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

[Shovel Mech Pilot]

This is a boomer-tier post but I miss when getting on the internet was a bit more difficult. The general quality was better since you had to be somewhat motivated to get there in the first place.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

Does every car need a screen on the dashboard?

Drive older, better built, cheaper to maintain, slightly higher fuel cost vehicles. Plus, the computer chips in those are primarily diagnostic.

FUCKING PROTIP.

This is a boomer-tier post but I miss when getting on the internet was a bit more difficult. The general quality was better since you had to be somewhat motivated to get there in the first place.

I came from the BBS era and oh God it's not even imperceptible anymore, it's unrepentant idiocy. Can you imagine trying to explain CLI to some of these people?

 

[Ginger Piglet]

This is a boomer-tier post but I miss when getting on the internet was a bit more difficult. The general quality was better since you had to be somewhat motivated to get there in the first place.

This is not a boomer complaint, it's very legitimate. Lowering the barriers to entry hasn't "democratised" the digital public sphere, it's just allowed every dribbler, foamer, and loudmouth to shriek their ignorance and narcissism to all and sundry.

 

[Shovel Mech Pilot]

This is not a boomer complaint, it's very legitimate. Lowering the barriers to entry hasn't "democratised" the digital public sphere, it's just allowed every dribbler, foamer, and loudmouth to shriek their ignorance and narcissism to all and sundry.

It actually did the opposite of democratization. I miss the days when the internet was populated by hardline free speech advocates. Now it's just the rabble clammoring for opposing voices to be silenced because they disagree with whatever narrative CNN/MSNBC/DNC is pushing today.

 

[Blamo]

In general it is amusing to look back to those early 90s presentations and shows talking about the Internet. The Information Super Highway! So much optimism, gone all to waste because ads make money and people only care about shiny multimedia content and convenience.

It actually did the opposite of democratization. I miss the days when the internet was populated by hardline free speech advocates. Now it's just the rabble clammoring for opposing voices to be silenced because they disagree with whatever narrative CNN/MSNBC/DNC is pushing today.

Feel old yet?

You -- Yes, You -- Are TIME's Person of the Year -- Printout -- TIME

archived 12 Apr 2021 12:18:31 UTC

archive.is

Spoiler: You -- Yes, You --- Are TIME's Person of the Year

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
(WATCH: YouTube's 50 Best Videos)

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
(PHOTOS: The History of the Computer)

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
(LIST: 50 Best Websites 2013)

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

MORE: TIME's 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg

 

[Zero0]

I only have seen that in the degenerative shit hole known as discord. Can you give any other examples ?

reddit

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Something old that I wish would finally die is functions like "Set image as desktop background"

I miss 3dfx. Wonder where they would be now if they had some foresight.

In hindsight they had their trajectory from the start, in a way they were cursed by having the absolute perfect product as a debut and kept building on that architecture, making faster but not really making it more advanced.

What I would have liked to see was PowerVR going further on PC. They made money with the Dreamcast, the Kyro 1 and 2 punched well above its weight and as it turns out their technology was actually the future and they made the GPU for iPhones up until a couple of years ago. Along the way both Nvidia and AMD have adopted their idea of tile based rendering while game engines themselves adopted deferred rendering. Tile based deferred rendering was what PVR was all about.

 

[Puff]

Does every car need a screen on the dashboard?

Backup cameras are now required by law in the US, so yes.

 

[Toolbox]

Backup cameras are now required by law in the US, so yes.

The endless reach of US car safety regulation has been demolishing the car industry for years. Why not make every car a massive hideous blob with ten billion crumple zones, and interior big enough to lay down in both the front and back, to the point that the car fills up the entire lane of the highway? Just comparing today's cars to 90s cars is a big enough difference but when you compare todays "compact" cars to those from the 60s it gets ridiculous. And we're actually at the point that todays cars are heavier than those made almost entirely from steel. What point could possibly be made to backup cameras being a safety NECESSITY and not just a useful feature? Eventually cars are just going to be filled with bubble wrap.

 

[stupidpieceofshit]

What point could possibly be made to backup cameras being a safety NECESSITY and not just a useful feature?

It doesn't help (in my experience at least) that it seems a shit ton of cars have horrid rear view visibility even pre camera requirement. There have been cars I have driven where if I turn my head back to look out the back window I couldn't see shit.

The whole "reason" the backup cameras started to be required was because there was a period of a few years where young kids were getting ran over by cars backing up.

 

[Molly White's Breast Milk]

The whole "reason" the backup cameras started to be required was because there was a period of a few years where young kids were getting ran over by cars backing up.

This is why you have several kids. They're little retards that get themselves killed doing stupid shit so it's good to have a few spares.

