I'm not subscribing to anything. If I buy something, it's fully functional, and it's mine. There is no ongoing relationship between me and the manufacturer. Done.
I'm working on this, the subscription model has gotten so expensive now that literally everything uses it. Do you have any tips besides "just pirate everything"?
you know, I (supposedly - you cant prove anything, mr. prosecutor) may have done this as a kid. then I hopped hardcore on to the FLOSS bandwagon and never looked back. everything I need I can find as a FLOSS package (firmware often excluded, of course). all the learning that I (supposedly) did through the "hack" as a kid now goes into writing original code and supporting open source software. FLOSS literally (may have) made an honest man out of me :-)
This is what I'm resorting to. Instead of pirating Lightroom, I'm using RawTherapee for my (non-professional) photo editing of my x100t photos. In the old days, I'd have done it (I still have a very old version of LR exe in one of my hard drives) but today I'd rather not have a ton of keygens and crap on my laptop.
I've wanted an EV for years, but I'm sticking with my very old and fuel-efficient ICE car until it's absolutely dead. At that point, I'm hoping that some model of EV emerges as the most hackable one, like the Nissan Leaf. I'll buy a very used one of those & hack it.
The only thing I'm willing to pay a subscription for are the essentials that have no product alternative, i.e. utilities - power, water, Internet. I refuse to pay for streaming when they used to sell DVDs and CDs with the same content. I refuse to pay for game subscription services when you used to be able to buy the games outright. I refuse to pay for software-as-a-service or bullshit like cloud service integrations for smart home stuff. If I don't own it, I don't buy it.
At least for utilities you can reframe it as paying for parcels of utility, and then consuming them, like you do for food. Middleman bullshit like cloud services that refuse to let you just self-host can screw off. Having to spend money to spend extra resources to deal with a 3rd party is obnoxious, doubly so when they just decide they don't want to support it anymore and pull the plug.
Except more and more companies are hopping on this gravy train because they can get away with it. At some point (and that point may be now already, depending on the sector), it's going to be difficult-to-impossible to buy anything without this subscription bullshit.
I’ve thought this since I was young. Background music? Cool, keep it quiet so we can talk.
Does this mean loud music is bad? No, I’ve been a put my head in the PA speakers metal head since I was young too. But I don’t expect a waiter to serve me then.
Beyond that, it’s a known problem that as you get older audio distractions become more severe, and I’m sure there’s a neurodivergent dimension to it too, so it’s one of those things where we are actively punishing people for wanting to be out and socialise. Also sure it’s one of those things where everyone thinks they have to do it but don’t
If I know I'm going to one of those extra loud bar or clubs, I always being some earplugs. I have some pretty stealthy ones in a mint tin. I can't hear people talk either way, might as well not hurt my ears.
Interesting fact: I just got a new ev (so a battery hooked up to a computer with wheels) - and it has buttons! It also has dials for sound and climate.
Now to be fair it also takes interacting with a touchscreen to turn on the heated seats, but I'd say it's progress in the right direction.
Bring back stick-shift, too. People shouldn’t be driving if they have no grasp of the mass and inertia of their car. We should be able to disengage the engine at will. And we should have to pay attention when we drive.
I don't want to have a subscription for everything. It used to be possible to pay a one-time fee for software and use it as long as I want. Now I have to pay a monthly fee and once I finish paying, I can't use the software anymore. And it's not like I constantly get updates for the software. Often it stays the same for months or years.
I understand that software has a price, but no way these prices are sometimes justified...
I had a Adobe subscription for Professional stuff and they charged me an early termination fee when canceling. There are SO many free alternatives and with this policy they've ensured that I use all of them and never ever Adobe ever again.
Smart tech in general is annoying and dumb. I want my TV to just be a tv with inputs, I don't need built in firmware and updates to shove ads in my face. I don't want my car to have a touch screen to adjust the A/C, just give me a knob or buttons.
Algorithms that try to suggest me content are universally bad, and all searches should provide results based solely on the terms, syntax, and language entered. Same with anything that tries to provide me content based on data harvested about my location or demographic.
I feel like this could go either way whether it's a boomer opinion or not. Real boomers are not very tech literate and probably don't have much of a notion of online privacy.
On the other hand for those that were adults in the early years of the internet, they likely think we're all giving away too much of our private information.
Boomers (my parents' generation) were telling us 90's kids how dangerous it was to put your information online, but then it seemed once social media happened they all forgot about such privacy concerns entirely. They were right the first time!
Sneaker culture is incredibly weird. Shoes made by children in China with a limited edition color are in such high demand that there are sites where people refresh F5 constantly hoping to have the honor to pay hundreds and hundreds for shoes that cost $7.50 to make. Then half of the time people won't even wear them outside, they'll put them in a bag and change shoes when they get to work or whatever. Or some might not even wear the shoes at all and just display them.
I'm an old soul in this sense. I love a quality goodyear welted shoe, and made in USA, UK, or Italy usually. An Allen Edmonds strandmok is a fantastic everyday shoe for me. I like to purchase nice things in general, use them, take care of them. I really hate throwaway culture as well.
Please nobody hate me for this, I'm a bit self conscious being an admin of my own instance and don't want to piss people off haha. If you're into gym shoe culture that's awesome. If I knew you in real life I'd probably make fun of you for a minute if I saw you walking outside in socks carrying your $400 limited edition sneakers, but then you can make fun of me for one of the thousands of things I do and it's all in good fun.
I think two out of those believes stem from survivorship bias. You think of old music and consumer products as superior because the only ones that "survived" are the good ones. No one remembers bad music from 50 years ago, and for every old thermos flask/blender/knife that you see around there are dozens that broke years ago.
There was song from the 60s (supposedly the best music everyone tells me) called "7 little girls". The chorus went "7 little girls sitting the back seat kissing and hugging with Fred"
Thankfully a mostly forgotten song now, but a clear example of how bloody awful pop music is not a new phenomenon.
I say yes for the music one, maybe not for the first. There are literally different materials being used and increasingly optimised-for-profit-to-effort-ratio processes. Many things are just straight up made more cheaply because we have the technology to do that.
Although for the music one, a relevant lyric comes to mind:
Hip hop is pretty mainstream now but it started as counter culture. And I don't think a sample in a song makes it similar to the sampled song. A lot of tracks that rely on samples completely create something new. Look at J Dilla who relied almost entirely on samples. His music isn't a collection of old songs, it's entirely new songs. I guess this thread is for boomer takes.
My theory on the first one is that it's usually hard to make things cheap and consistent, so it often starts off as bad, then good but expensive, and then trends towards and past "good enough"
Modern music is fire when you know where to look but I've always felt like pop music has been taking a very slow weird turn. It seems like 1970s and earlier it was mostly good, and mostly good after, but at this point I'm just confused
I think it's simultaneously an opinion held by very old people who remember when they could just walk to the store and younger urbanists that want us to return to that. The people in the middle grew up in a car oriented society that hadn't completely lost small businesses and been locked down by traffic. And they now have a house way out in the burbs with a disdain for the traffic of the city. Urbanism threatens their way of life now. That's my opinion.
Most of the US has dug a hole that can't easily be fixed with its car-centric developments, people living there pretty much need a car for everything.
Driving there may be a pleasure, but I personally wouldn't want to live in that situation at all. I'm glad and lucky to have the equivalent of a mall just a 10 minute bike ride away, 25 minute walk, 5 minute bus trip.
America is definitely pretty deeply invested in car-centeic living. But I don't think it's impossible to get out of it. There's rising pressure to lower housing costs, traffic, and improve infrastructure quality. My city (which is about as car centric as it gets) is growing fast and most of that is with infil development. It's going to be a slow transformation but I think it will happen. I don't think American cities will look like European or Asian cities because they won't evolve the same way. But they will look different to how they look now.
Yep I agree - It's definitely possible for the US to shift away from it, some cities have even been transforming some of their busy central roads into pedestrianised boulevards (such as times square in NY, and a couple others I can't remember off the top of my head) and from an outsiders perspective been successful.
The difficulty is mainly going to be places like Culver City where some just don't get that cars don't scale well in dense urban areas like cities - they've voted to remove a 2 year old bike lane just to get back an additional driving lane. That's just going to move most of the bike riders back into their cars, filling that brand new driving lane (and the other existing driving lanes) with traffic that previously didn't exist. Hopefully over time positive changes will return though!
Depends on the city. In my city, you could walk across the whole thing in maybe an hour, and anything major the furthest you would have to walk is about 30 minutes.
Go pick up a heap at your local hospice shop. I've gotten a lot of mine there and made a few more out of scrap fabric. I use old flannelette cotton sheets for our spill rags.
Those cars that don't have the flecks in the paint look like children's toys
Actually, why do so many modern cars straight up look like oversized toys?
