be both cool and useful.<p>At a lower level, Docker is pretty cool and having practical ARM laptops is fantastic (even if only Apple have great ones right now).<p>It is easy to all doom and gloomy, but we tend to forget that we are living in a world so full of magic. We have access to the greatest library in the world[0], millions upon millions of songs in excellent quality, the most complete encyclopedia of all time and an excellent search engine to tie them all together.<p>We have free video calls of unlimited duration around the world, we have GPS and can navigate from any one point to any other on Earth.<p>As long as I am lost in a place with cellphone access I can hold down a button and tell Siri to find a way home (or to any other place).<p>And while we are talking about this: we have completely changed the face of the planet, throwing out night it self with artificial light. I was born in 1987, we had street lights, but flash lights was a special item that you had to bring and they weren&#x27;t that bright and didn&#x27;t last that long. Since LEDs became a thing, they became smaller, brighter and lasted forever. These days they are a built in thing in phones that we don&#x27;t even think about.<p>Anyway, we have so much to be excited about if we just look around, but we don&#x27;t because we take everything for granted.<p>[0]: what scholar of yore had access to a library with a million books? I know of none. Today anybody who can access library genesis has access to over 6.6 million books.

Honestly one of the most stressful things about tech is feeling like you have to &quot;keep up&quot;.<p>So when I have time to toy around, its with something dumb or old. Or its more of a foundational thing&#x2F;idea that lasts. Dumb things like &#x27;how does a relational DB work&#x27; or &#x27;how does bumpy work&#x27;.<p>At my day job, it feels like I always have to push the envelope. Its fun to just relax and fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

I&#x27;m excited by the idea that entry level embedded stuff like Arduino and RPi will keep feeding a new generation of tinkerers, in the same way PCs did (speaking as a child of the 80s). With the amount of plug and play sensors and code nowadays, it seems like imagination is the only limiting factor for inventing useful physical things. I suppose this has been going on for a while now, but I&#x27;d say we&#x27;ve yet to see the dividends as it takes a generation of kids to start really being creative with the possibilities.

Right now my current off-hours time-consumer is audio-synch’d lights. Specifically I’m working on music sync for Halloween props. This is a lot of warm up for Christmas too. I’m blown away by what’s available in the FOSS space for this stuff.

Metal additive manufacturing emerging tech, printed perovskite solar cells, solid state batteries, deepmind going into physics, VR finally passing early adopter phase and getting ready to hit wider population

Among other things, Virtual Reality... specifically 3D stereoscopic interactive imagery makes things very life-like and I am stroked by its possibilities for recreation as well as for training.<p>The present day headsets are still bulky, but am sure they will become lighter and even more better.<p>The interface will also improve. In oculus we can already use fingers to navigate and interface with the OS. This will only improve.

No one mentioned machine learning yet so I will. Recent language models are incredibly impressive, I’m really excited to see where we go next.

Computer Architecture is exciting. Non Volatile memory, dark silicon, FPGAs, etc are gaining serious traction. Also integrated photonics.

After trying Half Life: Alyx on a quest 2 I am absolutely convinced that VR is going to be huge for the general public in the future.<p>I saw a comment that said it feels like a game from 5 years in the future and I agree.<p>VR&#x2F;AR in general feels like a young field with lots of room for innovation.

Linux Gaming is exciting - because it&#x27;s been progressing from virtually nothing 10 years ago to being a tangible Windows alternative in 2021. And it keeps getting better.

Quantum computing. It&#x27;s in very early stages still, but the potential of what it could revolutionize is huge.<p>Technologies that help us take better care of the environment, slow down climate change, make agriculture sustainable and environmentally friendlier, etc.<p>And the obvious: space exploration, deeper human-computer interfaces (as much as I&#x27;m creeped out by Neuralink, it is inevitable).

