i actually think plumbing is the thing we’d miss most if it suddenly vanished - collecting water and getting rid of human waste would be horrible chores. Also it’s always so nice being able to turn a tap and drink fresh clean water,
Currently the Steam Deck. Between having (most of) my whole Steam Library availble, being able to run EGS/GOG via Heroic Launcher and all the emulators available, it’s like having my entire gamining history all in one machine.
Plus in Desktop Mode it’s pretty much a full-on desktop Linux PC as well.
I love that emulation lets me play small screen games on a big screen (I know the Steam Deck can do both, but the pitch is more ‘big screen games made portable’)
Raspberry Pi.
I love how such a small computer can overpower many of the computers I had for much of my life. And still overpowers moat of the old computers people still has today in my country.
I’d probably go with the Linux kernel. It’s the basis of a fantastical operating system, and used in computing almost everywhere.
End-to-end encryption is my favorite technology.
- Prevents those with power from spying on everyone and ossifying their power
- Protects communications from smaller scale malicious actors
Such an important tech. Hopefully soon we can get quantum-secure cryptographic algorithms in wide use.
I wonder what things are going to be like when previously hoarded encrypted data begins to be decrypted en mass
Computers. There is no limit to what they can do. You put a computer to measure time, temperature, the weather; and you can use it to plot all those things in nice graphics. The way you can make computers relate to nature just outline how fundamental it is to science.
Over the last couple years, kubernetes. It completely changed the game and the ecosystem growing up around it is both exciting and refreshing compared with the old way of managing servers.
I’ve been surprised not to see this with any of the fediverse platforms I’ve browsed. Instead, they’re all using Docker Compose. Any idea why that is?
K8s is amazing for big, complicated services. For small things, it quite honestly can be overcomplicated. If you’re running something massive, like, say, Spotify, then k8s will make things simpler (because the alternative for running such a massive and complicated service is… gross lol). That’s not to say that k8s can’t be used for something like Lemmy, just that it might not be worth the complexity.
For the fediverse, I think a lot of the development is written for small, mostly monolithic single servers. K8s is meant for when you have an entire cluster running some service. You wouldn’t typically run a single server with k8s, but rather you’d have many “nodes” and you’d run many instances of your binary (“pods”) across those nodes for the redundancy.
I’m not very familiar with the backends of fediverse servers nor Docker Compose, but I’m under the impression that’s for single servers and I’ve seen many Lemmy instances talk about their hosting as if they only have one physical server. That’s probably fine for a FOSS social media site that is run by hobbyists, but major commercial software would never want to have a single server. Heck, they wouldn’t even want to run just servers in one location. The big cloud providers all offer ways to run k8s clusters that use nodes spread across multiple data centers, usually ones with isolated failure zones, all to maximize uptime. But that’s also expensive. For a big business, downtime means millions of dollars lost, so it’s a no brainer. For Lemmy? As annoying as downtime is, users will live.
That’s a tough one, but I think I’m going to go with my ebike. That thing has paid for itself several times over by replacing 90% of car trips, and it’s just so much fun! I cut through parks and follow urban trails to work rather than getting stuck in traffic.
Complements on a cool question.
Maybe glassblowing. Inert, airtight containers in any shape you want, made from common minerals. Siphons are also neat, and I didn’t know about them until a surprisingly old age. Ditto for diving bells.
Fire making. It’s a bunch of different techs, but taken collectively they’re the foundation of almost every other human technology, and the reason for our survival, and the first things that we did to say “I don’t just live in this world, I also reshape it.”
“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” - Beavis.
Raspberry Pi.
I love how such a small computer can overpower many of the computers I had for much of my life. And still overpowers moat of the old computers people still has today in my country.
I think I would say the pocket digital camera, I guess specifically the phone camera. Being able to quickly snap a picture of my kids doing random things over the last 10 years has meant some amazingly beautiful trips down memory lane when I either go looking for a particular photo, or my photo app throws up a curated memory.
I heard this episode of 99pi last week. The more I think about it, the more I like nails.
My man, 99pi is the shit!
Obviously for everyday reasons I’d say computers, internet, electricity and functional plumbing.
Now getting fancy, I think microscopes are amazing. I haven’t used them a lot unfortunately but whenever I had the chance they got addictive pretty fast. They reveal another world that exists right here, that we can’t perceive, and I’m always mesmerised. Microphotography doesn’t scratch the same itch, there is something about inspecting your own sample .
A lot of different pieces of tech I use come to mind. I guess because it’s the most recent piece of tech I use but I’m gonna say Graphene OS. I’ve never felt like I’ve had this much control over my smart phone before while still having 99.99% of the functionality of my previously owned, much more privacy invading phones.
Other than that honorable mentions go out to my Linux distro of choice, Artix Linux. Runit and s6 are great init systems, and pacman and the AUR are fantastic to boot.
Suckless terminal, tmux, and NeoVim also get honorable mentions as well.