Electric cars are the worst for this IMO. Aside from the Tesla model 3, Nissan leaf and a handful of other ones... everything else looks like an oversized replica remote control toy to me. Some are nice, like the VW minivan, but most look like cheap wannabes. I can't quite put my finger on it
I always bring half a dozen hankies with me camping. They're so useful on a limited inventory. They help you grab hot things. As napkins. Allergies. Wounds. Cleaning knives. Storing spare fish hooks/lures i.e. pocket tackle. I handwash them in the river and they sun dry quiet quickly.
I bought FL Studio back in 2017 and have received free updates since then.
Meanwhile, most other software companies: "nooo, you can't own the software, you have to pay for a subscription and you can't keep using it when it's over! Also if you want updates you have to pay for the premium subscription"
The only exceptions I can think of are streaming services that simply couldn't exist as standalone one-off products (Spotify, Netflix etc). But yeah, there's no logical reason something like Photoshop should ever require more than one transaction.
Maybe for people like us, CLI is easier. I grew up with a DOS pc, and started playing with Linux as soon as we had an Internet connection that I was allowed to use to download stuff.
For my parents, who actually are boomers, give them a CLI and they think something is broken.
I'm 18 years old. I legitimately thought command line is something for hackers more than 80% of my life. Yet, rest 20% of life was enough to make me love it.
I like the concept but feel like an idiot everytime I have to google "How do I [insert simple task here]" because I can't remember the syntax, where a GUI would handheld me in a much better way through finding back what I used to be familiar with.
Anecdotally, this is a position I've seen held more often by young people than by boomers. Not sure what the statistics are exactly, but regardless it would be nice to see a cultural shift away from alcohol.
I think that's a more modern opinion. Maybe the religious boomers want tight legal controls on alcohol but the youth today are more into weed than alcohol from my experience.
I’m a certified computer expert, but I sound like a Luddite when it comes to anything mainstream.
I thought it was pretty well known that the magnitude of one’s ludditism related to their computing expertise as a U-shaped curve. That is, (actual) experts and non-experts are equally Luddite. It’s the mediocre and peri- technologists that drive hype. Right?
Hah, I haven't heard that analogy before, but I see what it's getting at. I wouldn't say it's a rule to live by, but as you learn more about technology you (usually) also learn more about its constant abuse and its critical flaws.
It’s the mediocre and peri- technologists that drive hype. Right?
I'm not sure exactly who you mean, but never believe the hype:
Steve Jobs didn't know shit about computers and took the fame from people who did, just like Edison and Musk.
Most people studied in machine learning hate the term "Artificial Intelligence", it's a marketing gimmick used by marketing.
There's a similar, but lesser, sentiment in security being called "cyber".
Anything saying "better privacy" or "more secure" without giving a specific threat scenario (like, more secure against [x] attack) - they don't know shit. Privacy and security are not linear values you can have more or less of.
Internet of Things ('smart devices') is a privacy and security NIGHTMARE, and we've known that since day 1. Companies don't care. It's easy money.
If you can't (hypothetically) run it yourself, you're the product.
Smart TVs are stupid and only exist to make ad revenue and sell user data. I'd pay extra for a TV like an LG C2 OLED but with no OS. Just a monitor that displays sources plugged in.
Had a samsung TV I caught with a pihole trying to call home. Had no way of disabling it.
Switched to a sony TV that lets you turn off smart TV mode. So far data from the router and pihole shows no attempts to bypass that and I don't think it has hidden mobile network connectivity.
What was really worrysome was that the thing tried to connect to one of those services that scan whatever you're watching - I am just using my TV as a playstation screen, even watch Netflix on playstation
also my boomer opinion on a tangent topic is that I should be able to rearrange or delete the bloatware that comes on my PS (or any device for that matter) angry fist intensifies
Remeber guys to buy your intelligent smart home frigde freezer that sinks up to your phone and uses the latest GPT models to......
I would certainly be inclined to agree on that last point
not only that, but "smartness" and longevity seem to be inversely correlated. your grandma's alarm clock she bought in the 70s most definitely still works and will still work fifty years later, while that fancy smart display your rich neighbor has is going to break after three
A recent job change caused me to revert back to my old G-Shock watch instead of my Apple Watch. I was setting the time and date and noted that the date “only” goes up to the year 2039. Even though it is already over 20 years old, I fully expect this watch to work well past 2039; I have no expectation that the Apple Watch will. Even if it technically functioned, the software and protocols would have been long abandoned.
I signed for a storage unit this week, and they require me to use an app to access the unit. Of course their servers were down when I first tried using the app. 🤦
I bought a gas stove/oven a few months ago. Took me a couple of weeks to notice that I can connect it to my wifi for some reason. I haven't, and don't intend to, but I am a little curious what features could possibly be in there.
Physical media generally has less aggressive DRM. Buy a DVD and the movies your's for life, you can even rip it and put it on a media server to make your own little streaming site.
"Buy" a movie/audiobook on Amazon and it's yours as long as the company wants you to keep it.
It’s funny because people were talking about how they were bad before they even got really big.
I remember a “Every Frame A Painting” episode talking about how their scores are basically rubbish (this was specific to marvel). Similarly about their bland color palettes, repeated story lines and CGI sky monster endings. I think in hindsight it will be a little cringe.
Spielberg and Lucas were on the money when they compared them to Westerns, and I’ve always wondered if there’s a sociological phenomenon buried in there. Some sort of nostalgic cultural ideal that gets seeded in one generation to sprout a generation or two later?
Not the person you replied to, but I doubt it personally. Usually "comics" refers specifically to the western Marvel/DC stuff, not Japanese manga where things are very different (from an outsider's perspective like myself anyway)
Have you found a good way to read a PDF? I can't stand reading for an extended period of time on a monitor or tablet. It is so much easier on the eyes to print things. Maybe you could use a color e-ink reader, but the're so friggen expensive.
Ahh that's a fair. I don't really have that issue but I use computer glasses with a blue light filter and when my eyes are feeling sensitive I usually just put some eye drops in. That happens regardless of if I'm using a computer or not though
I remember being one of the many who thought touchscreens wouldn't catch on because people loved physical keyboards too much. Of course, touchscreens weren't quite what they are today. Haptic feedback and multi-touch were game changers.
The bizarre part is how popular the keypad phones like the BlackBerry or Nokia 9000 series were, or the multitude of Windows Mobile, Psion and other devices. As soon as iPhone came out, suddenly nobody wanted keypads anymore. People are just chasing after the latest shining trends.
I was so stubborn haha. Blackberry had a phone where the touchscreen still clicked like a button when you pressed it and I thought that was the compromise everyone wanted. I was way off.
You can consider using a USB keyboard or Bluetooth keyboard with your phone. Can't really use them on-the-go though, so it is quite limiting, but it does allow a keyboard experience on a phone. This works on Android; not sure if it works with iPhone.
I used to have a bunch of keyboards but it's not a workable solution. If I have such a surface or environment as to use one, might as well just use a laptop or something.
You don't have to. The Droid 3 had a large display and an excellent slide-out keyboard the same size as the display. Why no other phone manufacturers did this, I cannot fathom. Typing on a screen is supremely annoying.
There were a few that did that, I used to have a Sony Xperia Mini Pro. It probably is the best solution, but I can understand not willing to do such a mechanism. A keyboard itself bolted right in the body is trivial however, compared to all the other design shenanigans manufacturers have to do.
Still the same problem. There are lots of small wireless keyboards, you can probably get one like that for $10 (you could 10 years ago). Still can't use it in a pinch without a decent surface.
A had a few keyboards...
Compare to this, this or this which you just hold in the hand like a normal phone.
Headlights on cars are so bright now. I also wish headlights as well as overhead road lights they went back to a warmer temperature. I really don't like driving when it is dark due to the light brightness and color temperature now.
The 11" MacBook Air used an LCD screen, not OLED. It may have an LED backlight, but that's not the same thing.
Not sure why the pulse width is so large on the screens you had trouble with. LEDs can pulse millions of times per second, far beyond what human eyes can perceive. 240Hz, on the other hand, is well within the range of human perception, so they're lucky if that didn't also cause epileptic seizures.
As a person who works in tech and is an early adopter for almost every new gizmo out there, I feel that we were better off back in the day when stuff was all analog and things were done manually.
Sure it was inconvenient, but it made us experience the world more and actually interacted with real people. I have crappy social skills and I have seen the change in myself over the years. I get anxious when my phone rings now, as opposed to being excited back in the day.
“I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterward I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “Okay, I’ll send you the pages.”
Then I go down the steps and my wife calls, “Where are you going?” “Well,” I say, “I’m going to buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in the closet.” And I say, “Hush.”
So I go to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately.
I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it.
Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home.
