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

[The Last Stand]

Facebook doing that whole 3D effect with photos. Hurts my eyes.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

So many PC gamers nowadays are obsessed with having old games run in modern resolutions, and I don't understand why. Most of the time, the games are clearly not meant to be played at modern resolutions because something inevitably breaks,

Max Payne 2 is an interesting example. It uses fancy Finnish middleware to cull meshes that can't be seen in 4:3(or 5:4) and this is very noticeable in 16:9.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I was helping a friend set up their new printer on their new computer and it was horrifying. He's pretty clueless and trusting, it's old lady syndrome in a way. At one point during the driver installation HP tried to sign him up for a subscription that would send him new ink cartridges at a regular interval. If I hadn't been there he would have filled it all in, thinking it was mandatory and surely HP would know these things better than him.

I've seen that with newer HP printers. Only this one wouldn't send new ink every few weeks or so. It would save your credit card details and buy new ink cartridges for you whenever you ran low, without you doing anything. As if that's not going to be card fraud waiting to happen.

Maybe useful if you do a lot of printing but if you do that much printing why are you farting around with a normie grade HP inkjet. Why aren't you getting a big ol' commercial or industrial grade Ricoh or Konica Minolta with toner bottles the size of your leg. Faster as well. And better quality. And cheaper per page.

 

[Kosher Dill]

At one point during the driver installation

You know what I miss? Drivers that were just drivers, not bloatware software packages. (Special shoutout to wi-fi software that hijacks Windows' functionality)

 

[Blamo]

I miss manuals. It was always fun to just read them and discover features I had no idea about.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

You know what I miss? Drivers that were just drivers, not bloatware software packages. (Special shoutout to wi-fi software that hijacks Windows' functionality)

A couple of years ago I had problems with the setup program of some VIA drivers because VIA is top to bottom garbage. The solution was to install them from .inf/.cat and it made me remember how simple and fast things used to be. Point windows to the files, windows asks "uh oh, do you really want to install this?", click yes and it's done.

 

[AnOminous]

You know what I miss? Drivers that were just drivers, not bloatware software packages. (Special shoutout to wi-fi software that hijacks Windows' functionality)

HP/Logitech/Epson are incredibly shit for this. At least video cards usually have a pure driver component, or maybe a driver/control panel, while also having a separate software package you can install if you want (which you usually will not).

 

[Meriasek]

More and more I hate the modern Internet. Sure, you can find everything and in many ways it's super easy, but holy fucking shit everything is programmed like ass using wayyyyy to many resources, shit is unresponsive as fuck and if you only have to click through two pop-up messages before accessing a site you've found a good one. Most pages are utterly unusable without an ad-blocker, and some annoy the shit out of you if you use one.
Any site asks you for consent for cookies, then about your ad-blocker, then if they can send you push-notifications, and probably also for subscriptions or whatever, depending on what it is.
And everything is fucking terminally online.
Fuck this shit, I think I'll go back to monke and use text-based interfaces as much as possible. Get news from RSS feeds, that sorta thing. Fuck the Internet.

/edit: I wonder how far I could go with a Raspberry Pi 3 as a desktop replacement. It already has all the stuff I would really want (i.e. reasonably functional DAW, although VST support might lack, Playstation emulator, and OpenMW)....

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

More and more I hate the modern Internet. Sure, you can find everything and in many ways it's super easy, but holy fucking shit everything is programmed like ass using wayyyyy to many resources, shit is unresponsive as fuck and if you only have to click through two pop-up messages before accessing a site you've found a good one. Most pages are utterly unusable without an ad-blocker, and some annoy the shit out of you if you use one.
Any site asks you for consent for cookies, then about your ad-blocker, then if they can send you push-notifications, and probably also for subscriptions or whatever, depending on what it is.
And everything is fucking terminally online.

I encountered this beauty yesterday.

That's the button to close that thing, under the clickable banner menu.

 

[Meriasek]

I encountered this beauty yesterday.
View attachment 2266185
That's the button to close that thing, under the clickable banner menu.

Just decimate all zoomer website designers and shove the rest into reeducation camps where they learn to program efficiently for low resource requirements from smelly boomers.

