What's Some Tech That Was Better Than It Is Now?
When you connect a new device to a 'smart' tv, you must pay homage to the manufacturer with a ritualistic dance. Plugging and unplugging the device. Turning them on and off in the correct sequence like entering a konami code.
Every time you want to switch devices, the tv must scan for them. And god forbid you lose power, or unplug something. You are granted the delight experience of doing it all over again.
I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.
What is some other tech that used to be better?
The internet.
The internet of the 90s was wild, creative, and not as accessible. We dreamed that as it grew and became more accessible, a utopia of information and creativity would flourish.
Instead we got a bland, corporate wasteland, and free soapboxes for every shithead out there.
Yup, most of the internet is now sadly an ad-infested monetized corporate hellhole, and as a bonus it's now rapidly being filled to the brim with AI slop, because it clearly wasn't bad enough just yet... :(
Is there a solution (other than being on Lemmy)?
There is a bit of a smolnet renaissance happening in niche tech and creative circles. Using IRC to socialize, reviving gopher protocol for blogs, creating lofi and pure HTML/CSS sites instead of using bloated JS frameworks. And of course, creating simple and/or federated services for media sharing.
Tell me if you'd like to know more. Additionally, my home instance is full of people with such interests.
I would like to know more.
Mind linking some communities?
I hope they reply (and that I remember to come back and check again so I can see it,) I'm very interested, too!
I've been thinking of starting a blog to help motivate me to do more writing. For a while I felt burnt out because I knew I'd have no hope in hell of being able to do a bunch of SEO stuff to enable people to actually see if anything I write, but I've concluded that people based networks are the only way something like this will work for me. After all, most of my favourite blogs or blog posts are ones I've heard of through word of mouth.
I've not heard of gopher protocol though, that sounds interesting
If you are interested in gopher you might also like gemini protocol.
To be honest i hate irc, im glad matrix is slowly replacing it
IRC will never be replaced. Matrix is just a more modern option.
Theres XMPP too, its nice
If you haven’t tried I2P, it gives me those old web vibes.
Ooh, I looked it up and it sounds interesting. I look forward to figuring it out and experiencing it for myself, thanks! :)
Webrings, decentralized networks and list of links proposed by a blogger you like. That's a good start I'd say.
Yep, theres a lot of old/new sites for that:
https://yesterweb.org/community/
https://www.notechmagazine.com/
https://goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/cyberspace/webrings
All kinds of stuff. https://melonking.net/melon
Most kinda look like the old geocities lol
Decentralized & federated networks: Lemmy, Mastodon, Nostr, Freenet, I2P, etc
Donate monthly to Wikipedia
Geminispace.
NNTP :(
Go back to gopher :)
All that chaos is still out there. Its just that its smaller and you have to not get stuck in the corporate bullshit.
Finding it is almost impossible though. I've tried and tried but the search engines don't show any of these cute little niche sites that are definitely out there.
You know, you aren't wrong.
I've been noodling on an idea for a while:
What about a.. fediverse focused/ federated search engine?
Yet back in the "good" days, we didn't have search engines.
Cars.
mechanical, no software bugs
physical buttons, no touch screen
everything just worked, no need to license the heating of your chair
freaking lane assist
You get it..
Much safer now though. Traffic accidents are much less lethal nowadays (except SUV/Truck vs ped)
Yeah but that isn't because of the LCD touchscreen console and software locked seat heating
Lane assist and being able to control shit via voice or steering wheel buttons absolutely has helped with safety though. While lane assist is not going to completely prevent you from serving off the road if you pass out, it will happen much less often. Of course you should not drive while tired but people still do pretty often. Being able to change a radio station or call someone from steering wheel buttons is a hell of a lot safer than fiddling with a radio dial or searching for a CD/cassette to play. A girl in my high school died doing that one.
Seat heating was not really a thing in anything but luxury models until pretty recently.
I do agree about replacing controls with a touchscreen though. Fuck that. That is absolutely less safe than having tactile feedback.
The problem you’ve addressed is that too many people should not be driving or doing what they’re doing while they’re driving. All these safety features are really just ‘I’m too distracted to pay attention to operating a motor vehicle’ features.
There absolutely is some technology that’s been beneficial. But the cat has been let out of the bag and people are losing the choice to safely operate a car on their own.
Yeah, it turns out humans be humaning. We are not robots. You have the option to safely operate a car on your own but if you so happen to have an issue where you cannot operate one safely in the moment, the safety features help you out. You can still operate a vehicle with lane assist and not even notice that it is enabled. You also have the ability to turn it off. You can also still operate a vehicle with adaptive cruise control enabled and not even notice it if you are shaky operating the vehicle properly. These features do not prevent people from operating a vehicle safely on their own. They are there because a fuck ton of people cannot and never have been able to. The past driver mortality rate which was higher when these safety features were not an option is clear evidence of that.
Again, if you are indeed a robot and have never had an issue of going over the lines or going above the speed limit or ever checked your rear view mirror at an inopportune time when someone in front of you is slamming on their brakes, you can still operate a vehicle just the same as you would if they were not there. Hell, you can also simply disable them. But those safety features are there for the rest of us that recognize that shit happens.
Now I will certainly agree that many people should not be driving. I believe that you should have a hell of a lot more practice than six months of driver's education and passing a very simple test once to be able to drive for the rest of your life. I also recognize that driving is a requirement for many people to work. I welcome alternatives to driving but it is not a reality yet. The increase in safety features helps minimize death and injury in the current reality.
I see this as the problem. We're becoming more reliant on robots to accomplish basic tasks. If the mode of transportation is fully automated - fine. But that is not the case, yet. It's still the licensed driver's responsibility if there's a crash. You can't tell a judge your robot made a mistake.
You know how they say Gen Alpha doesn't know how to turn on a computer or use a file system? It's like that. We can't just give the robots full control of our lives. We should know the basics of operating a car, of being aware of our surroundings, of how to instinctively make a split second decision.
I'll offer a compromise. There should be two (or more) levels of operating licenses. If you want your car to do everything for you, you do not have the same permissions as someone who knows how to fully drive a car. This means you're unable to rent or borrow a car that requires your full attention. At least this creates some sort of stricter legal ramification when someone who's been dependent upon driver assist features for a decade and gets behind the wheel of a "dumb" car and kills someone because they don't know how to merge onto a highway. Frankly, we could benefit from this premise on existing drivers and vehicles today.
Even the most reliable drivers overlook something, get distracted by something on the road or in the car. These features absolutely help more than they harm.
Of course not, what makes you think anything i said is even vaguely related to those negative cherry picks?
Is car manufacturing and design not tech?
Do impact detection, brake assist/auto brake, modern lane assist, distance detection etc not add to safety? I could probably rattle on
Over the past 5 years the monthly road deaths here in aus have been going up, because of the prevalence of those massive cars
Yeah tbh there would be no harm in banning them. If you need a work truck, those are fine. No person in the world needs an SUV or an oversized pickup truck
I wouldn't say "no person" but the F150 should not be the most sold vehicle for the last 10 years straight.
We need to shame Pavement Princesses and Suburban Assault Vehicles out of market dominance.
https://tyreextinguishers.com/
Not sure who would ever need an SUV, especially in an urban env. Most of the common ones have zero off roading capabilities either, so work vehicles are usually specialised.
Thanks for the link though, I'll forward it :)
Those awful american "trucks" do my head in, always a certain type of dickhead driving them too...
This is a matter of perspective and shifting skill set demographics
From the perspective and skill sets of a old school mechanic/gear head who classically never really liked "tech stuff" yes that's a problem.
From the perspective and skill sets of, say someone like me who's really into the "tech stuff", but old school mechanical cars were never interesting are excited about some of the tech in cars, bugs be damned.
