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What are we in a golden age of?
I don't normally give my own examples for my own questions, but for this one I think it'll help with clarity for what I'm trying to get at:
I mentioned recently that we're in a golden age of N64 decompilations/recompilations with several high-profile games getting releases that make them run on modern machines with huge quality of life upgrades, and many more in the works (one for Extreme-G just came out two days ago).
I know that, with everything going on seemingly everywhere in the world right now, it can be difficult to think of things in terms of abundance and prosperity, but I also think there's a lot of it around if we look for it, especially in niche corners.
Me!
My life has never been better, and there is no end to how good it will continue to become.
There are struggles, personal as well as societal but overall me and my life just keep getting better and better.
This is fantastic!!! I love hearing this and I hope more of us are celebrating golden ages of ourselves
God, I get you! I'm having a gorgeous time too!
Super annoying to admit from a storytelling perspective, but it does get better!
I've been in a similar bucket and it's been great.
It feels obvious to say, but if you don't take steps to improve your life, things won't improve except by random chance. Having taken a lot of these steps in the past couple years, things have never been better.
Would you mind summarizing a few of those steps? Sometimes it feels like I'm in a slump, but don't even know what I would need to do to get out.
In no particular order:
If you're unhappy, try and evaluate why that might be. There's lots of possible sources, and they all have solutions or at least alleviations.
I also realize a lot of what I listed above involves spending money, but there's low cost or free alternatives to a lot of them (museums have free nights, thrift stores are great if they carry your size, decluttering can be profitable if you sell things, a bottle of nail polish is a few bucks, etc). I can't fix your shitty job that doesn't pay enough in a self-help comment, but I can push you to improve the other aspects of your life where you can.
Also, if you do all these things and you're still depressed or feel stuck in a rut, consider therapy, there might be something more going on beyond what general life improvements can resolve. And don't be afraid of antidepressants, they can make a world of difference.
Wow, I didn't expect so much advice, so thanks a lot. The one about throwing out unneeded crap is definitely something I've been putting off and yet it would probably help a lot with just a few hours of work.
And this, at the very least, gave me a good laugh :)
Hahaha, after letting this thread sit I thought I would come in here with the exact same answer!
I guess we should all get together and have a self-aggrandizement party. šø
Same, but I work in tech so Iām perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop haha
Saaaaammeee. Despite the world, my own life has so much going for it that I have to be grateful.
I would say we are in the golden age of experiencing biodiversity. Yes we've lost many many species, but never before in billions of years had any one species been able to view coloured, accurate, high def, animated footages of as many other species before. Heat vision, night cams, tracks, time lapse.... It's all so amazing for viewing the diversity of moving-around-molecules.
@ENNautilus showed me weird jelly dudes in the depths of the Mariana Abyss .
ę°“ć©ć”ć³ @WaterRamen picks up dying supermarket weird critters and keeps them as pets until they die of old age and then he eats them.
This is my second year watching 24/7 live cams of @CornelBirdCam 's royal albatross from new hatchling to giant 10kg (20 lb) fluff balls to
derpymajestic sea bird with 3m (9.8') wingspan.ćŗćć©ć @pendra100legs uses super macro lenses to capture footage of adorably translucent gummy looking spring tails or Pikmin-enemy like critters that look so flashy folks thought the scienctists' drawings were an exaggeration.
Mankind has also never been more able to travel, and have field guides and Birder / iNatrualist apps and can obtain retroactive knowledge of "what did I just take a photo of". Speaking of apps we also have never had worldwide, remote, 24/7 engagement with niche animals such as fish door bell š or
Zooniverse.
Thatāsā¦ weird. It makes me uncomfortable. Why save them and then eat them anyway once they die? I understand he doesnāt kill them to eat them, but it does blur the line between pet and food. Which is something interesting, why would you eat a baby cow but not a cat or a dog? Is it just because you didnāt know the baby cow but you know your cat or dog? But then why not eat a cat or dog if not your cat or dog and have no such qualms about baby cows?
It is quite weird. The vtuber's comment is that while they are alive they are good friends, and then once they are gone it is dinner. Partially maybe for the clicks? Partially, well, the animal has passed and isn't suffering, and if the vtuber doesn't have a private plot of land protected from scavengers and there isn't any sort of pet cemetery, it feels wrong to put them in the garbage doesn't it? It's a sort of way to honour their memory. And also crustaceans are pretty tasty.
I agree I can't do it with a pet dog or cat. But back when I kept cherry shrimp, if they were much bigger and I had that kind of confidence that I kept their tank at optimal capacity, I would have eaten them.
Edit: also, folks living in the west don't often see live creatures living in tiny oxygenated tanks at the supermarket or wet market, and don't have that "animal is kept alive until meal time" connection. Maybe it's more weird that our meat animals had been killed a long time ago in a strange horrible place and now sits under plastic wrap.
In my opinion, what really weird is to kill your dinner. Not withstanding extreme situations or developing countries, itās really not necessary. And it sidesteps the whole suffering/not suffering question.
I was reflecting on this point in my original comment because itās a very unusual twist on eating animals and it made me feel even more awkward than the usual dilemma.
