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.
Donate monthly to Wikipedia
Decentralized & federated networks: Lemmy, Mastodon, Nostr, Freenet, I2P, etc
Geminispace.
Go back to gopher :)
NNTP :(
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Buttons!
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.
- Customization!
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
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.
- 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)
Boing!
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.
My dad has an old Makita cordless drill from 1995 which he used for everything from assembling Ikea furniture to drilling holes in cement walls. Complete metal innards, full metal case, battery that’s big and heavy enough to bludgeon somebody to death with.
Until one day I bought a fancy new Bosch cordless screwdriver with Li-ion battery, brushless motor and 1/4 the size and weight of the Makita.
At first he laughed at me for buying a toy, then he tried it. He ordered one as well the week after and uses it pretty much exclusively since then.
Still keeps the Makita box and drill around purely for the retro look but even with fresh batteries the amount of torque they put out is not even in the same league.
Obviously that is the exception rather than the rule and most technological advances went into making companies more profits instead of building better products, but there are some advancements that made power tools better. Li-ion batteries and brushless motors being two of the big ones.
No that’s not the exception cordless tools will kill anything from even 10 years ago in torque and speed and weight. This idiot doesn’t know anything. A cheap brushless hercules drill from HF will absolutely destroy a nicad professional grade 10 year old Milwaukee or dewalt.
And yet I do not think I will be using my Bosch in 25 years because some cheap internal plastic part will have broken down while the Makita would still run.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everything Google has done was better before
There. Google up to 2014 was still mostly decent, with some notable stupid decisions. Anything since feels like shit on top of shit
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.
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.
I guess that’s fine as long as you have both options for touchscreen and buttons
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.
You bought a samusng tv didn’t you?
I feel this deep inside
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.
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.
Analogue TV
I mean, the vacuum tubes will take quite a while to warm up at the start.
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.
javascript/css having control to FUCKING HIDE AND DISABLE MY SCROLL BAR
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:
TinderEvery widely-used dating app.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
but people from other countries definitely know a big local name that used to have a much better site years ago compared to today.
No, that one was always slow. While the other has an atrocious product search.
Smartphones. I used to have a Droid 4 with the slide out landscape keyboard, and that was peak mobile computing. I don’t care if Swype is better than it used to be, it’s no replacement for physical buttons - whenever I type anything more than a couple words long on my phone I spend like half the time deleting and retrying when it guesses the wrong word. Never had that problem typing with my thumbs.
Also, physical buttons make emulation doable on a phone in a way that on screen buttons and keyboards do not. Back when I had a physical keyboard I played games on my phone all the goddamn time - now I basically only use it as a web browser, because any other use case is painful in comparison.
I’m glad some qwerty phones are making a comeback, but they’re all in the portrait orientation which has always felt way too cramped to me. A Droid 4 with a modern screen/battery/processor would be my dream device.
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.
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.
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.
Video games. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.
- The inclusion of obnoxiously long, often unskippable, intro sequences with studio credits and such. There used to be maybe a logo, maybe a very short sequence at worst, and almost always skippable.
- Most of the big budget games are intended to be a grindy slog, often to get you to spend more money on micro transactions. Fun takes a back seat to intentionally addictive but objectively less enjoyable experiences.
- Others are intended to be cinematic experience. Some of that can be fun, but sometimes I just want something like the old Sonic or Mario games that I can just pick up, play for a bit, and put down.
- Enjoy a game? You could talk to friends about it at school, or buy a magazine that talks about it. The experience now is largely an unregulated online wasteland… If you find a community, it may quickly be beset by people that you really don’t want to associate with, posting crap that no magazine ever would have published. Except for some of the funnier magazines, which may have published it just to rightfully mock the person.
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.
#2 is a very good point, at least regarding the AAA space. This was my experience with Fallout 4.
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.
It’s extremely easy to disturb asbestos, it does not take a large chronic exposure to get health consequences, it takes a very small amount of acute exposure or even less chronic exposure. Generally you will be fine from incidental one-off exposures, but if you live in a home with say, asbestos tiles in your kitchen, or asbestos in the paint or drywall, it can be very easy to build exposure from reno or damage from normal home wear. Not to mention it’s extremely expensive to modify because of the required controls, meaning it disproportionately effects low income households, who both struggle to afford preventative maintenance, and struggle to afford the reno.
There’s a reason asbestos ppe is decon controls roughly equivalent to mercury, lead, and beryllium.
Asbestos isn’t an issue if it isn’t airborne, and it’s not going to be airborne in any significant amounts if it’s in, for instance, tile, pipe insulation, or wallboard, unless you’re cutting them for some reason.
“People who become ill from asbestos are usually those who are exposed to it on a regular basis, most often in a job where they work directly with the material or through substantial environmental contact.” You are very unlikely to have “substantial” environmental contact in a typical 50s/60s/70s home, unless you are doing substantial renovations, because most of the fibers will be encapsulated in the material they were used with.
Asbestos PPE is made with the understanding that a person that is using it will be working directly with asbestos, or will be exposed to significant amounts. For the typical person, it’s as unnecessary as it is to wear PPE to a gun range.
Sibling in existence I know asbestos must be airborne. You aren’t refuting anything by repeatedly saying that. Respond to the words I am saying or I can only assume you are copy pasting talking points.
…And what could I say that you wouldn’t take as a copypasta talking point? The amount of dust that a homeowner would deal with, even with a fairly modest renovation, simply ain’t that much, compared to the people that were ending up with lung cancers and asbestosis. AFAIK, there have been no documented cases of a person contracting either disease simply because they lived in a home that had asbestos, unless they also worked extensively with the mineral.
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.