Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

[HumanHive]

I hate NFTs not because i dont understand them but because I know people are making bank selling them and Im too stupid to know how to do it.

I hate NFTs because they’re trying to mainstream the notion that .png files are somehow worth monetary value.

 

[Small-arms Supremacy]

I hate NFTs because they’re trying to mainstream the notion that .png files are somehow worth monetary value.

The whole world's money supply is based on nothing and has no inherent value. NFTs are hardly the first thing based on the idea that bullshit is worth something.

 

[HumanHive]

The whole world's money supply is based on nothing and has no inherent value. NFTs are hardly the first thing based on the idea that bullshit is worth something.

Money is an abstract unit of exchange. There are myriad reasons why barter systems were replaced with currency.

NFTs are true attempts to create value out of the valueless.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I have never cared for touch screens and would much rather have an old-fashioned phone keyboard.

also i really miss those early-2000's chunky cd players. i dunno why.
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Also with a tape deck in the front. They do have a certain charm.

In fact, I miss portable music devices like that in general. A boombox, or even an egg like that, had a certain grandeur to it. Because a tape or a CD was of necessity of a certain size, it means that you might as well have speakers worth the size. It was kinda like a campfire. You set one up in a park or on the beach, and people gather round it. Bluetooth speakers are nasty, scratchy little turds by comparison. Especially the cheap Chinese ones that are so prevalent nowadays. Usually playing 128kbps MP3 off someone's phone.

Also, while on the subject of music, assuming "big bass" equals "quality sound." It really doesn't. It just means there's this WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP wanking over everything. Looking at you, Beats headphones.

 

[Uncle Ted's Cabin]

I have never cared for touch screens and would much rather have an old-fashioned phone keyboard.

also i really miss those early-2000's chunky cd players. i dunno why.
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There is something subconsciously pleasurable about pushing a real, physical button and receiving tactile feedback from doing so. It's a confirmation that the device is going to do what you want it to do. You can feel the size and shape of a button, which allows you to confidently interact with the device even if you aren't looking directly at it.

In contrast, most touchscreen devices only give vague, generic vibrations to confirm that you touched something. If you aren't paying direct attention to it or if your fingers are just a little too big, you could end up doing something unintentional and not know it because the response is the same.

It's kind of ironic that using your phone while driving has been banned in a lot of places, but just about every new car has a giant phone-like screen protruding from the center of the dashboard to distract drivers even when they want to do something basic like change the radio station.

 

[AnOminous]

The whole world's money supply is based on nothing and has no inherent value. NFTs are hardly the first thing based on the idea that bullshit is worth something.

The full faith and credit of the U.S. isn't nothing, because it comes out of the barrels of the biggest guns in the world, which also certainly aren't nothing. It's certainly not as trustworthy as cold hard math though.

 

[Shroom King]

For context, if you go to McDonalds its USUALLY once a year they do that retarded monopoly thing, speaking of which has anyone ever won something good from it? Anyways it was something like that, but with like McDonald coins. They only came on hot drinks, large fries, big macs, 20 piece mc nugs, etc. Anyways if you got enough of these stupid coins, which you had to make an acc to LOG INTO to put the code into to get your shitty virtual coins.

Remember when you bought a 20 oz bottle of coke and you screwed off the cap and underneath was your chance to win something?Like you could actually win a car or a boat or a trip to Hawaii just with the plastic bottlecap. Usually it said "Please try again." About 15-20 years ago, they replaced all that shit with some code you have to enter on a website (or scan with your phone) to see if you win, and give up all your personal info in the process. I think I should be allowed to win a free boat without giving out my Linkedin profile, thank you very much.

I still have a Galaxy S7, and it's stuff like this that makes me terrified of the idea of it breaking down because it's as if newer smartphones are becoming more actively hostile towards the user.

My work phone does not have a calculator app. It has a Facebook app, and a Twitter app and all the horseshit apps. But putting a calculator on the thing was too much work (or something). My phone from 2013 could block phone numbers on the national level, I could block entire countries with using the "block numbers starting with..." feature. Of fucking course that was one of the things that got yeeted from newer phones so assholes like Truecaller can datamine the shit out of you in exchange for offering a feature that used to be standard a few years ago.