Moral and emotional reasons aside:
Baby cow meat is more tender and there's is overall more quantity compared to your well lived pet (there's not that much material on your average cat/dog, while a calf is still in the 20kg range at minimum).
Eating cats and dogs is tolerated (private consumption only, not sale; mostly sausage making for dogs; it's also suuuuuuper rare) in Switzerland and the testimonies I read of people doing that were "meh, meat is meat š¤·".
Maybe closer to your inquiry is that it's very common to find horse meat in supermarkets. Rabbit meat is uncommon but not shocking either.
Personally I would not eat animal I'm emotionally attached to, except post apocalyptic situations that's unlikely to arise. Growing up in the countryside as long as the animal was humanely treated (with my baseline being the farmers I know) then I'm ok with anything
I also had a visceral reaction to this premise but similarly found it fascinating.
Most cultures have a strong taboo against 'desecrating' (including by eating) bodies of anything friend-shaped, but this is such an edge case where many of the usual arguments against it are negated and we're just left with a discomfort that might be entirely learned.
See also the debates around endocannibalism.
I'm very curious why the AI auto-dub for this used like a Swedish accent. I thought it was a real voice at first because...why would AI choose a Swedish accent for that? Maybe it's supposed to be Japanese and it came out wrong?
Yeah I first got algo'd to the channel with English dub as well, I don't know what accent it was but it felt like I was watching an old game show Takeshi's Castle English dub or something. Really strange. And can you confirm if you go to another random Japanese channel it's not YouTube auto dubbed? If now maybe the YouTuber selected this AI...?
I watch Karasuma A's channel where he plays kusoge in Japanese. A while ago, not only did all of the videos switch to English auto-dub, but all of the video titles were auto-translated to English too.
There is apparently no option in YouTube to 'play in native language voice track for this language', but I must have switched it enough times for YouTube to work it out because it usually gives me the Japanese voice track first now. Still haven't worked out how to get the Japanese video titles back, though.
To address the earlier question, the English auto-dub I was getting was a generic American male voice with no unusual accent.
I would love to but I can't even find another Japanese channel with a voiceover!
Also, I already changed that setting, so I suspect it might carry over.
Oooh I found another video YouTube marked auto-dubbed! It's this little parakeet getting its birthday treat
Yeah, YouTube does it a lot these days. Luckily, it seems my setting was preserved because I see that marked as Auto-dubbed but the default audio track for me is the Japanese original.
Thanks for trying that. Glad the setting stuck for both of us . What a dumb and unwanted feature to have automated.
WaterRamen is incredibly entertaining. Him eating his pets doesn't really bother me since I know buying seafood live at the grocery store is normal there and he treats them better than most animals I eat get treated.
If youāve ever wanted to write your own personal software, this is a fantastic time to do it. You might make a mess, but with AI, you will make messes much faster and learn from them. And if you manage to avoid getting too ambitious, you might even build something you actually use.
I don't have time right now to write out a thorough comment on this, but using LLMs is one of the best ways possible to learn badly, if not outright decrease your skill level. This is for many of the same reasons it's discouraged for novice programmers to copy-and-paste their code from elsewhere, except now it's much worse, since you don't strictly have to write almost anything at all. There's more, of course, but again, I'm being brief.
I'll grant you we live in the "golden age" of being able to get code made on the cheap, but there's no promise that code will be either good or ethical, and you most certainly won't be learning anything very well at all by generating it.
I think it depends on how you go about it. With the right attitude you can learn from mistakes, too. Your own mistakes, other peopleās mistakes, and the AIās mistakes. You try stuff, it breaks, and you figure out why. Or these days, ask the AI why it broke, and then see if its explanation makes sense.
This tells me you don't understand what I mean when I say "it's discouraged for novice programmers to copy-and-paste their code from elsewhere." So to explain in short: You learn things better when you have to actually do them yourself. This applies as much to more physical activities as it does to code, and if you're not actually typing the code yourself, you will not remember as well. You will also remember the reasons behind patterns better, because doing it yourself inherently requires you to pay more attention.
These are ways in which copy-and-pasting was a bad way to learn. AI is that, but worse, because now you don't even have to so much as look at the code. Now you're required to pay even less attention than before; any effort to counteract that is going to be inherently less effective, because you're fighting against the current. And having the tool output an explanation for the errors isn't going to be very helpful at all, as I've said elsewhere, because you're getting answers that sound right, not ones that have any promise of being actually right. The output can, will, and has contradicted itself.
I'm sorry, but there's no good way to learn coding by using AI.
Yes, there are things that are best learned by doing it yourself. For example, when you're learning math, you have to do the exercises. I think that's true of programming, too.
However, there are other things that students might learn more easily learn by working with AI. For example, you might learn from the struggle of working on a large-scale program where you didn't write it all yourself. Many concepts from software engineering don't really sink in until you're working at a larger scale than is likely to happen when you're writing a program that you can keep in your head.
There are many different exercises we can learn from. If the software has bugs, that's part of the challenge. If the answers aren't always right, we learn to be skeptical and test things. In the real world, when we look for answers, we do sometimes get bad advice. The AI is going to let us down sometimes, but I still think it's more good than bad.