You might have gotten excited to figure out and fix what that "Weird knocking" was mechanically where as I would have just thrown my hands up and gone "Fuck. Now I gotta take it to the mechanic".
Now the roles are reversed, now you might be pissed to see the car show "ERROR CODE 73997" whereas I am more likely to have fun diagnosing it "the tech way". Plugging in my laptop, delving through logs etc. in the end I might still need to take it to a mechanic when the fix is something ultimately mechanical, but I sure as hell would have had a lot more fun with it and maybe even a little security against scrupulous mechanics.
Tl;Dr The car heads time is over, the time for the nerds to take over cars has come!
The rest, subscription seats, being locked out of manuals and diagnostic tools by the manufacturer etc are a whole different thing and can fuck ALLL the way off
The bigger problem is, being ALLOWED to plug in your laptop and delve through the logs.
The right to repair has died with manufacturers following in Tesla footsteps, who is following the guidebook from apple.
The original Volkswagen Beetle was specifically designed for literally anyone to work on it.
While cars have had computers in them since the 1970s, they were still easily diagnosed by almost anyone with a basic education (most people took a basic automotive class in high school). If you could fix a lawnmower, you could fix a car.
Now cars are just rolling computers. Mr. Nerd, how often do you upgrade your computer? And how long do you anticipate Teslas remaining on the road? Aren’t they all doomed to the scrap yard in 10-15 years?
You can still work on older cars. They may be less safe, they may cause more pollution. But in the context you’re arguing, I can’t say you’ve presented a compelling case.
Moreover, consumer demand for distraction has driven (so to speak) the popularity of cars and other gadgets to do the thinking for us. A brief example is how often my Uber driver takes a wrong turn into another state because he’s unfamiliar with the city and relying on his phone. A taxi driver would never make that mistake because they’re knowledgeable and able to think for themselves.
I’ll pick a dumb device 9 times out of 10.
Depends, systems that I routinely push enough computational demand through? every couple years (Or at least some part it if applicable) is about average.
The laptop I keep in my room for light research/gaming/general computing/remoting into other systems? When it breaks.
Phones? Whenever I see something compelling enough, every year for awhile until I was on the OnePlus 8T for 3 years before the Pixel Fold dropped
Yes, but it has nothing to do with the on board computers and everything to do with Tesla's shit quality in general
I could just as easily drudge up old ICE "minimal computers" cars that only lasted "10-15 years" because of similar issues
Thanks to better higher precision machining tech and the "computers" working together to significantly decrease wear & tear, newer cars can regularly exceed 200k miles as long as it makes it past the first few years and decently maintained. The older cars you see lasting today are the rare exception, not the rule. Many many of a models "brethren" died LONG ago, well short of 200k miles.
They also cost more long term to, in both fuel economy (The "computers" have far greater control over the engine and associated parts, to more easily achieve better fuel efficiency) and repair costs (In both your time spent repairing (your time is valuable to ya know) and in parts) because they are also far more prone to regularly breaking down.
That's an entirely different problem to the discussion, but also a classic "That new fangled gizmo, kids these days don't learn the REAL ways!!!"
That's fine, car computerization (as far as engine/motor/transmission control go; infotainment systems and subscription heated seats are a whole different problem) is here to stay, the young car heads/mechanics coming up behind you are learning the newer ways regardless. There are fewer and fewer of this stuck in the past mindset every year and every year these older cars get harder and harder to find as they die.
Until some open standards are made for car computerization, it will continue to be used as a tool to keep you as a consumer dependent on the company’s good will and certified technicians. It is so much easier to lock a silly little consumer out of a digital system with closed source and obfuscation than a mechanical one, if both systems have a way to be serviced. When this status quo changes, I will finally give up my old 20+ year old cars. As of now, they are reliable as long as I keep up with their routine maintenance, and they dont track me, monitor me, or lock me out when i need to get something changed or modified. - gen Z system admin
For anyone like OP here, get a BT device that plugs in the computer. Then get the Android app, free but worth paying for if you want more bells and whistles. I had a hacked version but was so pleased I bought it to always have on future phones.
You can see and lookup engine codes, see what's wrong with your car. It kind of a trip what all it does. I'm not gearhead, but when the car acts up, I can get a clue. Also clears annoying gremlin lights.
For $6 I consider it a "must have". While you're at it, get an air pump that plugs in the cigarette lighter. Saved me tons of hassle.
OBDII only gives you access to metrics the manufacturer decides you are allowed to access. That's a far cry from having control of your device.
A challenger arises!
https://forscan.org/home.html
This is just the beginning...
Cars are one of the first thing I would use as an example of something that's gotten better. Heated seats, heated steering wheels, better safety ratings, better comfort, power windows, power steering, ABS, backup cameras, adaptive cruise control....
Uh cars now have subscription services for various features. You dont just get whats in the car when you buy it second hand, you still have to pay to use those features.
Repair costs are stupdily expensive in comparison, and require significant diagnostic tools to do simple things because everything in your car has a sensor in it.
And cars are now spying on you to your insurance company because you dont actually get to decide if they are allowed to use your data or not
Sure cars have a lot more features, but they used to just work
Oh, I agree with your complaints. But that doesn't change that cars offer a much more comfortable and convenient experience today than they did in my youth.
Reread what i wrote and thought about it today.
What message im hoping to say is its all downhill from here. Autopilot and AI will be crammed into every piece of tech imaginable and car manufacturers tech has always been trash, I dont know what its going to look like at the bottom but weve gone over the cliff already and we wont know what its gonna look like in 15 years, but we will dream of what we have today.
Ill bet you 1 dollar im not wrong
I still think you're probably right.
A lot of the modern tech is really good, though.
Cars are way more reliable than they were. They get way better gas mileage. They have a shitload more power (this is actually a con due to how everyone else drives these days). They're way safer in both accidents and just general driving with traction control and lane departure warnings.
So it's a real mixed bag. But I'd rather have the cars of today.
The only thing that used to be better was more physical buttons. And it looks like the EU will be pushing for that to return (requiring more physical buttons for the highest security rating).
I also prefer the old style heat/AC bar over the modern style where you set a temperature number. What's the point of setting a temperature number when the car doesn't actually maintain or output that particular temperature? For example, if it's 70° out and I set my temperature control to 70°, it might blast cold air at me or hot air. It's a crapshoot. The old style bar, you just set how warm or cool the air was that's coming out of the vents and it didn't change based on external temperature. So much simpler.
But yeah, non-physical buttons are both inconvenient and hazardous.
What does a person do if they want that stuff now? Get an old car? Is that the only option?
Yeah pretty much.
Unless you want to build your own car from the ground up, which you can do in most places if it passes safety regulations. But that takes time, money, workspace and knowing what you're even doing.
I just bought a 2013 Mini Copper. The tech is relatively limited but I have to admit there are some ergonomic issues - specifically with the lights, wipers, and radio controls. I installed a phone holder but I’m almost regretting it. I’m trying to retrain myself to not rely on gps for everything. Like, I shouldn’t need gps to tell me how to get to my mom’s house where I’ve driven to hundreds of times.
2014 Honda civic here. Thats basically the last era. 10 years from now buying a car will be tough
And also:
Yeah no sorry, as shitty as the software side of cars has become, the hardware is much advanced. And overall cars have become much better, though the recent trend towards SUVs gas removed a lot of those gains as we needlessly buy pricier and less safe cars that use more energy. 🤷 But that's on us consumers, tons of non-SUVs to buy, we're just not buying them.
This is why I'm still driving my 1996 Volvo 940. I can fix most things on it myself (and I'm not even mechanically inclined), and it doesn't have a boot time.
90s Volvos are great! S70 over here.
Buttons.