 

[AnOminous]

I miss Usenet. I miss killfiles and scorefiles. I miss being able to filter or sort content with regular expressions. With even primitive newsreaders like the basic rn, you could filter on any arbitrary criteria you liked to ignore bullshit or seek out what you actually wanted to see. With scorefiles, you could use sets of arbitrary criteria to assign scores to the value of posts and see the ones you really wanted to see first.

So for instance, if you generally liked a particular poster but they sperged out about some bullshit and their posts about that subject were utter shit, you could just block those, or score them downwards. Or if someone was an absolute fucking idiot but you wanted to read every single post about some specific subject, you could let them out of the cage for just that issue.

And this was 30 fucking years ago.

Or ignore someone on one thread but not anywhere else. Now you can't do any of that shit. Modern forum software is absolute trash.

This is actually a general tech trend I hate, too, rather than a specific one. It's literal degeneracy when features that were commonly available literally decades ago have virtually disappeared for no good reason.

 

[Dona Morte]

I miss shit being BUILD TO LAST.
Remember stuff your parents owned in the 60's and 70's and the fact that it STILL worked YEARS after?
Now it's a few years before this shit breaks.

 

[Flavius Claudius Julianus]

I miss when Windows didn't keep pushing me to back up my data on OneDrive. It's cheaper to buy my own drive and back them up myself.

I've nixed this bullshit for as long as I can remember. I did however log into an old burner account I used 5 or so years ago, and inadvertently discovered OneDrive had uploaded 600 pics or so from the machine I was then using. I don't remember allowing it access at any stage. Kinda weirded me out to be honest.

I miss shit being BUILD TO LAST.
Remember stuff your parents owned in the 60's and 70's and the fact that it STILL worked YEARS after?
Now it's a few years before this shit breaks.

I have a gramophone (phonograph) player from the late 1920s that I use for classical recordings, many of which from the early 20th century have never been reproduced - at all. The machine was serviced once in the 1970s, and that's it. About 95 years old, and it chugs on like a hardy sunvabitch.

Meanwhile, tech just a few years old as is lifeless as a box of hammers.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

I miss shit being BUILD TO LAST.
Remember stuff your parents owned in the 60's and 70's and the fact that it STILL worked YEARS after?
Now it's a few years before this shit breaks.

The problem isn't that new stuff breaks, it's that you can't fix it. The old stuff still breaks, but schematics and manuals are pretty readily available and they can be repared.

 

[Dona Morte]

The problem isn't that new stuff breaks, it's that you can't fix it. The old stuff still breaks, but schematics and manuals are pretty readily available and they can be repared.

Yes.
Best example of this is my work laptop.
I cannot even remove the fucking battery to replace it.

 

[A Dumb Demon]

I miss when the internet was a wild, unchecked frontier of all sorts of kooky shit, before Muh Corporations and Muh Social Media came and turned everything into bland, overly-curated safe spaces and advertisement dumpsters. I also miss the jank of 90s/00s design. Sure, it was hideous sometimes, but at least it felt like a human made it instead of being shat out by a soulless corporation.

 

[kūhaku]

I also miss the jank of 90s/00s design. Sure, it was hideous sometimes, but at least it felt like a human made it instead of being shat out by a soulless corporation.

All corporate websites look basically the exact same now, it's really annoying. Parts of the page appearing and disappearing dynamically, images moving with parallax, the same big blocks of color with pictures in the background, it's gotten boring.

 

[AnOminous]

I miss when the internet was a wild, unchecked frontier of all sorts of kooky shit, before Muh Corporations and Muh Social Media came and turned everything into bland, overly-curated safe spaces and advertisement dumpsters. I also miss the jank of 90s/00s design. Sure, it was hideous sometimes, but at least it felt like a human made it instead of being shat out by a soulless corporation.

There used to be a bit of a cost of entry, where you had to figure shit out and be slightly above average IQ even to be on the Internet. Letting on the kind of absolute fucking mongoloids who turn into SJWs by making it accessible utterly ruined it.

