Welcome to the modern world

WhatsApp group share real time location still amazes me 😁

Nope not just you. Had more or less the same experience in John Lewis a while back. My TV is a cheap-assed 15 year 32" Sony, It's OK...until you stand in front of a modern TV.

Felt like a country rube gone to the big city to ride the escalator.

I had very similar, stayed in holiday rental with a 55" TV and watched Planet Earth in HD. I have a >15 year old 32" TV that is technically HD but doesn't come close.

Anyone else had an ‘OMG, welcome to the modern world’ technology moment?

Sort of more or less exactly the same as you, but I found the TV repulsive. All subject to personal tastes of course, if someone is getting an awesome experience out of it then fair enough. Kind of having the same thing with cars where I'm finding they're being crammed with more and more tech I dont want.

I can't be far off being the old man shouts at sky meme.

Sometimes stuff on the phone. For example scanning the chip in my French passport with my phone and taking a selfie to prove I'm me on a British government web site.

Every time my teenager precedes with flip top moaning head “I can’t believe you don’t know it can do this…”

I know what you mean… but then again, I thought a ten year old television set was new… the only time I would think; oh, that’s an old telly would be if it had a curvy screen or wood on it.

Same. 32" Samsung died after 12 years.

Also now have a washing machine that tells me what's going on...

Suspect Paul Weller isn't impressed let alone Damon Allbran

I've a kettle with a funky light in it. 🤘

HiDef freaks me out sometimes. There will be a close up shot, usually of some high drama, of someone's face and all I think about is why are their pores so obvious or why is the rufty tufty action hero wearing so much obvious make up?

All the things I can do with my mobile phone, banking, booking tickets, checking train times, translating etc

I still can't get my head round my tea still being hot when I open my flask hours later! 😳

Why worry? The last time we bought a new TV was when the 14 inch TV with a CRT broke the morning the TDF was about to start so I went and bought a 26 inch TV which we still have. We only ever seem to replace things when they are beyond repair or use.

This is often quite a longer time as I can often repair things.

The big TVs in John Lewis do look a bit better than ours.

Driving a modern car with lane assist, adaptive cruise control and automatic lights and wipers. Add automatic transmission and driving becomes a lot simpler than my 2007 S-Max. Had a hire car for a 200 mile work journey which I was dreading and it was pretty relaxing compared to driving my own vehicle.

Android auto connecting my phone to use Waze was also very cool - no need to stick cradles to the windscreen.

ChatGPT. As part of my role I subcontract people to build connectors between our systems and other platforms. Usually this takes the dev guys about a week, but with ChatGPT I can build a new connector myself in about 2 minutes. It comes out properly polished with good code comments and is consistently good performance wise. You can even give it hints in natural language like “this service doesn’t do paging so you might have to handle that” or “they've dumbly not built a GetALL API for group objects” and  it’ll tune things accordingly. It’s so damned good that we’ve actually banned ourselves from using it until we work out what it does with its knowledge in the background.

Google translate photo thing - you can use your camera to view a menu in Thai (& any other language) and it automatically translates it to English. Pretty handy if you like to know what your eating.

To our our car fleet, both designed in the 20th century, one built in the 20th century, a few months ago we added a one year old car with a lot of added extras; a totally different (and better) driving experience.  I still shake my head that the sat nav display goes into night mode when the light levels drop.

Electric cars.  Compared to the expectations ingrained in me when I started driving, my current car is quieter and smoother than a Rolls-Royce and accelerates like a Ferrari.  It costs a fraction of a petrol car to run. It will effectively drive by itself on the motorway, modulating speed to match traffic conditions and steering by itself. It’ ll actively avoid accidents that I don’t have the reactions to prevent. It is imbued with all sorts of actual witchcraft.

It’s a Hyundai. (Albeit a posh one)  The Hyundai Pony was the Dacia Sandero of my youth. One kid at my school used to get his Dad to drop him off 2 streets away so he didn’t get laughed at for the weird far eastern noddy car.
Now I get asked if it’s a Bentley or an Aston Martin.

