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?
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.
If I had a fan that did that I’d open it up and clip off the Bluetooth antenna.
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.
Oh! I just remembered that I can control my neighbor’s fan! I got tired of the constant notification that I could see it/set it up. So, I connected to it and the notification finally went away. But yeah: I can see when it’s on/off and turn it on/off whenever I wish. I’ve never abused this power, they are old and will probably think their house is haunted or something. I just wanted the stupid notification to go away.
Yeah ok having both makes sense as it allows easier controls for the passenger to use or while being stopped
My knees
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.
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
Honestly, just have both. I’ve got physical buttons for basic controls (think volume, power, seek, skip…etc) and touchscreen capabilities for maps, connecting phone, managing car settings. Also, my car has a physical pointer stick that you can use to move the selection around on the screen, so you can even interact with soft buttons using a physical interface.
I 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 grandma’s Phillips CRT TV input switching works the same way with all hardware.
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 smart TV does some weird AI frame interpolation. It can be hard to tell in live action content, but it absolutely butchers things like anime. I had to dig through the settings to turn it off but it sometimes decides to turn it back on.
My mom’s TV had that. Absolutely infuriating. I want my TV to play the signal it gets, not try to “fix” it.
that’s the wrong kind of Weird Al :(
I prefer Frank’s 2000" TV.
I hate when manufacturers put those settings on by default. I’m already someone who, when they get a new TV, will go through every settings menu it has to tune it to how I like it before I even start watching anything, so I catch those weird settings before they affect me.
I guess I do this with all hardware (and even software, including video games), that is, fiddle with every possible setting until it’s exactly how I want it (or as close as the thing will let me get).
Which is why I don’t own anything Apple.
Roomba. It got better in ways that made it worse. Really just want to put it in a room and let it wander around and vacuum. It doesn’t need to map the house and then get confused if a door is closed. It doesn’t need to tell me the filter is old. The old ones you could just put them wherever and close a door or put a box in the way to keep it corralled where you want it.
Better and smarter are two different things. Sometimes they intersect, other times they don’t.
The new ones can do what you want too though. Just press the “clean” button on the roomba twice. Or the “clean everywhere” option in the app, if you’ve set it up.
In both cases, it goes wherever it can and returns to the starting point.
IMO both features mentioned sound good, but they shouldn’t be a showstopper if they don’t work as intended. Can you jailbreak a roomba?
I don’t know. It’s interesting tech, but just not useful. I don’t need to start it from my phone when away from the house, and it loses its maps and makes new ones that don’t have the whole house if it encounters closed doors; if you then put it into the room it forgot and start it, it just sits there confused. It gets confused when furniture moves too. We have to close doors a lot to keep dogs separated, teens close their doors all the time, my house is not static enough for this detailed mapping function. I tried giving it zones but even then the closed doors break the maps.
There are things I like about the app. Getting the details on what an error message means, finding it more easily when it’s hiding. But overall losing the ability to just set it down anywhere and let it run without mapping was a bigger loss than what was gained.
Gee, now that’s just crappy work. It should be able to add (or remove) a “wall” without assuming away the rest of the house.
Overdesigning is one thing. Missing obvious functionality while doing it is quite another.
Books and authorship in general. To make a living these days many feel pressured into using closed source corpo messaging systems like tiktok, twitter, instagram, etc to promote some bs brand to sell books because the market is flooded with so much garbage from AI generated to auto translates to just poorly written unedited gibberish.
Keyboards. They had way better and more innovative switches back then. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything today that doesn’t use cherry, or cherry clones.
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.
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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
I got my first dishwasher a few years ago and decided to go sort of all in and get a solid mid range one instead of the cheapest option because I was so excited to not have to do dishes.
The fucking touch buttons are the worst fucking god damn bullshit pieces of shit I’ve ever experienced. From the jump even when they worked ‘properly’ it just felt weird, but a couple years later and half the time the touch doesn’t register. Sometimes there’s the slightest but of crud or water on there and the thing goes crazy and becomes super sensitive all of a sudden, usually I spend 5 minutes loading the dish washer and 10 minutes trying to get it to register which button I pushed.
I want real physical buttons.
Also while I’m on the topic I was highly disappointed to learn that you still have to wash food and stuf off of dishes before you put them in. I don’t know why I thought I could throw a plate with crusted lsagana on it the dishwasher but I did. I thought all dishwashers had some sort of garbage disposal thing built into it. They do not.
30 mins of a German professor who all his life studied doing dishes and how dishwashers work. (in juicy German accent English).
The answer is soaking.
Obligatory Technology Connections video. Might help with your dishwasher woes: https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0
Uhh Linux is a kernel and on its own doesn’t even support graphics much less customising them.
But if you wanna actually blame someone, we’ll need to know which software youre talking about - could be OPPO’s ColorOS for all we know.
