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?
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’.
Printers
Most electric appliances in the second version. Always some lock-in anti repair bullship.
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.
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
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.
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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…
Buttons.
Everything used to have buttons and switches for things. You knew when you activated something because you could feel the button getting pressed.
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.
That’s the main reason I stick with OnePlus. The notification slider is a feature the I need on every phone.
Switched to OP after LG dropped out. I’m basically pro “anything but apple and Samsung” but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by my Pro 9. Hands down the best phone I’ve ever used. My only real complaint is that after 3 years, the battery doesn’t make it all day every day, but its easy enough to carry a battery bank, or just pop it on the charger for 10 minutes and get 40% of the battery back.
Retrofuturism, fuck yeah. I have a major soft spot for stuff like that because of movies like Aliens and Star Wars.
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.
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.
Does your car have the rocket launcher button directly next to the volume knob or what do you mean with life and death?
I mean looking down at a touch screen that offers no tactile feedback is dangerous. And feeling a button click that your muscle memory can intuitively find is not.
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.
He only wanted to make sure that no one else could fly his shuttle.
Dystopian retro futures were so much better back then.
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.
My knees
- 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)
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
You really summed it up. So much good on that list gone poorly wrong. But hey, they made a few increments for the shareholders.
Boing!
Pandora. I remember when it was a “music experiment”
Hey now, Pandora still pays 0.133 cents per play to the artists like they always have!
Surprisingly, it’s more than Deezer pays (0.11 cents).
So on a good month, 10 to 15 cents of my $5.00 subscription will go to the artists.
…I think I just talked myself out of paying for this subscription any longer.
Ive never paid for subscription on pandora. The ad version isnt that bad, but I also dont listen to it for more than an hour at a time. I would say on average I get 5 -15 second ads an hour.
XMPP > Matrix | Slack | Telegram
How is XMPP better than Matrix?
I think a better question is how matrix is better than XMPP. I don’t know much about it but I think the answer is “it isnt”.
Matrix has better encryption protocols, its always been an afterthought for XMPP, and I am worried XMPP doesn’t have the mindshare to fix it.
XMPP is the better protocol, hands down.
They are both using the exact same double ratchet Signal protocol for end-to-end encryption down to the same problems of other clients keys for haven’t used in a while due to ‘inactivity’.
The only difference is that XMPP is an extensible protocol where you very much can drop encryption all together if that doesn’t suit your use case for the protocol (such as not chat). However, all modern servers folks actually use for chat comminacations follow with the Conversations compliance suite & OMEMO support is expected in clients—meaning everyone using XMPP for standard coms in 2024 have a good encryption story.
Matrix’s extensibilty is limited due to the choice of JSON over XML relying on adhoc, stringly-typed message names. Due adopting an eventual consistency model, Matrix server can’t be run on a potato in your bedroom & most folks are relying on public servers rather than the decentralized, federated self-hosted tendency of the XMPP network in practice not just theory. Most users are on Matrix.org or Matrix.org-provided servers syncing all metadata back to a single entity started with funds from Israeli intelligence. If you ask me which one has a better story for freedom, it’s going to be the one that is lightweight enough & designed to be individually-hosted over the defacto centralized option with resource-intensive clients.
TIL. What are some good clients?
Also, how does ActivityPub compare, because that’s what we’re using right now?
Like Matrix the clients aren’t all equivalent without feature parity (& no concept of the flagship or implementation client). For desktop, Gajim has the most power user features but issues rendering in smaller windows like a tiling split (& being written in Python has other issues). Dino is feature-complete & calls tend to always work—great if not connected to tons of chats. Profanity is the best TUI which is very fast but usability is really good for some things & really bad for others (like accepting no OMEMO keys). I use all three depending on the environment & task. Android it is a lot clearer where Cheogram takes the cake for me being a Conversations fork but with OLED black support as well as webxdc. For the web, Movim has the best UX/feature set & can be used anywhere a browser can with PWA support. You can also just check to see what provide OMEMO: https://omemo.top/.
ActivityPub is a JSON-based protocol for seems primarily built for social networks, with the DMing experience normally not being secure or particular fast. XMPP is largely for building networks for passing messages & client presence—which can be extended to support PubSub like MQTT. It isn’t normally built for social networks but Movim & Libervia have extended XMPP to be a social network.
Hmm. Looks like Libervia is working on bridging XMPP and ActivityPub, as well.
I was just thinking, I don’t know ins and outs of it all, but ActivityPub is often compared to Matrix, so if XMPP is a better version of Matrix does that mean ActivityPub could be improved upon?
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.
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.
Yet back in the “good” days, we didn’t have search engines.
Back then, you didn’t find them in search engines either. Your friends told you about them.
I feel the bigger problem is that there just aren’t as many of them.
Why host a webpage now when you can just set up a Facebook page for it?
