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?
I feel like the problem is less with the technology itself and more with some of the stuff within and around it. So let me list my favourite bugbears:
- Buttons!
Here’s the thing about buttons and knobs: they are definite. When you press them, you KNOW you pressed them, you can use your finger to feel for them without activating other stuff by accident. Back in the day with my cheap-ass chinese MP3 player, I could change tracks and playlists without taking it out of my pocket just by using tact and muscle memory.
Nowadays with my smartphone even something as basic as skipping a track requires me to take it out and unlock the screen. It’s like. Sure, the phone does a lot more stuff, and can stream stuff from the internet so I don’t have to download every track (even if I keep a local library for my favourites in ogg format), it has bluetooth for wireless headphones, a lot of good shit – But that little bit of user experience is just dead and buried.
Heck, my older sister tells me she used to text her friends in class without taking her phone off her pocket. Imagine! IMAGINE typing a text on one of those old phone number pads, just by muscle memory and tact! It may not be the ideal user experience, but holy shit, it was possible! Try doing anything even close to blind typing on a modern smartphone.
Another point: when something goes unresponsive on a device with just a touchscreen, you experience a confusing and annoying experience as all you have feedback-wise is the screen and sometimes it freezes and you’re swiping and tapping and just praying something happens.
When a computer with keys and buttons goes unresponsive you can do the three-fingered-salute and that usually gets it to do something, and because the keyboard is a physical object, it can’t be hidden from you by a crashed OS.
Nowadays even kitchen appliances are dropping buttons and knobs. My parents’ dishwasher is all touch-buttons, sometimes they brush against it while walking around the kitchen and lo and behold, their butt pauses the washing cycle. Something that wouldn’t be an issue with a much cheaper set of regular-ass buttons.
To say nothing of cars and the horrid security issue that fusing a tablet to the dashboard and replacing every control with just that has proven to be.
- Customization!
Used to be, Windows 9x let you change every colour of your UI right from the built-in settings app and came with a dozen colorschemes built-in, and Windows XP came with three built-in themes and could with just some changing around (you replaced like ONE dll file, a single copypaste), support themes that totally changed the look of the OS. Nowadays you get “White” and “Black” and that’s it.
And like, that’s windows, a corporate-ass proprietary system for corporate jerks – But even Linux – Linux! the darling of nerds who like to change everything in their computers (like me!) has caught this illness – And you’ll see people defending this. Saying that having no theming support and only having users be able to change highlight colours if even that is the “right way” to do it.
On the note of customization – In the back-then times, chat applications let you set fonts and colours to give your messages “your look”, and your friends could do the same. – Fuck! The application me and my mates used for playing RPGs by text back in the early 10s supported not just font colours, but also complete rich-text, and would let you set different colours for like, things said by a character vs. narration, resulting in an utterly beautiful formatted text.
Don’t get me wrong, we use Telegram/Discord for that now and having a fully searchable archive of everything that we did and talked about is great and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. But the most customization you get is – Setting a profile picture. The most formatting you get is bold/italics.
Webforums would let you have an avatar, a user title under the avatar (that many forums let you customise!), and a signature. Nowadays with things like Lemmy you have to squint to see a person’s username.
And like, it’s not like there is something about the modern technologies unto themselves that prevents these bits of customisation: Computers are better at drawing shit on screen than ever, internet connectivity has only gotten faster, and we figured out ‘sending some markup codes to make rich text’ as a thing way back in the 80s. We lost all that simply because the people making the applications don’t want to have it.
I feel like for every neat thing that new technology provides us, it takes three steps back for entirely human and not at all technological issues. read: capitalism
Touchscreen in cars are so bad for safety. Buttons mean you don’t have to take your eyes off the road
Literally what I said.
I got my first dishwasher a few years ago and decided to go sort of all in and get a solid mid range one instead of the cheapest option because I was so excited to not have to do dishes.
The fucking touch buttons are the worst fucking god damn bullshit pieces of shit I’ve ever experienced. From the jump even when they worked ‘properly’ it just felt weird, but a couple years later and half the time the touch doesn’t register. Sometimes there’s the slightest but of crud or water on there and the thing goes crazy and becomes super sensitive all of a sudden, usually I spend 5 minutes loading the dish washer and 10 minutes trying to get it to register which button I pushed.
I want real physical buttons.
Also while I’m on the topic I was highly disappointed to learn that you still have to wash food and stuf off of dishes before you put them in. I don’t know why I thought I could throw a plate with crusted lsagana on it the dishwasher but I did. I thought all dishwashers had some sort of garbage disposal thing built into it. They do not.
You shouldn’t need to wash food off. Was that in the manual or something that someone told you? Just scrap off what you can. Too much gunk can clog the filter and also end up filling the base with water and tripping an E15 error.