Perhaps you’re feeling like everything has been done before. Consider a particular area and imagine how it could be if only a few things are changed. For example, we know where social media got us. How did it evolve to get to this point? Is there a better alternative? Build a better experience or work with others to cut a new path of least resistance.<p>You may have enjoyed mining Bitcoin, but there’s more to blockchain technology than that. I’m surprised you didn’t mention NFTs or dapps. Search for Web3 if you’re into playing buzzword bingo.<p>A part of Oculus may have sewn the seeds of fascism that we recently witnessed and are experiencing the effects of as we attempt to squash it back under the rock it crawled out from, but their corporate overlords still feel strongly enough about it to announce they’re dropping a considerable chunk of cash to swindle everyone into thinking they’ve created a “metaverse” instead of another walled garden. There’s a ton of work happening in the VR&#x2F;AR&#x2F;XR space that is approachable. Look beyond gaming to AEC and manufacturing applications.<p>The new 5G phone books are coming! Get ready for that.<p>Solar and alternative power is only getting bigger. We’ve experienced some technical difficulties getting a certain segment of the population to transition away from fossil fuels, but if we can get an electric car into space, we can hopefully get one in NASCAR.<p>And I’m sure you’ve seen all the robots, right? The Roomba folks have a nice platform, but there are many others out there. Add a camera, a laser, and a bit of deep learning into the mix and you’ve got yourself hours of entertainment.<p>Go back and watch Douglas Engelbart’s mother of all demos and you’ll see that some things have progressed further than others. Why is that?<p>Find what interests you and dig deeper. Make something that works for you and show others the way.

GNU Guix and reproducible builds. That software can be bitwise reproducible and explicitly declared feels like an exit ramp from the relatively brittle systems that are standard. It feels insane to me that only now these concepts are coming to fruition. Afaict, Guix and Nix invalidate the need for things like puppet, ansible, etc.

The C&#x2F;C++ replacement landscape is getting more attention than ever.<p>Odin, Zig, Jai, and Rust all seem promising in their own respects.

Today is like a better version of the 1960&#x27;s.<p>Two things:<p>1) The new space age, really aiming far to the Moon and Mars.<p>2) The altered state of mind that wide acceptance of Psychedelics is going to bring to the masses.

I&#x27;m not interested in &quot;new&quot; usually (but I do enjoy anything Heidi Howard releases in her research). I like distributed systems, highly available services, and operating at scale. I like thinking how we can improve systems to make customers happier and grow the bottom line. Sometimes, I&#x27;d probably keep optimizing a given service, but I also like monitoring services and determining ways to know if the service is meeting customer needs, and I let that guide or influence &quot;good enough to delight customers.&quot; I like ownership. I want to own my services from data layer to public API, and to promote devops culture.<p>Not sure if this is the spirit of your question. I like moving products forward, and the tech is usually an implementation detail.

Obviously the technology in question is mostly about software related developments. There is a lot of exciting technology out there about emission reduction, renewable energy or CO2 capture. Judging by the comments not really a matter of interest, or is it?

For the thing that keeps exciting me, has been for about 5 years now, is single board computers. At first the Raspberry Pi and the forks of it were exciting to me. But as time as has gone on more CPU power, memory and even graphics have been stuffed into these boards. Sure, they don&#x27;t 100% replace a beefy desktop but considering they give some desktops of the 2000-2015s a run for their money is exciting. Not only that but the size too. Just the power&#x2F;size and general usability is exciting to me. Then there is the whole connection headers for programming the board as a microcontroller for robotics or whatever.

AI (GPT-3 and similar technology). It&#x27;s spawning a new generation of games, probably similar to roguelikes in that the effort bar is low enough that someone of generic skill can build one on their own. Games have the potential to be far more emergent than they ever were. AI Dungeon is like the Zork of today.