I wish people would realize there are people from every generation who won’t touch Facebook, IG and other meta things. When we finally got s new mayor who actually said our town with soon have a real website, I nearly wept with joy.
“aren’t as many of them”
I do not believe that. There is more of everything now than there was Internet before. The web used to be tiny.
You are not going to find what you want by clicking on the “Mozilla Cool Site of the Day”. But they are out there.
Not that I do not agree with the point the OP is making. The “cool site” story itself illustrates the overall story-arc of the Internet pretty well:
You know, you aren’t wrong.
I’ve been noodling on an idea for a while:
What about a… fediverse focused/ federated search engine?
Is there a solution (other than being on Lemmy)?
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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
NNTP :(
Decentralized & federated networks: Lemmy, Mastodon, Nostr, Freenet, I2P, etc
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.
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! :)
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!
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
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.
Geminispace.
Go back to gopher :)
Donate monthly to Wikipedia
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.
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… :(
iPods
Google search
Netflix/streaming
Windows
I still regularly use my iPod. Going on 20 years old! I’ve replaced the battery and swapped the hdd with an sd card.
Cars.
- mechanical, no software bugs
- physical buttons, no touch screen
- everything just worked, no need to license the heating of your chair
- freaking lane assist
You get it…
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
Oh, I agree with your complaints. But that doesn’t change that cars offer a much more comfortable and convenient experience today than they did in my youth.
Reread what i wrote and thought about it today.
What message im hoping to say is its all downhill from here. Autopilot and AI will be crammed into every piece of tech imaginable and car manufacturers tech has always been trash, I dont know what its going to look like at the bottom but weve gone over the cliff already and we wont know what its gonna look like in 15 years, but we will dream of what we have today.
Ill bet you 1 dollar im not wrong
I still think you’re probably right.
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).
I also prefer the old style heat/AC bar over the modern style where you set a temperature number. What’s the point of setting a temperature number when the car doesn’t actually maintain or output that particular temperature? For example, if it’s 70° out and I set my temperature control to 70°, it might blast cold air at me or hot air. It’s a crapshoot. The old style bar, you just set how warm or cool the air was that’s coming out of the vents and it didn’t change based on external temperature. So much simpler.
But yeah, non-physical buttons are both inconvenient and hazardous.
Much safer now though. Traffic accidents are much less lethal nowadays (except SUV/Truck vs ped)
Over the past 5 years the monthly road deaths here in aus have been going up, because of the prevalence of those massive cars
Those awful american “trucks” do my head in, always a certain type of dickhead driving them too…
Yeah tbh there would be no harm in banning them. If you need a work truck, those are fine. No person in the world needs an SUV or an oversized pickup truck
I wouldn’t say “no person” but the F150 should not be the most sold vehicle for the last 10 years straight.
We need to shame Pavement Princesses and Suburban Assault Vehicles out of market dominance.
Not sure who would ever need an SUV, especially in an urban env. Most of the common ones have zero off roading capabilities either, so work vehicles are usually specialised.
Thanks for the link though, I’ll forward it :)
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
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
This is just the beginning…
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.
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
They definitely can. The Chevy volt complies to the standard, but anything outside (ie to do with the battery diagnostics, or electric propulsion system) is behind a completely different protocol where most normal readers won’t read.
Considering how every company is trying to paywall everything, I don’t doubt they’ll continue to push the “limit” further and further from any standard.
My friend, look up dodges asinine “security” gateway.
In some models you have to strip the dash to remove the entire head unit to get to the two extra plugs, not to mention having to have a compatible scan tool - $$$$
Yea, this has been an issue for 20 years, at least.
Manufacturers make it difficult as possible to retrieve any more than basic codes.
It’s the constant cat-and-mouse game, and why I bought a very expensive code reader 15 years ago.
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!
The original Volkswagen Beetle was specifically designed for literally anyone to work on it.
While cars have had computers in them since the 1970s, they were still easily diagnosed by almost anyone with a basic education (most people took a basic automotive class in high school). If you could fix a lawnmower, you could fix a car.
Now cars are just rolling computers. Mr. Nerd, how often do you upgrade your computer? And how long do you anticipate Teslas remaining on the road? Aren’t they all doomed to the scrap yard in 10-15 years?
You can still work on older cars. They may be less safe, they may cause more pollution. But in the context you’re arguing, I can’t say you’ve presented a compelling case.
Moreover, consumer demand for distraction has driven (so to speak) the popularity of cars and other gadgets to do the thinking for us. A brief example is how often my Uber driver takes a wrong turn into another state because he’s unfamiliar with the city and relying on his phone. A taxi driver would never make that mistake because they’re knowledgeable and able to think for themselves.
I’ll pick a dumb device 9 times out of 10.
Mr. Nerd, how often do you upgrade your computer?
Depends, systems that I routinely push enough computational demand through? every couple years (Or at least some part it if applicable) is about average.
