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

[TVB]

It became popular because it allowed you to call people through the internet without using your call charges. You could call someone across borders with no roaming.

Yes I am well aware of that, but that doesn't change the fact that I never used it and never will because fuck social networking

 

[Stanley Ipkiss]

It became popular because it allowed you to call people through the internet without using your call charges. You could call someone across borders with no roaming.

The calling feature came a bit later after Viber did it first. It was mainly the chat feature that made it blow up. I get why someone in the US wouldn't get the point of Whatsapp, what with unlimited texting and MMS for $x every month. But in a lot of these other countries, each text costs a lot of money, so the ability to send multiple texts and pictures with just a couple of kilobytes of mobile data was game changing.
Now it's not that unique and it's become more like Facebook was, in that you get it because everyone you know has it.

Now that it's turned into a full fledged social media platform with "channels" and "follows" and shit, it's no better than any of the others.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

whats a good, user friendly alternative?

 

[seri0us]

whats a good, user friendly alternative?

- xmpp
- matrix
- jitsi

 

[Flatline]

Blessed not to live in a third-world country where life is dependent on WhatsApp.

 

[Book Thief]

I miss when a game's installer used to come with options to remove certain features like textures or music to save on disc space. In an era when hard drive memory was at a premium, developers were forced to optimize the shit out of their games to ensure as many people could enjoy their games as possible.

Nowadays? Nobody compresses shit anymore. If you wanna play the latest of games, you're forced to download uncompressed 4K textures, regardless of your computer's specs or if you even have a 4K monitor. As a result, games these days are in the 100's of gigabytes and I fucking hate it.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Google image search became very good up until recently. The reverse image search was particularly great and always led to info quickly but now its impossible to look up anything.

Now it only gives you links to stores like shein or alibaba instead of looking at the origin of an image and no matter what search term you use it will flood you with AI generated garbage that is of no use for absolutely anything, its all just trash and the worst kind of spam.

Duck duck go is also shit and pinterest is also sufferin from similar issues.

 

[thog]

Google image search became very good up until recently. The reverse image search was particularly great...

I have had some good experiences with Yandex on that front, but it's a Russian service so be forewarned.

 

[PC LOAD LETTER]

The realization that consumer technology will never again be truly exciting or innovative.

How exciting was it to hear broadcast radio for the first time? Or to see moving pictures at home, even more so when you went to the local Sears, Montgomery Ward, or JCPenny to see them in color? Having a Commodore 64 was a great time to be alive, as was BBSing and phreaking. It's hard to imagine anyone saying this about Windows now, but Windows 95 was truly revolutionary for its time. Say what you will about Apple, but I think Jobs was the greatest salesman of our time and he was enough of an asshole behind the scenes to actually whip the teams at Apple into making some pretty magical stuff.

Coming to the realization that all of that is gone now and will never, ever be coming back makes me sad. There is nothing to be excited about in consumer technology anymore. There's no innovation, no risk-taking. What was the latest Apple event all about? A slightly faster phone with a USB-C port, and 15 minutes of cringe virtue signalling about the environment. Microsoft's latest event wasn't even open to the public and the only thing that they announced was that AI is going to be integrated into Windows 11! Yay!

Yeah yeah, I'm dooming, gimme my top hats. Hard not to when you grew up in such a whirlwind of exciting change and promise, and now everything sucks shit, isn't it?

 

[Kalsarikännit]

I hope whoever invented chiclet keyboards experiences eternal suffering. Thanks for ruining laptops forever, jackass.

I know I posted something similar before, but I just wanted to emphasize how much I fucking detest chiclet keyboards, to a point where I just bought a 12 year old Thinkpad from eBay just to avoid using them.

Call me crazy, but I like them.
Of course, I only use Apple’s keyboards, so I can definitely understand why you would hate a chiclet keyboard on a cheap plastic Acer craptop.

 

[WelperHelper99]

I miss when a game's installer used to come with options to remove certain features like textures or music to save on disc space. In an era when hard drive memory was at a premium, developers were forced to optimize the shit out of their games to ensure as many people could enjoy their games as possible.

Nowadays? Nobody compresses shit anymore. If you wanna play the latest of games, you're forced to download uncompressed 4K textures, regardless of your computer's specs or if you even have a 4K monitor. As a result, games these days are in the 100's of gigabytes and I fucking hate it.

Amen. Oh, you want to put a dinky little game on a budget laptop with a 256 gig ssd, and half is in use? Fuck you, 20 gigs. The game isn't actually that intense, it's Just in 1080p. Nevermind mainstream titles that can't even keep it under 50, because the "memory is cheap" philosophy is rampant. I still remember when a 100 gig HDD would get you far. Not now. That's a whole ass game. I just want to play some decent fun shit on the go, more than chess and minesweeper, please.

