Asklemmy

The FOSS, for one.

The technologies were/are not grifts. They were used as buzzwords to enable the grift of spending investor money.

Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.

Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.

The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.

All technologies are grifts when controlled by the capitalist class and marketed under the logic of capitalism. Simple as that. Even the simple hammers you find at a hardware store are a side effect of some rich asshole's money hoarding operation.

For this reason, I do not reject the listed technologies outright. (Although I do not personally know of a non-capitalist use for Blockchain, I'm open to suggestions.) I reject the capitalists who control these technologies.

Computer vision enabled selective weeding of farms is an emerging technology that represents a real opportunity to reduce herbicide usage.

Similarly the use of aerial or terrestrial drones to carry out farming tasks or surveillance is becoming more viable as prices drop.

In medicine mRNA vaccines are quite new and doing cool work.

Alternative chemistry batteries like lithium sulfur appear promising and are getting closer to commercial viability. Sodium based battery chemistry has a lot of research interest and looks promising where cost is a bigger factor than energy density.

Phytoremediation is as ever tantilising and increasingly seeing real-world pilot programs.

I think it is only partly dependant on the technology. Each of the listed technologies CAN have useful applications, but the current capitalist system is expecting unattainable growth so ot creates bubbles and in the bubbles there are grifters.

Gene therapy and stem cells.

There is one from Japan about regrowing teeth, and then the one (forget where) about a 4 hour gene therapy treatment that basically cures issues some people have around cholesterol.

Although maybe the first one might turn into a grift. Like honestly, if I could GMO in/ Stem cell in like, just one alligator tooth into my grill, I might just.

At this point, the only thing that wouldn't be a grift is a proof that P=NP, so that we can break all DRM effortlessly.

Surveillance capitalism is sadly not a grift, it works very well and makes billions of moneys worldwide.

Arch Linux

We’re very stuck with LLMs etc but the current shit is very much a bubble. It mostly reminds me of the dot com era but the money was far less frantic.

Fire.