The laptop I keep in my room for light research/gaming/general computing/remoting into other systems? When it breaks.
Phones? Whenever I see something compelling enough, every year for awhile until I was on the OnePlus 8T for 3 years before the Pixel Fold dropped
And how long do you anticipate Teslas remaining on the road? Aren’t they all doomed to the scrap yard in 10-15 years?
Yes, but it has nothing to do with the on board computers and everything to do with Tesla’s shit quality in general
I could just as easily drudge up old ICE “minimal computers” cars that only lasted “10-15 years” because of similar issues
You can still work on older cars. They may be less safe, they may cause more pollution. But in the context you’re arguing, I can’t say you’ve presented a compelling case.
Thanks to better higher precision machining tech and the “computers” working together to significantly decrease wear & tear, newer cars can regularly exceed 200k miles as long as it makes it past the first few years and decently maintained. The older cars you see lasting today are the rare exception, not the rule. Many many of a models “brethren” died LONG ago, well short of 200k miles.
They also cost more long term to, in both fuel economy (The “computers” have far greater control over the engine and associated parts, to more easily achieve better fuel efficiency) and repair costs (In both your time spent repairing (your time is valuable to ya know) and in parts) because they are also far more prone to regularly breaking down.
Moreover, consumer demand for distraction has driven (so to speak) the popularity of cars and other gadgets to do the thinking for us. A brief example is how often my Uber driver takes a wrong turn into another state because he’s unfamiliar with the city and relying on his phone. A taxi driver would never make that mistake because they’re knowledgeable and able to think for themselves.
That’s an entirely different problem to the discussion, but also a classic “That new fangled gizmo, kids these days don’t learn the REAL ways!!!”
I’ll pick a dumb device 9 times out of 10.
That’s fine, car computerization (as far as engine/motor/transmission control go; infotainment systems and subscription heated seats are a whole different problem) is here to stay, the young car heads/mechanics coming up behind you are learning the newer ways regardless. There are fewer and fewer of this stuck in the past mindset every year and every year these older cars get harder and harder to find as they die.
Until some open standards are made for car computerization, it will continue to be used as a tool to keep you as a consumer dependent on the company’s good will and certified technicians. It is so much easier to lock a silly little consumer out of a digital system with closed source and obfuscation than a mechanical one, if both systems have a way to be serviced. When this status quo changes, I will finally give up my old 20+ year old cars. As of now, they are reliable as long as I keep up with their routine maintenance, and they dont track me, monitor me, or lock me out when i need to get something changed or modified. - gen Z system admin
Yea but where’s the fun in that? Part of the fun is worming your way through those (Usually laughable) security measures and hacking through. When the white paper came out about the Jeep Uconnect vulnerabilities I used that to eventually take near total control.
I even have the patched firmware on the canbus interface chip in the infotainment system that Chrysler was so kind as to wire it into all sorts of stuff and give it privileges it didn’t need lol (That’s what those articles were talking about when the researchers were able to get the brakes to stop working)
Right to repair legislation is also alive and well, state after state are passing them, even Apple themselves has been having to soften their stance over the years
What does a person do if they want that stuff now? Get an old car? Is that the only option?
I just bought a 2013 Mini Copper. The tech is relatively limited but I have to admit there are some ergonomic issues - specifically with the lights, wipers, and radio controls. I installed a phone holder but I’m almost regretting it. I’m trying to retrain myself to not rely on gps for everything. Like, I shouldn’t need gps to tell me how to get to my mom’s house where I’ve driven to hundreds of times.
2014 Honda civic here. Thats basically the last era. 10 years from now buying a car will be tough
Yeah pretty much.
Unless you want to build your own car from the ground up, which you can do in most places if it passes safety regulations. But that takes time, money, workspace and knowing what you’re even doing.
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.
What I wanted to say is that a car’s quality doesn’t solely depend on if it’s got touch or physical controls but on **how ** good or bad they’re done. OP overly generalised that.
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.
90s Volvos are great! S70 over here.
And also:
- No exhaust filters
- Leaded fuel
- No crash safety because rigid frames
- Wat is errbeck?
Yeah no sorry, as shitty as the software side of cars has become, the hardware is much advanced. And overall cars have become much better, though the recent trend towards SUVs gas removed a lot of those gains as we needlessly buy pricier and less safe cars that use more energy. 🤷 But that’s on us consumers, tons of non-SUVs to buy, we’re just not buying them.
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.
Analogue TV was much faster with much lower latency than digital TV.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Analogue TV
I mean, the vacuum tubes will take quite a while to warm up at the start.
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.
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.
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 don’t know if it counts as tech per se, but phone calls. It used to be the case that many if not most phone calls people received were important, so they would have a good reason to answer the phone. These days most calls are spammers or scammers and a lot of people don’t answer the phone because of this. With spoofing, even calls that appear to be from a legitimate number can easily be a scam, and it’s hard to trust any calls these days.