"REEE REEEEEE REEEEEE you can't just say shit I disagree with!" Except pre-2000 you'd just laugh at these worthless, useless, idiot sub-100 IQ fucks. Now they are Twitter mods and plebbit mods.

 

[Pee Cola]

I miss Usenet.

It was a great retard filter. These days, forums and social media make it way too easy for literal window lickers to stink up almost every area of online discourse. In the olden days, you had to be autistic intelligent enough to work out how to use a terminal emulator and a modem to dial into another computer.

This also meant physically sitting in front of a computer, which would take time to boot up. In some cases, this meant having to set the computer up before even powering it on. Especially if there was only one TV in the house and the only computer in the house was an Amiga or an Atari ST.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

There used to be a bit of a cost of entry, where you had to figure shit out and be slightly above average IQ even to be on the Internet. Letting on the kind of absolute fucking mongoloids who turn into SJWs by making it accessible utterly ruined it.

"REEE REEEEEE REEEEEE you can't just say shit I disagree with!" Except pre-2000 you'd just laugh at these worthless, useless, idiot sub-100 IQ fucks. Now they are Twitter mods and plebbit mods.

GeoCities. The whole process was designed to facilitate uploading things but at the same time not to hold your hand.

Webrings.

It was a great retard filter. These days, forums and social media make it way too easy for literal window lickers to stink up almost every area of online discourse. In the olden days, you had to be autistic intelligent enough to work out how to use a terminal emulator and a modem to dial into another computer.

This also meant physically sitting in front of a computer, which would take time to boot up. In some cases, this meant having to set the computer up before even powering it on. Especially if there was only one TV in the house and the only computer in the house was an Amiga or an Atari ST.

I never had a modem with my Atari ST so couldn't do it, but the magazines of the time, especially the more application / productivity / enthusiast focused ones, always had features on "comms" which was things like dialling into BBSes and stuff. The intellectual barrier to entry meant that you could have informative discussions with people about things without the sort of spackers you get on twatter shitting everything up. Usually this was, yes, pirating software (esp. on the ST where piracy was frighteningly organised; one group in Germany had a mole who worked in a distributor for a lot of games and was in a position where she could borrow a game disk before it was packaged and sealed, bicycle it round to her mate, wait for him to do the crack job - a lot of DRM back then was as now a joke and only deterred casual copiers as opposed to anyone who had assembly language chops so you could literally do it in an afternoon - then bicycle it back the next day). But also it had stuff like programming, hardware modding, and similar.

Speaking of which, the unmoddability of hardware. Related to how everything nowadays is throwaway and unrepairable. Back in the Atari ST days there were a huge variety of mods and tweaks you could make to your system to get it to do things that the manufacturers never intended. The most common was the Marpet board for the STFM. The later STE model had standard 30 pin PC style memory modules so you could have up to 4 megabytes RAM (which was quite a lot back then). But the STFM relied on individually soldered to the board banks of chips. The Marpet board was a circuitboard with a memory controller and 4 megs of RAM pre-installed on it, which you would wire to various pins on the MMU and motherboard to basically bypass the already installed RAM and use that instead. Also popular was the Spectre which plugged into the cartridge socket and contained a dump of the OS and roms from the original Apple Mac and various other things. Armed with the relevant software you could then emulate a Mac, in full, on your ST. This worked because both the original Mac and ST ran on the Motorola 68000 CPU. You could then run original Mac software from floppy or hard drives as you saw fit.

You can't really mod current year hardware like that.

TOS switchers were another one. Basically, the ST had its OS in a series of roms, and there were different versions. But some software complained if asked to run on some versions. So what this was was a board containing the roms for other versions of TOS which was soldered into place atop and parallel to the already installed roms. Also provided was a switch that you drilled a hole in the side of the case and installed there. This allowed you to swap the OS that would be run on powering on.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

Cars with a glorified tablet stuck on the dashboard in lieu of proper instruments can get fucked too. Don't even get me started on gay shit like electronic parking brakes, proximity keys and stop/start engines...

Basically, fuck almost every car made after about 2010.

