Ask Lemmy

Kinda true, how this thing even worked, nobody knows

Even better, if you scour your local thrift stores you can occasionally find them for as little as $10 and all they typically need is a cleanup and a new toner cartridge.

I bought mine for $7 4 years ago and it's still working on the toner cartridge that was in the printer when I bought it.

Admittedly, I only print about 40 or 50 pages a year but that's a hell of a deal.

Imagine this weird future: Printers that always just work no matter what type of computer you have or how long they've sat since you last used them. And the "ink" cartridges last forever. And you can buy 3rd party refills or even refill them yourself. Plus it's completely reliant on microplastics to do its job, what's more futuristic than that?

I lived in the 90's, when office work was a tad more reliant on printers and late stage capitalism wasn't as bad. My dad had a laser printer for his business. Very reliable, fast, never needed anything.

I remember that as the past, is my point.

I'm actually blown away by how good of a 3D Printer you can get for ~$200 now. Huge improvement from just a few years ago.

You can buy an ESP board that meets all those qualifications from AliExpress for less than $3CAD shipped.

Setting one of those up was the first time in a while I’ve been so impressed with just how cheap and accessible tech has gotten. It’s a web server with WiFi and Bluetooth shipped to my door all for the price of a chocolate bar.

It's interesting the difference in what people think a collapsed civilization will look like.

Some people think we will "return to monke" where wilderness survival skills will be essential and people who have them will be the "main characters." That would probably be the easier and better future.

The more likely option will be technofeudalism where rich people have small, brutal armies and control localized power grids, farming operations, and politics with tech as mass migrations happen and wildlife becomes all but extinct outside of human cultivation. Survival skills won't matter when all land and food scarcity is controlled by a rich few with absolute control. The average survivalist will be wiped out with the first natural disaster or by the feudal lords with drones. Return to nature might only come after 50 years when chip supplies and power grids have dried up and fallen apart, but it would just as likely be mad-max as oil could likely still be used.

Who knows. Fascism might take over with how it is going now and solve the climate crisis with mass genocide and forcing green energy for all we know.

The RPI400 is basically a full solution. You just need a display and a mouse, and you have a fully functional desktop computer. Not very powerful, but good enough for basic tasks like writing documents or browsing the web, coding etc.

That's a good example! I have a RG35XX, and definitely fun to see how far gaming tech has come.

While "good for you" and "congrats", it's not something anyone can buy for under 100 bucks.

And ping all that data to CCP instead of our corporate overlords? No thanks

I was thinking of something that would be considered futuristic to an average person today. So, maybe something uncommon, with impressive capabilities, but still affordable?

Not sure if many items fit that criteria, but was curious if any!

The pound isn't the future since Brexit.