Everything used to have buttons and switches for things. You knew when you activated something because you could feel the button getting pressed.
That's the main reason I stick with OnePlus. The notification slider is a feature the I need on every phone.
Switched to OP after LG dropped out. I'm basically pro "anything but apple and Samsung" but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by my Pro 9. Hands down the best phone I've ever used. My only real complaint is that after 3 years, the battery doesn't make it all day every day, but its easy enough to carry a battery bank, or just pop it on the charger for 10 minutes and get 40% of the battery back.
Retrofuturism, fuck yeah. I have a major soft spot for stuff like that because of movies like Aliens and Star Wars.
Not even that, I just want a fucking keyboard on my phone again, and for actual buttons in my car so I can feel when I change the song on the radio or whatever.
It’s not just a “soft spot” thing though - the tactile confirmation of a button press is life and death if you’re driving a car.
Does your car have the rocket launcher button directly next to the volume knob or what do you mean with life and death?
I mean looking down at a touch screen that offers no tactile feedback is dangerous. And feeling a button click that your muscle memory can intuitively find is not.
In Star Trek Voyager, pilot Tom Paris creates a custom shuttlecraft called the Delta Flyer. Tom's a history geek who spends his holodeck time repairing antique muscle cars from the 20th century. So naturally, he designs the Delta Flyer with lots of analogue switches and dials instead of the usual Starfleet Okudagram touch screens. He thinks they're much better.
He only wanted to make sure that no one else could fly his shuttle.
Oh yeah when the click hit just right. Soft touch buttons on a 1990s Sony tape deck mmmmm
Kia gets this right with their window controls Just the right clickyness.
Whoever thought a touchscreen is the optimal way to interact with a wearable fitness device while running and drenched in sweat is really dumb. Just give a couple buttons, I can't fucking swipe while moving like that.
I know this is a cop-out because of the vast number of other improvements to devices and infrastructure, but I really liked having a seemingly indestructible phone with a removable 10-day battery and an absolute death grip on that 2g/3g network.
I really hope swappable batteries make a comeback to ditch the portable batteries and just swap a fresh one.
I kept using my LG G5 for years after I might have upgraded just for the swappable batteries.
Have you tried the fairphone?every component, including the batteries are easy to swap. Only issue is that it's a midperformance phone costing the price of a high end Huawei/Sony (Samsung and Apple prices are just straight robbery)
I'm eyeing a fairphone or a pixel (graphene) when Europe makes swappable batteries the standard. Until then, I hope my phone keeps on working, I don't change phone unless my last one dies.
Business phones with humans who answered them.
I hate this so much. I had to call a clinic the other day to ask about medical test results. None of the options on the menu were for that. So I clicked 1 for appointments. Then my options were to reschedule an appointment or to cancel an appointment. No option to go back. I clicked 0 and it hung up on me. Called back, clicked schedule an appointment and it told me to hang up and go online. Fuck me.
CVS has a speech recognition system that just won't forward me to a damn human.
And the nerve of them to constantly berate you about using the app, when I'm calling because the apps not working.
Have you tried calling the IRS? I think it's the worst.
I'm fine with that. I don't want to talk with people - I just want an email address to write to.
Here, have this useless chatbot instead.
This is only going to get more pervasive with the corporate AI craze.
I agree overall, but it is usually much quicker to talk with a human on the phone than it is to deal with an automated system.
I don't really want to talk to people either, but sometimes you need help right away. I usually try chat first. It's a little less frustrating.
Tbf in many countries you still get this. The Nordics is night and day compared to the U.K. where I live now. You get a local number, a local email and someone who works at that office actually responds and is enabled to make decisions.
It’s a trust thing.
Instant messaging.
20 years ago, there were half a dozen competing major platforms (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, etc), like today.
The difference is that you had your choice of half a dozen clients that could each talk to ALL of the platforms. Adium, Trillian, Kopete, etc.
Today's kids have no idea what we lost to the god of profit.
I feel like AIM was the de facto god-emperor of IM platforms and the rest were just also-rans.
Maybe that was just my experience tho, but I feel like ICQ and IRC were older but more clunky, MSN and Yahoo were newer or contemporary but less dependable and had less buy in from the community.
Maybe it's just my personal era, but MSN/Messenger was used solely in the group I grew up around. With maybe an addition of trillium eventually
In my bubble, MSN was the first messenger used by non-nerds. For me it was the third messenger after IRC and ICQ that i really used. Nerds were on IRC, Gamers on ICQ
MSN was for your friends and friends of friends, ICQ was gamers and pre-MSN friends, IRC was for pretending you were a 17 year old girl from California.
Text Messages killed instant message programs. Same "format", but infinitely portable and won't crash out your full screen game when you get a new message.
This is an American thing. In the rest of the world WhatsApp and the like still reign supreme.
WhatsApp is the same as texting in this regard.
iPods
Google search
Netflix/streaming
Windows
I still regularly use my iPod. Going on 20 years old! I’ve replaced the battery and swapped the hdd with an sd card.
Google keyboard before they went all in on machine learning for spelling and grammar. It was freaky good at correction, then immediately fell off a cliff. It still replaces my son's name, which I type multiple times a day, with a less common name even when I type it correctly. I've removed the wrong name from the dictionary but no dice, still gets it wrong.
Everything Google has done was better before they inserted machine learning. Google Maps used to give accurate lane-specific directions, then they switched to using approximate traffic data to determine directions, and since most drivers are morons, Maps now tells you to turn right in a straight-only lane and make an illegal left turn in 150ft after crossing 4 lanes.
There. Google up to 2014 was still mostly decent, with some notable stupid decisions. Anything since feels like shit on top of shit
Android "swipe" keyboards in general are almost all terrible right now. We had it, I would get the correct word most of the time and I could do it fast. Now, no matter which one I try using - Google, Samsung, Microsoft, that FOSS one - nearly every sentence i type has some word that it gets wrong.
yep. Swype was like a mind reader. now none of the keyboards seem to have any idea about what I'm writing. random capitalization, suggesting completely obscure words instead of perfectly common ones that makes sense in context, the smallest hitch leading to inserting five completely irrelevant words instead of the one I'm trying to type...
I'm using heliboard without any trouble. In three languages. It takes a bit of time but if you stick with it the keyboard learns your preferences.
I use it without Internet connection (disable network permission on grapheneos) so it works great for me.
I feel like the problem is less with the technology itself and more with some of the stuff within and around it. So let me list my favourite bugbears:
Here's the thing about buttons and knobs: they are definite. When you press them, you KNOW you pressed them, you can use your finger to feel for them without activating other stuff by accident. Back in the day with my cheap-ass chinese MP3 player, I could change tracks and playlists without taking it out of my pocket just by using tact and muscle memory.
Nowadays with my smartphone even something as basic as skipping a track requires me to take it out and unlock the screen. It's like. Sure, the phone does a lot more stuff, and can stream stuff from the internet so I don't have to download every track (even if I keep a local library for my favourites in ogg format), it has bluetooth for wireless headphones, a lot of good shit -- But that little bit of user experience is just dead and buried.
Heck, my older sister tells me she used to text her friends in class without taking her phone off her pocket. Imagine! IMAGINE typing a text on one of those old phone number pads, just by muscle memory and tact! It may not be the ideal user experience, but holy shit, it was possible! Try doing anything even close to blind typing on a modern smartphone.
Another point: when something goes unresponsive on a device with just a touchscreen, you experience a confusing and annoying experience as all you have feedback-wise is the screen and sometimes it freezes and you're swiping and tapping and just praying something happens.
When a computer with keys and buttons goes unresponsive you can do the three-fingered-salute and that usually gets it to do something, and because the keyboard is a physical object, it can't be hidden from you by a crashed OS.