I  wish my Dad had lived long enough to see it. It would have genuinely freaked him out.

I'm still amazed that a phone that is the same size as my first transistor radio when I was 13 can connect me with someone the other side of the world in NZ instantly.

There's a chambered cairn by my house, it is estimated to be 4000 years old

On the winter solstice the sun rises and shines in directly through the opening passage

I don't think I'll ever get used to how incredible that is

Electric cars.

I’m always amazed that the first cars were leccy but dino juice was easier.

Not tried them myself, but people I work with who have lots of up to date tech are amazed with their Meta Quest headsets.

It’s so damned good that we’ve actually banned ourselves from using it until we work out what it does with its knowledge in the background.

Same as what your contractors do 🙂

Just get a big pc (or something with the right gpu board)and run one of the coding Llms  locally, it’s too good a resource to not take advantage of.

I stay in reasonably good hotels - I have never seen a TV in a hotel room that I would consider in anyway high quality by current standards. If you by some chance did luck out, then I can guarantee the picture would have not setup in any way optimally, and I've never seen a hotel room TV being fed a source of any quality, so would say with reasonable confidence there's plenty of scope for you to be even more impressed!

Thats nothing.

Marvel at how easy it is these to be a lazy bastard.

Can't be arsed popping out for 5 quids worth of shopping. Pop on the app and Pay Tesco Whoosh* to do it for you.

Truely the modern age is the utopia we all dreamed of.

*Other lazy bastard options are available

Google translate photo thing – you can use your camera to view a menu in Thai (& any other language) and it automatically translates it to English. Pretty handy if you like to know what your eating.

Apple translate app does the same. Blew my mind on holiday recently.

I went round to my mates house for the first time this weekend......and had a poo indoors! His toilet is inside the house! When did that become a thing?

@rustynissanprairie you have just reminded me of the Techno Toilet! We stayed in a house with a modern toilet in the USA and even my kids were impressed. It had a heated seat, lights, and a front and back bum washer and dryer! I can’t say that I’d want one, though it would be useful if you’d broken both elbows.

We hung onto a 32" Sony CRT until 7 years ago. We replaced it as it was starting to get a red hue to the picture.
We swapped it for a relatively budget 43" LG 4K TV and to be honest that did blow me away a bit. Wished we'd done it sooner.
It still impresses me, when you get a well recorded bit of nature footage or something similar.
The Smart bits are also very useful & still working fine - I was led to believe that all the smart functionality would stop working within a year or so of getting it.

Mobile phones - I always try to appreciate what a modern smart phone can do. My Pixel 4a is getting on for 4 years old now & still does the job perfectly. Last year it got an update so now in the camera app I can do that magic eraser thing and it can just remove things from the image that I don't want.
It doesn't always get it quite right & if you really zoom in you can see the fill-in section. But, it is still bonkers impressive. You can even do it on any photo on your phone, not just those taken with the camera.

Stuff like Amazon, click-and-collect shopping, deliveroo etc....all of that stuff is bonkers when you think about what is actually going on behind the scenes & how it all works.

Smart speakers and their ilk. Playing music in my office, go downstairs to lunch & just say "hey google, transfer music to kitchen speaker" and a few seconds later it has done it. Or go downstairs and realise I haven't paused the podcast I'm listening to; "Hey google, pause office speaker"......it's done.

You have a TV?

There is a group of holograms doing very well at the moment,other hologram bands will be available soon.

I fully intend to enjoy this transition time before AI takes over 😉 😆

I went round to my mates house

He has a house! We live in a hole in the road.

qwertyFree Member
WhatsApp group share real time location still amazes me

FB Messenger does it too...

He has a house! We live in a hole in the road.

Luxury....

Modern Tv's may be be amazing but its compensated by 97.6% of anything on TV being rubbish, and maybe on average a handful of films worth watching a year... and one or two streamable series max....

everytime I go round to the in-laws the TV seems to get a little big bigger (and louder), some stuff looks really good but cheap content, daytime TV and upscaling just looks horrific.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think there has been much advancement in the last 20 year.  In fact, I'm not sure there has been that much advancement in the last 50 years.

