I guess I’m easy to please, but, recently I got myself a better bluetooth dongle over the holidays. I had one before, but it was stupid cheap, connection was frail and didn’t have good range. Now I have one with Bluetooth 5.4 and I’m amazed with what I can do with it.
I can funnel sound to any one of my bluetooth speakers so I don’t have it hogging my main speakers when I want something close by me.
Speaking of which, I wish I had really known this far earlier in my days of using a computer. But, being able to split audio in multiple ways. I can assign where sound is going to, program to program. One browser gets these headsets, that browser gets the TV speakers .etc
That kind of shit amazes me and damn shame I never explored this before.
Whether it’s hardware or software, I like technology that enables me to do things. Playing fun and impressive games, painting, animating, sculpting, making music, making my own video games, and so on…
One of the simple reasons I really dislike AI slop is that it removes humanity from the process. In fact, there isn’t much of a process at all. It’s all about plopping out an end product and there’s no “art” to it. As someone who values my own creativity, loves the process of making things, and doesn’t believe in exploiting others for my own gain, generative AI is the last thing I want out of technology.
Of course, a lot of technology is “fascinating”:
The complex and intricate boards with even more complex and intricate chips and parts on them.
Storing data with electrons in RAM cells or on magnetic, optical and audio media.
How chips are basically printed on to wafers.
How we turn high level ideas into source code, compile it down to machine code, which is then interpreted as a series of numerical CPU instructions.
And even though I hate how AI is being used and humans are being abused, how “machine learning” works by essentially biasing a data structute a certain way is also fascinating.
How fast and small all of this has become over the last 100 years.
How we power all of this stuff by harnessing river currents and the sun, and by splitting the atom, is also fascinating.
There’s a lot about technology to enjoy and find interesting. We just have to remember that it should be there to make life better, not worse.