I’m half on one side, half on the other.
The line I draw is between safety and convenience. On the safety side, I want things to be very manual. I don’t want some app or external system managing whether or not the lights stay on, or whatever, on the convenience side, I 1000% want a way to manage things like the lighting from an app.
So anywhere that safety is a concern, like the kitchen, bathroom, a handful of other places… There’s zero “smart” anything. Everywhere else, yeah, I can turn off my lights from an app.
When I’m in my office/living room, where safety isn’t really a concern, I don’t have to get up to turn on the lights, I can yell at my Google home to do it for me, or use an app. If I want the lights to be some shade of turquoise, I use the app…
In the kitchen, as an example, no such control exists. You have to push the light switch, and you get basic bitch white light. You don’t get an option. You want the light off? Take your fingers and do the thing that makes the light switch go click and turn off the lights.
The decision to make anything smart relies on whether or not I’m going to be in danger if the lights go out and there’s no way to turn them on again because the Internet is down.
I agree completely. But now I can’t get the image out of my head, of the maniac that has done the complete opposite of this. Like putting the sink disposal unit, door locks, and flush toilets, all on a publicly accessible “smart” network.
Chaos.
I want quality buttons and knobs that let me control all necessary functions manually from the device. Smart features are for convenience and tracking stats. Never should the device talk to any party but me.
I want everything as dumb as possible. I will register whatever I buy with the manufacturer for warranty purposes, but other than that: dumb toaster, dumb fridge, dumb washing machine, dumb robot vacuum cleaner, dumb doorbell, dumb locks, etc…
If it doesn’t need internet to function, it’s not getting any.
Last time I registered was for my dishwasher, all it did was get me on the mailing list to buy another dishwasher.
How many fuckin dishwashers do you think I need, mate?
I just stopped registering anything. I’m entitled to my warranty either way.
That’s why I use mail relays.
And if it does need internet to function…I’m going to try to not buy it.
I’ve seen some neat features included, but it’s never worth all the added bullshit they add in. Being able to tell if your oven is still on, or garage door is still open is great, but the app is never just that. It always comes with a truck load of bullshit noone asked for.
Enter your pazswird; enter the code from your authenticator
hunter2
*******
Huh?
Weird, I didn’t type stars. hunter2
For the outdated services I use that still require passwords, my password manager handles all that.
Yup.
Comcast “updated” their network yesterday and broke every fucking smart plug in my house. None of them will work anymore.
Did they disable the 2.4ghz band on your router?
Thought of that too, but yup it’s still active. A couple other devices are connected via 2.4 but none of my plugs or bulbs will connect. They worked just fine yesterday and now they’re all bricks.
This isn’t a shit post IMO.
Yeah. It’s straight fire.
This describes my reality nowadays.
I bought a fan the other day, cause it warm. Cheap as I could find. Plug the thing onto the wall, can’t figure out how to get it working. Read the manual: I need an app. I download the app, logged in with Facebook (had to create a Facebook account, for I had none. It was the only option), filled a form with my information, agreed to the Terms of Services and Privacy Policy. Gave it location access, to connect to the fan. It needed a few other permissions, which I had to give it. Now I can turn the fan on and off, from my phone (the fan has none). I can set a direction, turn the spinning on or off. Set the RGB light colours. I can even give it an image, and it’ll display on the fan as it spins (probably why they demand entire system file access). I can even turn it on and off from the Quick Settings Tile. And make some changes from there as well. All in all, I must say, this fan is defin
This was the cheapest fan you could find?
Yeah, that’s just how it be these days. The damn thing comes cheap, but surprise, surprise, they charge ya for it l8ter. Like, the fan was cheap af. Unmatched by the competition. Almost free, for that price. But the cartridges? Those damn things will get me broke. If I knew ahead of time it would only work with their proprietary air, I would have looked for another option. Costs more upfront, but you end up saving overall
This fan of yours sounds fucking terrible, bud.
Hey, the fan’s not horrible. The fan is actually very nice and friendly. You’d know if you ever got to chat to it
I wouldn’t even return that, I’d straight up get physical with it
That makes me want to vomit.
Looks like the fan hopped up and murdered OP before he could finish his post.
Don’t worry, she fine
Now THAT’S a Pixar movie I’d watch …
Like Rubber but with a killer fan. Maybe a Big Ass Fan branded machine. On wheels.
Ngl sounds like expensive ass fan
car
This is a lovely comment, thanks!
Terrible mid 20xx introduction of full on touchscreen tablets to motor vehicles would like to know your location.
And your phone number and your address and your contact list and permission to read-write access to your files and your social security number and your blood type and your date of birth and your mother’s maiden name and the location and shape of any birthmarks or scars and your fingerprints and your genealogy and your deepest darkest secret and what you ate for breakfast last Tuesday and if you’ve made any pacts with yogsathoth and if your soul is still available for sale and your dental records and your porn preferences and your favorite color and your BMI and the name you gave to your favorite stuffed animal when you were six years old
Hello fellow old person. I too miss things that just work.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (a bit ironic when you consider this quote comes from Apple).