 

[AmpleApricots]

My shitty brother printer broke a while ago out of nowhere and I got an early 00s NEC Laserprinter off ebay for fifteen bucks. (I only really need to print once in a blue moon and always ran the danger of the Ink drying out with Ink printers) You can still buy spare drums and toner cartridges for it and as it speaks postscript so I don't need drivers. It works with all hardware I own from my modern Linux system to my old Amiga and has everything from serial ports to parallel to USB connection. There's absolutely no technical reason for printers being as shitty as they are now. If governments actually cared about environmental destruction beyond what voter brownie points it gets them or how they can abuse it for other means they'd fuck the corpos with regulations until stuff like "the modern printer" would just outright cease to exist. At this point though I'm not sure they'd have the power to do it, even if they wanted to.

/edit: I wonder how far I could go with a Raspberry Pi 3 as a desktop replacement. It already has all the stuff I would really want (i.e. reasonably functional DAW, although VST support might lack, Playstation emulator, and OpenMW)....

I tried to go down that route, although not with the Raspberry products. ARM SoCs are still the redheaded stepchildren of the Linux world and kernel support for the hardware is often really hit and miss. I guess that's better with the Pi although I don't know by how much. You can mostly get away with it if you eschew the modern internet in its entire form. If you want a fast ARM the power consumption and cost for the system gets into an area where it's actually worth the thought to just invest into a low powered x86 machine that will consume more power but will also be a lot more capable. It's also less of an headache and stuff just works there. There are many non-Pi systems that are a pretty good bang for the buck. I don't know how the graphics support is these days though, when I screwed around with it mali open source drivers already existed in the kernel but were absymal. If you want pure console you could also go with something really low powered Cortex A7 based and just remote connect to more powerful systems locally or over the net. A kitted out Allwinner A20 can go as low as 3W under load.

 

[Never Scored]

More and more I hate the modern Internet. Sure, you can find everything and in many ways it's super easy, but holy fucking shit everything is programmed like ass using wayyyyy to many resources, shit is unresponsive as fuck and if you only have to click through two pop-up messages before accessing a site you've found a good one. Most pages are utterly unusable without an ad-blocker, and some annoy the shit out of you if you use one.
Any site asks you for consent for cookies, then about your ad-blocker, then if they can send you push-notifications, and probably also for subscriptions or whatever, depending on what it is.
And everything is fucking terminally online.
Fuck this shit, I think I'll go back to monke and use text-based interfaces as much as possible. Get news from RSS feeds, that sorta thing. Fuck the Internet.

/edit: I wonder how far I could go with a Raspberry Pi 3 as a desktop replacement. It already has all the stuff I would really want (i.e. reasonably functional DAW, although VST support might lack, Playstation emulator, and OpenMW)....

The 3 won't have enoigh juice, you need a 4 or 400. I tried it for a few weeks with a Raspberry Pi 400. It works pretty good if you use a lightweight distro, I used Raspbian Lite and install Mate and Slim as a login manager, Chrominium and only enable JavaScript for sites that absolutely need it to function. Don't bother playing YouTube in the browser, you need to open video in vlc to get a good framerate.

 

[Blamo]

Oh. I forgot my major pain in the ass, the websites that are just translating themselves. Without a button to select your language.
At least more old fashioned sites have a language/country code in their url.

Fuck those, I tend to work around multiple countries internet and those are annoying.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

Even though it gets brought up on every page of this thread, I'm going to say it again. I miss when you could actually fix the shit you buy. I recently got an old technics turntable for free from someone looking to get rid of it. It was pretty much 99% working except for the wonky speed control. 2 new $1 potentiometers and a bit of soldering later and it's good as new.

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

Blame the "diversity and inclusion" era, when you hire people not based on merit you get employees that at best are going to be a waste of money, at worst are going to actively muck up projects.

Idk if it's diversity and inclusion stuff (tho Google turning into some kind of woke IRL tranny Hunger Games is lol). I think it's more outsourcing and H1Bs.

