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’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.
Yep, theres a lot of old/new sites for that:
https://yesterweb.org/community/
https://www.notechmagazine.com/
https://goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/cyberspace/webrings
All kinds of stuff. https://melonking.net/melon
Most kinda look like the old geocities lol
Decentralized & federated networks: Lemmy, Mastodon, Nostr, Freenet, I2P, etc
Donate monthly to Wikipedia
Go back to gopher :)
All that chaos is still out there. Its just that its smaller and you have to not get stuck in the corporate bullshit.
Finding it is almost impossible though. I’ve tried and tried but the search engines don’t show any of these cute little niche sites that are definitely out there.
You know, you aren’t wrong.
I’ve been noodling on an idea for a while:
What about a… fediverse focused/ federated search engine?
I disagree. There’s so much more creativity and information out there than there was in the 90’s.
It’s just easier to access and in a prettier box, covered in advertisements.
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…
Much safer now though. Traffic accidents are much less lethal nowadays (except SUV/Truck vs ped)
Yeah but that isn’t because of the LCD touchscreen console and software locked seat heating
Lane assist and being able to control shit via voice or steering wheel buttons absolutely has helped with safety though. While lane assist is not going to completely prevent you from serving off the road if you pass out, it will happen much less often. Of course you should not drive while tired but people still do pretty often. Being able to change a radio station or call someone from steering wheel buttons is a hell of a lot safer than fiddling with a radio dial or searching for a CD/cassette to play. A girl in my high school died doing that one.
Seat heating was not really a thing in anything but luxury models until pretty recently.
I do agree about replacing controls with a touchscreen though. Fuck that. That is absolutely less safe than having tactile feedback.
The problem you’ve addressed is that too many people should not be driving or doing what they’re doing while they’re driving. All these safety features are really just ‘I’m too distracted to pay attention to operating a motor vehicle’ features.
There absolutely is some technology that’s been beneficial. But the cat has been let out of the bag and people are losing the choice to safely operate a car on their own.
Yeah, it turns out humans be humaning. We are not robots. You have the option to safely operate a car on your own but if you so happen to have an issue where you cannot operate one safely in the moment, the safety features help you out. You can still operate a vehicle with lane assist and not even notice that it is enabled. You also have the ability to turn it off. You can also still operate a vehicle with adaptive cruise control enabled and not even notice it if you are shaky operating the vehicle properly. These features do not prevent people from operating a vehicle safely on their own. They are there because a fuck ton of people cannot and never have been able to. The past driver mortality rate which was higher when these safety features were not an option is clear evidence of that.
Again, if you are indeed a robot and have never had an issue of going over the lines or going above the speed limit or ever checked your rear view mirror at an inopportune time when someone in front of you is slamming on their brakes, you can still operate a vehicle just the same as you would if they were not there. Hell, you can also simply disable them. But those safety features are there for the rest of us that recognize that shit happens.
Now I will certainly agree that many people should not be driving. I believe that you should have a hell of a lot more practice than six months of driver’s education and passing a very simple test once to be able to drive for the rest of your life. I also recognize that driving is a requirement for many people to work. I welcome alternatives to driving but it is not a reality yet. The increase in safety features helps minimize death and injury in the current reality.
operate a vehicle with lane assist and not even notice that it is enabled.
I see this as the problem. We’re becoming more reliant on robots to accomplish basic tasks. If the mode of transportation is fully automated - fine. But that is not the case, yet. It’s still the licensed driver’s responsibility if there’s a crash. You can’t tell a judge your robot made a mistake.
You know how they say Gen Alpha doesn’t know how to turn on a computer or use a file system? It’s like that. We can’t just give the robots full control of our lives. We should know the basics of operating a car, of being aware of our surroundings, of how to instinctively make a split second decision.
I’ll offer a compromise. There should be two (or more) levels of operating licenses. If you want your car to do everything for you, you do not have the same permissions as someone who knows how to fully drive a car. This means you’re unable to rent or borrow a car that requires your full attention. At least this creates some sort of stricter legal ramification when someone who’s been dependent upon driver assist features for a decade and gets behind the wheel of a “dumb” car and kills someone because they don’t know how to merge onto a highway. Frankly, we could benefit from this premise on existing drivers and vehicles today.
Even the most reliable drivers overlook something, get distracted by something on the road or in the car. These features absolutely help more than they harm.
Of course not, what makes you think anything i said is even vaguely related to those negative cherry picks?
Is car manufacturing and design not tech?
Do impact detection, brake assist/auto brake, modern lane assist, distance detection etc not add to safety? I could probably rattle on
Over the past 5 years the monthly road deaths here in aus have been going up, because of the prevalence of those massive cars
mechanical, no software bugs
This is a matter of perspective and shifting skill set demographics
From the perspective and skill sets of a old school mechanic/gear head who classically never really liked “tech stuff” yes that’s a problem.