Steam is fun and all, minecraft is a great game, but goddamn, i have a 10kbps at home, and network is unstable where i live, why can’t i play my fcking
game“licence” which is not even online based, because the network decided to stop??I prefer from far a simple folder with assets and a .exe that i will put on my desktop with a shortcut.
What an application is supposed to be anyways.
Simplicity is easy to pirate though.
If the product is a program that executes 100% of its functionality on your computer, it is impossible to make it pirate-proof. Even if all the functionality is client-side and the server is used only for authentication, it can be pirated.
The only way to make a program pirate-proof is if it runs on the server with a thin client.
That being said, some products execute on the client. Therefore if they want to prevent piracy, the only thing they can do is security through obscurity. That is, make it as complex as possible so the pirates take as much time as possible to reverse-engineer it.
I don’t think it’s ironic, it just doesn’t say the quiet part out loud. Everything just works if they control the entire ecosystem, so if you want ‘sophisticated’ let us control everything and it will all just work.
Steam has a “Go Offline…” options for pretty much that. Indeed it sucks that you have to do that before you go offline, but it sounds like a good idea with your setup and just switch to online occasionally to update.
Furthermore it depends heavily on the games, not on steam. Some steam games work without the steam client, though for some of those you have to fiddle around or execute different binary.
Luanti is a credible replacement option for Minecraft single-player
You don’t need a network connection for Minecraft single player. I’m not actually sure what they’re on about.
Steam works fine for me offline, though I can’t speak to all the games - what are you running into with it?
I hear you on Minecraft, though…
Shit either has no buttons, with an capacitive touch surface, or if it has buttons, it’s never immediate response, you have to press it for an extended amount of time.
it’s fucking infuriating.
Yes long press needs to be relegated to the most obscure functions of a device, not the main uses.
You just described my Chevy Volt so accurately. All the buttons are touch surface except the parking brake switch, and I usually have to pull that twice.
I went to a coffee shop yesterday that tried to tell me they only accepted orders through their app. I almost walked out, until the finally poured my coffee, but continued to give me shit about it, “ok but next time you have to use the app”
“Yea no. There will be no next time.”
Luckin Coffee, the extremely successful Chinese competitor to Starbucks exclusively operates via their app. Sadly, users prefer it because of all the discounts and coupons it offers. So really, just surveillance capitalism as usual.
Dennis??
A QR code and a website I could understand. But app? No.
No. Not even that, that’s just shit and the site brings a plethora of formatting issues and accessibility issues.
Just give me a fucking paper menu.
Paper menu has accessibility issues too. You have to stand up and go to the counter, for one. You have to talk to someone.
For different reasons, physical or mental, those aren’t great for a lot of people.
Mate you’re already in the restaurant. If you couldn’t talk to anyone, or move your own weight - you wouldn’t have made it inside the restaurant to the counter. Those issues already had solutions to get to the point of ordering.
No, even QR I can only accept as an option, as in completely optional. I’m out and about without a phone quite frequently.
I have my phone on me all the time. Still no way im using an app to order. The screens I can tolerate at fastfood joints because it gives me time to decide.
But if you can’t be bothered to come to my table to ask what I want at a real restaurant, I can’t be bothered to go to your > resturant.
OP said coffee shop so I’m presuming it’s not a real restaurant, and the app would facilitate ordering without queueing. Which I like. But I don’t wanna download an app, I want to just sit down, scan a QR and pay with one of the cards stored in my phone. And obviously cash should still be a backup option. I can see why they might want to do away with card terminals though.
True. I would put coffee shops in group with the fasfodd joints. There’s wasn’t really much service to begin with. But it should always be possible to order by a real person.
I wonder if it isn’t actually illegal to deny personal service for accessibility reasons.
This sentence makes me realize I take my phone with me everywhere
“It’s a work phone. I’m not allowed to install apps.”
There’s an Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode for exactly this situation
Props to Dennis for not unleashing his fury , like the crashing of a thousand waves
I havent watched Sunny in ages. But yes, that was my experience lol
It’s so good. Best of theirs in a long time.
I rented a car, a Mercedes B class or something
Everytime I started it, it would ask me to sign up for some bullshit Mercedes service Half the features of the car were disabled due to requiring subscriptions
I will NEVER buy that car nor rent it ever again
the fuck, which features?
Cruise control automatic distance keeping
Cruise control lane assist
Seat heating
Something else that I don’t recall
And I’m sure a lot more, I didn’t try much else after that.
Either way, I will NEVER buy a car with any of that shit
My guess would be heated seats and driver aids.
