What things has tech made significantly better in your life?

Besides that it improved my salary, it made backpacker-like traveling much easier.

Sitting on a bus from one to other town and having an hour or so downtime, I can browse, compare, and even buy my next flight ticket/room booking on the spot, without much thinking about how to get a better deal, giving the flexibility of staying at a place longer if I want.

On the same note, offline maps, guide books (OsmAnd's wikivoyage integration is amazing) are at your disposal any time of the trip, so you can avoid tourist traps.

Additionally, service providers also leverage "technology", advertising to and connecting with their audience through chat apps, social media. Often using online translation services to bridge the language gap.

This is a combination of "technologies": mobile internet, mapping, booking services in phone apps, community-sourced content, online translators, and network effect on services like WhatsApp and Instagram.

The kind of flexible traveling I am doing currently in South America couldn't have been done even 20 years ago.

Tech gave me both a hobby and a career and guaranteed I’d never want for something to muck about with. It’s made for easier, distributed working environments and allows for what was science fiction level of communication. It’s also made my music and video library vastly larger and right at my fingertips. It’s also made travel much easier and more flexible.

My only regret is that it all started out social due to the size and limitations of technology and it’s become single individual. A f2f hacker community was more enjoyable than a larger yet remote one.

I would have to say discovering and learning things. The vastness of breadth and depth of content and knowledge available on the internet is astounding. A lot of it can also be practiced on the same devices whether in a browser, source code, or downloaded app. Most other things that were fussy or hard like image, sound, video, midi are so accessible now. Computer or online Chess, Go, sure.

Surprisingly, cell-phones and sms are useful to me, but much less so mobile apps and things. IM is only better because sms is slow/unreliable for no good reason and the occasional group chat. The only real day/night difference is having GPS maps readily available if I'm in an unfamiliar area. I like the form factor of a Surface tablet. Small/light enough to take any time and try out ideas on-the-spot when you have them rather than wait til you get somewhere with something more than a consuming device. I really hope we get some mobile AR/VR consumer gear soon that I can use with cloud creator apps/platforms--a bigger screen in a smaller form-factor.