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?
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 And then they’re outdated in five years anyway.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.
Using a typewriter was a nightmare, but the keyboard feel was so satisfying.
Or just use a mechanical (200$+) keyboard!
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Dude. Fucking buttons. We’re so amazing!
I had a low end Samsung like this and I miss it so much.
I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.
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.
that’s the wrong kind of Weird Al :(
I prefer Frank’s 2000" TV.
My mom’s TV had that. Absolutely infuriating. I want my TV to play the signal it gets, not try to “fix” it.
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.
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.
Since they’re both Sony
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.
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…
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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
This is just the beginning…
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:
- 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.
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.
What I wanted to say is that a car’s quality doesn’t solely depend on if it’s got touch or physical controls but on **how ** good or bad they’re done. OP overly generalised that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, wow. Thanks for the in-depth explanation - very interesting. I had never really looked into the technical details. Well, I suppose I’m lucky that my reasonably new smartphone still has a 3.5mm audio jack, so I can continue to use my now rather old, but in my opinion still pretty good, headphones. It wasn’t that easy to find a new smartphone with an audio jack, but then it looks like I’ve actually done everything right when it comes to listening to music.
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.
Just don’t connect your TV to the internet and plug in a raspi. All the “smart” you could ever want without the bloat
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.
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.
Thanks. Will check out my router settings and respond back later tonight. :)
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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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.
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.
I kept using my LG G5 for years after I might have upgraded just for the swappable batteries.
Why swap a 10 day battery anyway? What’s the use case here? I mean in the last decade I had not a single phone die on me with an empty battery. That’s one day battery life or more, so why 10 days and have it (hot) swappable? I understand that on a hike or while camping outlets and wall chargers are off limit. But there are so good alternatives to having an immensely dense battery in the phone that you don’t also have to carry all the time.
Being able to swap a battery to keep a phone working well for a few more years makes sense.
Oh you mean replace. Swap means (for me) to switch from one battery to another on the go. Of course, replacing batteries in any appliance should be easy and cheap. Maybe not necessarily being performed by the customer.
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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.
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.
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I use it without Internet connection (disable network permission on grapheneos) so it works great for me.
