HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's the most interesting (non-AI) advancement in tech in 2023?

54 points by jwestbury ↗ HN
LLMs and AI in general have captured an outsized portion of our minds and of media reports this year, but surely there are other interesting and impactful things happening across the industry.

So, what does hn think is especially interesting from the past year? What went un- or undernoticed?

66 comments

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znpy
Probably the framework laptops, particularly the 16” (I’m waiting for reviews…)

It’s good to see somebody doing something actually useful and consumer friendly for once.

RetroTechie
Don't pick 1. There's so much happening! A nice starter:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologie...

lelima
This Link it's gold, very interesting!
civilitty
I wonder how much of that list is vaporware.

Blockchain is on it.

[deleted]
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taco_emoji
Blockchain isn't really vaporware, it's real. It hasn't lived up to the hype (to say the least), but it does exist and does have limited utility.
joshz404
How can I trust this comment if this forum isn't on the blockchain!?
franky47
Blockchain is smokeware. Vaporware would imply an emission-free power source.
D4ckard
What's special about the `en.m.wikipedia` subdomain compared to the usual `en.wikipedia`?
angrais
I assume it's the mobile version of the website so probably has slightly different stylesheets.
appplication
Perhaps someone can explain to me why this concept needs to exist. When I visit regular Wikipedia on mobile, I get mobile style sheets. What’s the need for the separate url? Maybe Wikipedia is ok with this but I’ve found Confluence basically completely breaks if you try to give someone on desktop a mobile link. Seems like the whole system is just not quite right.
Two4
It's a holdover from before reactive styling was really a thing - there was a stage, if you recall, where people were maintaining two versions of their websites, one being for mobile. It was awful, and mobile user agents were bombarded with banners asking to switch to the mobile version, which would invariably break the flow and bounce them back to a landing page. They then had to claw their way back to where they were in the website, if they could. On the upside, it was mobile first, and had more intuitive layouts for mobile devices. I suspect that Wikipedia still maintains this split so as to not break those old web clients, or any other client built on top of the mobile web interface. I bet that if I broke out my old Nokia E63, I'd still be able to boot up that Symbian browser and read a Wikipedia article.
RetroTechie
Wikipedia switches between mobile & non-mobile site automagically.

I'm assuming the mobile flavour is a resource-lighter version that should load quicker. If you are using a mobile device (and/or on cellular data), it's nice to not take any detours - however small. And I'd expect a good % of users to be on a mobile device.

From a desktop/PC/whatever, it's probably a don't care.

TLDR; an attempt to feed WP link followers a 'lite' version first.

schleck8
They for some reason encode the viewport into the URL, it's pretty annoying because there is no automatic redirects either. I assume there is some good reason for this like accessibility for low-bandwidth regions but surely there must be a similary efficient solution.
andrei_says_
Sony just released a9iii, a prosumer camera with a full frame global readout sensor which eliminates rolling shutter.
Brajeshwar
I'm not a professional, not even near an enthusiastic amateur but this is a entirely new game changer. This is like the move from DSLR to Mirrorless. The A9III is super costly but makes sense for pro and prosumers.

Let me try and see if I understood what their tech is.

This is like, as soon as you open the camera, it is pretty much taking a video. When you are shoot, it is just picking the shots from the frames that is already in the camera's sensor!

robga
This is what iPhones have done for a long time?

Edit: OK, not quite, thanks for the correction.

buildbot
Yeah most phone sensors have high enough readout speeds that this is the best way to handle shutter lag and also computational photography needs. To my the best of my knowledge though, all cellphones still use rolling shutters, just fast ones. This is a single freeze frame capture, all at once, 120 times per second.
itishappy
The iPhone sensor uses a rolling shutter and is 25x smaller than Sony's.
buildbot
It's nuts. The sensor can dump 6GB/s of data!!!!