On a social level: open source and how easy it is nowadays to develop something.<p>People may say the same about the computer platforms of the old days, but i think that we&#x27;re still seeing a pretty good period of time before the larger walled gardens have taken over. You can have a server in the cloud up and running in minutes. There are even managed services or PaaS offerings, if you&#x27;d prefer to use those and don&#x27;t fall in the SaaSS trap: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;who-does-that-server-really-s...</a><p>Want to do embedded development? Arduino and the compatible platforms are lovely! Need something more powerful? Raspberry Pi and the compatibles have got your back! Even more so? Just get a low power x86 CPU like 200GE and it&#x27;ll be more than you need for the near future! Of course, you can also do your part in decreasing e-waste and use cheap refurbished hardware as well, perhaps even buying professional grade stuff, like the people over at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;homelab&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;homelab&#x2F;</a> community often do.<p>Need a software library or a language to help you with a particular task? It probably not only exists, but also has documentation and even tutorials available at a whim! You don&#x27;t need to read magazines or manually copy code, you can download ready to run examples from GitHub, or even view them without leaving your browser! And the variety of languages is also lovely, anything from Python with its rich ecosystem, Ruby and PHP for simple webapp development, to Java, .NET for more serious platforms, Go and even Rust for working at a lower abstraction layer.<p>Need a larger piece of software? There are self-hosted platforms for blogging, sharing files, even e-commerce stores that you can host on your own. Most of those are also open source and free. While the licenses vary, in most cases you can modify the software to suit your needs, or to even offer fixes that may benefit thousands or millions across the globe. And on the opposite side, you also benefit from the work of others as well! As for the complicated domains, there are businesses to address your needs. Want to take payments? Stripe or Paypal has got your back.<p>And even within these walled gardens, things are mostly acceptable for now: you can host videos on YouTube, reach your audiences on social media or even use platforms for app delivery. That&#x27;s not to say that they&#x27;re perfect, but 20 years ago you simply didn&#x27;t have anything like that. I recall one of the GDC talks about how back in the day people had to order video games from a small company by phone, which nowadays seems as curious, as it does unnecessary.<p>Oh, and also the FOSS and open source movements in general are amazing to behold. You get entire production ready operating systems like Debian or FreeBSD for free. They even probably run on the hardware that is in your home! And they can scale from a laptop to a server farm with few to no issues! Even driver support is improving and you also get a whole bunch of amazing free software: everything from LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Krita, Blender, Audacity, kdenlive, VSCodium&#x2F;NetBeans&#x2F;Eclipse&#x2F;IntelliJ (though personally i pay for the package of all JetBrains tools) to even game engines like Godot.<p>On a technical level: containers and software that compiles to small static binaries. In my eyes, both of those approaches are good for achieving higher levels of environment independence and if software is written with 12 Factor App principles (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12factor.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12factor.net&#x2F;</a>) in mind, or just follows some of the UNIX best practices, then it&#x27;s likely that it&#x27;ll be reasonably easy to configure and run.<p>For example, in my homelab, i run about 90% of the software in containers, giving everything resource limits, being able to redeploy stuff based on changes to a text file or two, but besides that i can also escape the clutches of the *nix file system structure which every piece of software treats differently and can achieve something like keeping all of the data that i care about within the system under a separate&#x2F;common directory, &quot;&#x2F;docker&quot; in my case. This leads to a simple directory structure, like &quot;&#x2F;docker&#x2F;nextcloud&#x2F;data&#x2F;mysql&#x2F;...&quot; and also really simplifies backups.<p>It seems like someone looked at how we run software, and instead of trying to implement it from the bottom up, instead decided to create it from the top down - focusing on an easier Ops experience, and it shows! Similarly, even static binaries need to be built more often to keep up to date with their dependency updates, at the same time when you get that binary, you&#x27;ll be pretty sure that it&#x27;ll work to the end of time in a trusted environment with trusted data. It&#x27;s much better than CentOS 8 breaking the xrdp package for some reason, or similar things happening with updates.<p>Oh, also, i cannot overstate how nice things like Let&#x27;s Encrypt are - now you can secure your sites for free and automate certificate renewal. And with web servers like Caddy, a lot of things that used to be really hard are getting easier to do. Same for using Docker Swarm and Portainer for managing small container cluster deployments (though some people also say lovely things about Hashicorp Nomad, which optionally also integrates nicely with their Consul service mesh and Vault credential system).<p>In summary: Things aren&#x27;t necessarily perfect, but they definitely could be a lot worse! If you look at the positives, it seems like there are a lot of advancements happening and maybe even mobile devices won&#x27;t be so vendor-locked in about 20-40 years, given how ARM seems to slowly be gaining more and more ground! Similarly, i&#x27;m curious to see where FOSS will go.

Unreal Engine, Tesla, techno music.

Basically all the things that EM&#x27;s companies are working on: spaceships &amp; solar system exploration, neuralink, humanoid robots. EM has perfect taste for what&#x27;s cool and important in tech&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;applied science<p>Everything else is meh

Hm… This excites me: Go. Containers. The Linux kernel. Static site generators (pick your desired flavour). AWS Lambda. Laurent Bercot’s s6&#x2F;s6-rc (the former is a suite of programs for process supervision, the latter is a service manager).

Pretty excited about Algorand&#x27;s AVM 1.0 release and new features. But I am biased since that is what I have been working on recently.<p>Looking forward to more comfortable lighter weight VR&#x2F;AR glasses. Think that upcoming displays will be 10X more comfortable and use optical wave guide instead of phone on face and that will make a huge difference.<p>Looking forward to Neuralink and that type of thing, ie brain computer interfaces.<p>Artificial muscles have come a long way. Especially promising are the high voltage types which I can&#x27;t remember now, HASEL or something. 3d-printed artificial muscles and limbs could be a real thing.

Probably nothing. I think we peaked in early 2000s and now we&#x27;re floating on a plateau. I don&#x27;t think progress will be restored during my lifetime unless we first meet a shared catastrophe on the level of WW2.