The way we live and work (and most of our recreation time) would be 100% recognisable to my grandparents and possibly even to my great-grandparents.

We definitely have more stuff.  And that stuff is pretty undeniably better (for the most part).  But the stuff we have, the work we to do buy this stuff, and what we do with the stuff is pretty much unchanged.

But yeah, it could just be me.  It probably also depends on your definition of advancement and improvement.

and maybe on average a handful of films worth watching a year… and one or two streamable series max….

Obviously it depends what you're after, but check out the Netflix thread, its become a wider guide for TV and the movies, and I've found dozens of programmes,  documentaries, drama series, and movies that have been really excellent that otherwise would've passed me by. Certainly more than the handful you're suggesting.

There's some dross to be sure, but there's also some really excellent stuff being made.

We have a 4k LG OLED from 2017 in our living room, and I am still amazed by the picture - after 7 years.  Although you can see the difference in the picture quality from our newer 2023 LG 4k OLED in the front room.

I like a good picture - but I do get surprised by the picture quality difference because I don’t replace televisions until the old one breaks.  I had a 25” analogue 4:3 set for over 15 years - because it didn’t break.

you have just reminded me of the Techno Toilet! We stayed in a house with a modern toilet in the USA and even my kids were impressed. It had a heated seat, lights, and a front and back bum washer and dryer! I can’t say that I’d want one, though it would be useful if you’d broken both elbows.

Breaking a hand and ribs made bum wiping difficult, a broken shoulder on an another occasion too.  Any kind of movement was painful!

The ability to travel around the world with all you need about where to go, how to get there, what to see, where to stay, what to eat and how to speak / read the language all in you phone. Amazing.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think there has been much advancement in the last 20 year.

I dunno, I'm in the older half of the millennial group as I was born in the 80's.  So I remember:

Courting costing a bloody fortune at 10p/text.

Phone cameras at 480x240 pixels. I remember getting a Sony Cybershot phone ~2007 which was probably the first example of a phone camera that was actually worth having as the picture quality was on a par with consumer compacts.  It cost 70p to send a picture to someone, assuming they had a color screen on their phone to receive it.

Flatscreen telly's are rubbish for console games because there is always too much lag, if people don't understand this fact then they didn't live through that era. It was almost as bad as poorly done PC ports.

Camcorders still used Mini-DV tapes. Who even owns a camcorder, let alone one that still runs on tape!

The way we live and work (and most of our recreation time) would be 100% recognisable to my grandparents and possibly even to my great-grandparents.

There was an interesting but obvious point made on an archeology program about how far back could you go and still think things were "normal".  The anthropologist said that apes still found farts funny so it's likely you could swap places at birth over a million years and get on just fine in a tribe of Neanderthals. The idea that we suddenly became grown up and sophisticated is a prudish Victorianism.

I’ve spent the morning using AI in photoshop to do the same job in seconds that would have taken me hours of faffing

int technology BRILLIAAAAAANT!!!

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think there has been much advancement in the last 20 year.

There was an interesting but obvious point made on an archeology [sic] program about how far back could you go and still think things were “normal”.

I think there's a well know idea that suggest that the time difference of 'future shock' is shortening. So some-one from the 11th or 12thC could be transported to say the 15th and even 16thC and still more or less get on, and like wise someone from the mid 18thC could be landed in say mid 19thC and still more or less cope, that time frame is certainly getting smaller and smaller in so much that I think anyone from before mid 20thC would think "it's all just magic, and we live like royalty" if they landed in the early 21stC

@Blackflag

The ability to travel around the world with all you need about where to go, how to get there, what to see, where to stay, what to eat and how to speak / read the language all in you phone. Amazing.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy made real.

yeah, it’s just you! There’s a lot of people here not quite made it to the 21st century yet, let alone the “modern world” – just check out any tech related thread

Yeah, I kind of get what your saying.

But on the other hand, I think most of the time when people say they don't understand or can't use some type of 'new' technology then what they mean is they can't be bothered learning because it is simply not relevant enough for them to make the effort.

