What opinion just makes you look like you aged 30 years
I’m not subscribing to anything. If I buy something, it’s fully functional, and it’s mine. There is no ongoing relationship between me and the manufacturer. Done.
I mean, that’s basically what FOSS is about.
I’m working on this, the subscription model has gotten so expensive now that literally everything uses it. Do you have any tips besides “just pirate everything”?
Just pirate some of the things?
Depends on the media, buy from bandcamp, steam
Bandcamp is the move.
Use free or at least alternatives without a subscription model where possible
For cars? Just buy one that’s a bit older
Movies etc? Pirate
I’ve wanted an EV for years, but I’m sticking with my very old and fuel-efficient ICE car until it’s absolutely dead. At that point, I’m hoping that some model of EV emerges as the most hackable one, like the Nissan Leaf. I’ll buy a very used one of those & hack it.
Anything that doesn’t incur an ongoing cost to provide should be legally prohibited from being sold as a “subscription.”
Not everything needs a law against it. I’m just not going to buy into their fucked up system.
Except more and more companies are hopping on this gravy train because they can get away with it. At some point (and that point may be now already, depending on the sector), it’s going to be difficult-to-impossible to buy anything without this subscription bullshit.
Single player modes in games shouldn’t require internet connection.
That fact that’s considered a boomer take makes me sad
It was totally uncool to remove the headphone jack from my device, man.
I doubt you’ll find anyone here that disagrees with you. I was going to get an older pixel but I got a 6 instead and I’m still grieving the loss of my headphone jack.
At least we can get USB-C headphones and use the charging port as a headphone jack.
But then you can’t charge at the same time, no good if you want to plug your phone into some speakers and charge it at the same time
Wireless charging?
Inefficient, over priced, less reliable
My take: cables are a sustainable, effective and ELEGANT solution. Most wireless solutions fall under the definition of over-engineering.
Cable: a properly lengthened cheap rope that magically transfers information, power and anchor stuff together.
Wireless: two antenna, encoding of all kind, radiations, BATTERIES, higher chance to lose stuff, degrading of quality (Bluetooth).
Cars shouldn’t be loaded with user-facing technology. Bring back analog dashboards and buttons for climate control!
I just want to be able to adjust the stereo without looking away from the road. Is that too much to ask?
Interesting fact: I just got a new ev (so a battery hooked up to a computer with wheels) - and it has buttons! It also has dials for sound and climate.
Now to be fair it also takes interacting with a touchscreen to turn on the heated seats, but I’d say it’s progress in the right direction.
Bring back stick-shift, too. People shouldn’t be driving if they have no grasp of the mass and inertia of their car. We should be able to disengage the engine at will. And we should have to pay attention when we drive.
Smart tech in general is annoying and dumb. I want my TV to just be a tv with inputs, I don’t need built in firmware and updates to shove ads in my face. I don’t want my car to have a touch screen to adjust the A/C, just give me a knob or buttons.
I DO NOT WANT MY TV TO HAVE A FUCKING CAMERA OR A MICROPHONE
We need electric vehicles with the interiors and exteriors copied from consumer cars from the 90s.
Like that Hyundai concept? That thing was rad. I’d drive the hell out of an EV that looks like an AE86.
Car-ware is the absolute worst. I remember reading an article on Hacker News 10 years ago saying they should just be a blank canvas that our cellphone decides what goes on it.
I think that one is pretty popular. Popular “smart” products are usually only smart to and make the manufacturer some extra scratch after sale.
And car touchscreens are either disliked, considered a status symbol, or considered necessary in order toobtains another feature. Very few people actually like them.
100% agreed.
Like, cram android onto an underpowered SOC and it’s just incredibly frustrating to use.
Music in restaurants and bars is just too loud. I know why the music is loud, but I am still going to shake my fist at it like Grandpa Simpson.
Same. It’s getting worse over time too, I can hardly hear anything anyone is saying in restaurants and bars anymore.
I felt my inner boomer grow stronger after writing that.
I’ve thought this since I was young. Background music? Cool, keep it quiet so we can talk.
Does this mean loud music is bad? No, I’ve been a put my head in the PA speakers metal head since I was young too. But I don’t expect a waiter to serve me then.
Beyond that, it’s a known problem that as you get older audio distractions become more severe, and I’m sure there’s a neurodivergent dimension to it too, so it’s one of those things where we are actively punishing people for wanting to be out and socialise. Also sure it’s one of those things where everyone thinks they have to do it but don’t
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GIVE ME BACK MY DAMN 3.5MM HEADPHONE JACK ON MY PHONE!!!
This but with SD cards
User replaceable batteries
I’ve been voting with my wallet on this one for years- no headphone jack, no purchase
It’s becoming super difficult now to be honest. I think I’m about to bite the bullet this weekend and just get a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter although it pains me deeply.
What phone do you use??? I’m looking at the S23 at the moment but I’m still on an S8 lol
I’m on a Sony Xperia 10 IV now. Amazing battery life, decent for one-handed use, has a headphone jack, SD slot, and meh camera. Mostly solid overall- agree the situation’s getting worse and worse every year
I remember switching to Android because you could replace the battery and expand storage, and those were huge selling points. But now my phone has none of those things. Although I guess a lot of stuff is in the cloud.
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I don’t want to have a subscription for everything. It used to be possible to pay a one-time fee for software and use it as long as I want. Now I have to pay a monthly fee and once I finish paying, I can’t use the software anymore. And it’s not like I constantly get updates for the software. Often it stays the same for months or years.
I understand that software has a price, but no way these prices are sometimes justified…
Algorithms that try to suggest me content are universally bad, and all searches should provide results based solely on the terms, syntax, and language entered. Same with anything that tries to provide me content based on data harvested about my location or demographic.