And I’ve had a hell of a good time. I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
I really believe that part of the loneliness and lack of community many people feel nowadays can be attributed to automating everything for convenience. We miss out on these brief interactions and meaningless smalltalk, giving us less chance to practice our social skills in low-stakes situations. I see the change even in myself; in my college days I didn't really experience much social anxiety since I was always surrounded by people, but now I sometimes find a quick trip to the grocery store somewhat difficult. It's really troubling to think about, and it makes me long for the analog past.
I'm working at a liquor store as a cashier right now. It isnt where I want to be in six months but it's been a joy overall. The amount of chitchat I get to engage in is voluminous and I learn a lot every day about people's lives.
Wow... thank you for this. This captures my feeling exactly and this is what I and many others miss from life.
I feel you and I experienced the same. I was quite social back in my college days too, even though I was still an introvert. I used to strike up conversation and small talk with people. However, now, just the thought of making eye contact with a stranger is enough for me to avoid going outside or skipping the thing/event altogether.
I mean, I can still do the small talk, but it comes with immense effort, and a bit of awkwardness. Internally I just want to run away and hide in a corner. Never used to happen before.
We miss out on these brief interactions and meaningless smalltalk,
We lost this when "smart" phones took over, people use them to shield themselves from these brief interactions and small talk.
I also work in tech and love to buy gadgets and stuff. I've lived the majority of my adult life with a smart phone, pretty much my entire career. One thing I really wish I got to experience more of was working, dating, socializing, etc when you were very hard to get ahold of once you left the house. You'd have a phone at work, a phone at home, you'd check your messages and read the mail. Beyond that, you would be on your own when you were out in the world and not at the beck and call of anyone who who can contact you via one of hundreds of ways on a smartphone.
When I was a kid, I could go out and play with other kids on the streets, without fear of being snatched or hit by a car or worse. We made Judas ragdolls before Easter just to burn them, and use them for practical jokes. We used to play some child version of cricket, I've even broke a window of a neighbour doing it.
Children nowadays do not do any of those things dammit. What the fuck? How exactly are you growing up without leaving home? For some it's lack of desire, but for most of them it's outright lack of possibility.
"no mow may" and "bee friendly lawns" are just an excuse to justify being too lazy to take care of your property. Idgaf if you don't want to have a lawn, but plant flowers or plants that actually help pollinators. Leaving 2ft tall grass just harbors ticks and looks terrible.
Every time a new technology comes out we think it's going to make our lives so much more simple, but what really happens is the expectations of what we should be capable of doing increase and as a result we take on more responsibilities. One example is cars. You can travel further now, right? Only, now it's normal to drive an hour to commute to work. Or now you have a wider area of travel you're expected to make to visit people you know.
My boomer opinion is that smartphones have done this in a big way. I'm expected now to be available 24/7 to respond to texts on a moments notice. Not responding looks rude. I've been in workplaces that had a culture of checking work messages on Teams on cellphones outside of hours (which I refuse to do). My friends will have long group messages that I'm expected to keep up with. All of this responsibility adds up to more stress than we had in a pre cellphone era. And that hasn't translated to better lives for us in the end. There are advantages and I appreciate many of the things our high tech era gives us. But part of me longs for that era where we just had to trust that people would show up to get togethers at the agreed upon times. When conversations were special because we didn't just have 24/7 access to each other. Where we had to decipher maps to take road trips. Where we were more present with each other. I was born in the 90's which puts me in a strange generation of people that only kind of remember what it was like before.
I think dating should be more accidental, as well.
Meet someone at the bus stop and ask them out, that sort of thing.
Barry Schwartz (if you want more boomer opinions, look him up) made the excellent point that it's very difficult for us to be pleasantly surprised these days.
Everything we do now comes with expectations.
Before a date, we look at their profile.
Before a meal, we look up the restaurant ratings.
Before buying anything, we read all the reviews, etc.
Before we experience anything, it's already been marketed to us.
It's great in a lot of ways, but it means that the best we can ever hope for is to be not disappointed.
It's becoming very very rare that something will exceed our expectations and we will be pleasantly surprised.
I wouldn't be surprised if this has impacts on our psychology.
As it relates to dating, I think it's nice when you stumble upon a good connection when it's least expected, rather than swiping through 1000 pictures.
And on your first date, you should probably have no idea what the other person might be like.
I agree. Robert Putnam has some great points in “Bowling Alone” in that, we need that socialization—something to bridge the gap. And the human, as an animal, in us needs the socialization just because that’s how we are as a species.
Don't listen to anything on my phone but definitely agreed, I much prefer having the songs on my computer and using ncmpcpp to play them (and with a cool visualiser too).
Newer versions of office allow for "sharing" the excel sheet via a link but I don't know if they allow track changes to be on/visible for the "live" edits.
Microservices and general "everything in the cloud" sentiment is stupid, it has ridiculous oerformance overheads and adds single points of failure that can easily prevent half the world from functioning.
I will disagree on microservices. I think it gets used for things that don't really require it like anything that gets hype, it gets overused. But I will give you example of exactly why and how it can be used correctly.
My company was early on the Kubernetes bandwagon. Before Amazon and Google provided hosted Kubernetes solutions, I had to write and bootstrap clusters automatically.
We had all our microservices deployed on k8s when covid hit. We went from about 4000k visitors/hour to 400,000k visitors an hour. This happened over a single week. k8s scaled out perfectly, our services scaled out perfectly and we had zero hiccups or downtime. We didn't have to do anything from an engineering perspective except increase our hard limits on the compute scale outs. During evening hours when load went down, the cluster would scale down.
If we were using a monolith application, we would have been really fucked. No way we could have scaled like that.
Tv was better 30/40 years ago. When TV became all marathons was when it all went to shit. There's no curated mix of video content outside of YouTube anymore and we're all worse because of it.
Also binge watching sucks. I never want to do anything for more than 2 hours in a row unless its sleeping.
I miss YouTube actually being YOU tube. It was originally supposed to be a place for the common person to post their videos and find an audience, but now it's devolved into YouTube Music, YouTube TV, and even regular YouTube is heavily dominated by for-profit, high production value full-time content creators. It's become just as commercialized as old TV was except that instead of commercials it's sponsorships and paid reviews even if you adblock away the actual ads. Everyone panders to YouTube's inane rules now because heaven forbid they get DEMONITIZED!
I don't think this is a boomer opinion but I got called a boomer for it once so maybe it is idk:
I think online dating is shit and I don't mean it in a "It doesn't work for me" kinda way but I believe it's objectively shit. In an ever faster world that demands more and more flexibility from people that also extends to dating. It introduces a certain arbitrariness to romantic and sexual relationships. We now have dating apps that you can use to scroll through potential partners like a furniture catalog. It reduces people to a commodity and I hate being confronted with that. I believe it could in combination with the realities of late stage combination harm our ability to establish deep and meaningful connections to people.
It's literally what my mom warned me off 20 years ago and now I believe she was right.
Nobody should be able to profit off boring industries. Utility (power, water, telephony (which includes internet), banking, insurance.
Cap the profits at an arbitrary number that keeps up with inflation and allows for expanding business basic needs like staffing and inventory. Large investments should be reviewed and approved by regulating bodies and monies allocated and investments must be met with progress goals that achieve the completion of the project in full. None of this "Thanks for the monies, lol bye" bullshit.
Containerization seems overrated. I haven't really played with it much, but as far as I can tell, the way it's most commonly used is just static linking with extra steps and extra performance overhead. I can think of situations where containers would actually be useful, like running continuous integration builds for someone you don't entirely trust, but for just deploying a plain old application on a plain old server, I don't see the point of wrapping it in a container.
Mac OS 7 looked cool. So did Windows 95.
Phones are useful, but they're not a replacement for a PC.
I don't want to run everything in a web browser. Using a browser engine as a user interface (e.g. Electron) is fine, but don't make me log in to some web service just to make a blasted spreadsheet.
I want to store my files on my computer, not someone else's.
I don't like laptops. I'd much rather have a roomy PC case so I can easily open it up and change the components if I want. Easier to clean, too.
Idea is that you can have different apps that require different versions of dependency X, and that could stop you with traditional package managment, but would be OK with containers
Haven't seen macOS 7,but 100% agree on Windows 95. 2000 is better though.
Still can't believe someone actually believe they are
100% agree
Sometimes you just have 1 hour free, and that's not enough to go home, but too big to just kill it. That's when laptop is great. Also, sometimes going outside and do stuff feels better than doing it at home.
Idea is that you can have different apps that require different versions of dependency X, and that could stop you with traditional package managment, but would be OK with containers
That's what I mean by “static linking with extra steps”. This problem was already solved a very long time ago. You only get these version conflicts if your dependencies are dynamically linked, and you don't have to dynamically link your dependencies.
Don't I? Recompiling avoids ABI stability issues and will reliably fail if there is a breaking API change, whereas not recompiling will cause undefined behavior if either of those things happens.