Coming from someone who has in fact written a large-scale program themselves, there is nothing special about code you didn't write, save avoiding whinging about style guides. You work on something big enough for long enough, you start forgetting about how stuff works by the time you come back to it. There are no single-person teams, because there is always you and past you.
The key difference you'll face doing this with AI is that the bugs and flaws you'll have will be much subtler things. The kind you're less likely to notice, and which will have limited-at-best resemblance to human work. And that's assuming that's all you've done with AI ā people who "learn with AI" tend to start off with the stuff, or vibe-code at worst. This results in lacking foundational skills necessary before even considering large code-base evaluation, as you've agreed.
When you use AI, you risk getting bad advice from a machine that has a startling tendency to generate bad advice. You reach for something as a matter of convenience, learn bad habits from it, and become dependent. And cognitive surrender is not a good way to learn.
There's plenty of subtly wrong code in enterprise apps. I don't think it's all that different?
The obvious bugs tend to get fixed.
You and past-you does happens with time, but short-term exercises in school don't have much time for that. Working with AI will get you to large scale faster.
I don't think you're interested in changing your mind, so I'm going to stop now.
What if you used it as a starting point to read, modify, learn from after the initial generation to have some appropriate code you can look at?
Iām definitely not saying thatās how most people would go about it, just that having essentially a personalized tutor for āfree is incredible to those who are curious enough.
Edit: Basically what skybrian said in another thread, but less generalized, is what Iām talking about, too. :-)
This presumes the code you're looking at is appropriate. Which is a presumption, because AI will regularly output code that is anything but; it has a bad tendency, for example, to repeat code across files and create a bloated mess.
And that ties into what I said in that same thread you linked; you're getting something that sounds right, even when it isn't. Which is especially dangerous when you're a novice who cannot be expected to successfully evaluate the correctness of what you're looking at.
If you want to learn to code, there are an innumerable amount of resources online for doing that exact thing, and there have been for over a decade ā in (and for) any language you want, in any format you want. AI hasn't made this any easier, it just got encouraged as an avenue because the tech's being sold as an omni-solution to every problem. Unfortunately, it's no such thing, and unless we get tech from The Matrix, learning will always take time.
Fortunately, learning is fun, and so is coding. So I don't think AI had any problem to solve anyways.
Youāre right, and I think itās because I had an inaccurate scenario in my mind: I mixed up completely novice learners with those who already āknowā how to program, and just want to increase their scope.
Basically, if you can spot the bullshit, and know not to learn from that, youād be fine ā but then the question arises how big exactly that target demographic is. It apparently seems to include me and skybrian, though :)
I don't think we've reached a golden age of LLM assisted code writing or vibecoding--though it is pretty good. Maybe the golden age of slop is sharply fading so I think right now is the golden age of slop.
But maybe if LLM usage truly is heavily subsidized maybe we are in the golden age where everything is very cheap and in the future it will be too expensive for even serious hobby use. But I don't think so because even open-weight models on <$5k graphic cards are pretty good--I think it's only going to get better (or at least cheaper) in the next few years.
My guess is that it's going to get cheaper, but current prices aren't bad. I'm using Luna with a $20/month ChatGPT subscription (also used for asking questions). It's not free, but it's not that expensive as hobbies go.
At today's RAM prices, I'd put off buying an expensive machine for local inference.
Or, if you've ever wanted to use someone else's software. I don't know how to do finite difference time domain electromagnetics simulation. I can barely get to the end of the phrase, so I can just say FTDT. Thankfully, there's Meep, an open source package that does know how to do that. Just one problem: I don't know how to use Meep either. Ok, but Minimax does, or at least can figure it out. $3 later, I have an FTDT simulation. Wild.
This is a golden age for asking questions. Often Iām wondering how to do something and then I think, wait, I could ask ChatGPT about that!
Of course, this happened before with search engines. Those of us who are old enough can remember how cool it was to be able to search the web instead of going to the library.
But there are many questions that I wouldnāt bother to search on because I expected the results to be crappy, or I would try a different search thatās a bit more indirect but might dredge something up. Thatās a mental block thatās no longer helpful. You can often ask questions in the most direct, naive way, and get good results.
I don't know that I was expecting this one in the thread. I feel like I've been having the opposite experience; a crisis of trust and companies sequestering their data from LLM crawlers has me in a dark age of asking questions.
I've largely abandonned my reflex of using search engines like Google. When I try, I'm hit by articles that feel sloppy or bot challenges that don't run because I haven't whitelisted cookies for that domain yet. Repeatedly watching LLMs (including frontier models I have to use at $JOB) confidently lie to me has made me deeply skeptical of their output.
I'd be interested to hear more on how you've been finding good information lately. Maybe there's something I'm missing.
Not who youāre replying to but honestly Iām much more on your side here. Especially because the LLM generated answers for search inquiries seem to relatively frequently be wrong. I donāt use them much but when I do I try and follow the source links and itās not infrequent that the source just directly contradicts the answer or is about something related but not actually relevant to my inquiry. Add on the fact that so much of the internet seems to be even more polluted with ads and slop. I find it increasingly difficult to find good answers to my questions anymore.
