Self driving cars. Ten years ago I said, “we’ll have this worked out in 10 years”. What a fool I was.
Elmo has claimed to have it for over 10 years now
You weren’t a fool, you simply were lied to
Elmo always lies, every second word put of his mouth is a lie. Every project he boasts about has been a lie.
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.
Recycling that actually works.
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 :/
Oh no :(
Standardized connector for everything with backwards compatibility
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.
Wasn’t that something proposed in windows phone? I can’t remember and am too lazy to look it up
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.
Absolutely. My phone is more powerful than my family pc from 2007 by a mile
EVs are pretty cheap now. How cheap did you think?
Slightly cheaper than fuel by 10% for similar cars (including country of origin)
As cheap as gasoline cars
They are. You can get an atto 1 for 25k AUD. Lots of options in the 30-40k aud range. A petrol corolla is 32k, so they’re comparable.
Compassion, empathy, socialism.
Ability to live in balance with the earth
Only after the nuclear winter
Maglev trains in the US
I thought that by now we would’ve commercialized at scale alternative battery technologies. We’re still using lithium ion even for grid storage and EV’s.
Also, I expected we would have put a man on the moon by now.
We wouldn’t need such a battery development if we had simply invested in a standardised electrified wiring network for the motor roads. we would have lighter cars that charge their ~100 km battery while driving on the motor road so they can easily reach their destination
Maybe give cars a second pair of axles, to keep them aligned with the overhead power on the highway and to reduce the tire wear. Maybe join them together too so each individual car doesn’t have to worry about braking and the driver can basically just sleep.
This isn’t me sarcastically reinventing trains. I see why people would rather spend their commute in a private car than in a public train carriage. These features just seem genuinely useful.
What I have sarcastically reinvented is basically just self-driving cars.
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.
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.
Life cycle cost analyses are typically done by engineers.
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
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.
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
I’ve never had to replace my LED lights and I’ve had mine for a decade.
I miss incandescent bulbs and would install them if I had solar panels
I was there for the transition period between incandescents and LEDs: The CFL.
I broke a CFL pretty early on and noped out of using CFLs.
Yeah, I had more than one sheer off trying to put one in or unscrew one.
Buy dimmer, filament style LEDs. They don’t burn themselves out hy heat at least.
Otherwise you’re facing planned obsolescence.
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?”
Realistically?
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Housing that doesn’t cost a fortune
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Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you
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Food that’s both affordable and worth eating
None of it is futuristic. All of it feels further away than ever.
That’s not tech, that’s policy. Technologically there are no holdups to this, capitalism just needs it to not be so
Your answer is something you want to force into the conversation, not what OP asked.
You’re not wrong, but that’s not the conversation man.
Yeah, the reason we don’t have those isn’t technological. We could have it today if we collectively decided that we wanted it.
That’s not really how it works, or we’d already have them. People in China have those things because they beat the fascist KMT back to Formosa, and by force subordinated the bourgeoisie and the remnants of feudalism.
Well, that plus militant organizing
As it is written in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra:
It is like when someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, that person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why? It is because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.
Recently quoted by Bruce Lee, than in the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain
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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.
Brit on a train; A phone network that would offer a reasonable level of connectivity no matter where you are in the country.
Ours definitely took a few steps back early 2023.