That's why semver exists. Major-update-number.Minor-update-number.Patch-number
Usually, you don't care about patches, they address efficency of things inside of lib, no Api changes.
Something breaking could be in minor update, so you should check changelogs to see if you gonna make something about it.
Major version most likely will break things.
If you'll understand this, you'll find dynamic linking beneficial(no need to recompile on every lib update), and containers will eliminate stability issues cause libs won't update to next minor/major version without tests.
Still, it's going to take some time, every time some dependency(of dependency(of dependency)) changes(cause you don't wanna end up with critical vulnerability). Also, if app going to execute some other binary with same dependency X, dependency X gonna be in memory only once.
Also see Mac OS 8, which added a shaded-gray look not unlike Windows 95, and Mac OS 9, the last version of the classic Mac OS. These versions have a lot more features than the older version 7, but they also take much longer to boot—so long that Apple added a progress bar to the boot screen!
This is too radical. Creators would be poor. Medium companies wouldn't be able to survive just because they would lose way to get new customers. If anything, it would take monopoly to new level. Economical disaster.
Like they're objectively pretty useful but I find the experience of using one to just kinda suck and I avoid it as much as I can. I'd much much rather use a laptop or ideally my desktop if that's at all possible. No idea how some people manage so much time using their phones
Also don't understand people, who chose drinking as their hobby, compete in how many and what drinks they drank, how bad it was in the morning and what weird stuff they did under influence.
I like alcohol beverages, but not a stupid culture being built around drinking.
It's actually really odd to travel to a place like Spain where the drinking culture is far more tame. Just see people put their achohol down for a bit after a couple of cups
I caught myself asking the neighbor kids not to play on my lawn, and it's occurred to me that I've actually reached that age (although I don't care about the grass, I just don't want to be liable for injury)
At least for me, I don't hate the Beatles because they made bad music. I hate them because they sound generic. Of course, they sound generic because of their far-reaching influence but that doesn't change my perception of them.
I feel like all fast food chain food has gone down hill from when a grew up. I remember Subway being pretty solid growing up, but now it's like a last resort road trip stop.
I find incredibly strange that people think it's normal to walk around with earbuds in at all times. When did that become acceptable? (I know it's the release of the airpod, but still, wtf?)
I can't believe how many people I see with them in when they drive and ride their bikes.
Also looking at your phone while driving. How in the hell is that so common?
Kinda mid one, but Pokémon Black/White 2 were the last real games. After that, they started being too 3D and lost a lot of their charm, imo. Gen 3, 4 and 5 as well are so freaking good! Love Emerald in particular (best end-game!) <3
The only 3D Pokemon game I really enjoyed were the Gen 3 remakes. Granted those were the first Pokemon games I finished, but none of the 3D Pokemon games I've played since have felt as complete.
Yeah, this is the one where I most feel like an out of touch boomer because I know people love the newer games. Honestly, like you say, the shift to 3d was such a massive turn off to me, it just doesn't look right
Sports video games peaked in the mid 2000s and are all garbage cash grabs now. They only make money because they have no competition (Madden is the only NFL game, 2K is the only NBA game, The Show is the only MLB game, etc).
They also take 15 minutes loading through their awful bloated menus just so you can play a game. Yeah sports games are awful these days and they used to be the games I played the most
Making tech thinner and sleeker doesn't always make it better, I think devices that follow their function look great!
Doesn't mean there should be no product design, but don't try to hide things for the sake of hiding them, leave the screws visible, show off the internals, try to complement them!
Theres a great theater near my house. Comfortable reclining and heated seats, plenty of leg space, nine screens and sounds. I watched The Batman there and I cannot imagine experiencing the movie in any other way.
In my opinion, theater movies are blurry. And I'm sure someone will come along and tell me why I'm wrong, but the 24 or 28 FPS thing needs to take a hike. Motion blur in movies is over-relied upon and looks bad on the big screen.
I need to start going back to the theaters more. The ones near me had awesome leather seats. I could hang out there all day and watch movies if it wasn't for the costs and need for natural light haha
I saw the new thing from Heinz which is like a Coke Remix machine but with dipping sauces, and the machine mixes it in front of you with a countdown and flashing lights. I envisioned a world where fast food places stop producing their own ketchup packets and just buy one of these giant machines because it's cheaper.
Hell no. I am not asking a robot to make me ketchup when you could just hand me ketchup packets.
When I listen to 100 gecs I just grit my teeth and smile, as if some Jehovah's Witness were proselytizing to me in my front door. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's very nice.
I like them but I get it when people don't like them. I describe their music like an ice cream brain freeze. It's something that's plain and pleasurable with all it's qualities pushed to the point of blowing out your senses. I like the grating overblown insanity but I understand it's not for everyone.
Physical media is superior. Don't get me wrong, I love the convince of being able to stream any song I want, whenever, from my phone. But you don't actually own that music, not even the digital music you bought.
So having that physical backup is good. But also, it's just a fundamentally different experience, to have to put a record on a turntable, or a tape in a cassette deck, and listen to an album from back to front.
There seems to have been a huge drop off and loss of knowledge related to retailer websites. For some reason if you want to buy something at all popular, you need to compete simply to get an order in. There is no longer the concept of back order or first-come first-serve, and it’s maddening. Discovering products has never been worse than it is now. ___
Netflix’s disc-by-mail service is better and more convenient than streaming in basically every way. Instead of having to look for the films/shows I want to watch on various streaming services only to find out they’re not streaming anywhere, or on some obscure/expensive service, I can be confident that if they’ve had a physical release, they’re probably in Netflix’s catalog of 100,000 titles on Blu-Ray or DVD. The I can just add it to my queue, and movies will show up. Then when it’s time to watch a movie, I don’t have to waste time mindlessly scrolling my trying to find something to watch, I just pop the disc in the player. Easy. It’s really a shame that it’s going away. My public library has a massive DVD collection that I’ll probably use, but they’re lacking in Blu-Ray discs, and nothing beats the convenience of having the discs come right to your home.
I work in tech, but sometimes tech is added to things needlessly. I just want my washing machine to be a washing machine. I'm tired of being the product.
Silicon valley's "disruptors" are usually full of shit. The vast majority of the time: it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Don't tell me what to do with my land if you're not willing to pay my taxes (or if you don't have good ecological reasons). I'll paint my shudders whatever color I want to.
Bring back the damn knobs, buttons, and switches in my car. I don't need more touchscreens.
On the other hand...
I recognize that the way I feel and some of the opinions I have are based on a context I grew up with that may no longer exist - or at least it may not exist in the form it once did. I recognize how I see things may die with me and my peers, and that's ok. It's a sad truth, but truth, nonetheless.
I know this opinion is wildly unpopular, but I think pirating is unethical. If you can’t afford something, or you disagree with spending money for it, then fine. Don’t watch that show/listen to that song/play that game. But the people who make things deserve to get paid. It’s not right to refuse to pay for something while also consuming that content. Many of the justifications for pirating just feel like entitlement to me.
On the gripping hand, they were right - the Ringworld would fall into the sun, but after books 3/4 of that series, it would have been a blessing if nobody ever brought a single one of its attitude jets back home.
Yeah I've been very happy with all the new sounds and genres to discover. You do have to parse through a bunch of mediocre stuff, but there are soooo many diamonds in the rough.
I second this, there are few gems hiding there, and even some newer bands, that aren't in the mainstream are making some nice tunes.
Since I got off spotify and went old school, found like dozen bands that never knew existed.
I'm not subscribing to anything. If I buy something, it's fully functional, and it's mine. There is no ongoing relationship between me and the manufacturer. Done.
I mean, that's basically what FOSS is about.
And that's why we use it.
Especially when it comes to expensive equipment like cars, computers, printers, etc.
who doesn't want a subscription for heated seats on their $100k car? /s
I'm working on this, the subscription model has gotten so expensive now that literally everything uses it. Do you have any tips besides "just pirate everything"?
Just pirate some of the things?
you know, I (supposedly - you cant prove anything, mr. prosecutor) may have done this as a kid. then I hopped hardcore on to the FLOSS bandwagon and never looked back. everything I need I can find as a FLOSS package (firmware often excluded, of course). all the learning that I (supposedly) did through the "hack" as a kid now goes into writing original code and supporting open source software. FLOSS literally (may have) made an honest man out of me :-)
Unfortunately the only alternative for some things are becoming very tech literate and running an objectively worse mediocre open source software
This is what I'm resorting to. Instead of pirating Lightroom, I'm using RawTherapee for my (non-professional) photo editing of my x100t photos. In the old days, I'd have done it (I still have a very old version of LR exe in one of my hard drives) but today I'd rather not have a ton of keygens and crap on my laptop.
Depends on the media, buy from bandcamp, steam
Bandcamp is the move.