Same thing here, I'm so tired of it. My issue has generally been, "here's your answer!" Followed by me explaining how that answer is impossible, or how it completely ignores a key detail of the question to begin with. I could see how some people might just get the answer and think that it's fact and move on.
Google does seem worse than it used to be. Also, finding news articles is somewhat worse. It's harder to find articles that aren't paywalled in some way, and there are more bot challenges, though I don't block cookies so maybe it affects me less. (I also have NYT and Washington Post subscriptions, which helps.)
I've had better luck with ChatGPT than with Google. It might be due to having a subscription, resulting in using a better LLM by default.
I can ask for a chart and if it doesn't find anything suitable, it might download the data and make one.
I feel the same way here. Asking a chatbot is just a great way to get an answer that sounds right, not an answer that is right. And that's a scenario where you deliberately asked a bot, not the depressingly-common one where someone else shoved a bot response at you when you were trying to get something written by a human with actual knowledge.
But there's a bright spot at least, in that Wikipedia is still going surprisingly strong. I find that I can still get almost all my answers so long as I know a trustworthy site to go to get them, with Wikipedia being the most common one. So it's not all bad.
I've got a large collection of papers and eBooks and using a rag llm setup that shows me where it found the answer whilst limited in domain does let me trust it more than otherwise. It has search as a backup but when it first searches locally over various sources like the encyclopedias it seems more right than when I just use gemini
Totally agree. I've been able to follow my curiosity on anything that strikes me, and it makes me feel like a kid again. I can take any subject and ask a hundred questions to Gemini about it. It recommends books for me to read, and then when I have a question about something in the book, I can follow up with Gemini. It's like having a personal teacher who never gets sick of me asking "why" or wanting to drill deeper on some bizarre detail.
In the past year, I've been able to use this to deepen my understanding of my local court system, the Khmer language, the physiology of exercise and recovery, and now the immune system. It's re-awakened my love of learning in a way that I'm deeply grateful for.
Edit to add: when I say Gemini, I mean the Gemini pro chatbot that I have a subscription for. I don't use Google, so I don't know how it shows up there.
Surprisingly I can agree to an extent. While ChatGPT can be hit or miss, I find that the AI on search engines is way more convenient to answer questions. Not because of the summaries, those remain hit or miss, but because they link freaking sources that I can check directly. Google even does it for each bullet points. It can still be wrong (soooo many times the source is a Youtube video or never seems to mention the thing), but it basically makes search engines actually useful again since it "refines" my search.
Especially useful as a writer. Sometimes I have super small/quick/specific questions that won't be the direct topic of articles, and would be buried within a larger article. I can't list any examples off the top of my head, but it's way easier to type in the question for a super-quick question and check the relevant sources than try to wade through entire articles in hopes of finding the info I need.
We are in golden age of many useful and easy to use open source things.
Be it Arduinos, Linux, programs like imagemagick or ffmpeg or linux AMD GPU drivers.
I use Graphene OS on my phone (which should be open sourve if I'm right), I use Matrix.org as my IM service of choice, I use Linux on all my PCs, I use Immich, Home Assistant, Kodi, FairEmail, Jellyfin...
It is great to be free like this - to be free of dependencies on big corporations. This is the golden era I live in. And everyone can.
Now this is an answer! Open source feels like it has been doing surprisingly well for itself the last decade, and it's been a beauty to behold. Hell, not just the wonderfully ubiquitous and useful stuff like FFmpeg, but also stuff becoming de facto industry standard like Blender, or to a lesser extent, Godot. Shit, Linux is gaining market share as an OS ā I never thought I'd see the day.
I love FOSS and I love the people who make it happen.
OSHW in particular! There are still some binary blobs going around but things are pretty good in terms of building real world things that do cool things. Since the ESP8266/32s and Raspberry Pi Picos started coming out itās been great to have some go-to modules that make it easy to start projects regardless of your skill level.
I'm ordering some ESP32s this week, as I have some usecase for them (integrate into Home Assistant and do PWM on some fans with them). It is really great time to be electronics enthusiast today!
I would say we're currently in the golden age of Warhammer 40,000 video games.
If you like video games and you like 40k, you are eating pretty good in the last few years and will be for at least a few more. While other IPs are limited to a single studio (e.g. Elder Scrolls) or have IP owners hesitant to license very many games (e.g. Star Wars until very recently), Games Workshop is handing over their IP to anyone with a pulse. This has burned them in the past with some stinkers but nowadays they seem to have a bit of a groove going on and the hits outnumber the misses.
Here's some of the standouts from the last 5 years:
And here's what's still in the pipeline:
I am particularly excited for Total War: Warhammer 40,000 as the previous entry, Total War: Warhammer, was a 10 year behemoth of a game/trilogy-that-combined-into-a-super-game that I sunk quite a few hours into.
Interestingly, for those of us who are explicitly not interested in WH40K, it's a dark age of video games. Maybe it's because I haven't interacted with the IP directly, but it feels like the community and setting are based on one-upmanship. Sometimes it feels like I can't have a conversation about Spartans from Halo, or Ardat-Yakshi in Mass Effect, or just enhanced individuals in particular without someone butting in and saying "yeah well in Warhammer we have..." just to show how much worse that setting has it.
