I think a 1970s American would get a kick out these:
- Global warming is real and worse than you think and no it’s not going to be addressed.
- Those gas prices are going no where but up.
- Anyway we decided that all cars will be F350s.
- I hope you like pocket electronics because those are literally the only things that will seem truly futuristic to you. Everything else? Pretty much the same. Yep. We don’t even live longer.
LLMs - you can just talk to your computer. I used computers since the 90s and that has always been the ultimate scifi dream and it’s here.
You can talk to dumb chatbots since the nineties. Now they can into grammar, wow.
(I know they are way better now. But the basic fact stands.)
I remember cleverbot back in the day, and thinking that was peak.
As much as I have a love-hate relationship with these because of all the negative effects (And there are countless ones), it’s quite impressive what current Frontier models can do at this time, with very little input.
Not related to technology. Walking into an airport to greet or to say Bon Voyage to people at the gate!!! Now, the fucking things are like prisons!
Running to tell the woman you love to stay, before being tazed to the ground and put on a no fly list.
That we live inside a dystopia that is a pretty even mix of Brave Nee World and 1984.
CT and MRI
i saw this on r/futurology
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3367612/chinese-scientists-build-worlds-smallest-ct-scanner-weighing-just-6kg“The device can be held in one hand and is the world’s smallest and lightest CT system, earning it the nickname ‘palm-sized CT scanner’,” Liu Baodong, a senior engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and general manager of Rayim, told the Science and Technology Daily on Monday.
The machine had a spatial resolution of 80 micrometres, roughly the width of a human hair, and could analyse objects from snail shells to medicine capsules, Liu said.
It consumed only about 200 watts, which meant it could be powered by an ordinary portable power bank during fieldwork, he said."
This is the hot shit as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon-counting_computed_tomography
i believe that CT&MRI are also used in research. which i think is really great.
in clinical diagnostic setting, the imaging is for a single case and privacy protected… whereas in research, it is greenlighted and maximally designed for greater good of medicine.
I got to thinking about like, Amazon. To an American in 1970, the equivalent would have been Sears, the retailer that sells literally everything though an enormous catalog. They had department stores you could visit in person and they’d publish a phone book thick catalog for mail order. And there was a time that Sears could have bought Amazon outright for chump change. I remember a Tim Allen stand-up routine where he talks about mail ordering a tool from Sears, and it arrives 6 to 8 weeks later. Shipping is now usually a matter of 1-4 days.
But no, the real answer is probably wireless headphones. Like if you were showing around a tech enthusiast from 1975 around my house, the thing that would probably break his brain the most is a pair of wireless earbuds.
Indeed, Sears had every chance to become Amazon. I kind of miss my old Sony Walkman with the foam earpads.
Unfortunately they don’t sound near as good. Maybe in the future they will.
Compared to a lot of headphones available in the 1970’s they sound amazing.
Not so sure about that claim. In the 70s everything was analogue. Bluetooth can barely do mp3 quality let alone CD which is still far from full analogue tape. Many headphone from back them line Sennheiser HD 414, Koss Pro/4AA, and Stax SR-X blow away anything some makes now
Allow me to re-state, with emphasis:
Compared to
A LOT
of headphones available in the 1970’s, they sound amazing.
Yeah, there’s been good audio gear for decades, but there was also utter garboleum.
My issue was back then things got better every year. People chased sound quality. Now people use Bluetooth and listen to music mixed on a laptop with autotune.
Christians of Lemmy: You think your god would have bothered creating the universe if he knew it would inevitably lead to the existence of audiophiles?
Let me guess it’s okay to appreciate good food. It’s okay to appreciate sweet touching. But it’s not okay to appreciate good audio. Gotcha
All video graphics after Pong’s.
… after pong’s what ?
Graphics.
Computers are things you can personally own, most of the people on the planet own at least one, probably including one that fits in a pants pocket.
Steve Wozniak once proudly told his mother that some day, he’ll have a computer of his very own. Richard Stallman, in his now famous usenet post announcing the beginning of GNU, says that “one manufacturer has already promised us a machine.” So, Richard Stallman was working “In the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT”, and even in that position there was a question as to where he was going to get a computer for his project. In 1983.
Ironically, we’re circling back to renting a dummy terminal to access someone else’s computer.
The combined computing power to run NASA and put men on the moon…now fits in my pants pocket
The Nazis are back.
the punks tried to warn us
I’m late gen Z and when I first saw a 1TB micro SD in I too had a “Wow” moment. For me 1 TB was a rather big hard drive. What I want to say is that its insane how fast technology is developing.

Without any sarcasms… That is some kind of wild shit.
So uhhh, why was that ready to hand?
Well both their hands are free, you see, due to the cage.
It’s not for the hand.
This is the opposite. I was watching the transformers 40th anniversary in the theatre with my son and noticed in the 80’s we had such a hard on for hover boards. In 2005 on earth Daniel had one. In back to the future it was 2015 and they had hoverboards.
Man we fucked up. I want my hoverboard.
Last night my sister and I had a 90 minute conversation on our phones with full-colour, hi-res video, me in the UK, her in NZ. It didn’t cost either of us anything. We’re in our 70s, such a thing was unimaginable back in the day.
This one for me too. I remember watching some movie when I was younger and it had two people talking over a video screen and I thought that when that happens I’ll be actually living in the sci-fi future. Fast forward many years and I’m driving with my husband, regular old day, and as I’m looking out the window I see a girl face timing with somone at the bus stop. And it hits me, I’M HERE, I’M IN THE SCI-FI FUTURE. And that was 15 years ago. It’s missing a bunch of the other cool sci-fi shit, but it’s nailing the dystopian aspect’s full on.
I was explaining to my 8 year old son only last week about how when I was a boy phones existed but nothing like what we have today. We had one phone in each house, usually in the hallway or bottom or the stairs. Rotary and then digital. Phone books, pay phones, yellow pages, and so on.
The conversation started because we walked past an old BT glass phone box with still had the phone inside and the slot to put coins in. He asked what it was.
I remember talking to family in Australia from UK on the phone in 90s and it costing multiple £/min with noticeable delay.
Remember the pressure to say everything as fast as possible without lapsing into mundane things? Long distance phone calls were stressful.
The wheeze was to make a reverse charge call and tell the operator your name was “Itsaboy”. The call would then be declined.
It cost you internet and your privacy. 🤗
Mate, back in the day there was a phone book in every home with everyone’s exact address and phone number in it. If you wanted the phone number of someone in another city, you went to the public library, which had more phone books. If the library was big enough, they had international phone books.
If someone didn’t have a phone, you could get their address from the electoral roll, again available at the library.
A lot of people didn’t even lock their doors. We did, but the key was hanging up in the garage.
Edit: my internet is unlimited - it doesn’t cost me any more to blab for an hour.
You could, however, pay a fee to the phone book company to leave your info off of it.
Not if they were using stolen wifi and Signal \s
Not your privacy if you can find an encrypted video chat software. I’m trying keet.io it’s been solid
That advertisements would be used to disrupt and control your online activities.
4TB??. I remember being in highschool in 2003 and we were all standing around looking at a 1GB USB. It was insane that a USB could hold an insane 1GB
My first MP3 player was a USB stick that plugged into an adaptor that had a 3.5mm headphone jack… It let me carry 60-85 songs, There was no Bluetooth.
1GB hard drive (1980)

500 pounds and $40,000
Ibm hard drive. 1956. 5MB