Nowadays even kitchen appliances are dropping buttons and knobs. My parents' dishwasher is all touch-buttons, sometimes they brush against it while walking around the kitchen and lo and behold, their butt pauses the washing cycle. Something that wouldn't be an issue with a much cheaper set of regular-ass buttons.
To say nothing of cars and the horrid security issue that fusing a tablet to the dashboard and replacing every control with just that has proven to be.
Used to be, Windows 9x let you change every colour of your UI right from the built-in settings app and came with a dozen colorschemes built-in, and Windows XP came with three built-in themes and could with just some changing around (you replaced like ONE dll file, a single copypaste), support themes that totally changed the look of the OS. Nowadays you get "White" and "Black" and that's it.
And like, that's windows, a corporate-ass proprietary system for corporate jerks -- But even Linux -- Linux! the darling of nerds who like to change everything in their computers (like me!) has caught this illness -- And you'll see people defending this. Saying that having no theming support and only having users be able to change highlight colours if even that is the "right way" to do it.
On the note of customization -- In the back-then times, chat applications let you set fonts and colours to give your messages "your look", and your friends could do the same. -- Fuck! The application me and my mates used for playing RPGs by text back in the early 10s supported not just font colours, but also complete rich-text, and would let you set different colours for like, things said by a character vs. narration, resulting in an utterly beautiful formatted text.
Don't get me wrong, we use Telegram/Discord for that now and having a fully searchable archive of everything that we did and talked about is great and I wouldn't trade it for the world. But the most customization you get is -- Setting a profile picture. The most formatting you get is bold/italics.
Webforums would let you have an avatar, a user title under the avatar (that many forums let you customise!), and a signature. Nowadays with things like Lemmy you have to squint to see a person's username.
And like, it's not like there is something about the modern technologies unto themselves that prevents these bits of customisation: Computers are better at drawing shit on screen than ever, internet connectivity has only gotten faster, and we figured out 'sending some markup codes to make rich text' as a thing way back in the 80s. We lost all that simply because the people making the applications don't want to have it.
I feel like for every neat thing that new technology provides us, it takes three steps back for entirely human and not at all technological issues. ^read:^ ^capitalism^
I got a car with a T9 input and I was pleasantly surprised at how good I still was at typing without looking
Wait a dishwasher with buttons on the outside? I have only seen ones that had them on the inside. Physical and touch.
Odd.
All the ones I've seen have the interface on the outside. Like on the door. Usually at the top.
Well yes but once you close the door the buttons are not accessible anymore?
Nope. Still accessible on the front of the door. Dunno what to tell ya.
I got my first dishwasher a few years ago and decided to go sort of all in and get a solid mid range one instead of the cheapest option because I was so excited to not have to do dishes.
The fucking touch buttons are the worst fucking god damn bullshit pieces of shit I've ever experienced. From the jump even when they worked 'properly' it just felt weird, but a couple years later and half the time the touch doesn't register. Sometimes there's the slightest but of crud or water on there and the thing goes crazy and becomes super sensitive all of a sudden, usually I spend 5 minutes loading the dish washer and 10 minutes trying to get it to register which button I pushed.
I want real physical buttons.
Also while I'm on the topic I was highly disappointed to learn that you still have to wash food and stuf off of dishes before you put them in. I don't know why I thought I could throw a plate with crusted lsagana on it the dishwasher but I did. I thought all dishwashers had some sort of garbage disposal thing built into it. They do not.
You shouldn't need to wash food off. Was that in the manual or something that someone told you? Just scrap off what you can. Too much gunk can clog the filter and also end up filling the base with water and tripping an E15 error.
Obligatory Technology Connections video. Might help with your dishwasher woes: https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0
30 mins of a German professor who all his life studied doing dishes and how dishwashers work. (in juicy German accent English).
The answer is soaking.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001xdbx
Touchscreen in cars are so bad for safety. Buttons mean you don't have to take your eyes off the road
Literally what I said.
ALSO
ALSO
ALSO
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ALSO
Pandora. I remember when it was a "music experiment"
Hey now, Pandora still pays 0.133 cents per play to the artists like they always have!
Surprisingly, it's more than Deezer pays (0.11 cents).
So on a good month, 10 to 15 cents of my $5.00 subscription will go to the artists.
...I think I just talked myself out of paying for this subscription any longer.
Ive never paid for subscription on pandora. The ad version isnt that bad, but I also dont listen to it for more than an hour at a time. I would say on average I get 5 -15 second ads an hour.
Boing!
You really summed it up. So much good on that list gone poorly wrong. But hey, they made a few increments for the shareholders.
Car stereos.
They used to have buttons and tape decks and cd players in em. From the factory.
I don’t want to do a complex install of some aftermarket thing. I want a car stereo with buttons, knobs, a tape deck, cd player, am/fm and aux input that looks like it belongs in my cars interior and is designed with the same ideas as the rest of the cars controls.
I still feel touchscreen controls are such a bad idea in cars. Old stereos have dots and grooves on them so you can operate them without having to take your eyes off the road.
Honestly, just have both. I've got physical buttons for basic controls (think volume, power, seek, skip..etc) and touchscreen capabilities for maps, connecting phone, managing car settings. Also, my car has a physical pointer stick that you can use to move the selection around on the screen, so you can even interact with soft buttons using a physical interface.
I'm on the fence about this as most (all) modern cars also have steering wheel controls so you don't even really need to move your hands much. My car is from the mid '10s and the touch screen is absolutely slow garbage but I was just in a friend's 2020ish Sienna van and her touchscreen is lightning fast like a smartphone which was fine to use comparatively. I do agree that having all the control on the touchscreen sucks but hers still had physical buttons for the HVAC and other commonly used items.
Swords are kind of crap now compared to the Renaissance. These days they come out of malls to be put on walls.
I mean you can still buy good quality swords, you just don't buy them from the mall.
Where else can mall ninjas get their gear?
The knight shop is good for mall ninjas,
Actual weapons you need to seek out companies like kvetun etc
With the ever growing HEMA and reenactment scene, there are a bunch of really good forges/manufacturers putting out fantastic training equipment, replicas and custom work, sharp and blunt.
With our machining and material science I'd guess that a high end sword now would blow the originals out of the watee
Mall swords? That’s an apples and oranges comparison.
I love how “technology” means “man-made” and you think of swords.
Yeah I was trying to make a cheeky joke.
You bought a samusng tv didn't you?
I feel this deep inside
Roomba. It got better in ways that made it worse. Really just want to put it in a room and let it wander around and vacuum. It doesn't need to map the house and then get confused if a door is closed. It doesn't need to tell me the filter is old. The old ones you could just put them wherever and close a door or put a box in the way to keep it corralled where you want it.
Better and smarter are two different things. Sometimes they intersect, other times they don't.
The new ones can do what you want too though. Just press the "clean" button on the roomba twice. Or the "clean everywhere" option in the app, if you've set it up.
In both cases, it goes wherever it can and returns to the starting point.
IMO both features mentioned sound good, but they shouldn't be a showstopper if they don't work as intended. Can you jailbreak a roomba?
I don't know. It's interesting tech, but just not useful. I don't need to start it from my phone when away from the house, and it loses its maps and makes new ones that don't have the whole house if it encounters closed doors; if you then put it into the room it forgot and start it, it just sits there confused. It gets confused when furniture moves too. We have to close doors a lot to keep dogs separated, teens close their doors all the time, my house is not static enough for this detailed mapping function. I tried giving it zones but even then the closed doors break the maps.
There are things I like about the app. Getting the details on what an error message means, finding it more easily when it's hiding. But overall losing the ability to just set it down anywhere and let it run without mapping was a bigger loss than what was gained.