 

[Puff]

It doesn't help (in my experience at least) that it seems a shit ton of cars have horrid rear view visibility even pre camera requirement. There have been cars I have driven where if I turn my head back to look out the back window I couldn't see shit.

The whole "reason" the backup cameras started to be required was because there was a period of a few years where young kids were getting ran over by cars backing up.

They have horrible rear visibility due to crash requirements. The spiral must continue.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

The endless reach of US car safety regulation has been demolishing the car industry for years. Why not make every car a massive hideous blob with ten billion crumple zones, and interior big enough to lay down in both the front and back, to the point that the car fills up the entire lane of the highway? Just comparing today's cars to 90s cars is a big enough difference but when you compare todays "compact" cars to those from the 60s it gets ridiculous. And we're actually at the point that todays cars are heavier than those made almost entirely from steel. What point could possibly be made to backup cameras being a safety NECESSITY and not just a useful feature? Eventually cars are just going to be filled with bubble wrap.

People also generally suck at driving and maintaining their cars. All the modern safety nannies only make it worse when you look at the normie driver.

 

[Never Scored]

People also generally suck at driving and maintaining their cars. All the modern safety nannies only make it worse when you look at the normie driver.

Honestly, you're probably going to see more stuff like the Slingshot as time goes on. Lots of people who just want something simple that works to get from point a to point b, without a bunch of safety features driving costs through the roof. Even they have a screen in them though.

 

[Madre Muerte]

Braided cables, it's a computer not a colourful toy! That is often an advantage in budget electronics, I don't have to deal with them.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Braided cables, it's a computer not a colourful toy! That is often an advantage in budget electronics, I don't have to deal with them.

This. In every case where I've had one, the braid slowly fell apart and I had a tangled mess that I had to cut off with scissors. What's the advantage supposed to be again?

 

[Toolbox]

People also generally suck at driving and maintaining their cars. All the modern safety nannies only make it worse when you look at the normie driver.

And the maintenance issue is only compounded by the fact that maitenance becomes harder and harder the more stupidly complex safety requirements make every part in the car. Everything is continually proprietary as well.
Edit: Saw a good point recently about the whole trend towards massive tablet displays, from that Donut Media channel. They move away from the old radio socket standard that most cars had to a completely proprietary, mounted in system that you could likely never repair yourself, and you definitely can't reasonably mod. Cars basically had a standardized media port until this shit came around.

 

[Blamo]

And the maintenance issue is only compounded by the fact that maitenance becomes harder and harder the more stupidly complex safety requirements make every part in the car. Everything is continually proprietary as well.

As a funny sidenote: All the regulations makes the barrier to entry higher and higher. Established businesses "love" being regulated because they already made it, the new guy would need to jump impossible hoops to even get started.

At least this basically helps to keep Chinese cars out from the American and European markets. They would have the Industrial capacity to actually flood the market, but you couldn't import them en mass due to lacking safety and possibly environmental standards. (as far as I know)

 

[Toolbox]

As a funny sidenote: All the regulations makes the barrier to entry higher and higher. Established businesses "love" being regulated because they already made it, the new guy would need to jump impossible hoops to even get started.

At least this basically helps to keep Chinese cars out from the American and European markets. They would have the Industrial capacity to actually flood the market, but you couldn't import them en mass due to lacking safety and possibly environmental standards. (as far as I know)

By safety alone most Chinese manufacturers are going to be barred probably for decades. Their cars actually just completely accordion during crash tests. Or at least used to.

Some claims of crash test safety improving but I have to wonder if it's Chinese manufacturers just giving a 'perfect' version to crash testers and making crap for most of the market.

Would probably still fail environmentally anyways.

 

[Blamo]

By safety alone most Chinese manufacturers are going to be barred probably for decades. Their cars actually just completely accordion during crash tests. Or at least used to.

Some claims of crash test safety improving but I have to wonder if it's Chinese manufacturers just giving a 'perfect' version to crash testers and making crap for most of the market.

Would probably still fail environmentally anyways.

Also it's an area where foreign brands basically stomp the market... of course, perhaps this could be partly a choice to let foreign powers to use your market so you will have more of an influence on them. I mean sure Japanese imports hurt the US auto industry, but it gave Washington extra leverage over Tokyo. You don't play ball? Fine, we will just put tariffs on your exports and hurt your economy. Making foreign capital being addicted to both your markets and production capacity is pretty serious business.

The other part is... they don't care about quality and they still lack the experience to build good designs. Corporate knowledge and experience are priceless. If you lose them or don't have them it can be extremely difficult to get it. Especially as industries progress towards more complexity.

On a other note, I think it would be a hard sell to sell a Chinese car in the West. People still think their quality sucks and frankly the Chinese suck at branding. Chery and Geely simply doesn't sounds like anything other than a small Yugo style mystery metal car.