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

[Mal0]

I helped a friend's sister do some work to her car. Cracked her radiator (dunno how she managed to do so in winter) and did some other maintenance things around the car. It's a 2020 Volkwagen Jetta. Man was it a bitch and a half to work on. So many plastic pieces that were cheap and broke easily, and with such narrow spaces to work on. Not to mention all the codes I had to go in and check.

Compare that with my first car I worked on regularly to get it running, a 90's celica, where a lot of the pieces were sturdy (even the plastics) and there was much more room to work in there due to the lack of electric equipment and wires, and it makes me feel like a boomer when I complain that there is too much tech in cars these days. Sure some features are nice, and others are good for safety, but the cost is making things harder to do yourself when it comes to repairs.

That's why I'm keeping my current 2007 SUV for as long as I can. It's an upper trim model with some neat bells and whistles, so it's modern enough to be comfortable and useable, but old enough to be easily worked on and repaired. Plus it's in mint condition since I bought it off an old couple with under 70k miles on it or so.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

pilfering whole rolls of TP

They could've made the amount given more than just one square per person though.

For a lot electronics you'd have to go a long, long way into the past to actually find them not running some kind of processor that doesn't run some kind of code.

So how far back would this be? The '80s?

'90s TVs could easily have some limited digital interface. Like controls of stuff like volume and color worked with a simple onscreen text display. But the difference from Current Year TVs is that such digital control systems were "hardwired" into the TV as read-only. No "firmware updates" possible.

 

[Molly White's Breast Milk]

They could've made the amount given more than just one square per person though.


So how far back would this be? The '80s?

'90s TVs could easily have some limited digital interface. Like controls of stuff like volume and color worked with a simple onscreen text display. But the difference from Current Year TVs is that such digital control systems were "hardwired" into the TV as read-only. No "firmware updates" possible.

90s TVs also had the V-Chip.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

SOLID principles.

It's a pain to debug and expand ironically, and needlessly expensive. Might make sense for excel code for an actual application? Nah.

 

[ks99]

Although I miss new TVs not being "smart" internet-connected things, I don't miss the CRT beyond some nostalgia.

Heavy, the picture itself can degrade over time, very vulnerable to "burn-in", takes up a lot of space, heavy...

I'll take all of those issues over the still-garbage LCDs today. $600 monitors used to be incredible, and now they're all dog shit. Every single LCD on the market is a blurry mess when displaying something moving, and it's fucking disgusting. Are there mitigations? Yes. Are they good? No. I'd say OLED is our only hope, but that technology actually seems to have burn-in as an actual problem, instead of how it was with CRTs, where (at least in my experience) it was a problem only if you displayed the same shit for fucking YEARS at a time. In the maybe 17 years I used CRT monitors on a daily basis for hours on end, not once did I see one of mine have burn in, not even the Windows taskbar. I would only ever see terminals or store TVs that would have weird looking issues. Online I've seen some awful looking arcade monitors.

I miss eMachines.
They had some really good PC bundles.
View attachment 2769804

You miss the price. The computers themselves were fucking garbage, but to be fair, my dad used one for over 10 years.

 

[Born to Be Wasted]

You miss the price. The computers themselves were fucking garbage, but to be fair, my dad used one for over 10 years.

Well they were kinda slow but I loved the games that were preinstalled on them. There was this hack n' slash game on them that I used to enjoy called FATE where you would hunt monsters at dungeons, collect weapons, and go fishing. It was surprisingly good.

 

[ks99]

Well they were kinda slow but I loved the games that were preinstalled on them. There was this hack n' slash game on them that I used to enjoy called FATE where you would hunt monsters at dungeons, collect weapons, and go fishing. It was surprisingly good.

Lol looks like it was made by WildTangent. I had so many laptops filled with that company's bloatware. Blasterball was actually a not a bad time waster though.

 

[Born to Be Wasted]

Lol looks like it was made by WildTangent. I had so many laptops filled with that company's bloatware. Blasterball was actually a not a bad time waster though.

Yeah. Blasterball 2 was okay although it got repetitive.

 

[Chaos Control]

So many plastic pieces that were cheap and broke easily

I have friends in the American auto industry and it's depressing to hear that most meetings are just going through each part and reducing it's cost. They've cut so many corners that the cars just make it past warranty before it starts to crumble. And this is done through what is called VAVE (Value Analysis Value Engineering) which was suppose to optimize the productions of parts but turned into 'how shitty can we make something before customers notice.' I'd like to think this is only for American cars but its obvious the others do this too.