Gee, now that's just crappy work. It should be able to add (or remove) a "wall" without assuming away the rest of the house.
Overdesigning is one thing. Missing obvious functionality while doing it is quite another.
Dude. Everything?
I’m exhausted with how much stuff I can’t use like I used to because a dev or manufacturer updates software. Granted, the speed of things is much improved thanks to chip technology. Software, in some cases - many cases in my experience, is getting worse.
A big one for me is music. I prefer FM radio and my own music library (digital, iPod, cd, vinyl). Because, as it’s increasingly becoming the case with everything else, you’re relying on someone else or some algorithm to do the thinking for you. And when you finally get used to something, they break it or add needless complexity.
Another one is cameras - they just do way too much crap now. Lots of people might find added features and improvement but for me it just gets in the way of iso, aperture, shutter speed. And then they’re outdated in five years anyway.
I still have a dumb tv from ~2012. The back lighting is starting to go and I’m terrified of getting a new one.
The camera thing i always find kinda funny. I bought a "good camera" back in like 2006 and a bible on how to use it. I never really hot into it, because guess what, it's pretty hard.
Kinda the same goes for mobile phone cameras. I have a friend who always huys the new flagship phone because of the CaMeRA. He only uses auto everything and just hits the button. One day we went on a bicycle tour and he took like 100 pictures because instagram. I took one, because we were on top of a skilift and i have never seen it in the summer. We went directly to a birthday party and he showed off his pictures. The only picture he didn't take was from the skilift, so he pointed at me and said that i took one. The guy hunched over and was like oooooh, holy shit what a picture, what kind of camera are you rocking? It was a 250 dollar phone.
Google Assistant/Google Now (RIP).
My phone 10 years ago used to have a component called Google Now on Tap which would show me useful information like where I parked my car, when my next appointment is, what my commute looks like, what the weather is going to be, etc.
It was so context aware and good at predictive algorithms, I never really had to do more than swipe left to get what I needed. But of course now that's in the "Killed by Google" graveyard because it didn't enforce enough "engagement" with apps and services that could feed you ads.
In general, I find Google Assistant to be less helpful overall and worse at understanding what I am trying to do. It used to be a daily convenience for me, but now I can't remember the last time I ever bothered with it. Not to mention every time you use it these days, it has to throw in a "By the way,..." suggestion that just feels like an ad for itself, because it is never related to anything I want to do.
The assistant used to be able to translate any app on the fly. It was great when living in a foreign country and trying to figure out what those text messages I got meant.
It was truly the only thing I used assistant for. I've had it disabled since they dropped that feature.
Miss now on tap a ton.
So much. So, so, SO much.
Websites in general. More bloat, more CPU usage, worse design, less content. This is even worse for shopping sites, USAians probably only know Amazon, but people from other countries definitely know a big local name that used to have a much better site years ago compared to today.
Smart TVs are the worst. You're better off buying a shitty china android tv box than a smart tv, both will suck up and sell all your data, but at least the latter can be kept off when you don't need the "smart" part.
Smartphones. Not only the whole "LETS COPY APPLE" on hardware and software design, but also on how fast it's doing a lot of the stupidity that followed PCs: phones keep getting more powerful, programs keep getting slower and more resource intensive because
fuck you"new features"Ad tech. Yes, I'd glady go back to shitty popups over clickjacking, infinite redirects that don't show up on the "back" button, annoying anti-adblocks, 70% of pages being advertising and fingerprinting bloat, javascript/css having control to FUCKING HIDE AND DISABLE MY SCROLL BAR
Tinder. It was good 10 years ago, enshittification accelerated aroudn 2017. Free accounts have had a hard time getting any matches as far back as 2019, as I recall from experience. Nothing like having received "41" likes, going through 300 profiles with "nope" and not losing a single match.
No, that one was always slow. While the other has an atrocious product search.
That sounds like something you could definitely turn off in browser settings. It never happens in Tor Browser, which is just souped up Firefox.
Also:
They're all trying to be Tinder, because it's good business. It turns out, making an app for someone to delete is exactly as commercially self-defeating as it sounds.
Other dating apps weren't good back then, that's why I singled out Tinder. I remember that, before tinder, every app/site was all about charging premium subscription to read and send messages
Honestly I'd prefer long-form profiles and pay-by-message over a slot machine filled with faces. I guess we just like different things.
Considering both cases must have >50% fake or inactive profiles, it's wasted money either way
Analogue TV was much faster with much lower latency than digital TV.
If there's one thing I don't need from a TV, then it's low latency. The pause, rewind, and skip functions are some serious stuff, on the opposite.
It was funny during the transition period. You could hear through the timing of cheers during football matches who in the neighbourhood was analogue and who was digital.
But yeah, recording features were really nice for the transition to streaming.
It was so in the football world cup of 2014 IIRC. Outside was public screening and they had a sat dish while we watched a delayed stream. We could hear the goal seconds in advance. But that's an edge case.
Latency doesn't matter if you're just watching television, but it's very important if you're trying to hook a game console up to it.
Speaking of analog: Light Guns don't work on modern televisions due to the high latency relative to CRT screens (which had essentially zero latency).
Mostly because of the timing of the electron beam. That let the game see which target you hit. Otherwise you could hit everything by shooting any bright light.
Oh man, remember when you just had to press the channel number on the remote.
Now you gotta use menus in a Smart TV that takes 2 seconds to process an input event.
Reminds me of the time I had to make an interface for a set top box by Deutsche Telekom. It was severely underpowered and I had to work with some very quirky browser. I think the browser was based on Internet Explorer.
It was super slow and couldn't handle anything asynchronous. Which meant that it would lock up for even the simplest operation. And they insisted on their buttons having button down animations. Which meant that I had to slow down the incredibly slow machine artificially so that you could see the animation. And it wasn't enough to slow it down just for the animation duration. You had to give it some extra time because it was so damn underpowered. I think in the end a button push took a whole second extra time.
And it was still faster than what they had produced themselves before that, even though their thing didn't have any animations.
The worst was that those machines actually did have a fancy hardware accelerated interface one could use. But for some reason they weren't ready yet for that. So everything I had done was just a placeholder anyways.
Back when Nintendo light zapper games worked, the power bars you stopped on games were accurate, and guitar hero was perfectly synced in timings.
I think radios the fact the digital ones use much more battery and just break all the time. I think FM was higher quality as well at least in the UK.
They can pry the radio from my 15 year old car from my cold dead hands. I want analog controls not a touch screen! Tuning should be done with a knob. Nothing more.
I'd agree and broaden this to lots of controls. It's nice to have physical inputs with tactile feedback. Especially in cars. I don't want to use a fucking touchscreen to adjust the radio or the climate controls. And universally the touchscreens lag occasionally. Yeah. Don't want that when adjusting volume or temp. Thanks.
I had a crank powered am/fm radio, no bigger or heavier than a pack of cards, that used a pair of wired headphones as the antenna. About a minute of cranking got you about 20 mins of surprisingly decent quality radio. I used to use it all the time for years, until it got water damaged camping one time. No chance of doing that with digital radio (or Bluetooth headphones).
FM > DAB
well, radio was better back in the day. now it's bland pop crap for the 5 minutes per hour that isn't shitty ads
My dad got and refurbished a vintage receiver and was showing it off to me. I asked if he was listening to a CD or a record because I'd never heard clearer audio. Nope, it was an FM station.
Blew my mind.
Yo just turn off that TVs version of HDMI control. (CEC, magic remote, etc) To avoid the scanning bullsh. (Sounds like Samsung)
Outside of that I kinda miss old copper phone lines to a certain extent. Analog stuff in general
Everything being digital removes any possibility of a signal being able to still be discerned even if it's not absolutely perfect.