Use free or at least alternatives without a subscription model where possible
For cars? Just buy one that's a bit older
Movies etc? Pirate
I've wanted an EV for years, but I'm sticking with my very old and fuel-efficient ICE car until it's absolutely dead. At that point, I'm hoping that some model of EV emerges as the most hackable one, like the Nissan Leaf. I'll buy a very used one of those & hack it.
The best thing that you can do for the world is but less shit that you don't need.
The only thing I'm willing to pay a subscription for are the essentials that have no product alternative, i.e. utilities - power, water, Internet. I refuse to pay for streaming when they used to sell DVDs and CDs with the same content. I refuse to pay for game subscription services when you used to be able to buy the games outright. I refuse to pay for software-as-a-service or bullshit like cloud service integrations for smart home stuff. If I don't own it, I don't buy it.
At least for utilities you can reframe it as paying for parcels of utility, and then consuming them, like you do for food. Middleman bullshit like cloud services that refuse to let you just self-host can screw off. Having to spend money to spend extra resources to deal with a 3rd party is obnoxious, doubly so when they just decide they don't want to support it anymore and pull the plug.
Anything that doesn't incur an ongoing cost to provide should be legally prohibited from being sold as a "subscription."
Not everything needs a law against it. I'm just not going to buy into their fucked up system.
Except more and more companies are hopping on this gravy train because they can get away with it. At some point (and that point may be now already, depending on the sector), it's going to be difficult-to-impossible to buy anything without this subscription bullshit.
We'll find a way. Right now, I'm mostly concerned about cars. That's going to be an interesting problem over the next few years.
@TheBaldness Do you pay taxes? It's literally a subscription on the state :)
Only because the late fees and collection agencies are to die for :)
It was totally uncool to remove the headphone jack from my device, man.
Single player modes in games shouldn't require internet connection.
That fact that's considered a boomer take makes me sad
Exactly this
Music in restaurants and bars is just too loud. I know why the music is loud, but I am still going to shake my fist at it like Grandpa Simpson.
Same. It's getting worse over time too, I can hardly hear anything anyone is saying in restaurants and bars anymore.
I felt my inner boomer grow stronger after writing that.
I think many grey hairs suddenly sprouted on peoples' heads after commenting on this thread.
I’ve thought this since I was young. Background music? Cool, keep it quiet so we can talk.
Does this mean loud music is bad? No, I’ve been a put my head in the PA speakers metal head since I was young too. But I don’t expect a waiter to serve me then.
Beyond that, it’s a known problem that as you get older audio distractions become more severe, and I’m sure there’s a neurodivergent dimension to it too, so it’s one of those things where we are actively punishing people for wanting to be out and socialise. Also sure it’s one of those things where everyone thinks they have to do it but don’t
If I know I'm going to one of those extra loud bar or clubs, I always being some earplugs. I have some pretty stealthy ones in a mint tin. I can't hear people talk either way, might as well not hurt my ears.
GIVE ME BACK MY DAMN 3.5MM HEADPHONE JACK ON MY PHONE!!!
Cars shouldn't be loaded with user-facing technology. Bring back analog dashboards and buttons for climate control!
I just want to be able to adjust the stereo without looking away from the road. Is that too much to ask?
Interesting fact: I just got a new ev (so a battery hooked up to a computer with wheels) - and it has buttons! It also has dials for sound and climate.
Now to be fair it also takes interacting with a touchscreen to turn on the heated seats, but I'd say it's progress in the right direction.
What EV did you buy?
Iconiq 5. I can honestly say I really enjoy it (and I'm not a car person).
Bring back stick-shift, too. People shouldn’t be driving if they have no grasp of the mass and inertia of their car. We should be able to disengage the engine at will. And we should have to pay attention when we drive.
I hate the touch screen climate control, especially when's it's cold and it takes the touch screen awhile to get started...
I don't want to have a subscription for everything. It used to be possible to pay a one-time fee for software and use it as long as I want. Now I have to pay a monthly fee and once I finish paying, I can't use the software anymore. And it's not like I constantly get updates for the software. Often it stays the same for months or years.
I understand that software has a price, but no way these prices are sometimes justified...
I agree, but from a !piracy perspective
I'm always on the hunt for self hosted/open source solutions.
I had a Adobe subscription for Professional stuff and they charged me an early termination fee when canceling. There are SO many free alternatives and with this policy they've ensured that I use all of them and never ever Adobe ever again.
Smart tech in general is annoying and dumb. I want my TV to just be a tv with inputs, I don't need built in firmware and updates to shove ads in my face. I don't want my car to have a touch screen to adjust the A/C, just give me a knob or buttons.
Algorithms that try to suggest me content are universally bad, and all searches should provide results based solely on the terms, syntax, and language entered. Same with anything that tries to provide me content based on data harvested about my location or demographic.
Digital privacy is important, and it's important to be anonymous on the internet
I feel like this could go either way whether it's a boomer opinion or not. Real boomers are not very tech literate and probably don't have much of a notion of online privacy.
On the other hand for those that were adults in the early years of the internet, they likely think we're all giving away too much of our private information.
Boomers (my parents' generation) were telling us 90's kids how dangerous it was to put your information online, but then it seemed once social media happened they all forgot about such privacy concerns entirely. They were right the first time!
You're right, i guess i am mistaken
Sneaker culture is incredibly weird. Shoes made by children in China with a limited edition color are in such high demand that there are sites where people refresh F5 constantly hoping to have the honor to pay hundreds and hundreds for shoes that cost $7.50 to make. Then half of the time people won't even wear them outside, they'll put them in a bag and change shoes when they get to work or whatever. Or some might not even wear the shoes at all and just display them.
I'm an old soul in this sense. I love a quality goodyear welted shoe, and made in USA, UK, or Italy usually. An Allen Edmonds strandmok is a fantastic everyday shoe for me. I like to purchase nice things in general, use them, take care of them. I really hate throwaway culture as well.
Please nobody hate me for this, I'm a bit self conscious being an admin of my own instance and don't want to piss people off haha. If you're into gym shoe culture that's awesome. If I knew you in real life I'd probably make fun of you for a minute if I saw you walking outside in socks carrying your $400 limited edition sneakers, but then you can make fun of me for one of the thousands of things I do and it's all in good fun.
I have three:
I'm 17.
I think two out of those believes stem from survivorship bias. You think of old music and consumer products as superior because the only ones that "survived" are the good ones. No one remembers bad music from 50 years ago, and for every old thermos flask/blender/knife that you see around there are dozens that broke years ago.
There was song from the 60s (supposedly the best music everyone tells me) called "7 little girls". The chorus went "7 little girls sitting the back seat kissing and hugging with Fred"
Thankfully a mostly forgotten song now, but a clear example of how bloody awful pop music is not a new phenomenon.
That's fair.
I say yes for the music one, maybe not for the first. There are literally different materials being used and increasingly optimised-for-profit-to-effort-ratio processes. Many things are just straight up made more cheaply because we have the technology to do that.
Although for the music one, a relevant lyric comes to mind:
Hip hop is pretty mainstream now but it started as counter culture. And I don't think a sample in a song makes it similar to the sampled song. A lot of tracks that rely on samples completely create something new. Look at J Dilla who relied almost entirely on samples. His music isn't a collection of old songs, it's entirely new songs. I guess this thread is for boomer takes.
Or the Prodigy, who relied almost entirely on samples yet made some of the most exciting music we had ever heard.
My theory on the first one is that it's usually hard to make things cheap and consistent, so it often starts off as bad, then good but expensive, and then trends towards and past "good enough"
Modern music is fire when you know where to look but I've always felt like pop music has been taking a very slow weird turn. It seems like 1970s and earlier it was mostly good, and mostly good after, but at this point I'm just confused
Cities are too car-oriented
I agree with the sentiment, but this feels like the least boomer opinion ngl
I think it's simultaneously an opinion held by very old people who remember when they could just walk to the store and younger urbanists that want us to return to that. The people in the middle grew up in a car oriented society that hadn't completely lost small businesses and been locked down by traffic. And they now have a house way out in the burbs with a disdain for the traffic of the city. Urbanism threatens their way of life now. That's my opinion.
Most of the US has dug a hole that can't easily be fixed with its car-centric developments, people living there pretty much need a car for everything.
Driving there may be a pleasure, but I personally wouldn't want to live in that situation at all. I'm glad and lucky to have the equivalent of a mall just a 10 minute bike ride away, 25 minute walk, 5 minute bus trip.
America is definitely pretty deeply invested in car-centeic living. But I don't think it's impossible to get out of it. There's rising pressure to lower housing costs, traffic, and improve infrastructure quality. My city (which is about as car centric as it gets) is growing fast and most of that is with infil development. It's going to be a slow transformation but I think it will happen. I don't think American cities will look like European or Asian cities because they won't evolve the same way. But they will look different to how they look now.
Yep I agree - It's definitely possible for the US to shift away from it, some cities have even been transforming some of their busy central roads into pedestrianised boulevards (such as times square in NY, and a couple others I can't remember off the top of my head) and from an outsiders perspective been successful.