From the perspective and skill sets of, say someone like me who’s really into the “tech stuff”, but old school mechanical cars were never interesting are excited about some of the tech in cars, bugs be damned.
You might have gotten excited to figure out and fix what that “Weird knocking” was mechanically where as I would have just thrown my hands up and gone “Fuck. Now I gotta take it to the mechanic”.
Now the roles are reversed, now you might be pissed to see the car show “ERROR CODE 73997” whereas I am more likely to have fun diagnosing it “the tech way”. Plugging in my laptop, delving through logs etc. in the end I might still need to take it to a mechanic when the fix is something ultimately mechanical, but I sure as hell would have had a lot more fun with it and maybe even a little security against scrupulous mechanics.
Tl;Dr The car heads time is over, the time for the nerds to take over cars has come!
The rest, subscription seats, being locked out of manuals and diagnostic tools by the manufacturer etc are a whole different thing and can fuck ALLL the way off
The bigger problem is, being ALLOWED to plug in your laptop and delve through the logs.
The right to repair has died with manufacturers following in Tesla footsteps, who is following the guidebook from apple.
See my post. They can hardly fuck up the standard OBDII interface without huge repercussions for the industry.
They definitely can. The Chevy volt complies to the standard, but anything outside (ie to do with the battery diagnostics, or electric propulsion system) is behind a completely different protocol where most normal readers won’t read.
Considering how every company is trying to paywall everything, I don’t doubt they’ll continue to push the “limit” further and further from any standard.
Yea, this has been an issue for 20 years, at least.
Manufacturers make it difficult as possible to retrieve any more than basic codes.
It’s the constant cat-and-mouse game, and why I bought a very expensive code reader 15 years ago.
My friend, look up dodges asinine “security” gateway.
In some models you have to strip the dash to remove the entire head unit to get to the two extra plugs, not to mention having to have a compatible scan tool - $$$$
Man people on the Internet need to not engage with cars as much, they’re clearly ignorant about them and have single instance counterpoints that clearly negate the fact you’ve put out there.
I swear by my OBD2 readouts, and my friends think I’m a wizard with a thousand dollar tool, rather than a dingus with a dongle, when I tell them what’s wrong with their vehicles.
I can’t believe you’re being dumped on for having a fact about the industry
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.
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.
OBDII only gives you access to metrics the manufacturer decides you are allowed to access. That’s a far cry from having control of your device.
A challenger arises!
Cars are one of the first thing I would use as an example of something that’s gotten better. Heated seats, heated steering wheels, better safety ratings, better comfort, power windows, power steering, ABS, backup cameras, adaptive cruise control…
Uh cars now have subscription services for various features. You dont just get whats in the car when you buy it second hand, you still have to pay to use those features.
Repair costs are stupdily expensive in comparison, and require significant diagnostic tools to do simple things because everything in your car has a sensor in it.
And cars are now spying on you to your insurance company because you dont actually get to decide if they are allowed to use your data or not
Sure cars have a lot more features, but they used to just work
What does a person do if they want that stuff now? Get an old car? Is that the only option?
Yeah pretty much.
Unless you want to build your own car from the ground up, which you can do in most places if it passes safety regulations. But that takes time, money, workspace and knowing what you’re even doing.
I just bought a 2013 Mini Copper. The tech is relatively limited but I have to admit there are some ergonomic issues - specifically with the lights, wipers, and radio controls. I installed a phone holder but I’m almost regretting it. I’m trying to retrain myself to not rely on gps for everything. Like, I shouldn’t need gps to tell me how to get to my mom’s house where I’ve driven to hundreds of times.
2014 Honda civic here. Thats basically the last era. 10 years from now buying a car will be tough
A lot of the modern tech is really good, though.
Cars are way more reliable than they were. They get way better gas mileage. They have a shitload more power (this is actually a con due to how everyone else drives these days). They’re way safer in both accidents and just general driving with traction control and lane departure warnings.
So it’s a real mixed bag. But I’d rather have the cars of today.
The only thing that used to be better was more physical buttons. And it looks like the EU will be pushing for that to return (requiring more physical buttons for the highest security rating).
This is why I’m still driving my 1996 Volvo 940. I can fix most things on it myself (and I’m not even mechanically inclined), and it doesn’t have a boot time.
I have a car with a touch screen and some few physical buttons and it just works. Here, I proved you wrong.
Meanwhile, I have a car with a big touchscreen, and few physical buttons and it clearly doesn’t work.
Here, with the exact same ammount of evidence you presented I proved you wrong!
Back in Not-idiot land however, we know that neither one of us have proved anything, we are both presenting claims, with zero verifiable facts, which at best should be treated as unverified antecdotes.
