Tech Fade - Old tech is simply... Forgotten. People rely on corporate services to substitute.

[Trans Fat 41g]

There's a resonant fear of making objectively, verifiably better decisions.

Imagine helping family who bitches about how much of an ad-ridden shit pile Google Chrome is, but then go out and say "it's too much work" to at least install Ublock Origin. It's "too much work" to use alternative YouTube front-ends. It's "too much work" to do anything that doesn't involve account integration. Suggest anything outside of defaults and it's a sensory overload, worse when they refuse to stick to better alternatives.

It's seriously "too much work" to just do zero-effort things the smarter way rather than the hard way. I am done helping boomers and various other NPCs with better alternatives.

 

[Geddy Lee's Fee and See]

I like the accurate drawing of the reader's future romantic prospects.

Goddamn man. That's true, but that's too much.

 

[Judge Dredd]

People believe that this is some sort of Library of Alexandria where knowledge will be stored forever yet it's not true.

Not a lot of people is aware that pretty much anything prior to 2010 and many things prior to 2016, for some reason, has been scrubbed out of the internet. A lot of stuff probably is better forgotten but lost of interesting content has been lost forever.

Now it's basically only internet archive doing it, with all the problems we have with them as an organization based on trust factor

I thought things like Flash being dropped, or Steam dropping Windows XP were outliers. But more and more that stuff is becoming the standard. Whats more, technological solutions like Flash emulators failed to materialize.

While "the zoomers will never know pre-2008 internet" is bad from a nostalgia point of view, for me it the destruction of content and the fact that these websites could've been saved.

You mention Archive.org, but there's other sites going that way too. I remember (must have been 15 years ago now) when ModDB was dedicated to being a mod archive. Now the place is stripped bare as users and mods are banned for failing to adhere to current year leftie politics. That's assuming autists didn't bully prolific or popular creators into hiding because they dared violate their headcanon.

I'm in a few threads related to the subject of game and film preservation. Old films and TV aren't just "not archived", but are sometimes actively destroyed and memory holed for no reason I can find. No archive of Adam and Joe Go Tokyo and Cybernet makes sense because they were obscure late night British TV shows, and I was one of only a dozen people who cared about them (and the other eleven probably worked on them), but even popular films like Casablanca can be hard to find.

One of the reasons I love KF so much is feels like the last ember of old internet.

It's seriously "too much work" to just do zero-effort things the smarter way rather than the hard way. I am done helping boomers and various other NPCs with better alternatives.

I'm the same. There was a clip of Linus Tech Tips where he said he doesn't do PC repair or PC builds for friends and family any more, because what should be a one time gift or favour turns into a lifetime commitment.

The only time it makes sense are those people that start spamming console and command line programs. I know a little bit of old tech and even I'm intimidated when it comes to that stuff. There's also some "zero-effect" things that are either outdated or have some middle step that is missed out.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

I'm in a few threads related to the subject of game and film preservation. Old films and TV aren't just "not archived", but are sometimes actively destroyed and memory holed for no reason I can find

@ToroidalBoat talks a lot about this, and this is one reasons I quite enjoy finding his posts in a thread because he often verbalizes stuff I had been munching for a while.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Old films and TV aren't just "not archived", but are sometimes actively destroyed and memory holed for no reason I can find.

It's that push to "cancel" the world before Current Year to make "an endless present" again?

One of the reasons I love KF so much is feels like the last ember of old internet.

Like I said, there's other "Web 1.0 style" places out there but they are harder to find now.

 

[Judge Dredd]

It's that push to "cancel" the world before Current Year to make "an endless present" again?

That's certainly a lot of it. One movie I've been trying to track down for a while is a Christmas movie called The Ref. I'm guessing it was memory holed due to starring Kevin Spacy. But some of it defies explanation.

Things like companies buying the rights to a property, then destroying the original masters, leaving only shitty and incomplete digital transfers and old VHS tapes as the only sources.

"Digital remasters" that destroys the image are common. These companies either don't know or don't care that applying a stock noise reduction filter makes a film look way worse by destroying the details of an image. Disney animated films seem to be the worst for this (which might explain the premium put on old VHS and Laserdisc versions). I assume the original movies exist somewhere in the Disney vaults, but they won't release them without messing with them in some way, either for political reasons or stupid attempts to "improve" them.

Everything is either too niche to bother archiving, or the studios put no thought or care into them. Those that do care often charge outrageous prices, which makes some sense, but £20-£50 for a single film stings, no matter how much I like it.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

companies buying the rights

I think copyright started as a form of censorship.

And it is still used as a form a censorship today.

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

Steam dropping Windows XP were outliers.