The difficulty is mainly going to be places like Culver City where some just don't get that cars don't scale well in dense urban areas like cities - they've voted to remove a 2 year old bike lane just to get back an additional driving lane. That's just going to move most of the bike riders back into their cars, filling that brand new driving lane (and the other existing driving lanes) with traffic that previously didn't exist. Hopefully over time positive changes will return though!
Depends on the city. In my city, you could walk across the whole thing in maybe an hour, and anything major the furthest you would have to walk is about 30 minutes.
Come to europe you'll like it here
Then, I have a couple that pre-date even boomers by many years 😅:
I miss the era when the web was just this
Handkerchiefs are the bomb. I carry one everywhere I go (when I don't forget 🥲). Really feel like they could make a comeback with the right marketing.
Go pick up a heap at your local hospice shop. I've gotten a lot of mine there and made a few more out of scrap fabric. I use old flannelette cotton sheets for our spill rags.
Finally I can out my finger on what bothers me about them
Actually, why do so many modern cars straight up look like oversized toys?
Electric cars are the worst for this IMO. Aside from the Tesla model 3, Nissan leaf and a handful of other ones... everything else looks like an oversized replica remote control toy to me. Some are nice, like the VW minivan, but most look like cheap wannabes. I can't quite put my finger on it
I always bring half a dozen hankies with me camping. They're so useful on a limited inventory. They help you grab hot things. As napkins. Allergies. Wounds. Cleaning knives. Storing spare fish hooks/lures i.e. pocket tackle. I handwash them in the river and they sun dry quiet quickly.
Love hankies. I miss the old web too.
I bought FL Studio back in 2017 and have received free updates since then.
Meanwhile, most other software companies: "nooo, you can't own the software, you have to pay for a subscription and you can't keep using it when it's over! Also if you want updates you have to pay for the premium subscription"
(this comment is not sponsored lmao)
The only exceptions I can think of are streaming services that simply couldn't exist as standalone one-off products (Spotify, Netflix etc). But yeah, there's no logical reason something like Photoshop should ever require more than one transaction.
Things should be made to last and not be made to intentionally break after a short time.
CLI > GUI on PC.
I mean, i have things like window manager and browser graphical, but most other things are just way faster and easier to use as cli.
Maybe for people like us, CLI is easier. I grew up with a DOS pc, and started playing with Linux as soon as we had an Internet connection that I was allowed to use to download stuff.
For my parents, who actually are boomers, give them a CLI and they think something is broken.
I'm 18 years old. I legitimately thought command line is something for hackers more than 80% of my life. Yet, rest 20% of life was enough to make me love it.
If you’re a systems/network engineer or a dev, the CLI is your home.
I grew up with Windows (the first version I used was 7, close to the launch of 10) and even I think CLI is easier (I now use NixOS)
🥳🥳🥳🥳
I enjoy a good cli or tui any day, but still sometimes fallback to a GUI for some stuff.
I definitely still use GUI, just when mostly in Windows.
It sounds like it should be other way, but same.
Thank you for your correct opinion.
I'm ready to die on this hill!
Sure, if you live and breath the same tools 24/7.
I like the concept but feel like an idiot everytime I have to google "How do I [insert simple task here]" because I can't remember the syntax, where a GUI would handheld me in a much better way through finding back what I used to be familiar with.
I do -h or --help in those cases. Usually, this is enough.
Truer words have never been spoken
What's CLI
Command Line Interface
Gui with keyboard shortcuts is the right mix of efficient and approachable imo
You should be able to repair your own things, without too much money and effort
Right to repair for life!
Do not share your name online.
Alcohol is toxic, carcinogenic garbage and we'd be noticeably better off if everyone voluntarily stopped drinking it.
Nah, all boomers drink beer. You sound like Zoomer.
Technically I'm not, but fair point
Anecdotally, this is a position I've seen held more often by young people than by boomers. Not sure what the statistics are exactly, but regardless it would be nice to see a cultural shift away from alcohol.
I hold this opinion because I've watched family die from alcoholism, and I myself am a recovering alcoholic. It's a miserable way to go.
I think that's a more modern opinion. Maybe the religious boomers want tight legal controls on alcohol but the youth today are more into weed than alcohol from my experience.
True, or maybe I've actually gone too far back to the pre-boomer era with this one
Basically any opinion of the modern Internet I give.
I'm a certified computer expert, but I sound like a Luddite when it comes to anything mainstream.
I thought it was pretty well known that the magnitude of one’s ludditism related to their computing expertise as a U-shaped curve. That is, (actual) experts and non-experts are equally Luddite. It’s the mediocre and peri- technologists that drive hype. Right?
Hah, I haven't heard that analogy before, but I see what it's getting at. I wouldn't say it's a rule to live by, but as you learn more about technology you (usually) also learn more about its constant abuse and its critical flaws.
I'm not sure exactly who you mean, but never believe the hype:
This is the nightmare of everything today, technology exists to prevent you from "doing it yourself". Try to repair anything modern.
Smart TVs are stupid and only exist to make ad revenue and sell user data. I'd pay extra for a TV like an LG C2 OLED but with no OS. Just a monitor that displays sources plugged in.
Look at commercial displays… and look to pay a lot more for them, which is probably what you'd expect.
Had a samsung TV I caught with a pihole trying to call home. Had no way of disabling it.
Switched to a sony TV that lets you turn off smart TV mode. So far data from the router and pihole shows no attempts to bypass that and I don't think it has hidden mobile network connectivity.
What was really worrysome was that the thing tried to connect to one of those services that scan whatever you're watching - I am just using my TV as a playstation screen, even watch Netflix on playstation
also my boomer opinion on a tangent topic is that I should be able to rearrange or delete the bloatware that comes on my PS (or any device for that matter) angry fist intensifies
I've never met someone who prefers touchscreen climate controls in a car tbh. Everyone I know agrees that it's stupid and unsafe
Strong agree on the first, and on the second VR is like most over-hyped technology: useful and unique, but not for the reasons people believe
As over-hyped tech goes VR is bad, but 3D cinema is not far behind.
let me see:
i know, and i'm really ticked about it
Remeber guys to buy your intelligent smart home frigde freezer that sinks up to your phone and uses the latest GPT models to...... I would certainly be inclined to agree on that last point
not only that, but "smartness" and longevity seem to be inversely correlated. your grandma's alarm clock she bought in the 70s most definitely still works and will still work fifty years later, while that fancy smart display your rich neighbor has is going to break after three
Even worse, the fancy smart display doesn't even have to physically break to become inoperable.
Most smart devices connect and are locked to a single company's servers and become e-waste the moment they decide to pull the plug.
If you're lucky, you or a techy friend can flash an open firmware to them, but that's not always possible.
A recent job change caused me to revert back to my old G-Shock watch instead of my Apple Watch. I was setting the time and date and noted that the date “only” goes up to the year 2039. Even though it is already over 20 years old, I fully expect this watch to work well past 2039; I have no expectation that the Apple Watch will. Even if it technically functioned, the software and protocols would have been long abandoned.
I signed for a storage unit this week, and they require me to use an app to access the unit. Of course their servers were down when I first tried using the app. 🤦
what do you mean by technological dumpster fire? too much tech?
yes exactly. there's so much tech that it's literally impossible to make a new browser engine from scratch
I bought a gas stove/oven a few months ago. Took me a couple of weeks to notice that I can connect it to my wifi for some reason. I haven't, and don't intend to, but I am a little curious what features could possibly be in there.
Physical media generally has less aggressive DRM. Buy a DVD and the movies your's for life, you can even rip it and put it on a media server to make your own little streaming site.
"Buy" a movie/audiobook on Amazon and it's yours as long as the company wants you to keep it.
As always, there is an relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/488/
I do not like comic book movies.
I quite liked them at first but how many do we need? It's become so over saturated and I've long burned out of the genre.
They're just so tired
It’s funny because people were talking about how they were bad before they even got really big.
I remember a “Every Frame A Painting” episode talking about how their scores are basically rubbish (this was specific to marvel). Similarly about their bland color palettes, repeated story lines and CGI sky monster endings. I think in hindsight it will be a little cringe.
Spielberg and Lucas were on the money when they compared them to Westerns, and I’ve always wondered if there’s a sociological phenomenon buried in there. Some sort of nostalgic cultural ideal that gets seeded in one generation to sprout a generation or two later?
Not the person you replied to, but I doubt it personally. Usually "comics" refers specifically to the western Marvel/DC stuff, not Japanese manga where things are very different (from an outsider's perspective like myself anyway)
:) or 🙂 is nice and not passive-agressive
Same, I always saw it as being friendly rather than passive aggressive
:)
Noooo... its gotta be a FULL smiley, lest I think you secretly want to eat me! :-)
:3
:)
oh damn, I didn't know people thought that was passive aggressive. Great, something else to over think about
I believe physical books are better than e books.