I get it, people are passionate about their interests. I'm just tired of hearing about 40k, and I've had to tell a couple friends that I will not engage with conversations if they bring it into the topic at this point.
Finally, someone's voicing the opinion I've tacitly held for so long. I don't know why anyone would like to actually interact with 40K so much, everything in that universe just seems so miserable, and that's explicitly the point.
Not that I'm a cosy gamer who only plays farming simulators, but I just can't get over the inherent brutality, hopelessness and hate that everything in 40K seems to be dripping with, and I don't exactly want to get into it on the off chance my opinion could be changed for the better.
I had the same opinion as you, and my interaction with WH40K is still quite limited, but having played Rogue Trader earlier this year, it did in fact change my thoughts about the setting. I think the thing you don't get from just hearing the annoying powerscaling-ass community from the outside is just how absurd, campy, and dare I say queer the 40K universe is. Often it functions as a sendup of bureaucracy, religion and militarism that is genuinely delightful because of how comically, unbelievably dark it is. The bleakness of the setting is actually so great that it loops back around to being silly and almost weightless -- at least in Rogue Trader anyway; I can't say whether all 40K media is so self-aware.
Yea it's definitely popular these days and like anything popular that is going to include people who dislike either the thing itself or the zeitgeist around the thing.
I don't really see this myself, it has seemed pretty chill in my interactions. There is definitely a certain % of 'chuds', but they are small relative to the larger fanbase in my experience.
My people.
I actively hate 40k and am well sick of it at this point. This coming from a person that is well into the four figures, dollar wise, as far as owning 40k models go.
The tabletop game itself is awful and tedious and the lore is just utterly uninteresting. Not to mention, GW itself is highly exploitative.
And for me, it's largely just 40k itself. I also have an extensive Age of Sigmar collection and while the game has similar issues as 40k, it's a little more interesting to play and the Lore is far better as well.
That said, I'm pretty much fully off Warhammer in all its forms these days; it was fundamental in my tabletop wargaming journey, but there's considerably better games out there that don't feel like they constantly have their hands in your wallet. I've actually made the decision this week to sell off my 40k stuff; I am absolutely over it.
Don't forget that Helldivers 2 just got a Warhammer crossover that's also pretty good.
I would say music. I know lots of people have their preferred genre which may have had its own specific golden age, but I think in general the way that information technology has broadened peoples access to diverse ranges of music and has lowered the bar of entry for musicians to get their works out into the world.
I dont particularly follow or care for contemporary pop artists, but there are a huge range of more niche sub genres that can exist now because the music scene extends beyond the establishment record labels and the live music venues.
No matter if you are into rock, hip hop, classical, experimental, theres probably someone out in the world making some cool works that you would love. The biggest problem now is just finding a way to sort through the huge volume of options in a reasonable timeframe.
I know there are a lot of concerns about Spotify's business model and impacts on artists, but if I can just take a very selfish perspective for the moment, it's absolutely astounding to me how great I have it as a consumer of music these days.
I grew up in the age of ipods and CDs and I already thought that was amazing at the time. Now, I can listen to any song I want at any moment on any device I choose. And I can easily discover more music that I love, and my musical appreciation can so easily grow deeper and broader by the day.
My younger self would be thrilled that I could essentially have an ultra portable, legal Napster without any download time or security concerns.
I really hate the idea of having the illusion of a complete library of music though. You really donāt have everything that you might have through file sharing. Apple Music and Spotify have a lot of music, but Nintendo keeps the vast majority of its music off and into its own music streaming app, and that doesnāt even include a great deal of historical VGM that wasnāt published by Nintendo and is largely missing on all streaming platforms with questionable legal status.
Same. There are a lot of legal issues with a lot of underground bands/artists I listened to from 2005-2018ish and sometimes but rarely newer music too. So a chunk of important music to my adolescence canāt be found.
The only godsend is you can upload local music files to Spotify that only you can listen to so I can circumvent that when motivated.. The only problem is if you donāt pay attention they go back to being unlistenable and you have to re-add them sometimes. I havenāt fixed mine in a while sadly.
Electronic dance music specifically is so good these days. Genres are once again beginning to cement themselves at parties, but the spirit of blending tempos, styles and influences is still upon us.
Dancefloors are better now than they every have been
I know right?
I was really into rock and grunge as a kid, but in recent years Ive been really into Future Funk as a genre.
Artists seem to be getting more proficient with incorporating audio processing effects into their songs, rather than it being a post production thing by the studio, and I think it really does a lot to elevate new songs coming out now.
Nice -- I agree. Also, any genre with future in the title is good with me. Future Pop, Future Garage -- all moody fun!
I came here to mention finding niche genres of music.
I tend to listen to albums while I work and study, preferably music with no words to not be distracting. I did start with the classic lofi beats along with some video games albums (shout out to the giant OSTS for Sterllaris helping me study for several certifications), but eventually I wanted to branch out. YouTube recommendations over the last ~5 years have led me to some real interesting genres that I wouldn't have discovered without it.