I can't wait for a digital back based on this tech - Phase One has an industrial body with a global sensor but it's dynamic range limited sadly.

camillomiller
To be fair, that’s what every iPhone does (with now somewhat limited rolling shutter). Nikon z9 already did the same and eliminated the mechanical shutter (now on z8 and z f as well). Sony brought this to a whole new level, but the competition is amazing. I honestly believe that with this plus all the new features that machine learning and deep learning enable on these cameras this is the most exciting time ever (gear-wise) to be a professional photographer.
jwestbury
Can't remotely justify the price to upgrade from my trusty A7iii, but definitely excited about this one!
devgoth
Maybe not this past year but I really think WASM will become a important piece of tech in the web stack as it matures.
paulgb
If we scope to the past year, Wasm’s garbage collector integration shipped in Chrome a few weeks back. It’s a solid step towards memory-managed languages running reasonably-efficiently in Wasm. There are still some unknowns to work out, but I think this is a bigger deal than it’s currently getting credit for!
jjcm
I just wish you could allocate more than 4gb of memory to it. Limiting it to 32 bit addressing greatly reduces the applications of it for pro tools.
nicbou
After people discovered that you could fax the Berlin immigration office to bypass their queue of 10,000+ unanswered emails, they turned the fax machines off.

Germany is going digital against its will.

Tainnor
As somebody living in Berlin, this sounds exactly like something our authorities would do.
LeafItAlone
Based only off your comment here, it doesn’t sound like they are going digital, but rather merely leaving fax. Have they started answering emails?
lnsru
First generation of real electric vehicles from established car manufacturers is being phased out. Kia EV6 and Ioniq 5 facelifts are coming and VW both id.3 as well as id.4 with their derivates are being upgraded. Exiting times come with usable electric vehicles on the market.
RecycledEle
There is a new space race on.

I almost gave up on ever seeing missions to asteroids, but we have: DART, Lucy and Psyche in a short time frame.

The next prototype of the class of ships that will bring colonists to Mars is scheduled for a test flight on November 18 or 19.

betterprojects
I am looking forward to the Apple Vision Pro and spatial computing. I'd love to compare the experience Apple is creating against existing AR/VR competitors. I think a lot of people still vastly underestimates the potential here due to the existing underwhelming experiences we've had going into the space.
dmarcos
What use case are you excited about?
betterprojects
Primarily computing. Right now that might mean a clunky headset tethered to your Macbook Pro to power the OS in virtual windows but the dream has always been advancing tech to the point where you could wear a pair of glasses and have all the computing power and OS running in the cloud (to remove the need for most of the hardware to be on the device). I'm a big fan of that vision.
dmarcos
We don’t have the tech to fulfill that vision (still research topic) Considering the constraints of Vision Pro: bulk, weight, battery live, resolution… Are you excited about any use case?
dangus
I presume the person you’re replying to is figuring that this technology won’t always have the same bulk, weight, resolution, and battery life constraints, and that’s why they’re excited about it.

From the demos shown it doesn’t look badly compromised for being a first generation product.

dmarcos
What demos / use cases showcased are you most excited about?
dangus
I’m not $3500 excited but I would buy the product as shown at $1000 or so.

I think it could be a great computer for traveling, especially the idea of being able to have a multiple monitor-like setup on the go without dealing with setting up a bunch of equipment.

Computing on airplanes would be so much better than struggling with a laptop on a tray table, and you could sit back and relax to watch movies rather than being hunched over a phone/tablet/IFE.

The “watching content while doing chores at home” that influencers have been showing off with the Quest 3 seems pretty nice.

I don’t buy into the idea that a device like this will replace smartphones or computers as our primary computing devices even when the technology gets far better, but it definitely has a place.

losvedir
I'm going with Apple Vision Pro, though technically maybe it should only count for 2024. Maybe I'll expand to say "the real beginning of consumer mixed reality", so I can kind of count the Quest 3 that launched a few weeks ago.

I was an early backer of the Oculus (backer ~200, if I remember correctly) and have been a big fan of VR since then. But it's had its challenges, and while it's a fun escape, for me it hasn't been ready for prime time and has been relegated to occasional workout Beat Sabers.

But I thought Apple nailed it with their AVP approach. Targeting MR _first_, with eye tracking and the pinch interaction seems like a smart approach to begin this new visual medium and UX. I think MR will be here to stay, as the tech miniaturizes and matures, and that the AVP will be looked back on as the Apple II of this tech universe. In the same way that my grandparents have sort of been left out of the "information economy" and the move to everything online - booking hotels and flights, interacting with customer support, banking, shopping, etc - I think people who don't have a MR headset will eventually be left out of the "ambient information economy". Stores will have prices virtually displayed over their goods, people will have profiles associated with them that you just see when you interact, etc.

I think a lot of people will see this as a dystopia, but my prediction is it will be coming. And I'm excited for it. Being able to "zoom in" at will, put screens and panels wherever I need them, redecorate my house, add hovering timers of my stove, have real-world ad-blocking, etc.