Nothing.<p>I think people confuse interesting with exciting. Excitement was when I first got my driver&#x27;s license; when I got my Atari 800 for Christmas; the first time I drove a 1998 BMW M3, whew! that car made me smile every time I drove it! Things like those excited me, not another web framework or programming language, or cloud services, or another phone, or saving the world somehow.<p>But I do have interests like programming a TI calculator, living off grid, making a rogue-like game, repairing and restoring classic arcade games from the ground up, such as Pacman and Defender.<p>Excitement only comes every once in a while.

Battery technology, specifically non-lithium. I see the efforts to get rid of gas powered cars, but I see battery technology as a potential blocker.<p>Decentralized Finance - seems some very interesting things could come out of this.<p>3D printing in the consumer space. I have heard they print jet engine parts now. I can only imagine what people who tinker at home can come up with as the technology improves.<p>Hardware based ML models, imagine having a gpt-3 model on a chip that fits in your pocket? This would be something right out of a William Gibson novel.

That we will one day be able to communicate telepathically via BMIs

3D-scanning of, places....<p>All the trend of VR usually forgets that until now it was very difficult ( &amp; costly) to have the 3D scan. Of shops, malls, indoor homes, cities, so we can get web users to immerse into. This excites me because it is happening now.<p>Examples : Matterport, Unity, free-visit ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;3BIMfwl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;3BIMfwl</a> )

Nothing specific but I think that products and services adding a layer of simplification, discoverability and aggregation on top of existing solutions has a bright future.<p>Too many well meaning, yet messy, complicated, risky and buggy services each try to drag potential customer into their swamp.<p>Each has a gold nugget and we need layer that aggregate, filters and simplifies whatever exists for end user.

Inverting the web.<p>Imagine web technologies that are inherently private, no third parties or servers, and yet more social than current social networks.<p>The goal of such a technology is to be divisive. Separate the population that wants to broadcast or silently lurk from those that wish to share and engage.

It&#x27;s sad, but... nothing.<p>The things that I do find interesting are usually expensive, which crushes any interest. I hate my job and mostly see technology as torture due to it. Even if I want to work on an idea, I don&#x27;t feel like staring at a screen after working my regular job.

Honestly nothing I’ve seen lately sadly. There have been a few more recent technologies that piqued my interest, but sadly I can never get involved with them. Im also pretty young and missed &#x2F; was too young for most of the revolutionary developments in tech.

Seeing all those comments about low tech being exciting to people here has really made my day. It&#x27;s something that I&#x27;ve been increasingly interested in over the years, but I thought I didn&#x27;t have much company in that.

Remote learning technology is what I would like to dig deeper in.<p>I imagine software development skills becoming as widespread as math skills worldwide in 50 years. Its impact will be exponential.

Photonic computing and the return of Fortran. These are two separate things but to some degree they&#x27;re both boosted by the rise of heterogeneous computing.

Fractional lightspeed orbital dock laser foil space trams and planetary exploration in nearby solar systems.

mRNA vaccines, for me. I&#x27;m sure most people read this fantastic write-up of how the covid vaccine works back in December: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;berthub.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;posts&#x2F;reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;berthub.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;posts&#x2F;reverse-engineering-source...</a><p>It really opened my eyes to how far we&#x27;ve come over the years in learning to game our immune system. And the existence of printers for custom DNA blew my mind. I can&#x27;t even get printers to reliably put ink on paper, let alone create the building blocks of life.

audio-based apps, AirPods, voice assistance - especially promising progress on the horizon with using OpenAI&#x27;s Codex

DeFi.<p>It&#x27;s an ugly callous teenager as of now, but it grows quickly and is ingenious.<p>(Edit: I am about the same age as you)

homomorphic encryption &amp; zero trust servers

Oculus quest 2. Reminds me of the first iPhone. So much potential, and they finally have the basics for the platform right.

I am replying to my own post to share something that gives me some excitement. Nothing compared to the major revolutions I mentioned in my post, but definitely something that shows some potential.<p>AR - I was blown away by the AR comic book reader developed by VeVe for their NFT comic books. I still think that NFTs are lame (at least their current format), but being able to see through your iPhone an old comic book sitting right there on your table and flipping its pages was something magical. Never before I wanted so badly to have AR glasses with me and just being able to read a comic book collection in this way, without the need of my iPhone.<p>Robots - I was initially excited about the Amazon Echo, but I ended up using it only to set a timer when I cook. The new Amazon Astro is exciting. Way too expensive right now and I am just scared it might be a huge disappointment, but the idea of having a robot in my house that follows me, helps me, etc. sounds like super fun and very exciting.