 

[seri0us]

Amen. Oh, you want to put a dinky little game on a budget laptop with a 256 gig ssd, and half is in use? Fuck you, 20 gigs. The game isn't actually that intense, it's Just in 1080p. Nevermind mainstream titles that can't even keep it under 50, because the "memory is cheap" philosophy is rampant. I still remember when a 100 gig HDD would get you far. Not now. That's a whole ass game. I just want to play some decent fun shit on the go, more than chess and minesweeper, please.

Also in tandem with size download caps from ISP. I suppose this has always been a point of frustration, but dividing whatever the monthly limit is amongst how many people are there and taking into account that pretty much everyone likes a bit of 1080p videos and maybe some modern games at the end of the day and it can get pretty meager.

 

[Mike Matei's Penis]

New PC's all having RGB bullshit. I shouldn't have to use a third party program to make my RAM chips stop glowing Windows Movie Maker rainbow plugin effect like a literal pride parade.

 

[The Last Stand]

Nowadays? Nobody compresses shit anymore. If you wanna play the latest of games, you're forced to download uncompressed 4K textures, regardless of your computer's specs or if you even have a 4K monitor. As a result, games these days are in the 100's of gigabytes and I fucking hate it.

Remember on-disc DLC where content in the disc would be locked behind a paywall? Now, games will just inflate space on your finite drive with cosmetics through updates that you have no choice BUT to download, even if you don't buy them.

Also yes, dumb tvs are dead and it is sad. I just want a screen most of the time. Sometimes it's convenient, but most of the time it's bullshit

I thought it was just phones that would strip ports and features in favor of Bluetooth connectivity.

 

[Dysnomia]

Portable tape recorders. I got one for Christmas when I was nine and it was so cool at the time. You could play music cassettes and record yourself. You could amuse yourself for hours. I recently found it but it doesn't work. Might be fixable. But eww D batteries.

 

[WelperHelper99]

Also in tandem with size download caps from ISP. I suppose this has always been a point of frustration, but dividing whatever the monthly limit is amongst how many people are there and taking into account that pretty much everyone likes a bit of 1080p videos and maybe some modern games at the end of the day and it can get pretty meager.

Haven't ran into that much because I don't download much, but if we're talking download speed, and say, your Xbox is in the basement over Wi-fi, fuck me. It's still better than dial up, but I expected a bit more from 21st century broadband ngl

 

[Stasi]

I've always used thunderbird for desktop email but since switching to windows just used the basic Mail app. It was simple but met my needs and I was too lazy to set up another email client. Well, Microshit just forced an update to Outlook and are now pushing ads down my throat. Not only do I get shitty ads in my desktop email client but they show up in my inbox as forced spam email and MS want me to pay for the privilege of not seeing them.

Back to thunderbird I go, Fuck you MS.

 

[Spruce Supremacist]

Portable tape recorders. I got one for Christmas when I was nine and it was so cool at the time. You could play music cassettes and record yourself. You could amuse yourself for hours. I recently found it but it doesn't work. Might be fixable. But eww D batteries.

Most of the time all it takes is to replace the belt, since those disintegrate over time. As for D batteries, here's a little trick for you: take a regular AA battery and wrap it in paper/electrical tape/whatever several times to make it fatter till it fits like a D battery -- problem solved. AAs and Ds are identical in functionality, only size/capacity differs.

 

[DavidS877]

Most of the time all it takes is to replace the belt, since those disintegrate over time. As for D batteries, here's a little trick for you: take a regular AA battery and wrap it in paper/electrical tape/whatever several times to make it fatter till it fits like a D battery -- problem solved. AAs and Ds are identical in functionality, only size/capacity differs.

Or go to your favorite Chinese crap site(like Amazon) and get the adapters. Can get one with a single AA to D or 3 AA(in parallel) to D for more capacity than a single AA.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

I miss forums.

A lot of my teenage years were spent roleplaying on forum websites for weeb shit. I met a lot of people who were pretty influential in my life through that and I still enjoy the writing that goes along with.

Basically every forum always had a life expectancy. It was something along the lines of how much bullshit could the community take from the Owners/Higher level characters being cunts before it got to be too much bullshit and the whole thing fell apart.

Normally you'd run into the same people in the same circles because often forums would reform and the same interested people would come back. As a result people would kinda get a reputation as you'd expect and you would generally know who was who, or what certain sites admins were like, what was a spin-off of who, etc. etc.

Now we have discord.

I hate discord. The word count is too small, the quality is ass, and there's too many faggots shitting up the place with their god damned pronouns and gender identity. Plus everyone wants to have their NSFW Porn sharing bullshit, and everyone has OOC channels where they all hang out all day and fuck me, its just so damn annoying.