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?
- Facebook.
- OKCupid.
- Netflix
- Amazon Prime Video
- iTunes
- Patreon
- Everything Adobe
- Google Voice
- YouTube
- Most search engines
ALSO
- MySQL
- Redis
ALSO
- Wordpress
ALSO
- Vacuum cleaners
- Refrigerators
- Every power tool ever
- Most cars
- Airplanes (looking at you Boing)
ALSO
- Apple products
ALSO
- The fricken Artemis Program vs. the Apollo Program. (I consult with the space industry a lot, so this makes me feel things)
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.
You obviously don’t know shit about tools. They are waaay better now.
Sure, that was overly broad. But I’ve got a BUNCH of tools in my garage and they’re fine, but my dad’s got a bunch of the same tools in his workshop he had when I was a kid, and they still work just as well now as they did in the 80s (I think his drill press actually used to belong to HIS dad and it’s never failed me). Also, his table saw and band saw rock. I remember using them to cut things for silly projects when I was a kid and I just used the table saw the other day… same saw, great results.
My take was all centered around “solid” and “built to last”. I don’t have any faith that the tools in my garage will outlast his tools. Don’t see it happening. I think me inheriting his tools is more likely than my tools outlasting them.
Again, you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Tools have improved significantly. I’ve been in the trades for a long time, I started at 14 years old working for my step dad remodeling houses and doing roofing and plumbing and electrical over 25 years ago. I know what tools were like back then, and the tools we have today. And the tools and processes are night and day better today. Just stfu, you have no clue.
The power tools today kill anything from 10 years ago in torque and speed and weight. Lmao… you think the brushed motors with nicad batteries were better than the brushless motor with lithium we have today? The cordess circ saws could barely make it through a 1/2" sheet of plywood 15 years ago and now tgey rip through it like a corded saw. Fucking please buddy. Ratchets and wrenches have significantly improved with less back drag and more teeth meaning less degree of swing. Wrenches with ratchet ends. All kinds of specialty tools that didn’t exist Processes in plumbing and electrical with pex and other types of clamp and crimp fittings have significantly improved. I can go on and on across multiple tools and processes. You are a moron.
You’re kind of an asshole for like completely no reason aren’t you? That’s now what this conversation is about. By all means, continue.
Swords are kind of crap now compared to the Renaissance. These days they come out of malls to be put on walls.
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.
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.
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.
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 - $$$$
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.
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
This is just the beginning…
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.
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.
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.
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.
2014 Honda civic here. Thats basically the last era. 10 years from now buying a car will be tough
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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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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.
Tbf though it’s not hard to differentiate the two unless you’re Kitboga’s grandma.
“Wow Steve, nice accent. You been spending a lot of time in Calcutta (or a robot factory depending) recently? And why do you know my car’s warrantee is about to expire (even though I bought it used and 20yr old)?”
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.
My knees
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.
Ooh thats what that is. Perfect. Every tv i buy is for a hotel in my home =)
Yep!
Thats cool i should check that out. Thank you!!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