The problem with older OSes is the ABI and encryption standards have changed too much. They would have to write support into the OS or the library to keep supporting it and, in Steam's case, new games won't work with older Windows. People sticking to Windows 7 are being shut out because of these issues. Android has the same issue. The new tech wont be backported. Even linux doesn't backport functionality to 10+ year old kernels, just sometimes to previous iteration enterprise server distros.

Like I said, there's other "Web 1.0 style" places out there but they are harder to find now.

Google penalizes Web 1.0 style sites unless they meet Google's requirements so they don't show up on google search. It's why you see static site generators like Hugo have many themes support at least some of the requirements.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Know how dumbed down and indoctrinating Current Year American public schools can be?

I imagine quite a number of "Zoomers" and "Generation Alpha" could be duped into believing the "Flat Earth" theory.

 

[Mr. Duck]

I blame Steve Jobs.

 

[Megaton Punch]

but there's a lot of boomers that can't so much as change a tire without going to a garage or calling a breakdown service.

I know a lot of boomers and almost none of them have any practical knowledge at all. The complexity of their skill set ends at "change a light bulb". The only ones who can do anything are ones in that industry. Mechanics can do mechanic stuff, plumbers can do plumbing stuff, and so forth.

This is also true of millennials and especially zoomers, but the point is, it's an incredibly rare person who learns skills of their own volition no matter the age. Of course most zoomers don't know what a terminal is. They don't need to learn it, so they don't. Simple as. What good are DIY skills in an era when everything is made specifically to resist being repaired by the user?

 

[King Vidiot]

My chainsaw is giving me grief. I looked at a fancy save-the-earth battery powered one... $500(with batteries, etc). A rebuild kit for the carb is $10, a new carb with probably identical Chinese parts from the rebuild kit is $20. I bought the new carb, fuck dealing with those tiny parts.

I definitely prefer my electric mower over a gas powered one. It is a lot more quiet and doesn't need any maintenance. The only downside to the one I have is the entire series was discontinued by the manufacturer 2 years after I bought it so new batteries are no longer available. When the batteries I have wear out, I will have to figure out if I can rebuild them by replacing the cells inside, or maybe modify a battery sold under another brand name to work with the mower. If I have to give up on my electric mower, I will use my spare gas powered one I got for free from Craigslist.

If you are thinking of getting any new yard equipment, you can probably find some good deals in the next month since yard equipment goes on clearance at the end of the season. The MSRP for my lawnmower was around $500 and I bought it at the end of season for $200.

One of the motorbikes I want (the Royal Enfield Meteor 350) has a carb instead of fuel injection despite being a modern bike. One of the reasons I'm given to avoid it is "carburetor woes".

I thought Royal Enfield switched to fuel injection for most of their motorcycles a few years ago. When I look up the specifications for the Meteor 350 it says it is fuel injected. Someone I know has an early 2000s Royal Enfield Bullet with a carburetor and it always needs work to keep it running. Their pre fuel injection motorcycles were definitely for people who enjoyed working on them.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

The KF incident last weekend made me think how the Internet is a big pile of nothing.

People believe that this is some sort of Library of Alexandria where knowledge will be stored forever yet it's not true.

Not a lot of people is aware that pretty much anything prior to 2010 and many things prior to 2016, for some reason, has been scrubbed out of the internet. A lot of stuff probably is better forgotten but lost of interesting content has been lost forever.

So many independent forums and imagehosts have died and with that a lot of internet history disappeared. It's not just that, I've been looking for articles about an event/crime/whatever that I am 100% certain that I read on [specific news site] in 98 or 2002 or 2004 or maybe 2006. It was also on other news sites but I'm focusing on the one that I know for sure had it.
Googling it is hard as fuck because it's old.
When I FINALLY find a lead by stumbling into another article ON THE SAME SITE with an internal link to the thing I want... it's busted because years of updates have broken(updated) all the links several times over. The one I found is not even the original link anymore so wayback machine have only cached a series of broken pages from 2003 and onwards and I'm looking for the 1999 article. If I knew the actual URL I might be able to find it in there, but I don't know it.

Sites like Gamespot and IGN prides themselves on having been around for a long time but going back in time they're just as broken. Maybe you find the page with the text but all media is broken. I was looking for screenshots from a specific game that I knew they used to have. All broken(some were on Unseen64 but not all). Years later I saw them in an episode of a BBC Euro-centered documentary series shown in 2000 that someone had uploaded to youtube.

This is all the information I can find about the series itself:

Mosaic and BBC part of Euro project​

14 April 2000
Mosaic Films has joined forces with the BBC and a number of European broadcasters to produce a major 20 x 26-minute documentary series on Europe, writes Colin Robertson.Eutopia! brings together Mosaic

That's all. Can't find shit on IMDB.