I'm pretty excited about being able to film my kids growing up with a spatial video camera (say, the iPhone 15 Pro), and then watch them in an AVP. I expect it will be a qualitative jump up in remembering and reminiscing, like going from paintings to black-and-white photographs, to color photos, to videos. Right now, the quality probably won't be great, but it's akin to watching those grainy '80s home video VHS clips you see from time to time.

robviren
CAR-T and PTCy (posttransplant cyclophosphamide) treatments for cancer have huge potentials for treatment options and positive outcomes for patients. Unsure if is qualifies as "tech" but hey, it sure required a lot of it.
foco_tubi
In this vein, a CRISPR-edited stem cell therapy for Sickle Cell Disease is nearing approval, providing at very least a "durable long-term remission from disease." Multi-million dollar bone marrow transplants will be unnecessary and treatment costs will decrease by ~80%.
bad_alloc
Consumer-grade drones and RC ground vehicles becoming a major part of a war between regular armies.
culopatin
Why is this exciting?
mmh0000
To be faiiirrrrr, the Ask HN was "most interesting," not "most exciting".

And it is very interesting watching the smaller (comparatively) country of Ukraine hold their own against a much much larger force in large part by using $50 Walmart drones with a grenade duct-taped on.

The large-scale use of cheap drones is going to change warfare tactics forever. It also leads to a bunch of fascinating anti-drone weapons, and then, of course, drones that can evade or are immune to such weapons will follow.

bad_alloc
From what I heard it is very exciting for tank crews, but not necessarily in a good way.
marginalia_nu
I think it's underappreciated just how fast computers have gotten in the last few years. Things that required a small data center in 2003 can be done on a PC or workstation today. Enterprise SSDs are super cheap too.
RetroTechie
Yeah, that's a special feature of IC's: one of few things that get better & better as they get smaller. By almost any measure.
marginalia_nu
The 2010s were also a bit of a lost decade in PC CPU innovation given AMD's floundering keeping up with Intel, and Intel's consequent permisson to rest on their laurels.
arthropodSeven
I'm pretty stoked about Frore Systems' "solid-state cooling" tech. The operating parts are micro-electro-mechanical systems created with the lithography tech typically used for manufacturing integrated circuits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsPzEEBNAxc

https://froresystems.com

Enormous gains in heat transfer efficiency, per unit of volume or power, relative to traditional air cooling with fans. We should see this hitting the market pretty soon in phones and laptops.

jwestbury
This is super cool (pun not intended, but embraced), thanks for sharing!
eliasmacpherson
rust: std::simd efforts

midi: 2.0

web: local-first as a trend

thelastgallon
Virtual Power Plant. These just started coming out, they will replace all peaker natural gas plants. Electricity from peaker plants is 10x costly. VPPs will make it cheaper.

More importantly, anyone with a battery (Electric car!) can make money by opting in for VPP.

Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day: https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo...

Thats with powerwalls, no reason it can't be done with an EV, definitely a bigger battery.

jjcm
I'm really into what Australian startup Roev is doing in that space - they're doing exactly that: leveraging your electric car battery to do arbitrage on the grid. They're targeting larger more industrial/commercial fleets of vehicles as well, which typically have more of an idea of when they'll need their vehicles to be at 100% charge and when they're OK with having them act as grid batteries. Means you make money when your car isn't in use as well.
UtopiaPunk
I know the concept of passkeys isn't new to the HN crowd, but 2023 seems to be the year where it is rapidly expanding to normal users. There are some major players that now allow for passkeys as a genuine replacement for a password.

While I am comfortable using a password manager and creating a new login for new website, I see friends and family who are exasperated whenever they have to log in to their email account or streaming service on a new device, or dumbfounded when something breaks with their iCloud Keychain/Google Password Manager. Managing dozens or hundreds of passwords just seems to be really difficult for "non-tech" people. I'm not sure what the password/passkey landscape will look like in a couple of years, but I can't help but thinking, once the rough edges are smoothed out, that passkeys will make managing accounts a lot easier for people, at least make a lot more sense to people. Physically picking something up off the table and saying "here are my keys" just makes sense.

It will be interesting to see what problems are solved and what new problems arise if there is a strong shift away from passwords to passkeys, and how much lock-in there is with the big players like Apple and Google. I'm hopeful that the FIDO2 WebAuthn alliance will create an industry standard that prevents a strong lock-in, but Apple and Google do have a way of making their offerings convenient. A large shift away from passwords would be huge, and I hopeful that it will be a net-positive change.