There are high quality plastics out there but everything today is recycled slag from China. So those pieces of plastic that you had to deal with probably where made out of a decent polymer in earlier models but in time the bean-counters came in and pushed for a 3 cent cost saving year after year and now we end up with cars where a handful of shit breaks as you try to fix it.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

I have friends in the American auto industry and it's depressing to hear that most meetings are just going through each part and reducing it's cost. They've cut so many corners that the cars just make it past warranty before it starts to crumble. And this is done through what is called VAVE (Value Analysis Value Engineering) which was suppose to optimize the productions of parts but turned into 'how shitty can we make something before customers notice.' I'd like to think this is only for American cars but its obvious the others do this too.

There are high quality plastics out there but everything today is recycled slag from China. So those pieces of plastic that you had to deal with probably where made out of a decent polymer in earlier models but in time the bean-counters came in and pushed for a 3 cent cost saving year after year and now we end up with cars where a handful of shit breaks as you try to fix it.

Cheap plastics are a problem for replacement parts too. Lot of no name brand parts like expansion tanks and plastic pipes seem to be made of that weak and brittle recycled plastic that fails very quickly. You have to go out of your way to find that nicer virgin plastic.

 

[AnotherPleb]

I wish cars had cassette tape players and even cd players in them. My fucking new honda doesn't have a cd player or cassette player and I collect cds and cassettes. Obviously I can just bluetooth my phone but it would be more convenient to just pop my music in and let it play rather than look it up and play it on my phone.

If they allowed that then you could listen to whatever you want without their approval.

 

[cybertoaster]

I really miss when shit could actually work offline, when software wasnt designed to only work when connected to a server and still offer full functionality even without a signal.

Nowadays you get locked out, fuck this timeline.

I helped a friend's sister do some work to her car. Cracked her radiator (dunno how she managed to do so in winter) and did some other maintenance things around the car. It's a 2020 Volkwagen Jetta. Man was it a bitch and a half to work on. So many plastic pieces that were cheap and broke easily, and with such narrow spaces to work on. Not to mention all the codes I had to go in and check.

Compare that with my first car I worked on regularly to get it running, a 90's celica, where a lot of the pieces were sturdy (even the plastics) and there was much more room to work in there due to the lack of electric equipment and wires, and it makes me feel like a boomer when I complain that there is too much tech in cars these days. Sure some features are nice, and others are good for safety, but the cost is making things harder to do yourself when it comes to repairs.

That's why I'm keeping my current 2007 SUV for as long as I can. It's an upper trim model with some neat bells and whistles, so it's modern enough to be comfortable and useable, but old enough to be easily worked on and repaired. Plus it's in mint condition since I bought it off an old couple with under 70k miles on it or so.

TBH toyotas were always durable cars while vws have always been known to break in expensive ways. A friend got a golf brand-new and went thru 4 gearbox changes until the warranty ran out and the dealership dumped him.

 

[byuu]

They could've made the amount given more than just one square per person though.


So how far back would this be? The '80s?

'90s TVs could easily have some limited digital interface. Like controls of stuff like volume and color worked with a simple onscreen text display. But the difference from Current Year TVs is that such digital control systems were "hardwired" into the TV as read-only. No "firmware updates" possible.

OSD pretty much guarantees that it uses a processor.
Usually masked ROM because that's cheaper so it would be read-only though.

 

[Cryonic Haunted Bullets]

What does the internet-connected stuff even do? Remind me to buy milk or something? Because I can tell whether I need to buy more milk by looking at how much milk is in the refrigerator when I open the door. There's lights and everything, and it's really easy to see what's in there. With my Mark 1 Eyeballs(tm). If there isn't any milk, or there's just a little bit left, it's time to buy more.

I'm reminded of the only good Hackernews comment:

 

[AmpleApricots]

So how far back would this be? The '80s?

Depends on what exactly we're talking about but highly integrated (for the time) stuff started showing up from the 70s to the 80s in home appliances. A lot of these very early OSDs you talk about were actually kinda complicated setups of a whole slathering of custom ICs and a MCU master. (I only remember this because I used to have to do with a whole lot of fancy KVM switches with OSD and they used some of the custom ICs to splice that in) There were tons of different, specialized video processors for different features you'd need in a TV, like SAB3035 or TDA8440 (two random ones I still remember) you'd then combine with a MCU like some Phillips one (optionally with more and more additional functions integrated depending on what year we're talking about) which is related to Intel's MCS-48 with a different opcode list + i2c integrated, which is how you'd then control the other chips (which originated there in the 80s as a standardized method to have all that custom circuity in these devices talk to each other) and a few other extras. Don't underestimate the complexity of the earlier TVs, there's a lot of stuff you have to do you need some processing power for and no, it wasn't all hardwired, that wouldn't have been very economical. These devices had their firmware too, be it in an EEPROM or mask programmed, the programs just had to be simpler and updates weren't practically possible so the manufacturers made sure that shit actually worked. Now of course all that stuff is one single chip doing absolutely everything. For such devices you do need a bit of processing power, what you don't need is a full linux distribution running a webbrowser and a whole network and python stack. Otherwise, I think you could get it down to an art building specific one chip solutions for such devices with limited processing power, only doing what they strictly need to do and not more.