Remember the annoying RGB lighting trend with computers? Not even cars are safe from this menace of a trend now, as the reveal of the Mercedes-Benz EQS EV, and the Ford Mustang Mach-E show:

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It's as if auto makers are trying to attract gamers, out of all people, to buy their cars these days.

And the Hyperscreen for the EQS screams of massive overkill with them. Also, having a vertical infotainment screen, like the one in the Mach-E, looks out of place in cars, in my opinion.

There is something subconsciously pleasurable about pushing a real, physical button and receiving tactile feedback from doing so. It's a confirmation that the device is going to do what you want it to do. You can feel the size and shape of a button, which allows you to confidently interact with the device even if you aren't looking directly at it.

In contrast, most touchscreen devices only give vague, generic vibrations to confirm that you touched something. If you aren't paying direct attention to it or if your fingers are just a little too big, you could end up doing something unintentional and not know it because the response is the same.

It's kind of ironic that using your phone while driving has been banned in a lot of places, but just about every new car has a giant phone-like screen protruding from the center of the dashboard to distract drivers even when they want to do something basic like change the radio station.

I have a new Mazda3 hatchback. While it does have proximity keys, screen spedometer, etc. It does have some actual gauges plus the nav/entertainment screen isnt a touchscreen.

That big button behind the shifter is a combo button/dial/joystick used to navigate the screen. Didn't take long for me to pick up. Can use while looking at the road. Tachometer and fuel are actual physycal gagues.

 

[moocow]

also i really miss those early-2000's chunky cd players. i dunno why.

In fact, I miss portable music devices like that in general. A boombox, or even an egg like that, had a certain grandeur to it. Because a tape or a CD was of necessity of a certain size, it means that you might as well have speakers worth the size. It was kinda like a campfire.

I liked boomboxes as a kid. I also had one of these beasts back when they still made them with decent built-in speakers and chewed up D-sized batteries like pieces of Pez:


And back before the iPod popularized using flash storage or spinning rust for portable music players, the holy grail in small portable music players was a CD player that could read MP3s off a data CD and play them (and play regular audio CDs of course). Just imagine, 6+ hours of music on ONE fucking disc!

It cost over a hundred bucks when it was new, but I loved this god damned thing. It couldn't even do "seamless" playback (there was always a little 1/4 second gap of silence as it loaded the next track) and it was picky about filenames and folder nesting depth, but it worked, was built like a tank, had good battery life, and served me well for years.

And this was 30 fucking years ago.

Or ignore someone on one thread but not anywhere else. Now you can't do any of that shit. Modern forum software is absolute trash.

This is actually a general tech trend I hate, too, rather than a specific one. It's literal degeneracy when features that were commonly available literally decades ago have virtually disappeared for no good reason.

It's partially brain drain (old hackers never die, they just go to bits), partially that the old tools are still around and still work (good old (Free) Agent ... the god emperor of Windows usenet clients), partially that current developers mostly don't even know about them (and thus haven't realized that there are much better ways to do certain things) and partially that said developers might not even be competent enough to implement those features. I've met mid-level programmers who've never heard of regular expressions. I was a god on that team just from applying junior-tier regexes to certain tasks and consequently drastically reducing code complexity and speeding things up quite a bit.

There used to be a bit of a cost of entry, where you had to figure shit out and be slightly above average IQ even to be on the Internet. Letting on the kind of absolute fucking mongoloids who turn into SJWs by making it accessible utterly ruined it.

Word. If you've never written a custom AT dial string to screw with your modem's register values to try to eke out a few more bytes per second throughput on a dialup link or set up Trumpet Winsock to talk to your uni's temperamental dialup server, you're forever a newfag and should get off my internet.

We're forever condemned to live in the Eternal September.

 

[Sperghetti]

I hate NFTs because they’re trying to mainstream the notion that .png files are somehow worth monetary value.

I’ve said this in another thread, but people and corporations have spent the last 20+ years trying desperately to deny the fact that digital content has an infinite supply and is, therefore, inherently worthless. They literally have to induce artificial scarcity to try and convince people that these things are valuable. NFTs are just the latest version of that.