However, physical work documents are not better than PDFs! Why the hell do boomers print so damn much?
I'm with you on this. Ebooks are super convenient, and I love them for that, but I do like a physical book.
Give me a PDF of a manual I'm rarely going to look at. Let me search that shit.
Have you found a good way to read a PDF? I can't stand reading for an extended period of time on a monitor or tablet. It is so much easier on the eyes to print things. Maybe you could use a color e-ink reader, but the're so friggen expensive.
Ahh that's a fair. I don't really have that issue but I use computer glasses with a blue light filter and when my eyes are feeling sensitive I usually just put some eye drops in. That happens regardless of if I'm using a computer or not though
Not meeting up with friends at a loud venue, I like to talk to them not try to shout over the music.
I hate QR code menus, just let me see the damn food options without squinting at my phone
I'll trade the large phone display for a physical keyboard.
I remember being one of the many who thought touchscreens wouldn't catch on because people loved physical keyboards too much. Of course, touchscreens weren't quite what they are today. Haptic feedback and multi-touch were game changers.
The bizarre part is how popular the keypad phones like the BlackBerry or Nokia 9000 series were, or the multitude of Windows Mobile, Psion and other devices. As soon as iPhone came out, suddenly nobody wanted keypads anymore. People are just chasing after the latest shining trends.
I was so stubborn haha. Blackberry had a phone where the touchscreen still clicked like a button when you pressed it and I thought that was the compromise everyone wanted. I was way off.
You can consider using a USB keyboard or Bluetooth keyboard with your phone. Can't really use them on-the-go though, so it is quite limiting, but it does allow a keyboard experience on a phone. This works on Android; not sure if it works with iPhone.
I used to have a bunch of keyboards but it's not a workable solution. If I have such a surface or environment as to use one, might as well just use a laptop or something.
My old qwerty keypad phones worked so well.
You don't have to. The Droid 3 had a large display and an excellent slide-out keyboard the same size as the display. Why no other phone manufacturers did this, I cannot fathom. Typing on a screen is supremely annoying.
There were a few that did that, I used to have a Sony Xperia Mini Pro. It probably is the best solution, but I can understand not willing to do such a mechanism. A keyboard itself bolted right in the body is trivial however, compared to all the other design shenanigans manufacturers have to do.
Which one
That just looks like a normal wireless keyboard, not something you can use while standing in a bus tho.
Still the same problem. There are lots of small wireless keyboards, you can probably get one like that for $10 (you could 10 years ago). Still can't use it in a pinch without a decent surface.
A had a few keyboards...
Compare to this, this or this which you just hold in the hand like a normal phone.
Headlights on cars are so bright now. I also wish headlights as well as overhead road lights they went back to a warmer temperature. I really don't like driving when it is dark due to the light brightness and color temperature now.
They do? That's strange. I don't get any noticeable eye strain from the OLED screen on my phone. Do you get eye strain from LCDs as well?
The 11" MacBook Air used an LCD screen, not OLED. It may have an LED backlight, but that's not the same thing.
Not sure why the pulse width is so large on the screens you had trouble with. LEDs can pulse millions of times per second, far beyond what human eyes can perceive. 240Hz, on the other hand, is well within the range of human perception, so they're lucky if that didn't also cause epileptic seizures.
I hate touch screens.
As a person who works in tech and is an early adopter for almost every new gizmo out there, I feel that we were better off back in the day when stuff was all analog and things were done manually.
Sure it was inconvenient, but it made us experience the world more and actually interacted with real people. I have crappy social skills and I have seen the change in myself over the years. I get anxious when my phone rings now, as opposed to being excited back in the day.
This makes me think of a quote by Kurt Vonnegut:
I really believe that part of the loneliness and lack of community many people feel nowadays can be attributed to automating everything for convenience. We miss out on these brief interactions and meaningless smalltalk, giving us less chance to practice our social skills in low-stakes situations. I see the change even in myself; in my college days I didn't really experience much social anxiety since I was always surrounded by people, but now I sometimes find a quick trip to the grocery store somewhat difficult. It's really troubling to think about, and it makes me long for the analog past.
Favorited. Thanks for the quote.
I'm working at a liquor store as a cashier right now. It isnt where I want to be in six months but it's been a joy overall. The amount of chitchat I get to engage in is voluminous and I learn a lot every day about people's lives.
Wow... thank you for this. This captures my feeling exactly and this is what I and many others miss from life.
I feel you and I experienced the same. I was quite social back in my college days too, even though I was still an introvert. I used to strike up conversation and small talk with people. However, now, just the thought of making eye contact with a stranger is enough for me to avoid going outside or skipping the thing/event altogether.
I mean, I can still do the small talk, but it comes with immense effort, and a bit of awkwardness. Internally I just want to run away and hide in a corner. Never used to happen before.
I also work in tech and love to buy gadgets and stuff. I've lived the majority of my adult life with a smart phone, pretty much my entire career. One thing I really wish I got to experience more of was working, dating, socializing, etc when you were very hard to get ahold of once you left the house. You'd have a phone at work, a phone at home, you'd check your messages and read the mail. Beyond that, you would be on your own when you were out in the world and not at the beck and call of anyone who who can contact you via one of hundreds of ways on a smartphone.
When I was a kid, I could go out and play with other kids on the streets, without fear of being snatched or hit by a car or worse. We made Judas ragdolls before Easter just to burn them, and use them for practical jokes. We used to play some child version of cricket, I've even broke a window of a neighbour doing it.
Children nowadays do not do any of those things dammit. What the fuck? How exactly are you growing up without leaving home? For some it's lack of desire, but for most of them it's outright lack of possibility.
Screw this shit. The world is becoming worse.
"no mow may" and "bee friendly lawns" are just an excuse to justify being too lazy to take care of your property. Idgaf if you don't want to have a lawn, but plant flowers or plants that actually help pollinators. Leaving 2ft tall grass just harbors ticks and looks terrible.
Every time a new technology comes out we think it's going to make our lives so much more simple, but what really happens is the expectations of what we should be capable of doing increase and as a result we take on more responsibilities. One example is cars. You can travel further now, right? Only, now it's normal to drive an hour to commute to work. Or now you have a wider area of travel you're expected to make to visit people you know.
My boomer opinion is that smartphones have done this in a big way. I'm expected now to be available 24/7 to respond to texts on a moments notice. Not responding looks rude. I've been in workplaces that had a culture of checking work messages on Teams on cellphones outside of hours (which I refuse to do). My friends will have long group messages that I'm expected to keep up with. All of this responsibility adds up to more stress than we had in a pre cellphone era. And that hasn't translated to better lives for us in the end. There are advantages and I appreciate many of the things our high tech era gives us. But part of me longs for that era where we just had to trust that people would show up to get togethers at the agreed upon times. When conversations were special because we didn't just have 24/7 access to each other. Where we had to decipher maps to take road trips. Where we were more present with each other. I was born in the 90's which puts me in a strange generation of people that only kind of remember what it was like before.
Dating should go back to face to face meetings. People need to get out and see others more, just generally.
I think dating should be more accidental, as well. Meet someone at the bus stop and ask them out, that sort of thing.
Barry Schwartz (if you want more boomer opinions, look him up) made the excellent point that it's very difficult for us to be pleasantly surprised these days. Everything we do now comes with expectations. Before a date, we look at their profile. Before a meal, we look up the restaurant ratings. Before buying anything, we read all the reviews, etc. Before we experience anything, it's already been marketed to us. It's great in a lot of ways, but it means that the best we can ever hope for is to be not disappointed. It's becoming very very rare that something will exceed our expectations and we will be pleasantly surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if this has impacts on our psychology.
As it relates to dating, I think it's nice when you stumble upon a good connection when it's least expected, rather than swiping through 1000 pictures. And on your first date, you should probably have no idea what the other person might be like.
No thank you. I can barely stand hearing somebody through a wall, why would I want to see them too?
Because dating hopefully takes place with individuums, to whom this limitation does not apply.
I agree. Robert Putnam has some great points in “Bowling Alone” in that, we need that socialization—something to bridge the gap. And the human, as an animal, in us needs the socialization just because that’s how we are as a species.
Face to face is key, in my opinion.
I use an iPod and physical media for most of my music
I want my Final Fantasy games turn-based not this action-RPG garbage, now get off my lawn!
We've become increasingly the minority on this but I agree wholeheartedly.
God yes
I hate music streaming services and rather buy the songs to play them locally on my smartphone.
This, but I'm a bit of a pirate myself
Yes! I use Plex and Plexamp to stream it all to my different devices.
Streaming services for discovery, then buy the best stuff to support the artists.