There are some complete idiots who are very adept at using technology.  I think the difference is they are motivated to learn.

I think there’s a well know idea that suggest that the time difference of ‘future shock’ is shortening. So some-one from the 11th or 12thC could be transported to say the 15th and even 16thC and still more or less get on, and like wise someone from the mid 18thC could be landed in say mid 19thC and still more or less cope, that time frame is certainly getting smaller and smaller in so much that I think anyone from before mid 20thC would think “it’s all just magic, and we live like royalty” if they landed in the early 21stC

I'm assuming this is a thought experiment.

I'm not sure everyone would struggle to use modern technology.  Once they had figured out the touch screen then it's not really that much of a leap to make the link from 'paper' to 'screen'.  Although, of course, many wouldn't have had any interactions with paper so the link might not be there.

Certainly the advent of universal education was a major change in the way society runs.  That is something that I would say was undoubtedly an advancement.  Universal education is what takes away the 'magic' of new technology.

Sure, there are lots of new tools (or more often better versions of existing tools) but I'm struggling to see anything in society that looks that different to someone from 50 years ago.

It's not like someone from today being transported to a Culture novel and trying to work out how anything got done without the 'work or starve' economic model we currently use.

A thought suddenly occurs to me, so I type a few words into my phone and the entire sum of human knowledge is instantly available. Amazing. Also, buying useless shit from Amazon on top of a mountain just in case I forget to do it later.

The internet seems to obvious and inevitable now, but I’ve yet to come across an old sci fi book that really imagines it in its full horror and glory.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think there has been much advancement in the last 20 year.

in 2004 you were still 1 year away from google maps (as a webpage to print out written directions from)

and a year away from youtube (mainly as weirdos uploading 360p home videos)

Now everyone has a phone in their pocket which comes with real time gps navigation, traffic, public transport schedules etc.

any media worth watching with the possible exception of live sport is streamed on demand.

@supernova

Last year on top of an Alp, my bottom bracket started to creak. I thought it was amazing that I could ring and book it into the bike shop whilst I was waiting for the other people to catch up.

I think anyone from before mid 20thC would think “it’s all just magic,

Indeed. I'm from mid 20th C thanks, and I think it's all magic.

I mean as a boffiny kid i could use a transistor to make  single logic gate and do sums in binary. And I can go blah blah quantum computing (doesn't quite exist yet). But I actually fully let go of how stuff works a loooong time ago and just use it. As do 99.9% of us once outside our immediate domains of expertise (if unlike me you have such a thing).  Frankly it is magic. And I don't think it would take someone literate from any age longer to get to grips with it than it does us.

in 2004 you were still 1 year away from google maps (as a webpage to print out written directions from)

and a year away from youtube (mainly as weirdos uploading 360p home videos)

Now everyone has a phone in their pocket which comes with real time gps navigation, traffic, public transport schedules etc.

any media worth watching with the possible exception of live sport is streamed on demand.

True, although in 2004 I was still able to find my way around and watch TV.

I will admit though, smart phones have changed pub arguments forever.  It used to be you could argue for hours about what historical thing happened when, where, and by who.  Now someone gets their phone out.  All that's left to argue about is the why.

Probably why pubs are dying.

Real time, hour by hour, weather forecasting for my exact location is pretty mind blowing to me, especially as it allows us to get outside in "bad" weather when we're away on holiday.

When you think about the granularity of the data that's available to us, especially compared to how it used to be, it's amazing for decision making.

I will admit though, smart phones have changed pub arguments forever. It used to be you could argue for hours about what historical thing happened when, where, and by who. Now someone gets their phone out. All that’s left to argue about is the why.

And in exactly the same way, arguments about facts can never happen on the internet.

@johnx2 when I was learning to code, my mind was blown when I realised that apps and websites used mostly the same data from the same source, just presented in slightly different ways.

When you think about the granularity of the data that’s available to us, especially compared to how it used to be, it’s amazing for decision making

Definitely the amount of data available is great.

However, most of us are so constrained by our cash rich (by historical standards) time poor existence that we can't really make use of this data.  We might be able to identify the best time to do something but if it doesn't happen to fall into one of our narrow windows of free time it doesn't really do us much good.