OP is now a proud BMW owner!
Im with you, I dont need my dishwasher to have WiFi and an account
How else are you supposed to see the live stream from inside it, and get progress notifications and ads?
I would actually like a live stream of the dishwasher. I bet it is gross as hell. (“Technology Connections”, a Youtube channel, cut a hole in one so they could film it doing its thing.)
Yeah that would be a somewhat cool feature, but it could also be accomplished with a simple pane of glass.
you can still have this, you just have to not buy the shit things
the only thing i’m aware of that has no non-shit option anymore is TVs, but then who the fuck watches TV anymore?
I use a 40" for a PC monitor and dual-monitor setup to watch movies on the 55".
But you’re right. My wife and I keep talking about putting spare TVs in the kid’s rooms, but they wouldn’t watch them anyway.
I’m road tripping through northern Europe. Staying at Airbnbs and every fucking tv is a smart tv and not one can I pick up a remote and start surfing channels. And if I find tv most of them are slow to react. So it’s press ch+ wait 5 seconds on black screen see that it’s in a language I don’t know and press again.
Do people under 60 still have flow TV? Why would you sit though a bunch of commercials to let other people decide what you are going to watch?
Streaming is becoming shit but for now it’s still better than flow TV.
I carry a Fire TV stick with me that accesses my Jellyfin server. Just connect it to the internet and you’re good to go.
O_O
^ OPs livin’ the dream in 2045.
Buy old stuff
Use open source
Downdate
etc
It is incredibly difficult for me to describe just how powerful a Linux desktop experience can be. You can buy a cheap computer that suports emulation and put QubesOS on it. Bonus points to putting a GPU in it and playing on either Windows or Linux with that GPU.
I don’t think Linux people entirely understand just how uninviting the prospect of messing around with an operating system is for the vast majority of the public.
As bad as Windows is, and it is it getting worse by the minute, it honestly does just work. I dual boot my computer, mostly into Linux everyday and even now I occasionally come across problems that don’t exist on the Windows side. The community need give up with this idea that Linux doesn’t have major usability issues.
The fuck are you doing, that you need to mess with the OS?
So Linux is just going to magically appear on your computer is it?
Not to mention all the dependencies for everything, I’ve gone multiple layers deep trying to install dependencies for the dependencies just to use a single module. Tbf I’ve mostly used Linux for bioinformatics so perhaps the problem for me is biologists creating software for other biologists and none are truly computer scientists (including myself)
It very much depends on the build of Linux you’re getting but there’s definitely quite a lot of builds out there that were designed for enthusiasts, where after you’ve installed it you have to spend the next several hours configuring everything. Your average computer user has very limited patience for this assuming they’re prepared to even do it at all.
I bet that 99% of people don’t even really know how you would go about installing a new operating system. It’s not exactly intuitive.
Yeah it’s funny. Post about stuff just working out of the box.
First reply: Open source. Downgrade. So… Do exactly what the post is raging about.
There are many advantages to open source software and a lot of it does actually just work. Linux isn’t one of them though.
To be fair that’s because an operating system is far more complicated than most open source projects which tend to be applications.
I may be in the minority here, but I absolutely know how to rock every corner of a modern Linux setup and I avoid OS-tinkering at home like the plague. I have better things to spend my time on, so the bar for user-friendly computerized things in my home is incredibly high. In fact, to circle back to OP’s point, such things have to “just work”, be secure by default, and require minimal hacking and tinkering to function reliably.
I don’t think Linux people entirely understand just how uninviting the prospect of messing around with an operating system is for the vast majority of the public.
The point is that you can, not that you have to. My system is very customized. A few years ago when I had to work with Windows I used it with ConsoleZ (middle click paste!!!11), Kate (KDE4Win) & Dolphin (KDE4Win; explorer didn’t support tabs), that also wasn’t the most stable experience one could wish for. I would’ve used a tiling manager if such a thing would’ve existed, but there are some things you just can’t have on Windows. Everything works fine and stable when you use the standard stuff (for Windows that would be Explorer, MS Office, Outlook, Edge, Visual Studio, etc), but I’d expect the same from stuff like Ubuntu without third-party repos and no manually installed stuff. And even more if you just use GNOME/KDE with their standard software.
My experience is pretty limited and I might just be lucky in that everything worked for me, but installing linux was exactly as hard as installing windows. If anything, I found it less annoying because with Windows I tend to decline a lot of their services (no cloud, no office, etc) and I profoundly resent being nagged by MS to use services that don’t interest me.
If I bought my laptop with linux preinstalled, I wouldn’t say that it has been less usable than a windows machine. there is some missing support, but I had similar issues with switching from mac to windows and back.
I am not a power user, but I’m ok. I got sick of Windows BS, so when I got my Framework 13, I installed PopOS. I haven’t had to do anything to get things to work. It’s been fantastic.