The biggest have been Dungeon Synth (+ it's many many offshoots i.e. Comfy Synth, Winter Synth, etc.), and Vaporwave + Barberbeats (depending on if you count Barberbeats as a Vaporware subgenre or not).
My main stream music I still listen to was stuff I liked when I was younger, but now almost all new music I listen to is from niche artists. If I had way more disposable income I would be purchasing some of their limited run cassettes and vinyl, but until I get to that point I'll be giving them listens online and recommending them to people I know when music comes up in the conversations.
Long-distance communication, maybe? With most folks having some device with a screen and an internet connection, it's quite easy to bridge long distances and feel closer. My aging parents are a FaceTime call away, people abroad can be easily reachable the same way via WhatsApp usually. Back in 2009 the video quality was mediocre at best, if not downright brutal with anyone a little far. Skype was the best bet and even that was hit and miss. Before that, any relatives abroad had to be reached by phone, via some sort of long-distance phone card or ridiculously high long-distance phone rates. Now it's almost free (after the internet connection fee of course).
I got a little magnetic phone mount that goes on top of the tv, then use an Apple TV for FaceTime which gives the option to use my phone as a webcam. Itās pretty great to just be able to sit on the couch and have the whole family chat with the other person on the TV. Now I just wish other people would adopt the setup so I can stop looking at peopleās foreheads on a 55ā screen.
Thatās a cool setup. I saw that in one of the Apple TV shows and thought about doing it too. Iām just missing the phone stand. Howās the audio? Does the mic pickup your voice well enough if youāre that far from it?
The audio is surprisingly good! Iāve never had anybody complain and feel like I can talk at a normal volume without yelling across the room to the phoneās mic.
Indie games. More games worth playing than can possibly be played. Games enough to last multiple lifetimes.
Idk, tbh, I feel like we're in an abundant moment of most things. Other than RAM. But food diversity has never been higher in most countries, you can get 20 different flavors of locally brewed IPAs, even with ram-a-geddon tech has never been more solid as phones and laptops seem to be in their end-state.
There's a renaissance of film photography, with some film producers actually restarting manufacturing. Discrete cameras are booming again, including point and shoots, once thought to be left in the dust after smartphone cameras became good.
Cinematic Youtube Videos about Hiking, Thru-Hiking, Bikepacking, or, more generally, long distance self-supported (i.e. not a car) journeys.
On their face, they're really interesting to watch because they're often shot beautifully, show really beautiful views, and follow someone on a really interesting journey where they're pushing themselves through an experience most people wouldn't dream of doing.
Unexpectedly, I've come to love this genre because of how often the films reaffirm how many good people are out there. So many times, you'll see examples strangers maintaining food and water drops in remote places, welcoming travelers into their homes for free, or spontaneously sharing a convivial moment. Especially now, when it can be easy to get trapped in negativity about our communities and neighbors, I value the reminder of the kindness that's still out there.
A couple of my favorites:
Though, one of the great things about this genre is that the content is so compelling that's lots of really small videographers on the platform that make great stuff
Backpacking a large section of the PCT is easily the most memorable time of my life, mostly because of the people I met along the way. 30 days felt like a decadeās worth of life.
Literacy.
That's it. More people can read, understand, write, and speak (from the knowledge transferred from reading) to another on a level much higher than ever before, across the world, across societies, across generational, economic, caste, race, gender, wealth, all of them we have transcended.
We may not all speak the same language, but we all have a level of intellectual curiosity and ability that has leveled the playing ground not by lowering it, but for-once by raising it. If the last thirty years have changed anything, its this very concept. Literacy is what builds societies, and historically have only catered to the wealthiest to build those societies, and this is the first time we have all been able to take an active part in it. You can argue that this change began in earnest globally starting in the 1620s, or 1870s, or even the 1960s (all eras that began large upward swings) , but for the great acceleration, the point in which growth became not just incremental but astronomical, astronomical in reaching the vast majority of 90% of the entire globe, that began in earnest thirty years ago. There is no real going back from here. The old generations must communicate to the young, they will always teach them to read/write, to have them know recipes, and ideas, and concepts, and invention, and trials and tribulations, previous discoveries and invention. There just won't be any practical ways of going back, even if a nuclear holocaust happened, or complete societal failures, or even when 99% of the population dies in the next pandemic
of 2035.Everyone keeps arguing that the internet has changed society for the better, or worse, depending on their mood for the day - but one thing is certain: More literacy builds new empires, destabilizes the old, and experimental new developments can flourish. We are living through turbulent times because of the high rate of literacy, because everything was predicated on knowledge, speech, reading, and writing that were only truly held and used by those in the upper echelons of society - and now everyone can take part in that, to converse, to determine, to understand others view points, in prose, in speech, in novels, in plays, in movies, in news, in everything. Before, literacy was a tell-sign of wealth, of power, or privilege, even to the wealthiest and most uniquely perceptive, someone of a dirt-poor station can now sound and affect and effect at the highest level of the bureaucratic elitist order with the (ahem) write words.