Heck, my older sister tells me she used to text her friends in class without taking her phone off her pocket. Imagine! IMAGINE typing a text on one of those old phone number pads, just by muscle memory and tact!
I got a car with a T9 input and I was pleasantly surprised at how good I still was at typing without looking
Uhh Linux is a kernel and on its own doesn’t even support graphics much less customising them.
But if you wanna actually blame someone, we’ll need to know which software youre talking about - could be OPPO’s ColorOS for all we know.
That being said a big name in the Linux world is KDE, and they have one of the best theming engines Ive ever used. Everything QT follows the theme - so much so I didn’t even realise how ugly some apps look on windows (like prism launcher not matching my file explorer?? Eww)
That being said I couldn’t agree more with the first part, and in linux specifically I wish we had more ‘basic display driver’ like tools to handle emergency situations.
Uhh Linux is a kernel and on its own doesn’t even support graphics much less customising them.
I think we all realise that when someone says “Linux” in casual conversation on the internet, they mean existing well-known distros that include far more than just the naked Kernel, because no one who uses Linux is using just the Kernel, even headless servers aren’t “just the kernel”.
ANYWAY, I mostly am bitching about Gnome, but other DEs and WMs caught that bug as well to varying degrees. As have a dozen unconnected libre programs. Just for one example try finding a Matrix client that DOESN’T look like a shittier version of Discord (… And doesn’t run on the Terminal)
There was even a collective of libre application developers that got together specifically to chastise people for using themes and to beg DEs to disable all theming by default because “muh app’s branding and identity!”
Everything QT follows the theme - so much so I didn’t even realise how ugly some apps look on windows
Unless you’re using Flatpaks. Then you have to spend an afternoon metaphorically beating your computer with a metaphorical hammer to get the apps (not just qt, gtk too) to look like the rest of the OS.
and in linux specifically I wish we had more ‘basic display driver’ like tools to handle emergency situations.
It’s true. It would make the whole thing more resilient.
Of course, but by just saying Linux you’re bound to be wrong somewhere - I’m just highlighting its so broad its an essentially useless definition (42% of all computers run it by the way). Gnome is pretty shit for customisability, so what’s more customisable than having another option?
By looking at ‘just Linux’ you couldn’t be more wrong for the core argument.
It also shifts the blame to many smaller devs like matrix which tbh they’re mostly doing work for free so who’s gonna complain they don’t want to add extra complexity, just get in that source code if you really care. And in the age of such easy frontend engines an experienced could probably whip up their own in a week.
Also ive never had issues with qt/flatpaks, using prism launcher as an example, its seamlessly followed my color scheme (not saying bugs don’t exist somewhere I’m not seeing, but there certainly is 'just works support to some degree).
I you’re gonna be mad people don’t like something, yikes open source isn’t for you - git as a whole all but is designed to handle disagreements without breaking its stride.
“I use Linux as my operating system,” I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. “Actually”, he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!’ I don’t miss a beat and reply with a smirk, “I use Alpine, a distro that doesn’t include the GNU Coreutils, or any other GNU code. It’s Linux, but it’s not GNU+Linux.” The smile quickly drops from the man’s face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams “I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT’S STILL GNU!” Coolly, I reply “If windows were compiled with GCC, would that make it GNU?” I interrupt his response with “-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even if you were correct, you won’t be for long.” With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man’s life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I’ve womansplained him to death. Here is a quick text about GNU/Linux:
"I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!"
Understood? No? Here then:
“I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn’t matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can’t even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated.”
First, I love this.
To be fair to the original poster though, he did not do the “GNU / Linux” thing. His point seems to be that “Linux” is not enough information to know much about the graphics stack and that seems fair since there is Wayland / Xorg and an array of DE, WM, and toolkit options.
Have you tried Chimera Linux? It does not even use GCC. It is even less “GNU” than Alpine but no less “Linux” and I do not mean just the kernel.
Wait a dishwasher with buttons on the outside? I have only seen ones that had them on the inside. Physical and touch.
Odd.
All the ones I’ve seen have the interface on the outside. Like on the door. Usually at the top.
Well yes but once you close the door the buttons are not accessible anymore?
Nope. Still accessible on the front of the door. Dunno what to tell ya.
Okay. I have never seen such a dishwasher. Where I live they all have buttons on the top of the door but in such a way they are hidden after closing the dishwasher.
This is my Bosch Silence Plus 44-DBa dishwasher and the buttons are still visible.
This is my uncle’s bosch silence plus (I am currently not home) but ours has buttons positioned exactly the same. So does any washing machine any of my relatives have.
- 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)
You really summed it up. So much good on that list gone poorly wrong. But hey, they made a few increments for the shareholders.
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.
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.
