2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy, pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and social media redefined how we connected to people online.

Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the decade, are both kind of here, but only kind of, and not enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The games we play or their graphics haven't changed significantly. I started using Linux and learned exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri dish that's stopped expanding.

0: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Computer advances follow network bandwidth increases. Network upload bandwidth has been stagnant for almost 20 years.

Give everybody symmetrical gigabit and watch the sparks fly.