We were previously in an age of growing literacy, and now we are in an age of the Literate, and that is changing, has changed, will change everything. Everything is fair game, no one can really envision a future or the possibilities, because we have never as a human society, as a civilization, been able to achieve this. All past revolutions, changes, structures, are going to radically change purely because we are now all literate.
The only path forward is higher level comprehension, we will never be able to long-term lower the level of literacy, it will always progress, change, become more unusual and understanding, higher level, and that is a glorious thing - and that starts now. That's the age we are in and it's rather glorious when you think about it. The next age we are beginning to live in is the rise of the comprehensive literate, unknown when that will truly arrive, we may already be there, but those results are a bit harder to really determine as everyone's concept of 'comprehension' is different, but it will, surely, get better.
Hello Mr. Rosling, it's so kind for you to visit us by borrowing the body of @macleod. I hope your stay in the place beyond is pleasant !
Ha. Thank you for taking control of the keyboard Mr. Rosling, it was wonderful to have been your
vehiclevessel for today.His book Factfulness has been downloaded and in my queue for probably two... or more.... years. The subtitle "Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World ā and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" always deterred me, maybe I just need to ignore it and get to reading it.
We are in the golden age of bullshit.
Want to find some bullshit? Google it. Someone somewhere will validate your bullshit belief.
Want to generate some bullshit? AI will generate all the bullshit you want.
Want to find some people to believe in your bullshit? Social media will deliver your bullshit to those most likely to believe.
What about hundreds of years ago? True bullshit is obviously bullshit, but has true believers anyway.
We are in the golden age of easy access to experts and we are in the golden age of having the sum of all human knowledge just a few clicks away.
Yet so many choose to believe in complete and utter bullshit.
And none of us are immune.
And so few of us care, as long as everyone agrees with the bullshit we believe in, and not the bullshit we donāt.
I came here to say we're in the Golden Age of Grift but Bullshit is a more apt umbrella term for what I'm feeling.
As I've been saying for a while now: stupid finds a way, life just clings to its coattails.
For my own primary pastime timesink, I would say film restorations and availability. Don't have to go back that many years where massive parts of cinematic history was out of reach for the regular consumer, and what existed outside the big titles, was old poor quality transfers. Now we are constantly getting new 2K and 4K restorations of obscure genre films, releasing on smaller labels such as Arrow, Powerhouse and 88 Films. Not a surprise that Ben Hur recently got a big 4K restoration release, but when niche genre films like Lucio Fulciās Murder Rock or Aldo Ladoās Short Night Of Glass Dolls are getting full restorations from original negatives, then that is a sign that the process has become cheap enough to warrant future proofing a much wider range of film history.
Tabletop games. There are more choices, and higher quality, more available, than ever.
Beer. Ditto. Nearly every town has a craft brewery, some of them are quite good, new styles being introduced regularly.
Bicycles. Steady advances in the technology, e-bikes make cycling more accessible to everyone.
Home Automation, namely Home Assistant is getting continuous improvements every month and the quality is excellent for a free software product.
The number of people coding their own home automation products, and the number of local-only non-cloud dependent things is improving all the time. I've never been more happy than now and it seems like there is an endless number of things I could choose to do if I want to.
At this point in time I would like to shame Chamberlain, the company with a monopoly on garage door openers with a proprietary home automation system that does not interoperate with any other system.
I have a Chamberlain garage door! I too was disappointed with their decision, so I bought a ratgdo at https://ratcloud.llc/ - it's a tiny circuit board that sits right next to the garage door opener and you can hook it up to Home Assistant, giving you completely cloud-free control over the garage door. It's been working well for a few years now; I have the earliest version so I can't comment on the newer board they are selling now.
Weāre in a golden age of medical advances where in 50 years time, a lot of stuff that is life altering or a cause of death will be much more manageable than ever before.
Yeh I guess that would make sense, in only climate change is going to have something to say about that and we will look back on this as the golden age for everything.
From my understanding it's going to be much harder. The casualty estimates are pretty eye opening, and the numbers become cataclysmic when one considers the refugee considerations due to regional size weather catastrophes such as fires and such. It's almost hard to wrap my head around it, but it's likely that most people are going to be busy surviving, not delivering or even developing medicines. The infrastructure just won't exist anymore.
We're in the golden age of being a fan of the arts (whatever your definition of art is).
Imagine you're a young person, say late teens, and the year is 1996 and you just watched a random episode of Mr Show and you think David Cross is hilarious. You want to know more about him and his work? Guess what? You can't. Maybe you can search online if you have Internet access and find little info. Maybe you can go to your local library and perhaps find one of David's specials? Probably not. Or maybe you start calling local music stores and ask if they have comedy CDs and after a lot of phone calls you find out a music store two hours away has one of David's earlier specials on a CD. And good luck ever seeing him in person or even knowing where all David may perform next.