Again, you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Tools have improved significantly. I’ve been in the trades for a long time, I started at 14 years old working for my step dad remodeling houses and doing roofing and plumbing and electrical over 25 years ago. I know what tools were like back then, and the tools we have today. And the tools and processes are night and day better today. Just stfu, you have no clue.
The power tools today kill anything from 10 years ago in torque and speed and weight. Lmao… you think the brushed motors with nicad batteries were better than the brushless motor with lithium we have today? The cordess circ saws could barely make it through a 1/2" sheet of plywood 15 years ago and now tgey rip through it like a corded saw. Fucking please buddy. Ratchets and wrenches have significantly improved with less back drag and more teeth meaning less degree of swing. Wrenches with ratchet ends. All kinds of specialty tools that didn’t exist Processes in plumbing and electrical with pex and other types of clamp and crimp fittings have significantly improved. I can go on and on across multiple tools and processes. You are a moron.
You’re kind of an asshole for like completely no reason aren’t you? That’s now what this conversation is about. By all means, continue.
My dad has an old Makita cordless drill from 1995 which he used for everything from assembling Ikea furniture to drilling holes in cement walls. Complete metal innards, full metal case, battery that’s big and heavy enough to bludgeon somebody to death with.
Until one day I bought a fancy new Bosch cordless screwdriver with Li-ion battery, brushless motor and 1/4 the size and weight of the Makita.
At first he laughed at me for buying a toy, then he tried it. He ordered one as well the week after and uses it pretty much exclusively since then.
Still keeps the Makita box and drill around purely for the retro look but even with fresh batteries the amount of torque they put out is not even in the same league.
Obviously that is the exception rather than the rule and most technological advances went into making companies more profits instead of building better products, but there are some advancements that made power tools better. Li-ion batteries and brushless motors being two of the big ones.
No that’s not the exception cordless tools will kill anything from even 10 years ago in torque and speed and weight. This idiot doesn’t know anything. A cheap brushless hercules drill from HF will absolutely destroy a nicad professional grade 10 year old Milwaukee or dewalt.
And yet I do not think I will be using my Bosch in 25 years because some cheap internal plastic part will have broken down while the Makita would still run.
Boing!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Keyboards. They had way better and more innovative switches back then. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything today that doesn’t use cherry, or cherry clones.
Happens to everything that becomes a commodity.
But Model Ms and Model Fs are still in production, and the MK ecosystem has never been so vibrant
Oh
I for-real misread this, as asking what is an example of tech that actually has gotten better, because the general rule is that things become more shit over time, as capitalism gets its hands on them
I was gonna say programming languages. Having come up in the time of C++ and Java, having Python and Go and Rust around is fuckin fantastic. Even Typescript is… well… it’s not JavaScript! See, things are getting better.
Literally everything else is getting worse over time.
Yeah developer tools have gotten easier and better. Never a better time to get into software. Even if its just to unlock your own devices. And repair things.
Dude, it’s fuckin magic now
I was used to emacs + gdb + valgrind. That’s actually pretty significantly powerful if you know how to use it, but I sort of bit the bullet really not that long ago and forced myself to learn VSCode, assuming that it would be a big over-feature-packed bunch of bullshit, and it’s gold. It can debug any language. I can edit and run and debug code that’s on the other side of an ssh connection in a git repo and all the different plugins and stuff just work (well, you know, for the most part, enough to be pretty massively useful).
Plus I can have GPT spit out boilerplate for me and it does it all semi-instantly, and it can teach me libraries and idiomatic patterns in environments I’m unfamiliar with way faster than I could do it myself from the documentation.
Fuckin magic man
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.
Miss now on tap a ton.
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.
Autocorrect on smartphones. Arguably, smartphone keyboards in general. The old iPhone keyboard was second to none in my opinion, but it feels like they’ve all got worse.
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.
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.
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.
Most electric appliances in the second version. Always some lock-in anti repair bullship.
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.
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.
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.
Buttons.
Everything used to have buttons and switches for things. You knew when you activated something because you could feel the button getting pressed.
That’s the main reason I stick with OnePlus. The notification slider is a feature the I need on every phone.
Whoever thought a touchscreen is the optimal way to interact with a wearable fitness device while running and drenched in sweat is really dumb. Just give a couple buttons, I can’t fucking swipe while moving like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google keyboard before they went all in on machine learning for spelling and grammar. It was freaky good at correction, then immediately fell off a cliff. It still replaces my son’s name, which I type multiple times a day, with a less common name even when I type it correctly. I’ve removed the wrong name from the dictionary but no dice, still gets it wrong.
Android “swipe” keyboards in general are almost all terrible right now. We had it, I would get the correct word most of the time and I could do it fast. Now, no matter which one I try using - Google, Samsung, Microsoft, that FOSS one - nearly every sentence i type has some word that it gets wrong.
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…
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.
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
I use it without Internet connection (disable network permission on grapheneos) so it works great for me.