Old tech would be subject to static of course, but you could possibly still make out the TV channel or radio station, even if it's not perfect.
These days, you hear or see a little tiling for a second and the media is gone until a good enough signal comes back.
Hi-fi stereo systems with amplifiers, speakers and cables.
I could be wrong, but I think that old stereo systems generally have way better sound quality than Bluetooth systems, soundbars and the like. Physical media such as CDs or even Flac files (etc.) are of course impractical compared to streaming, but the audio quality is much higher.
However, since you can also stream audio without any problems, I would recommend every music fan to buy a used stereo system with high-quality speakers from the 2000s or even from the late 90s - in my opinion, excellent audio quality at a low price.
Bluetooth is low bitrate. The audio codecs need to use a lot of compression. Old audio equipment are analog which is better because it doesn't have so much digital conversions to completely wreck sound.
Bluetooth is still reliant on its original SBC codec from the early 2000s or something. 20 year old tech. Due to this nobody really took BT audio adoption seriously until the past several years when the zeitgeist finally tipped. Suddenly wireless headphones were every where.
I think maybe it was when Apple got rid of headphone jack. So the rest of the industry caved. And we all just handwave away how bluetooth audio has always sucked.
For compatibility every device maker sticks to that 20 year old common denominator. There are proprietary codecs that are supposed be better quality but then you get all the joys of cross compatibility hell. If your devices aren't inter-compatible they'll fall back to the common denominator. The basic SBC codec. Even with better quality codec they can only do so much with limited wireless bitrate.
Fun fact. There is higher quality configuration for the SBC codec but nobody configures it in software when making their device. People say it's indistinguishable from the highest quality proprietary codecs. But audio can subjective so eh...
Even if you were to enable the better configuration for SBC. All the devices out there in the world are built with the default configuration. No two devices sender/receiver will ever both use the better config. So it's impossible to fix this.
It doesn't matter anymore since all this in the process of being superseded by Bluethooth 5 audio. Which throws away all that and tries to do it all over again. It's still reliant on low bitrate wireless protocol though. So they can use whatever algorithmic trickery so they can claim produce perceptually indistinguishable from CD quality or lossless quality or whatever.
I'm sure there will always be people that say they can tell the difference. I don't doubt people can because it's simply not the same audio but a disassembly into bits for wireless transmission. Then reconstituted on the other-side as near as possible to the original.
They haven't gone though
Anything with asbestos in it. It's just a truly amazing material, with the one catch that it happens to dangerously irritate lung tissues. Relevant XKCD.
Asbestos is mostly bad to the people that work with it, or manufacture products with it. If you have asbestos in your house or building, 99+% of the time it's fine, and you don't need to do anything at all. All of the remediation that we did in the 90s and early 2000s did more harm than good. Like, floor tiles with asbestos; how are the chrystotile fibers embedded in the tile going to break out in enough volume to cause harm to people?
On the other hand, the people that manufactured and installed asbestos-based products were often entirely fucked over.
Asbestos is not harmless to people living with it, all structures need repair and modification eventually (regularly) and unknown asbestos cutting or chipping can be incredibly hazardous.
Undisturbed asbestos is def. harmless to the people living in a structure. The hazards to a homeowner that does their own work will be minimal. The hazards to a professional that does many renovations is pretty significant, because they're likely to see many cases over the years.
It's like cigarettes; one isn't going to hurt you, and even a pack won't hurt you. But regular and repeated exposure will.
Fun fact: Where I live, there's apparently a loophole where if a building falls down on it's own, you don't have to do as much mitigation work. As a result, there's at least one government building near me that's just being left to sit there and rot, and has been locked up while they rebuild next door.
There's a massive housing crisis and a construction crunch.
Spend some money get an rpi or those cheapish intel boxes with an N95 or N100 processors. Install Kodi. Use smart TV as dumb TV!
Thanks. I'll look into it, but tvs are one of those things I expect to 'just work'. I swear my toaster is probably next 😮💨
Oh i completely understand that sentiment. I think due to enshittification i feel that its a pipedream to have things work as intended unless you do stupid research about the product. Maybe time to create a lemmy slice for unshittified products!
I get computer monitors as tvs now. While its a tiny bit more expensive (in some cases), you get a pi and your just as good. Everything is HDMI now anyways...
Ooh interesting. And you get TV sized monitors? That would be kinda awesome!
To be fair, if you get a TV that has a "Hotel mode", you can un-smartify your smart tv. I have one. As long as you never plug it in via ethernet, you should be good.
Yep!
Thats cool i should check that out. Thank you!!
Oh
I for-real misread this, as asking what is an example of tech that actually has gotten better, because the general rule is that things become more shit over time, as capitalism gets its hands on them
I was gonna say programming languages. Having come up in the time of C++ and Java, having Python and Go and Rust around is fuckin fantastic. Even Typescript is… well… it’s not JavaScript! See, things are getting better.
Literally everything else is getting worse over time.
Yeah developer tools have gotten easier and better. Never a better time to get into software. Even if its just to unlock your own devices. And repair things.
Dude, it's fuckin magic now
I was used to emacs + gdb + valgrind. That's actually pretty significantly powerful if you know how to use it, but I sort of bit the bullet really not that long ago and forced myself to learn VSCode, assuming that it would be a big over-feature-packed bunch of bullshit, and it's gold. It can debug any language. I can edit and run and debug code that's on the other side of an ssh connection in a git repo and all the different plugins and stuff just work (well, you know, for the most part, enough to be pretty massively useful).
Plus I can have GPT spit out boilerplate for me and it does it all semi-instantly, and it can teach me libraries and idiomatic patterns in environments I'm unfamiliar with way faster than I could do it myself from the documentation.
Fuckin magic man
Yep and with docker/other containers it's easier to set up on new machines. Terraform and other like services also make provisioning potentially easier (depends on your setup).
Video games. Don't get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.
The graphics have improved. In some cases the gameplay has improved. I don't want to downplay those. I'm just annoyed with how the overall experience has gotten worse on average.
Funny, I think video games, on the whole, are approaching a real golden age. Sure (like you said) if you stick to the $70 titles produced by big studios you're going to have an increasingly bad time. But the quality of ""Indie"" (but not even really since Indie studios are legit full companies now) games is rising damn-near exponentially. I personally haven't felt a need to choose an ""AAA"" title over an indie title in years and not only am I saving money but I'm enjoying my time with video games more than I ever have (including childhood!) in my life.
AAA games used to work when released.
Anarchy Online.
#2 is a very good point, at least regarding the AAA space. This was my experience with Fallout 4.
Best example Battlefield. How can you manage to just get worse and worse with every title. And for many games you need to implement new story or major game mechanics etc. but for this one it would be brilliant if they would have only updated the visuals every 5-10 years
My knees
I don't know if it counts as tech per se, but phone calls. It used to be the case that many if not most phone calls people received were important, so they would have a good reason to answer the phone. These days most calls are spammers or scammers and a lot of people don't answer the phone because of this. With spoofing, even calls that appear to be from a legitimate number can easily be a scam, and it's hard to trust any calls these days.
You can get around that by getting a phone number from a fairly distant location. Spoofed numbers will almost always use the same area code as your number. So if I were to get a phone number from, say, Presque Isle, ME, and started getting calls from the 207 area code, I'd know that I could safely ignore every one of them.
The physical aspect of laptops - the old ThinkPads were fucking amazing and while their specs may not be much to look at today they were equipped with adequate cooling and could take a fair amount of beating.
I don't want a light thin laptop that I could snap in two with one hand... I want a laptop that isn't going to overheat and can survive a few tumbles when someone trips over the power cord.
This is a funny one for me because I actually burned my lap on a ThinkPad back in something like 2003.