I think that technology has given society the potential to change significantly but that change just does not seem to be materialising.

I’m still amazed that a phone that is the same size as my first transistor radio when I was 13 can connect me with someone the other side of the world in NZ instantly.

Back in the mid-90's I was sat in a bar in Germany, my mobile rang, I answered, chatted and then it back in my pocket.

German chap sat next to me asked whether I'd been speaking to someone in England, and was gobsmacked when I confirmed I had been.

But here's a thing, my average mobile bill back then was £500-600 PER MONTH!

I travelled a lot with work overseas, but the mobile was justified on normally spending up to £1000 a month on hotel phone bills (including email using a standalone modem).  Replaced with a Nokia and a PCMCIA modem.

My own TV is still a cathode ray in a big box bought in 2003, with a £20 Freeview box balanced on top, so as I stay in hotels for work I have a similar experience quite often! I sometimes find the whole big screen thing almost intimidating and dislike the whole having to turn my head to watch thing on the really big ones.

I am definitely old, and have been known to shake my fist at the sky.

However tech in the car and mobile phones I am pretty up to date with and find a lot of it rather useful. Still want to change gear manually though!

arguments about facts can never happen on the internet

😲

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Google translate photo thing – you can use your camera to view a menu in Thai (& any other language) and it automatically translates it to English. Pretty handy if you like to know what your eating.

This STILL blows my mind and I've been using it for years now.

I no longer need to prick my finger to test my blood sugar levels. My phone does it for me.

I've still listen to music on an old gramophone player, because I think using modern technology for pure entertainment is a vile indulgence.

WhatsApp group share real time location still amazes me

The what now?

That sounds quite handy actually.

I think dating apps will have to be my nomination.

Man has walked on the moon

I can't get my head around how incredible that is.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think there has been much advancement in the last 20 year.

There has, but a lot of it happens behind the scenes now. This is how you're able to watch telly when you want to watch it, not when it's on.  And you can watch more than a couple of shows a week that you're interested in.

I agree with @BruceWee in so much as that we still 'mostly' do a 9-5, we still mostly will have the same hobbies - football, cycling, fishing, we still do a shop in much the same way (although it'd just be one shop rather than half a dozen) and make food that they'd recognise, and drive a car, or catch a train or bus in the same way. They would have a shock about maybe how we do, but not what we do.

There's lots that on the surface is similar just how it works underneath that that's changed fundamentally.

One that I forgot earlier - 3D printers/additive manufacturing, call it what you will.

I have my own 3-D printer that that I have owned for about 6 years. It is already a dinosaur because the tech has moved on so fast, but my needs are simple & it does the job. It cost me the princely sum of £225.
I can go from having an idea, to designing it & printing it in a matter of hours.
Some of the industrial systems out there are bonkers.

My father-in-law popped round on Friday afternoon just gone (to bring us a pork pie, so I was happy to see him).
He also happened to mention that his shower rail had come down as the bracket has cracked. He hurls his towel over it to dry, so not entirely unexpected. He can get a whole new thing, but not just the brackets so could I sort him some replacements?
By Saturday afternoon, I had designed & printed out replacement parts.

I have a multitude of things around the house that have been fixed or improved with the addition of a 3-D printed widget.
And it still boggles my mind when I see it working, even though I understand the process & what it is doing.

Man has walked on the moon

the computer processing power that got him there, now fits on a device in your pocket, and most children can operate that device.

To watch videos of other kids opening boxes with toys in.

In reference to the original subject it's only ever BBC nature programmes that make me think that maybe it's time to get a new telly, this old one's missing some stuff.

I mentioned in my first post being able to login to British government web sites with the chip in a French passport. Admin has changed radically thanks to the Net. When I worked in Barcelona I had to visit London in person and join a long queue to get a bit of paper  from the foreign office then drive all the way back to Spain. To renew a passport I had to find a  consulate. Self employed in France I spent hours every month filling in forms and posting them to administartions, Junior fills in one on-line declaration a quarter and that's it.