I think it has its place but it should absolutely be optional. Yeah they suck but the YouTube algorithm is responsible for like 70% of my knowledge base.
I miss accidentally finding the most random stuff on YouTube way back before they started pushing monetized content, but it’s been a very long time
I like that Lemmy and Masto don’t have those fucking algorithms. It’s a relief.
What is your opinion on Bluesky? Their default feed is chronological, but they do have algorithms. They’re actually moving towards custom algorithms, so you can build your own or use someone else’s, delete, pin, reorder them. It’s like different feeds. I like that implementation personally.
I couldn’t say, they’re closed to new users. I’ve been on the wait list for a long time, but no joy.
I’m skeptical that it ultimately won’t just turn into Twitter 2.0
Actually, the waitlist takes way too much time. I just went on Twitter and found a couple of people with invites. I don’t have one yet, but would you want one when I do?
Sure, I’ll give it a go, thank you for thinking of me. The whole bullshit with Twitter and now Reddit has me feeling pretty burned on corporate-owned social media, so I’m likely to stick with federated things like Masto, Lemmy, etc., but I’ll give it a go. I am curious about it. I wonder why they’re leaning so hard on the waitlist thing? They’re losing precious adoption time, as people are right now wanting to move away from Twitter. Or rather, they have been wanting that for months, so there may already be a lot of lost opportunity re: user attention or interest.
Some alternative frontends resolve this. Invidious for example is a youtube front end. There are public instances. Most popular sites have them.
Yes! I’ve started using Invidious more and more when I’m on PC, but there are also addons that make YouTube itself more tolerable.
I’ve been using LibreTube on my Android phone, and it’s so much better.
Yeah.
Invidious is pretty good in android Firefox like when you “add to homescreen”. The other browser add-ons won’t avoid the algorithm I think?
I use newpipe. I found libretube seemed to stop working more than newpipe but maybe time for another look!
I was actually using newpipe + sponsorblock before switching to Libretube. There’s only been once that I’ve had to manually switch the piped instance so far, but I just prefer Libretube’s UI. Newpipe worked great, too. Both very good apps. You can’t go wrong with either imo
Digital privacy is important, and it’s important to be anonymous on the internet
I feel like this could go either way whether it’s a boomer opinion or not. Real boomers are not very tech literate and probably don’t have much of a notion of online privacy.
On the other hand for those that were adults in the early years of the internet, they likely think we’re all giving away too much of our private information.
Boomers (my parents’ generation) were telling us 90’s kids how dangerous it was to put your information online, but then it seemed once social media happened they all forgot about such privacy concerns entirely. They were right the first time!
When contacting government or a service provider I want to call and talk to a human, dammit.
Phone bad.
Like they’re objectively pretty useful but I find the experience of using one to just kinda suck and I avoid it as much as I can. I’d much much rather use a laptop or ideally my desktop if that’s at all possible. No idea how some people manage so much time using their phones
let me see:
- physical media is Just Better (cds, game cards, etc.)
- the Internet is a technological dumpster fire
- devices are too “smart” nowadays
Physical media generally has less aggressive DRM. Buy a DVD and the movies your’s for life, you can even rip it and put it on a media server to make your own little streaming site.
“Buy” a movie/audiobook on Amazon and it’s yours as long as the company wants you to keep it.
As always, there is an relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/488/
I bought a gas stove/oven a few months ago. Took me a couple of weeks to notice that I can connect it to my wifi for some reason. I haven’t, and don’t intend to, but I am a little curious what features could possibly be in there.
it’s probably something like remote control, which is handy but ultimately not worth it imo
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I hate QR code menus, just let me see the damn food options without squinting at my phone
I don’t mind the ones that take me to the official website and an optimized UX, but the ones that just download a shitty pdf to my phone are garbage
Yeah I hate this and usually the menu is just a huge PDF you have to zoom in on and move around.
There is a place near me with great food, but their webpage menu is a scan of multiple pages of their menu set up in a slide show that will automatically rotate through the pages every ten seconds or so, and there is no way to stop it except to keep your thumb on the current page and kind of wiggle it. And if you want to scroll to a different page of the menu you can’t just flip through the pages, you have to wait at least 5 seconds before attempting to scroll but if you wait too long your scroll input and the auto scroll both happen and the menu has jumped past what you want to look at and by the way you can’t scroll backwards, only forwards so you have to make a full loop.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
There are some fast food places that do that on the screens that replaced their “behind the counter” menu. Worse, sometimes they will switch between two menus and an ad. I need to look at what I’m ordering so I remember to order it right.
Sneaker culture is incredibly weird. Shoes made by children in China with a limited edition color are in such high demand that there are sites where people refresh F5 constantly hoping to have the honor to pay hundreds and hundreds for shoes that cost $7.50 to make. Then half of the time people won’t even wear them outside, they’ll put them in a bag and change shoes when they get to work or whatever. Or some might not even wear the shoes at all and just display them.
I’m an old soul in this sense. I love a quality goodyear welted shoe, and made in USA, UK, or Italy usually. An Allen Edmonds strandmok is a fantastic everyday shoe for me. I like to purchase nice things in general, use them, take care of them. I really hate throwaway culture as well.
Please nobody hate me for this, I’m a bit self conscious being an admin of my own instance and don’t want to piss people off haha. If you’re into gym shoe culture that’s awesome. If I knew you in real life I’d probably make fun of you for a minute if I saw you walking outside in socks carrying your $400 limited edition sneakers, but then you can make fun of me for one of the thousands of things I do and it’s all in good fun.