There was a post asking how you can tell if someone was from gen z a while ago. Nailed it
that’s the point I was making: anectdotal evidence is not evidence, it’s opinion. have a nice day.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Retrofuturism, fuck yeah. I have a major soft spot for stuff like that because of movies like Aliens and Star Wars.
It’s not just a “soft spot” thing though - the tactile confirmation of a button press is life and death if you’re driving a car.
Not even that, I just want a fucking keyboard on my phone again, and for actual buttons in my car so I can feel when I change the song on the radio or whatever.
In Star Trek Voyager, pilot Tom Paris creates a custom shuttlecraft called the Delta Flyer. Tom’s a history geek who spends his holodeck time repairing antique muscle cars from the 20th century. So naturally, he designs the Delta Flyer with lots of analogue switches and dials instead of the usual Starfleet Okudagram touch screens. He thinks they’re much better.
Dystopian retro futures were so much better back then.
Oh yeah when the click hit just right. Soft touch buttons on a 1990s Sony tape deck mmmmm
Kia gets this right with their window controls Just the right clickyness.
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.
I’m fine with that. I don’t want to talk with people - I just want an email address to write to.
Here, have this useless chatbot instead.
This is only going to get more pervasive with the corporate AI craze.
I agree overall, but it is usually much quicker to talk with a human on the phone than it is to deal with an automated system.
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.
Tbf in many countries you still get this. The Nordics is night and day compared to the U.K. where I live now. You get a local number, a local email and someone who works at that office actually responds and is enabled to make decisions.
It’s a trust thing.
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.
Instant messaging.
20 years ago, there were half a dozen competing major platforms (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, etc), like today.
The difference is that you had your choice of half a dozen clients that could each talk to ALL of the platforms. Adium, Trillian, Kopete, etc.
Today’s kids have no idea what we lost to the god of profit.
Text Messages killed instant message programs. Same “format”, but infinitely portable and won’t crash out your full screen game when you get a new message.
This is an American thing. In the rest of the world WhatsApp and the like still reign supreme.
WhatsApp is the same as texting in this regard.
I feel like AIM was the de facto god-emperor of IM platforms and the rest were just also-rans.
Maybe that was just my experience tho, but I feel like ICQ and IRC were older but more clunky, MSN and Yahoo were newer or contemporary but less dependable and had less buy in from the community.
Maybe it’s just my personal era, but MSN/Messenger was used solely in the group I grew up around. With maybe an addition of trillium eventually
In my bubble, MSN was the first messenger used by non-nerds. For me it was the third messenger after IRC and ICQ that i really used. Nerds were on IRC, Gamers on ICQ
really? opposite for me and my group back in the late 90s/early 00s. IRC was for gamers as it was easier to organize a group since most games at the time someone had to host and connect to their IP. ICQ was more for friends and nerd stuff.
ICQ and IRC were older and more popular just before AIM. I first got online in 96 or 97 and then it was all mIRC and ICQ (Hell I still remember my ICQ number off the top of my head, 18982172) then I’d say around 99/00 it transitioned primarily to AIM with a bit of ICQ and other random chatrooms that were “cooler” than IRC like “The Palace” which was essentially irc but with avatars.
But then with Trillium or like Pigeon it all transitioned to that and in a weird way message boards circled back around and replaced chat rooms. Things just gradually got more and more isolated. Then Myspace and eventually Facebook replaced all of that and eventually discord just replaced everything.
I don’t use Discord, I can’t stand it. I miss the days of IRC and ICQ.
Swords are kind of crap now compared to the Renaissance. These days they come out of malls to be put on walls.
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
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
Mall swords? That’s an apples and oranges comparison.
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.
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
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.
yep. Swype was like a mind reader. now none of the keyboards seem to have any idea about what I’m writing. random capitalization, suggesting completely obscure words instead of perfectly common ones that makes sense in context, the smallest hitch leading to inserting five completely irrelevant words instead of the one I’m trying to type…
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- 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.
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.
- email. Before Microsoft fucked it up with html and “some asshole would like to recall this email” type bullshit.
- web search, obviously.
- any fucking software that you have to rent.
- so, so much more.
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.
Speaking of analog: Light Guns don’t work on modern televisions due to the high latency relative to CRT screens (which had essentially zero latency).
Mostly because of the timing of the electron beam. That let the game see which target you hit. Otherwise you could hit everything by shooting any bright light.
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.
I think radios the fact the digital ones use much more battery and just break all the time. I think FM was higher quality as well at least in the UK.
They can pry the radio from my 15 year old car from my cold dead hands. I want analog controls not a touch screen! Tuning should be done with a knob. Nothing more.
well, radio was better back in the day. now it’s bland pop crap for the 5 minutes per hour that isn’t shitty ads
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.
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