That being said a big name in the Linux world is KDE, and they have one of the best theming engines Ive ever used. Everything QT follows the theme - so much so I didn’t even realise how ugly some apps look on windows (like prism launcher not matching my file explorer?? Eww)
That being said I couldn’t agree more with the first part, and in linux specifically I wish we had more ‘basic display driver’ like tools to handle emergency situations.
Uhh Linux is a kernel and on its own doesn’t even support graphics much less customising them.
I think we all realise that when someone says “Linux” in casual conversation on the internet, they mean existing well-known distros that include far more than just the naked Kernel, because no one who uses Linux is using just the Kernel, even headless servers aren’t “just the kernel”.
ANYWAY, I mostly am bitching about Gnome, but other DEs and WMs caught that bug as well to varying degrees. As have a dozen unconnected libre programs. Just for one example try finding a Matrix client that DOESN’T look like a shittier version of Discord (… And doesn’t run on the Terminal)
There was even a collective of libre application developers that got together specifically to chastise people for using themes and to beg DEs to disable all theming by default because “muh app’s branding and identity!”
Everything QT follows the theme - so much so I didn’t even realise how ugly some apps look on windows
Unless you’re using Flatpaks. Then you have to spend an afternoon metaphorically beating your computer with a metaphorical hammer to get the apps (not just qt, gtk too) to look like the rest of the OS.
and in linux specifically I wish we had more ‘basic display driver’ like tools to handle emergency situations.
It’s true. It would make the whole thing more resilient.
Of course, but by just saying Linux you’re bound to be wrong somewhere - I’m just highlighting its so broad its an essentially useless definition (42% of all computers run it by the way). Gnome is pretty shit for customisability, so what’s more customisable than having another option?
By looking at ‘just Linux’ you couldn’t be more wrong for the core argument.
It also shifts the blame to many smaller devs like matrix which tbh they’re mostly doing work for free so who’s gonna complain they don’t want to add extra complexity, just get in that source code if you really care. And in the age of such easy frontend engines an experienced could probably whip up their own in a week.
Also ive never had issues with qt/flatpaks, using prism launcher as an example, its seamlessly followed my color scheme (not saying bugs don’t exist somewhere I’m not seeing, but there certainly is 'just works support to some degree).
I you’re gonna be mad people don’t like something, yikes open source isn’t for you - git as a whole all but is designed to handle disagreements without breaking its stride.
“I use Linux as my operating system,” I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. “Actually”, he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!’ I don’t miss a beat and reply with a smirk, “I use Alpine, a distro that doesn’t include the GNU Coreutils, or any other GNU code. It’s Linux, but it’s not GNU+Linux.” The smile quickly drops from the man’s face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams “I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT’S STILL GNU!” Coolly, I reply “If windows were compiled with GCC, would that make it GNU?” I interrupt his response with “-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even if you were correct, you won’t be for long.” With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man’s life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I’ve womansplained him to death. Here is a quick text about GNU/Linux:
"I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!"
Understood? No? Here then:
“I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn’t matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can’t even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated.”
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First, I love this.
To be fair to the original poster though, he did not do the “GNU / Linux” thing. His point seems to be that “Linux” is not enough information to know much about the graphics stack and that seems fair since there is Wayland / Xorg and an array of DE, WM, and toolkit options.
Have you tried Chimera Linux? It does not even use GCC. It is even less “GNU” than Alpine but no less “Linux” and I do not mean just the kernel.
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.
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!
I got a car with a T9 input and I was pleasantly surprised at how good I still was at typing without looking
Wait a dishwasher with buttons on the outside? I have only seen ones that had them on the inside. Physical and touch.
Odd.
All the ones I’ve seen have the interface on the outside. Like on the door. Usually at the top.
Well yes but once you close the door the buttons are not accessible anymore?
Nope. Still accessible on the front of the door. Dunno what to tell ya.
Okay. I have never seen such a dishwasher. Where I live they all have buttons on the top of the door but in such a way they are hidden after closing the dishwasher.
This is my uncle’s bosch silence plus (I am currently not home) but ours has buttons positioned exactly the same. So does any washing machine any of my relatives have.
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.
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.
#2 is a very good point, at least regarding the AAA space. This was my experience with Fallout 4.
AAA games used to work when released.
Best example Battlefield. How can you manage to just get worse and worse with every title. And for many games you need to implement new story or major game mechanics etc. but for this one it would be brilliant if they would have only updated the visuals every 5-10 years
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.
Swords are kind of crap now compared to the Renaissance. These days they come out of malls to be put on walls.
I love how “technology” means “man-made” and you think of swords.
Yeah I was trying to make a cheeky joke.
Mall swords? That’s an apples and oranges comparison.
I mean you can still buy good quality swords, you just don’t buy them from the mall.
Where else can mall ninjas get their gear?
The knight shop is good for mall ninjas,
Actual weapons you need to seek out companies like kvetun etc
With the ever growing HEMA and reenactment scene, there are a bunch of really good forges/manufacturers putting out fantastic training equipment, replicas and custom work, sharp and blunt.
With our machining and material science I’d guess that a high end sword now would blow the originals out of the watee