That’s an interesting example. Around 2010, I had a MacBook Pro (granted, before they were super thin) and I’d regularly pick it up by the screen. I then had a thinkpad for work and did the same thing and it cracked in half.
To be fair, that's a wild way to lift a laptop.
This drives me up the wall with my TV speaker - having to remember name of the settings that get reset for each power outage. If I was smart, I'd note the procedure down somewhere, but nah
I'd add any software that has switched to a subscription or SaaS model. Shit used to be super expensive in the past, but you could at least buy a software and keep it indefinitely for home use. It feels like everything is a subscription model. I have a family budgeting software that is no longer sold as a one-time purchase. I guess new users have to include the monthly cost of the budgeting software in their family now! Sure, the sub version has fancy ways to integrate your bank accounts, but doing it by hand every couple of weeks really makes you aware of what you are spending.
I sound so old lmao
Tupperware. Grandmas stuff is still around. It’s probably unhealthy to use but modern stuff doesn’t last.
Get glass containers and silicone lids. It lasts and you don't have to deal with micro plastics.
I also (re)use mason jars... I wonder if the lid is tight enough...
Old Tupperware has lead in it IIRC.
Connectivity or rather the lack of it...
I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don't know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?
But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor's to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn't disable that my TV doesn't even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn't even connected to the internet.
Oh! I just remembered that I can control my neighbor's fan! I got tired of the constant notification that I could see it/set it up. So, I connected to it and the notification finally went away. But yeah: I can see when it's on/off and turn it on/off whenever I wish. I've never abused this power, they are old and will probably think their house is haunted or something. I just wanted the stupid notification to go away.
Fucking fan that turns on only for car chases.
Get like some sort of turbine or like a dozen super loud shitty 90s PC case fans.
Would make fast and the furious more interesting for sure.
Edit: oh shit I just remembered those snowmobile arcade games with the fans, those were the best when I was a kid.
If I had a fan that did that I'd open it up and clip off the Bluetooth antenna.
Depending on your definition of 'better' . In terms of repair ability and ease of maintenance, pretty much all old tech. In terms of price... There is no chance, it's insane how cheap tech has gotten.
The power consumption of old stuff is also extremely bad compared to now. So yeh you can have fridges, washing machines, or whatever appliances from the 70's that still work and are easy to maintain.. They use way, way, way too much power for what they do. In an ideal world where energy is free, sure that stuff is better. We don't tho.
Also, basically everything that uses software while it shouldn't, has a worse user experience than before.
Engineers of the past had very limited design knowledge, so generally subscribed to the "I don't know how to do this. Oh well, more good, morer bettererer."
Even fridges, washing machines, and whatever else from the '00s was better than now. It's really been the last 15ish years that literally everything has been "Big Mac-ified" to the disposable products that we now have to deal with.
My grand parents had a fridge in their basement from the 50s until they died 2010. That thing was built like a tank
XMPP > Matrix | Slack | Telegram
How is XMPP better than Matrix?
I think a better question is how matrix is better than XMPP. I don't know much about it but I think the answer is "it isnt".
Matrix has better encryption protocols, its always been an afterthought for XMPP, and I am worried XMPP doesn't have the mindshare to fix it.
XMPP is the better protocol, hands down.
They are both using the exact same double ratchet Signal protocol for end-to-end encryption down to the same problems of other clients keys for haven’t used in a while due to ‘inactivity’.
The only difference is that XMPP is an extensible protocol where you very much can drop encryption all together if that doesn’t suit your use case for the protocol (such as not chat). However, all modern servers folks actually use for chat comminacations follow with the Conversations compliance suite & OMEMO support is expected in clients—meaning everyone using XMPP for standard coms in 2024 have a good encryption story.
Matrix’s extensibilty is limited due to the choice of JSON over XML relying on adhoc, stringly-typed message names. Due adopting an eventual consistency model, Matrix server can’t be run on a potato in your bedroom & most folks are relying on public servers rather than the decentralized, federated self-hosted tendency of the XMPP network in practice not just theory. Most users are on Matrix.org or Matrix.org-provided servers syncing all metadata back to a single entity started with funds from Israeli intelligence. If you ask me which one has a better story for freedom, it’s going to be the one that is lightweight enough & designed to be individually-hosted over the defacto centralized option with resource-intensive clients.
TIL. What are some good clients?
Also, how does ActivityPub compare, because that's what we're using right now?
Like Matrix the clients aren’t all equivalent without feature parity (& no concept of the flagship or implementation client). For desktop, Gajim has the most power user features but issues rendering in smaller windows like a tiling split (& being written in Python has other issues). Dino is feature-complete & calls tend to always work—great if not connected to tons of chats. Profanity is the best TUI which is very fast but usability is really good for some things & really bad for others (like accepting no OMEMO keys). I use all three depending on the environment & task. Android it is a lot clearer where Cheogram takes the cake for me being a Conversations fork but with OLED black support as well as webxdc. For the web, Movim has the best UX/feature set & can be used anywhere a browser can with PWA support. You can also just check to see what provide OMEMO: https://omemo.top/.
ActivityPub is a JSON-based protocol for seems primarily built for social networks, with the DMing experience normally not being secure or particular fast. XMPP is largely for building networks for passing messages & client presence—which can be extended to support PubSub like MQTT. It isn’t normally built for social networks but Movim & Libervia have extended XMPP to be a social network.
Hmm. Looks like Libervia is working on bridging XMPP and ActivityPub, as well.
I was just thinking, I don't know ins and outs of it all, but ActivityPub is often compared to Matrix, so if XMPP is a better version of Matrix does that mean ActivityPub could be improved upon?
Doorbells. I had to replace a relative's doorbell recently and the old one that lasted 60 years was built 10x better than the incredibly cheap model that all the hardware stores carry.
The options are either a cheapo doorbell that has an LED in it for no reason, a Ring surveillance doorbell, or a very expensive reproduction doorbell sold on some random website.
Printers
Dunno what kind of TVs you're using, but my Sony OLED pretty much behaves exactly like this. The Smart TV features are laggy and shit as usual, but those are still features that didn't exist in the old days so it's not a 1 to 1 comparison.
But with regards to just plugging in a blu ray or PS5 and hitting the input button, that's exactly how my modern TV works.
In fact, I don't even need to turn it on or hit the input button... Since they're both Sony, all I need to do is press the button on my PS5 controller and it turns on my TV and PS5 and switches to the correct input, without having to touch the remote. And vice versa (can turn on/off and control PS5 menus with the TV remote).
My smart TV does some weird AI frame interpolation. It can be hard to tell in live action content, but it absolutely butchers things like anime. I had to dig through the settings to turn it off but it sometimes decides to turn it back on.
My mom's TV had that. Absolutely infuriating. I want my TV to play the signal it gets, not try to "fix" it.
that's the wrong kind of Weird Al :(
I prefer Frank's 2000" TV.
I hate when manufacturers put those settings on by default. I'm already someone who, when they get a new TV, will go through every settings menu it has to tune it to how I like it before I even start watching anything, so I catch those weird settings before they affect me.
I guess I do this with all hardware (and even software, including video games), that is, fiddle with every possible setting until it's exactly how I want it (or as close as the thing will let me get).
Which is why I don't own anything Apple.
This would very likely work with most modern TVs that support HDMI CEC. Manufacturers like to put their own name on it, but Sony Bravia Link, Samsung Anynet+, LG SimpLink, Roku 1-Touch, and several more, are all just different names for the same control protocol.
My grandma's Phillips CRT TV input switching works the same way with all hardware.
Some of us remember the days of RF-adapters and old school A/B switches that definitely were not as straightforward as turning it on and switching the input.
I guess that's what I think of when I think of those days.
