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?
You bought a samusng tv didn’t you?
I feel this deep inside
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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.
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’.
Going with MacBooks. Used to be you could upgrade RAM and other components. Now, you have to get a new machine.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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
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.
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!
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!
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!
Most electric appliances in the second version. Always some lock-in anti repair bullship.
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.
Is there a solution (other than being on Lemmy)?
Geminispace.
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
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’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.
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! :)
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
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!
Decentralized & federated networks: Lemmy, Mastodon, Nostr, Freenet, I2P, etc
Donate monthly to Wikipedia
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… :(
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?
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I feel the bigger problem is that there just aren’t as many of them.
Why host a webpage now when you can just set up a Facebook page for it?
I wish people would realize there are people from every generation who won’t touch Facebook, IG and other meta things. When we finally got s new mayor who actually said our town with soon have a real website, I nearly wept with joy.
I disagree. There’s so much more creativity and information out there than there was in the 90’s.
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…
And also:
- No exhaust filters
- Leaded fuel
- No crash safety because rigid frames
- Wat is errbeck?
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.
mechanical, no software bugs
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 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.
Mr. Nerd, how often do you upgrade your computer?
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
And how long do you anticipate Teslas remaining on the road? Aren’t they all doomed to the scrap yard in 10-15 years?
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
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.
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.
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.
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!!!”
I’ll pick a dumb device 9 times out of 10.
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
Yea but where’s the fun in that? Part of the fun is worming your way through those (Usually laughable) security measures and hacking through. When the white paper came out about the Jeep Uconnect vulnerabilities I used that to eventually take near total control.
I even have the patched firmware on the canbus interface chip in the infotainment system that Chrysler was so kind as to wire it into all sorts of stuff and give it privileges it didn’t need lol (That’s what those articles were talking about when the researchers were able to get the brakes to stop working)
Right to repair legislation is also alive and well, state after state are passing them, even Apple themselves has been having to soften their stance over the years
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.
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.
See my post. They can hardly fuck up the standard OBDII interface without huge repercussions for the industry.
They definitely can. The Chevy volt complies to the standard, but anything outside (ie to do with the battery diagnostics, or electric propulsion system) is behind a completely different protocol where most normal readers won’t read.
Considering how every company is trying to paywall everything, I don’t doubt they’ll continue to push the “limit” further and further from any standard.
My friend, look up dodges asinine “security” gateway.
In some models you have to strip the dash to remove the entire head unit to get to the two extra plugs, not to mention having to have a compatible scan tool - $$$$
Man people on the Internet need to not engage with cars as much, they’re clearly ignorant about them and have single instance counterpoints that clearly negate the fact you’ve put out there.
I swear by my OBD2 readouts, and my friends think I’m a wizard with a thousand dollar tool, rather than a dingus with a dongle, when I tell them what’s wrong with their vehicles.
I can’t believe you’re being dumped on for having a fact about the industry
Yea, this has been an issue for 20 years, at least.
Manufacturers make it difficult as possible to retrieve any more than basic codes.
It’s the constant cat-and-mouse game, and why I bought a very expensive code reader 15 years ago.
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.
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).
Much safer now though. Traffic accidents are much less lethal nowadays (except SUV/Truck vs ped)
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.
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.
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.
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.
operate a vehicle with lane assist and not even notice that it is enabled.
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.
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
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.
What does a person do if they want that stuff now? Get an old car? Is that the only option?
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.
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 have a car with a touch screen and some few physical buttons and it just works. Here, I proved you wrong.
Not sure why you are getting down voted. I have a Tesla and agree. Now if you had that piece of shit Toyota EV (bzssrt?) then maybe I would agree with OP.
Meanwhile, I have a car with a big touchscreen, and few physical buttons and it clearly doesn’t work.
Here, with the exact same ammount of evidence you presented I proved you wrong!
Back in Not-idiot land however, we know that neither one of us have proved anything, we are both presenting claims, with zero verifiable facts, which at best should be treated as unverified antecdotes.
There was a post asking how you can tell if someone was from gen z a while ago. Nailed it
that’s the point I was making: anectdotal evidence is not evidence, it’s opinion. have a nice day.
Analogue TV was much faster with much lower latency than digital TV.
Analogue TV
I mean, the vacuum tubes will take quite a while to warm up at the start.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back when Nintendo light zapper games worked, the power bars you stopped on games were accurate, and guitar hero was perfectly synced in timings.
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.
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.
Swords are kind of crap now compared to the Renaissance. These days they come out of malls to be put on walls.
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
I love how “technology” means “man-made” and you think of swords.
Yeah I was trying to make a cheeky joke.
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?
Mall swords? That’s an apples and oranges comparison.
Business phones with humans who answered them.
I’m fine with that. I don’t want to talk with people - I just want an email address to write to.
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.
Here, have this useless chatbot instead.
This is only going to get more pervasive with the corporate AI craze.
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.
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 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.