I'm approaching my UK retirement having already retired in France. My whole career is online with details of my employment and the years I've paid voluntary class 3 contributions for. All dealt with from my living room with all the information I need on my phone rather than someone who has even less of a clue than me on the other end of a telephone suggesting I go into the office nearest where I last worked. Even the civil servants are no longer clueless because they have the same info on a screen in front of their noses as me on my phone.

So sometimes I'm gob smacked at how easy things have become.

Junior's mate bust the snow chains on my car, five minutes on line and I've found some brand new unused ones second hand I can pick up for 35e this evening. Booking ferry tickets took about 5 minutes, paying a bill took less than  a minute.

Book or CD aficionado? Got an iPhone/iPad?

Listen very carefully I will say this only once.

Take a picture of your CD cabinet or bookcase. or better still a row of them, allow it to be saved to the photos app.

Open your photos app, and search for the title and or author. Up pops the photo with the writing required with a highlighter effect across the text! Imagine five bookcases to look through in a charity shop. Click, click, click, click, click. Pause. Search. Done!

If someone knows how to do it on android, please tell, but I carry my iPad quite often, but have an android phone me all the time.

Mine was being in Sainte Foy in a powercut, suddenly perfectly dark clear skies, realised I could pop open an app and it'd tell me what all the stars and planets and even some satellites were, just felt amazing, to have such a random technology failure out-of-time moment of the perfect sky enhanced with a star trek tricorder thing

Modern Tv’s may be be amazing but its compensated by 97.6% of anything on TV being rubbish, and maybe on average a handful of films worth watching a year… and one or two streamable series max….

Got to call you out on this. We’re living in an age of amazing TV programmes. Long form storytelling is absolutely fantastic now and there are some truly epic series out there. Documentaries are great too, as are wildlife programmes. The last fifteen years or so have been bloody amazing. So much choice now.

I wouldn’t know about terrestrial Tv as I’m not my grandma so don’t watch it. In regards to the OP, streaming. When you sit back and think about it, it has completely changed how we consume media. From music, to films, books and video games. Everything at the touch of a button if you so desire.

we must have the same TV! Have the same experience whenever we're at someones house or hotel with a fancy TV. It's almost too HD though right.

I drive a 15 year old Mondeo, in an old job I drove a 'fancy' hybrid Mondeo pool-car - Genuine spaceship vibes.

Even from my shoebox in the road I can communicate with hundreds of thousands* of people in this thread from a computer that fits in my pocket. Worth remembering where we are now compared to just 15 years ago.

*Optimistic upper estimate

I miss those pub arguments over really serious stuff I used to have with my mates in the early 70s . We had been talking about Four Feather Falls 😁and what each of Tex Tuckers magic feathers did , never got to the bottom of it now Google it and hey presto instant answer 👍

I recently got a new TV. a Samsung 'The Frame' 65" QLED(currently on the wall, im sitting about 10' from it) and upon switching on i was astounded by the picture quality, but also in that programs and films especially look 'different'. I don't know how best to describe it but they looked too real if that makes any sense. Prior on my last tv all progs/movies seem to have a misty effect, which i think is like the actors and background sort of meld together, but on the new one they stand out more.

I picked the QLED over the OLED as i also use it as a computer monitor, and OLED can have a problem called 'screen burn in' where if you have something that occupies one part of the screen, it sort of leaves an residual image there, no matter what the screen is showing. Being my main pc screen i was worried something like the task bar or bookmark menus would cause this problem.

The soundbar and woofer thingy make a big difference to the sound quality. They were well worth the extra.

I think AI will be the largest singular "wow" moment of my life. Doubt anything is likely to come along in my lifetime that will have a bigger impact on humanity.

Mind you, I'm hoping to be around to see humanity set foot on Mars. That will be very cool. Hopefully they have better cameras this time! 😁

I don’t know how best to describe it but they looked too real if that makes any sense

Did you leave it with the 120Hz upscaling/interpolation feature turned on?  For some reason this is the default on most tellies and it's awful, makes everything look like a 1980s soap but in super high resolution.