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?
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.
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 search.
Smart TVs and cae infotainnent systems, for sinilar reasons. Full of bloat, so many bugs and unreliable functioning.
My old Panasonic TV had a fugly but extremely speedy OTA guide. It would load, display and start accepting (rapid) input in 0.2s when you clicked “Guide”.
My new LG - I mean, for Darwin’s sake, it’s like no one gave two shits about OTA programming. The guide takes 1.5s to load, then each channel row loads in, sloooowly, and scrolling is like shuffling clay tablets.
I’d take my old TV back if I could.
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Somehow, T9 worked better than basically anything we have now.
And the phones actually had hardware keys and weren’t a laggy mess on anything older, than 4 years.
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!
Yep!
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.
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.
I had a crank powered am/fm radio, no bigger or heavier than a pack of cards, that used a pair of wired headphones as the antenna. About a minute of cranking got you about 20 mins of surprisingly decent quality radio. I used to use it all the time for years, until it got water damaged camping one time. No chance of doing that with digital radio (or Bluetooth headphones).
FM > DAB
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Yo just turn off that TVs version of HDMI control. (CEC, magic remote, etc) To avoid the scanning bullsh. (Sounds like Samsung)
Outside of that I kinda miss old copper phone lines to a certain extent. Analog stuff in general
Everything being digital removes any possibility of a signal being able to still be discerned even if it’s not absolutely perfect.
Old tech would be subject to static of course, but you could possibly still make out the TV channel or radio station, even if it’s not perfect.
These days, you hear or see a little tiling for a second and the media is gone until a good enough signal comes back.
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.
Going with MacBooks. Used to be you could upgrade RAM and other components. Now, you have to get a new machine.
Most electric appliances in the second version. Always some lock-in anti repair bullship.
Google Assistant/Google Now (RIP).
My phone 10 years ago used to have a component called Google Now on Tap which would show me useful information like where I parked my car, when my next appointment is, what my commute looks like, what the weather is going to be, etc.
It was so context aware and good at predictive algorithms, I never really had to do more than swipe left to get what I needed. But of course now that’s in the “Killed by Google” graveyard because it didn’t enforce enough “engagement” with apps and services that could feed you ads.
In general, I find Google Assistant to be less helpful overall and worse at understanding what I am trying to do. It used to be a daily convenience for me, but now I can’t remember the last time I ever bothered with it. Not to mention every time you use it these days, it has to throw in a “By the way,…” suggestion that just feels like an ad for itself, because it is never related to anything I want to do.
The assistant used to be able to translate any app on the fly. It was great when living in a foreign country and trying to figure out what those text messages I got meant.
It was truly the only thing I used assistant for. I’ve had it disabled since they dropped that feature.
Miss now on tap a ton.
Anything with asbestos in it. It’s just a truly amazing material, with the one catch 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.
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.
This drives me up the wall with my TV speaker - having to remember name of the settings that get reset for each power outage. If I was smart, I’d note the procedure down somewhere, but nah
I’d add any software that has switched to a subscription or SaaS model. Shit used to be super expensive in the past, but you could at least buy a software and keep it indefinitely for home use. It feels like everything is a subscription model. I have a family budgeting software that is no longer sold as a one-time purchase. I guess new users have to include the monthly cost of the budgeting software in their family now! Sure, the sub version has fancy ways to integrate your bank accounts, but doing it by hand every couple of weeks really makes you aware of what you are spending.
I sound so old lmao
Movies. You used to be able to just buy them and own the data.
Now you have to pray the other party doesn’t ‘alter the deal’ and if you are proactive about safekeeping the stuff you own you’re a ‘thief’.
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.