It'd probably be greener too because all that internet shittery and superflous processing wastes energy, in operation and also in manufacturing the new model because the old one stops being supported.

 

[Cybertonia]

TBH toyotas were always durable cars while vws have always been known to break in expensive ways. A friend got a golf brand-new and went thru 4 gearbox changes until the warranty ran out and the dealership dumped him.

Even though VWs are terrible and cheap, but even on a shitty car if someone manages to crash 4 gearboxes in under 60,000 miles then I'd be willing to suspect the problem doesn't lie entirely with the gearbox...

Used to have a toyota a few years ago. OK car but they're ass in ice and snow so I had to get rid of it. As soon as toyota's ABS computers detect ice they just go LMAO I GIVE UP YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN GL!

Even on the new ones. Went for a ride last winter in a friend's (at the time) brand new 2020 camry and we almost died when the ABS computer completely gave up and we slid into an intersection. I guess their programmers are too busy to work on that problem, they probably took that team and reassigned them to in-car tik tok integration or some other dumb shit nobody asked for.

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

If you ever see "Century 21 Calling" (or the MST3K riff of it), you can see that back in the mid 20th century, it was thought that one day people could remote control stuff with ordinary landline phones. So the idea of appliances being connected isn't new, although maybe not in the disturbing way of Current Year "IOT".

The tech was available to consumers since at least 1980, but I guess back then anybody with the cash to buy a PC, install a computerized breaker, pay somebody to write the software for a personal phone hotline, etc... That person could afford a maid and a stay at home wife.

 

[Falcos_Commisar]

I hate the fact that CD/DVD drives are disappearing from PCs. They've been disappearing from laptops for a few years now but now they're going from desktop towers too. I still use CDs/DVDs either to play (games, music or movies), backup data or even transfer files or even operating systems to older systems. Some older computers struggle to boot from a memory stick and only work when the OS is on a disc.

My case was one of maybe 25-30 still sold that have the 5.25 slot off a disk drive

Fractal design. Huge, heavy steel box but it's a desktop so who cares.

Even though VWs are terrible and cheap, but even on a shitty car if someone manages to crash 4 gearboxes in under 60,000 miles then I'd be willing to suspect the problem doesn't lie entirely with the gearbox...

Used to have a toyota a few years ago. OK car but they're ass in ice and snow so I had to get rid of it. As soon as toyota's ABS computers detect ice they just go LMAO I GIVE UP YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN GL!

Even on the new ones. Went for a ride last winter in a friend's (at the time) brand new 2020 camry and we almost died when the ABS computer completely gave up and we slid into an intersection. I guess their programmers are too busy to work on that problem, they probably took that team and reassigned them to in-car tik tok integration or some other dumb shit nobody asked for.

No your friend forgot to buy SNOW TIRES.

I've driven a 15 year old Toyota (Lexus ES300) in the snow and it did a ok. Because I drove slow and timed everything in advance.

Friend wasn't too sharp, sorry to say.

 

[888Flux]

Websites forcing you to log in or sign up to access content.

"Internet-of-Things" ISM band modules in every device from your fridge to your car to your toaster to your light switch - huge security risk

5G and nu-Cellular technology that solely exists for the purpose of multi-billion dollar Telecom companies to milk guberment subsidies. The whole "5G causes cancer / ebolaids / is mind control / whatever" pysop was designed to deliberately poison the well and cloud information surrounding what is essentially a massive grift by companies like AT&T. Also the security risks posed by our Chicom friends manufacturing all the equipment too. Even after the Huwaei import ban. This could not possibly go wrong. I love China and His Honorable Xi Jing Ping.

 

[Cybertonia]

No your friend forgot to buy SNOW TIRES.

I've driven a 15 year old Toyota (Lexus ES300) in the snow and it did a ok. Because I drove slow and timed everything in advance.

Friend wasn't too sharp, sorry to say.

Oh yeah, he's a shit driver who over-depends on his brakes and doesn't have the instinct that you gotta let off em when they lock up and start slipping.

But with my old corolla it just got so annoying that every time the tires touched a piece of ice the ABS computer would have a stroke and lock up the brakes. Replaced it with an old subie a few years ago and that solved the problem, so I'll run that car until the frame rots out or it's defective head gaskets inevitably self-destruct.