Just pop in a magnetic screwdriver bit holder and you have strong power and perfect control.
It countersinks with ease but without the risk of screwing too deep like its electric counterpart all too easily does.
In the 90s, I felt like I knew so much about computers, both the hardware and the software, but I’ve definitely fallen off from all the improvements in the past 20 years, and I’m so Goddamn lost now. I miss those simpler times when it was more about the physical aspects of a PC and less about the technical aspects.
Japan mostly skipped PCs (outside of offices). Since their phones were ahead of the curve, a lot of stuff was designed for them. That means that a bunch of stuff is either exclusively done through some shitty mobile app, fax, or in person. There was a brief phase where PC versions did exist, but those are almost all being neglected or decommissioned now. I much prefer to do things on a PC with a nice, clear, big screen, especially if I need to use some translation tool since the text tends to expand (learning thousands of kanji for stuff like legal and taxes is hard).
I do miss physically owning media. A lot of physical media still decays, though, so not a panacea.
Software programs that were much more tested and completed before release.
Software development where we think things through, define requirements, define states, etc. before any code is committed. I do think PoCs are fine to throw something against a wall but, if it works, the proper version should go through those design phases before anyone writes a line of code. Cheap components and fast machines and networks have made people lazy which makes software worse in a number of ways quite often. No vibecoding. No AI/LLM shoved into everything. I think they can have uses in certain contexts (rephrasing questions, generating examples/docs in projects with bad/no docs, etc.), but hate how they are being shoved into everything.
An internet not run by corporations. I think a lot of people do see it through rose-tinted glasses (we still had trolls on BBS, UseNet, IRC, etc. and other bad actors), but a lot of things were much better.
Third spaces. Places where people of different backgrounds would interact in some common way. Sure, some were echo chambers just like online communities today, but many were not and let people interact together rather than just being othered to the point of fear and reviling.
I much prefer AD&D 2.5 rules to anything around today (and TSR still existing, but that ship has sailed).
I do miss physically owning media. A lot of physical media still decays, though, so not a panacea.
I prefer digital media that is locally stored. Many complaints I see about digital media revolves around DRM or a service’s ability to remove media that you think you “own”.
I think locally stored media solves that without taking us back to the days of a shelf of hundreds of DVDs.
I do own some physical media like certain very old PC games but only because there is no good digital option available that’s more convenient.
mail ! I mean, email is great, but mail is fantastic. It doesn’t make a bunch of sense in this isntantaneous world of ours, but if you just slow down a little, and write letters, and WAIT for a reply, you find yourself more attuned to your own pace, if that makes any sense
I learned about postcrossing (.com?) off Lemmy - you might want to take a look!
I like old timey radio (dramas like Twilight Zone, etc…Bob Dylan had a cool modern retro show, also stuff like Coast to Coast with Art Bell) but never listen to modern radio basically ever. Used to be much more magical.
The closest I’ve found is sound booth theature and the dungeon crawler Karl series. So good.
Anything to do with the internet. I’d go back to 2010 in a heartbeat.
I’d prefer to go back to an internet pre-YouTube where the Internet started to become corporate.
Bro, I had dial up in the early nineties…
I do not miss dial up.
Why did they want us to hear the handshake‽ Like there’s no reason we all would be able to pitch perfectly recreate a noise we haven’t heard in two decades.
Eeeeeeee brbrbrbbrbrll gzzzd
Ding-ur-ding-ur-ding brrp
cshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshsh…Actually I quite liked that bit. It was reassuring and familiar and you knew it was working.
What I didn’t like was taking 20 minutes to download a tiny video, anyone picking up the phone instantly killing your connection including the software download you’d been watching download for the last 15 minutes and the cost per minute and unreliability that taught me to connect, download my email, open my messages page, on the forum, disconnect, write all the forum replies in notepad and email replies in my client, then dial up again, hit sync on the email client and paste all my replies back in the forum.
We were well into the internet in 2010…
Hell, we were well into the internet in 2000
I’d argue people were really starting to discover the Internet at about the smart phone boom and housing crash of 07/08. I was talking about Wikipedia with someone then and they stopped taking to me for a while. They thought I was saying something like Wiccan-pedo.
Yeah, I was there for pre-2000 internet. It was cool back then too. I just remember 2010 as the last era where the internet still felt fun. That’s all gone now.
many countries need to go back to reasonable inconvenience for superior and ethical product. same-day shipping is accelerating the speed of climate change so no you don’t get to have it actually. no, fruits and vegetables are not available 24/7, seasons matter again. etc and etc. we need to go back to all of this. we have to reduce the strain.
TV.
I hate the smart-TV workflow, its a terrible user experience: Turn the TV on, wait for the smart-TV OS to load, land on an app menu, navigate around and select an app, wait for the app to load, choose a profile, wait for the list of shows to load, scroll through shows, finally select a show, wait for the video to load…
I miss when you turned the TV on and it was just instantly playing whatever channel you last had on. I miss not having to make the conscious choice of what to watch and feel overwhelmed by so many options. I miss TV programs being a common experience, like an event, that everyone would be talking about together the next day, instead of everyone watching their own thing on their own schedule.