Smart TVs and cae infotainnent systems, for sinilar reasons. Full of bloat, so many bugs and unreliable functioning.
My old Panasonic TV had a fugly but extremely speedy OTA guide. It would load, display and start accepting (rapid) input in 0.2s when you clicked “Guide”.
My new LG - I mean, for Darwin’s sake, it’s like no one gave two shits about OTA programming. The guide takes 1.5s to load, then each channel row loads in, sloooowly, and scrolling is like shuffling clay tablets.
I’d take my old TV back if I could.
Just don't connect your TV to the internet and plug in a raspi. All the "smart" you could ever want without the bloat
Is it possible to connect an Ethernet cable to my TV, but only have it connect the local network, not the Internet? I.e., just a LAN connection. I have very little desire to watch YouTube on my TV, but I do have a personal Emby server that is not connected to the wider net but is accessible locally.
If your firewall can set outbound rules, and you can control DHCP on your network so that you can reliably know the TV's IPv4 address, you can block the TV from reaching beyond the local network there with a "deny all from source address of TV" type rule.
If your router/firewall is handling IPv6 though, it gets a lot more complicated, since the TV could have any number of addresses that change often.
Okay, I checked, and as far as I can tell (which doesn't mean much as I don't know much about this stuff, mind you) it does seem like I can control outbound rules. However, I don't know how to find out the IP address of the TV. Additionally, I don't know if my router is IPv4 or IPv6 in this context, but according to the online spec sheet for my router model it supports both.
There should be a section in the configuration about dhcp, which is how ipv4 addresses are given out on your network. What happens is when a device first connects to the network, it sends out a broadcast with its mac address - the dhcp server (in this case, your router/firewall) hears this, and sends back a reply allocating an address. You should be able to see a list of currently allocated addresses, and hopefully configure reservations to make those allocations permanent. To reserve an ipv4 address for a specific device, you need that device's mac address.
Each item on that current allocations list should have a hostname, a mac address, and an ipv4 address. If it's not clear by the hostname which device is the tv, you can look up each mac address and deduce from there (the first part of each address is unique to a specific manufacturer).
Once you have an ipv4 address reserved for the tv, you can set your outbound firewall rule to block it.
Ipv6, as I mentioned, is much more complicated. It might be possible to disable it completely on your router, and that's likely the only way to block the tv from using it, but then your whole network will lose ipv6 capability across that boundary (probably not a lot of downside to that, though).
Good luck!
Thanks. Will check out my router settings and respond back later tonight. :)
That's the thing though it isn't. I don't need my TV reporting back to the mother ship how often I slug on the couch
Oh it's fuckin nonsense. Which is why you run the pi and control what does and doesn't phone home.
Most electric appliances in the second version. Always some lock-in anti repair bullship.
Using a typewriter was a nightmare, but the keyboard feel was so satisfying.
You can bring it back!
Or just use a mechanical (200$+) keyboard!
I remember back a decade or so ago when phones had a fully customizable ringtone option, wouldn't constantly tell you they're overheating when it's only thirty degrees out, had a block function that actually worked, didn't dump spam calls on you, wasn't always spying on you, and didn't cost so much per month, often coupled with the possible fact you don't actually use it everyday and maybe only have it to keep your overworried parents pleased.
I don't know about you, but for the unforeseeable future, mine is, for the large part, ghosted. I remember being in a dispute with someone where they asked what my number was as a form of feeling secure about me. "What age do you live in" he bitterly asked, "everyone uses a phone, are you a fake zoomer who is BSing me". This is the pedestal the existence of phones thrives on. Imagine if I was Amish, do you think I would survive past the job interview stage of finding a new job?
Even when I had high hopes, the way people would market the thousand-app aspect of it was absolutely fierce, you couldn't go tech shopping without the person selling you stuff going on and on about the smallest nook and crannies in each extra feature like they were Steve Irwin trying to teach you the beauty of whatever animal you just happened to step on (RIP Steve Irwin), and you couldn't do so much as go to a festival without a business person from the phone stall running up to you asking to pay for new plans like a Jehovah's Witness on a leash (always stood out to me because they were the only ones who would operate like this).
Phones today are borderline what they are in Futurama.
One wheel
easy to replace batteries,
easy maintenance,
most important: highly customizable
(I mean, yes, you could blow yourself up with the gigantic lithium pack in your garage, but the community around one wheel has a lot of rich guidance to prevent you from doing that)
batteries are now locked to the device.
hey! Ride carefully! Battery pack unplugging (even by accident) bricks the device 😆
uuuh, I bricked the device. What now? Send the device across Atlantic ocean to HQ in the US to plug it back in 🤣 🤣
Autocorrect on smartphones. Arguably, smartphone keyboards in general. The old iPhone keyboard was second to none in my opinion, but it feels like they've all got worse.
Somehow, T9 worked better than basically anything we have now.
And the phones actually had hardware keys and weren't a laggy mess on anything older, than 4 years.
Books and authorship in general. To make a living these days many feel pressured into using closed source corpo messaging systems like tiktok, twitter, instagram, etc to promote some bs brand to sell books because the market is flooded with so much garbage from AI generated to auto translates to just poorly written unedited gibberish.
Keyboards. They had way better and more innovative switches back then. You'll be hard pressed to find anything today that doesn't use cherry, or cherry clones.
Happens to everything that becomes a commodity.
But Model Ms and Model Fs are still in production, and the MK ecosystem has never been so vibrant
I have a smart TV and, while I hate that fact with every fiber of my being, I've never been through any of the particular bullshit you're describing. I absolutely can just plug a thing into it and it works when I switch to that input.
I'm going to go with video game console disk trays. Back on the PS1 and GameCube, you just hit a button to release a lock and then a spring popped the lid open. Now, I'll admit these newfangled interior conveyor belts we've had for checks calendar almost two decades have never actually broken on me, I resent the fact that if they were to break then I'd have no actual ability to get disks in and out of the machine.
That is, of course, assuming your console has an option for physical media at all, which is a very troubling direction in itself.
Going with MacBooks. Used to be you could upgrade RAM and other components. Now, you have to get a new machine.
To be fair, MACs are fast (sometimes too fast), and efficient; the perks of having RAM soldered millimeters away from CPU.
But they went and shat the bed, locking the SSDs to the machine and charging $200 for an upgrade. Stupidly absurd corporate BS
VGA just worked. HDMI and DP aren’t nearly as reliable.
Roads. Used to lay down concrete and they’d last for a decade. Now they put down asphalt on top of a concrete base. Granted they cost less in the long run to maintain.
My workplace still uses VGA monitors. They just don't die.
The amount of times I've struggled when setting up monitors over the past 5 years with HDMI and DP...only to have them eventually work in a way I had it previously when it wouldn't...is too damn high.
TVs
Holy shit rose tinted glasses all up in here. Let me be straight with you guys, televisions are definitely better, cell phones are much better, I don't think there's a single (consisting mostly of) electronics (some coffee grinders, maybe some other kitchen appliances) device that existed in the 90s/naughts that I would take over it's current iteration.
Food processors. Washing machines.
Analog cable with a cable-ready TV was better than digital cable. No set-top box with bullshit rental fees, no weird lag waiting for it to "boot up" or change channels, no interactivity so they couldn't easily try to upsell you, etc.
user friendly 'self installs' in many places.....
Movies. You used to be able to just buy them and own the data.
Now you have to pray the other party doesn't 'alter the deal' and if you are proactive about safekeeping the stuff you own you're a 'thief'.
Alternatively, everything is now digital which makes it super easy to pirate and keep forever in a universal format. The main exception is music since spotify and the like make everything so easy that most people don't bother to upload albums.
Yeah ok having both makes sense as it allows easier controls for the passenger to use or while being stopped