Silicon Valley is full of Pajeets, and the main priority of Pajeets is to hire their Pajeet cousins. This seemed like a great idea at the time when Boomer management was trying to avoid the horror of paying Americans American salaries, but most of their replacements are lazy, dumb, and suck at their jobs. Plagiarism and fraud is more popular at Indian universities than actual learning, so for every competent, switched-on Indian nerd they probably hire 20 losers who only know how to copy and paste from GitHub.

If India was great at software there'd be great Indian software companies. But there aren't. They're shitting up Microsoft and Cisco and the rest instead. C-Suite doesn't care, because they've already got their yachts.

The days of All-American nerds building quality tech is long gone, partly because they've been squeezed out by cheaper computer jannies, partly because the consolidation of Big Tech has turned formerly nimble, scrappy companies into bloated trillion-dollar megacorporations that can't innovate but can easily swat away upstart competitors. The FAGS may make increasingly shit products, but they're richer than most countries and have senators in their pockets, so directly competing with them is a losing proposition.

 

[Maurice Caine]

Max Payne 2 is an interesting example. It uses fancy Finnish middleware to cull meshes that can't be seen in 4:3(or 5:4) and this is very noticeable in 16:9.

I finished this game last week on my old ass 1024x768 monitor and I got this bug on the nightmare sequences.

 

[AnOminous]

If India was great at software there'd be great Indian software companies. But there aren't. They're shitting up Microsoft and Cisco and the rest instead. C-Suite doesn't care, because they've already got their yachts.

Some of the best and worst programmers I've ever known were pajeets. The best would obsessively comment their code, make it coherent, one of them I knew even wrote a fairly well known theory of programming type book.

The worst aren't necessarily even bad coders, but they often deliberately obfuscate their code so only they can possibly understand it and thereby guarantee their continued employment, or they're just hacks churning out utter shit in mass volume like they're getting paid by the line, which some of them are, I think. The latter category has a lot of the H-1B types we need to stop importing.

 

[Trapitalism]

5G - Don't hate it or think it'll get me sick or Kung Flu or whatever like some conspiratards do, but I fail to see how it is entirely necessary. The leap from 3G to 4G made mobile internet on par with ethernet or Wi-Fi. But the benefits of 5G probably only make sense for certain niche applications. Maybe there's some benefit that I'm missing that isn't niche.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

I've been using Steam for so long that whenever I talk about how bullshit DRM is, the irony is almost always lost on me.

Gay Ben is a sneaky bastard, isn't he?

Old first party joysticks that basically last forever, the drift issues are ridiculous given the cost of modern first party joysticks.

Dropped my PS3 controller the other day. It still functions perfectly. No drift at all on this 10 year old thing, either. My PS2 controllers work perfectly. Have to rub alcohol on the sticks due to how sticky they are, but that's it.

 

[Toolbox]

5G - Don't hate it or think it'll get me sick or Kung Flu or whatever like some conspiratards do, but I fail to see how it is entirely necessary. The leap from 3G to 4G made mobile internet on par with ethernet or Wi-Fi. But the benefits of 5G probably only make sense for certain niche applications. Maybe there's some benefit that I'm missing that isn't niche.

Agreed 100%. The only formats it's been shown to be somewhat functional are along roadways, around city streets, and in stadiums and such, yet telecom companies have wasted so much money developing it they have to advertise the hell out of it and push it to be installed in the most inane spaces. 5G's wave is too small to penetrate through objects. It's too weak to go long distances. Both of these were benefits all past wider band cell types held, even up to "4g LTE" which might as well have BEEN 5g for how much faster it was pushed to have been. Just like moore's law we're reaching the point where unless we develop quantum communication where you can have particles on two ends of a system instantly transmit via spooky physics or whatever it's called then it's just dimishing returns or even just a waste of time. Yet 5G is being pushed as a new era of connection to the point that Verizon bought out part of E3 this year just to shill it to hell and make the term feel like it means nothing anymore. It's even being promoted as a wifi replacement (because if you can charge cell service prices in people's households, you make make huge $$$) but there is little benefit for this. Node system wifi is essentially already like having several tiny cell nodes placed around a building, and it's probably more efficient at it than 5g ever will be.