You can still do that by paying for cable.
You’re not wrong, although I think I’d still have to wait for the smart-TV OS to load and navigate the menu to select the Cable input.
I have cable. It doesn’t really work like that anymore. I used to be able to click through ALL the basic cable channels, catching a frame or two of every single channel, with zero delay between channels, all within like under a minute. These days every channel change or menu selection has a built-in delay of at least a second or two. Channel surfing just doesn’t vibe the same anymore. That form of TV is mostly if not entirely dead.
On the plus side people with jobs other than 9-5 can now be included in the experience.
If you haven’t used free Over-the-air TV these days you might be surprised that most cities have a few dozen channels of live TV right now. If your in a large metro area get the simplest of cheapest TV antennas, plug it into your TV, and do a channel scan. You’ll be surprised how many channels there are now.
If you’re in suburbs or rural, you’ll still likely have quite a few but may need a more substantial antenna.
I do have an antenna and get some decent channels with it
It was truly exciting to look forward to a weekly show on TV.
A group of us used to meet every week to watch Twin Peaks. We’d unplug the phone, drink coffee, and eat cherry pie (or apple for a bit of variation). Then we’d watch the episode again having just recorded it and try to figure out wtf was going on. Happy days.
Except when you couldn’t know in advance when your show skipped a week and they had to play some crappy rerun of a completely different show.
This is kind of niche, but I mix concerts for a living and newer consoles and shows are all scene based, every song has a scene, and most of the time every verse and chorus in the song has a sub scene. It is a breath of fresh air to be able to mix with no scenes and have to rely on pure skill and intuition. Those shows tend to have a better feel and be more energetic, albeit less polished. They are also more fun, and a little bit more stressful.
Cool. I had no idea this was a thing.
It is 1000 times more enjoyable to actually mix a concert than just click to the next scene.
Dumb phones. I’ve grown to hate smartphones, apps, and all that goes with them.
Every app is harvesting my “data”, and every website is bloated to shit.
You can honestly use a smartphone pretty similarly to a dumbphone.
It’s your choice to use apps that aren’t email, text messaging, phone, or gps. Nobody is forcing you to use them.
I prefer pressing buttons and turning nobs in the car.
My old civic is so nice.
One of the many reasons I’ll hang onto my 2012 Toyota Corolla until I drive it into the ground. It has a touch screen for just the radio and Bluetooth, but it must be some sort of gen one prototype because it’s pretty awful. Thankfully, everything else is tactile. I can’t imagine giving it up.
Fwiw, I’ve just got a '22 corolla and everything has a physical button. I love it.
Don’t get me started on those fucking digital handbrakes
Those fucked me up so much when learning to drive. Ah yes let’s try starting uphill with the handbrake. Could not do it because I had no fucking clue when it was going to release.
First time I had to do it in my dad’s car which has a normal handbrake I had zero issues.
It’s actually safer to have tactile buttons, too.
Paper boarding tickets and having someone who works for an airline actually be able to help you directly when something goes wrong.
Print the qr code and take it with me as a backup. I get funny looks, but if my phone dies I can still take my trip.
Funny story, my phone died while traveling last year…
You can still do this.
As a software and electrical engineer who has worked in life system critical projects as well as foundational financial systems with strict uptime and performance requirements…
My home is as basic as humanly possible, no automation, manual systems for everything. Anything that must be digital is untrusted, isolated, and has a backup. A cabin in the woods off grid is the only way I feel comfortable
No… this is me
it's me
I liked automation until the end of the aughts but software has gotten dystopic. Its still possible with open source but im a bit to lazy now honestly. There are so many things where the benefit just is not worth it. Why would I want any of my appliances on the grid or my thermostat. I mean if I had a robot to load the dishwasher then automation would be great. Same with cooking. Still would not want the fridge and thermostat automated. Lights make a bit of sense benefit wise but its not a huge benefit.
What was “the old way we did things” before social media?
I’d like to shout from the mountaintop that I do not care what you and your boring family did over the holidays.
I don’t remember the last time I logged into any real social media account so I guess I’m kind of living as though it doesn’t exist anyway.
Tangentially, I preferred old Reddit.
Not sure how it got so shitty, but eeeeuuuuggghhh.
I prefer D&D 3.5e over all revisions.
Shadowrun 3E is so much better in so many ways, not least of which is that the “Wireless World” additions make hacking so boring and easy compared to how it worked prior. Don’t even need a party
Physical controls are better than touch sensitive controls.
Wireless controllers last way longer when you can turn off the vibration, speakers, microphones, lights and other things that don’t NEED to be there to control something (but I do like adaptive triggers when not just used as a secondary vibration motor; clicky tension feedback for shooting guns feels awesome tho).