Now, same scenario, imagine you're a young person, late teens in 2026 and you stumble upon a 19 second tiktok video od David Cross telling a joke and you think wow this guy is hilarious, I want to see more of him. And within four minutes youve got access to every one of his specials. Every appearance on every tv Show. Every appearance on every podcast. Every interview he ever did for a written paper/magazine. Every movie and tv Show he appeared in. One book he wrote and every other book which mentioned David and his comedy. Every podcast, shows, interview, of other people talking about David. And guess what? For just $45 and if you don't mind driving say 45-90 minutes to some random city near you, you can see David live in person?
What a time to be alive!
This reminds me of how I randomly saw one of Hiromi's concert videos on YouTube a few years ago. Then I searched for all her other videos and made a playlist, started listening to her albums on Spotify, went to see her in concert, and recently bought a book of sheet music from a store in Japan and started learning to play one of her songs.
Seems like I should listen to other jazz musicians more.
As a drummer, my answer is cymbals. There has been an explosion of smaller companies from Turkey and China making top end hand-hammered cymbals, to go along with the expanded pro-level offerings of the big four companies (Zildjian, Sabian, Paiste and Meinl.) Compared to when I first started playing back in the '80s, the variety of options available now is astounding.
The doomer and cynic in me wants to honestly answer "nothing". I don't feel like we're better in almost any way at the moment than we were in previous times. I am sure there are some things that are better, but the world feels quite bleak at the moment and I am having a hard time finding it otherwise.
Perhaps not a golden age (because I don't think it will ever go away now) but I think flashlights are far better than they were in the past. You get very bright illumination for long amounts of time and you even have a flashlight as part of your phone (to also be a camera flash) so that you are never all that far away from lighting up places.
While it is still possible to run into dark situations without something to light the way, that is far less common than it was in the past.
RC aircraft. When I was a kid, I dreamed of owning an RC helicopter. I loved helicopters, I still do, they're fascinating, ridiculously complex machines that I'm still shocked managed to fly all the way back in the 30s. My parents took me to look at some one time, were shocked at A. How expensive they were, B. how dangerous the guy at the store told them they were, and C. How insanely difficult he said they were to fly, so that was that.
Later in college, I finally got a blade 300, and the guy was right. The thing was absolutely terrifying, and it was so insanely hard to fly that I spent way more time fixing it after crashing than flying it. It took me hundreds of hours, but I eventually was able to hover around the yard. It was fun, but the amount of time, effort and money to fly for a few minutes just wasn't worth it for me.
I've recently gotten back into RC aircraft in the form of fpv quadcopters (drones), and man, it's insane how far they've come.
They're cheap as hell now, durable, stable, with incredible RC links and HD video systems that feel like magic.
I can build a whole quad faster than it took me to fix the rotor head of that rc helicopter after a crash. I can charge batteries in no time and fly around as long as I want. My RC link will reach tens of miles, and the receiver costs about 20 bucks. And I have a camera on the thing that makes your feel like you're flying, so you don't have to worry about losing sight of the thing and crashing. And if you DO lose your video link, the thing has a gps on it, it can fly back home and land itself.
Its so amazing how much more fun and accessible the hobby is now than it was back then.
It makes me really respect the people that were flying rc airplanes back in the 50s where every aspect sucked way worse than it did when I first got into it, but they kept doing it anyway.
At least in the US, we seem to be in the golden age of tattoos. Never been more widely accepted or more options for getting one. I have my first scheduled for less than a month out.
Fraud.
Deregulation.
Exploitation.
Powerlessness.
Bad actors profiting immensely with not only no repercussions but no fear of them.
And we've reached highest global temperature so far, yay! Living on a mortgage is fantastic, I just hope younger folks won't be too mad at us! /s
Hm, not sure, I guess the golden age of my headaches...
If I had to say something... Warframe, DE is going strong with it, this year there is even a new solar system update incoming, every year bigger updates... makes me think what will be next year...
Linux, selfhosting, and FOSS seems to be on a grand rise but the era of slop ware is also omnipresent, see reddits selfhosting community.
Iād also like to think good humanities studies in religion is improving especially on China but still limited for modern Japan.
I imagine a world where everyone is going to have their own custom software running on Linux, but it will be in a VM and they might not even know what they're running.
Unless you ask the AI how it works, and then you can go as deep as you want.
I see self hosting kind of like packing a parachute, I can't trust anyone even myself!
I just keep seeing where people set up these huge self hosted systems that have way more attack vectors than they can possibly even think of, let alone guard against.
Yea I think if you want to self host you should have a single hardened bastion node that serves as a VPN entry point and keep everything on the VPN.
But can you trust that? Self hosting looks fun but I always see some post mortem blog post from a guy who learned a lot and thought they did everything right and self hosting was going great! But then they discovered they've also been hosting a cryptojacker for the last 18 months.
Somewhere in here is a modern IT Crowd skit about the resident hacker living on someone's hardware like a nicely mannered squatter in low rent flats, but the owner feels bad for them, so let's them hang around.
I think a linux box with standard hardening procedures, an up to date kernel, and an attack surface confined to heavily used software such as wireguard and ssh is reasonably secure, yes. Would I trust my parents to set one up? No... but I think its achievable for a slightly above average linux user.
That is far more secure than running some random open source software written by an amateur that is not widely used and possibly full of vulnerabilities.
Interesting, I may have to look into that more.
Mainly fascism.