Also need to download mp3/flac/wav/whatever for sampling, remixing, and DJing. Or to put on a usb to leave in my car 🙂
Don't listen to anything on my phone but definitely agreed, I much prefer having the songs on my computer and using ncmpcpp to play them (and with a cool visualiser too).
When contacting government or a service provider I want to call and talk to a human, dammit.
Google Docs Editors is inferior to any office productuvity suite, and it's overused in the professional world.
I don't want your fucking Sheets link. Email me the Excel file with _v1 at the end.
Newer versions of office allow for "sharing" the excel sheet via a link but I don't know if they allow track changes to be on/visible for the "live" edits.
I don't think they do, but that would be a great feature!
Remaining on-theme for boomer opinions, I hate track changes even more than I hate all the Google suite nonsense 😛 Markup in Word can get fucked, too.
Microservices and general "everything in the cloud" sentiment is stupid, it has ridiculous oerformance overheads and adds single points of failure that can easily prevent half the world from functioning.
I agree and I hate it. As much as possible I want to work with files locally.
I will disagree on microservices. I think it gets used for things that don't really require it like anything that gets hype, it gets overused. But I will give you example of exactly why and how it can be used correctly.
My company was early on the Kubernetes bandwagon. Before Amazon and Google provided hosted Kubernetes solutions, I had to write and bootstrap clusters automatically.
We had all our microservices deployed on k8s when covid hit. We went from about 4000k visitors/hour to 400,000k visitors an hour. This happened over a single week. k8s scaled out perfectly, our services scaled out perfectly and we had zero hiccups or downtime. We didn't have to do anything from an engineering perspective except increase our hard limits on the compute scale outs. During evening hours when load went down, the cluster would scale down.
If we were using a monolith application, we would have been really fucked. No way we could have scaled like that.
Tv was better 30/40 years ago. When TV became all marathons was when it all went to shit. There's no curated mix of video content outside of YouTube anymore and we're all worse because of it.
Also binge watching sucks. I never want to do anything for more than 2 hours in a row unless its sleeping.
Agreed. Anything designed to be binged is all filler no thriller.
I'll one-up the boomerness and say youtube ruined youtube
I miss YouTube actually being YOU tube. It was originally supposed to be a place for the common person to post their videos and find an audience, but now it's devolved into YouTube Music, YouTube TV, and even regular YouTube is heavily dominated by for-profit, high production value full-time content creators. It's become just as commercialized as old TV was except that instead of commercials it's sponsorships and paid reviews even if you adblock away the actual ads. Everyone panders to YouTube's inane rules now because heaven forbid they get DEMONITIZED!
I don't think this is a boomer opinion but I got called a boomer for it once so maybe it is idk:
I think online dating is shit and I don't mean it in a "It doesn't work for me" kinda way but I believe it's objectively shit. In an ever faster world that demands more and more flexibility from people that also extends to dating. It introduces a certain arbitrariness to romantic and sexual relationships. We now have dating apps that you can use to scroll through potential partners like a furniture catalog. It reduces people to a commodity and I hate being confronted with that. I believe it could in combination with the realities of late stage combination harm our ability to establish deep and meaningful connections to people.
It's literally what my mom warned me off 20 years ago and now I believe she was right.
Nobody should be able to profit off boring industries. Utility (power, water, telephony (which includes internet), banking, insurance.
Cap the profits at an arbitrary number that keeps up with inflation and allows for expanding business basic needs like staffing and inventory. Large investments should be reviewed and approved by regulating bodies and monies allocated and investments must be met with progress goals that achieve the completion of the project in full. None of this "Thanks for the monies, lol bye" bullshit.
Containerization seems overrated. I haven't really played with it much, but as far as I can tell, the way it's most commonly used is just static linking with extra steps and extra performance overhead. I can think of situations where containers would actually be useful, like running continuous integration builds for someone you don't entirely trust, but for just deploying a plain old application on a plain old server, I don't see the point of wrapping it in a container.
Mac OS 7 looked cool. So did Windows 95.
Phones are useful, but they're not a replacement for a PC.
I don't want to run everything in a web browser. Using a browser engine as a user interface (e.g. Electron) is fine, but don't make me log in to some web service just to make a blasted spreadsheet.
I want to store my files on my computer, not someone else's.
I don't like laptops. I'd much rather have a roomy PC case so I can easily open it up and change the components if I want. Easier to clean, too.
That's what I mean by “static linking with extra steps”. This problem was already solved a very long time ago. You only get these version conflicts if your dependencies are dynamically linked, and you don't have to dynamically link your dependencies.
Yes, you don't have to dynamically link dependecies, but you don't want to recompile your app just to change dependency version.
Don't I? Recompiling avoids ABI stability issues and will reliably fail if there is a breaking API change, whereas not recompiling will cause undefined behavior if either of those things happens.
That's why semver exists. Major-update-number.Minor-update-number.Patch-number Usually, you don't care about patches, they address efficency of things inside of lib, no Api changes. Something breaking could be in minor update, so you should check changelogs to see if you gonna make something about it. Major version most likely will break things. If you'll understand this, you'll find dynamic linking beneficial(no need to recompile on every lib update), and containers will eliminate stability issues cause libs won't update to next minor/major version without tests.
What's so horribly inconvenient about recompiling, anyway? Unless you're compiling Chromium or something, it doesn't take that long.
Still, it's going to take some time, every time some dependency(of dependency(of dependency)) changes(cause you don't wanna end up with critical vulnerability). Also, if app going to execute some other binary with same dependency X, dependency X gonna be in memory only once.
In case you're curious, here's a browser-based emulator running Mac OS 7.1.
Yes, i agree, it looks awesome.
Also see Mac OS 8, which added a shaded-gray look not unlike Windows 95, and Mac OS 9, the last version of the classic Mac OS. These versions have a lot more features than the older version 7, but they also take much longer to boot—so long that Apple added a progress bar to the boot screen!
Advertisements shouldn't have anything sexual in them
Easier solution: ban all advertisements
The world would be so much prettier
now there's an opinion you don't hear enough of
This is too radical. Creators would be poor. Medium companies wouldn't be able to survive just because they would lose way to get new customers. If anything, it would take monopoly to new level. Economical disaster.
Ah, even better solution: get rid of companies and capitalism
Phone bad.
Like they're objectively pretty useful but I find the experience of using one to just kinda suck and I avoid it as much as I can. I'd much much rather use a laptop or ideally my desktop if that's at all possible. No idea how some people manage so much time using their phones
Drinking is not fun and loud parties too. Just understood, that I haven't had fun there most if the times.
Also don't understand people, who chose drinking as their hobby, compete in how many and what drinks they drank, how bad it was in the morning and what weird stuff they did under influence.
I like alcohol beverages, but not a stupid culture being built around drinking.
I'd through pot into this too. I don't get those people who's every waking moment is talking about getting high or what type of bud is the best.
It's actually really odd to travel to a place like Spain where the drinking culture is far more tame. Just see people put their achohol down for a bit after a couple of cups
Yeah, that's how I like it. Having one or two craft beers and just walking out to enjoy taste and light effect of it.
Maybe it's because of age, but hangover and lack of sleep make me think twice before taking one more cup.
Most weed sucks now
I don't care that it has 30% THC, it feels bad
Real weed has curves (in the distribution of cannabinoids)!
As someone who likes a mild, relaxing high, I concur!
The Windows 98 UI was the pinnacle of desktop computing.
We don't need a meeting for everything. It could have been an email.
You shouldn't walk through people's yard.
I caught myself asking the neighbor kids not to play on my lawn, and it's occurred to me that I've actually reached that age (although I don't care about the grass, I just don't want to be liable for injury)
Modern [insert any art style] has gotten worst and worse!
(although truth be told, it's more of a millennial "90s cartoons/music/films were so much better" opinion)
The Beatles are an amazing band
Now that doesnt count as an answer to the question
No way is that a boomer opinion
There's a lot of Beatles hate in younger Milennials/Gen Z. I assume it's based in general resentment towards Boomers and not actual music analysis.
At least for me, I don't hate the Beatles because they made bad music. I hate them because they sound generic. Of course, they sound generic because of their far-reaching influence but that doesn't change my perception of them.
I feel like all fast food chain food has gone down hill from when a grew up. I remember Subway being pretty solid growing up, but now it's like a last resort road trip stop.
I find incredibly strange that people think it's normal to walk around with earbuds in at all times. When did that become acceptable? (I know it's the release of the airpod, but still, wtf?)
I can't believe how many people I see with them in when they drive and ride their bikes.
Also looking at your phone while driving. How in the hell is that so common?
Kinda mid one, but Pokémon Black/White 2 were the last real games. After that, they started being too 3D and lost a lot of their charm, imo. Gen 3, 4 and 5 as well are so freaking good! Love Emerald in particular (best end-game!) <3
The only 3D Pokemon game I really enjoyed were the Gen 3 remakes. Granted those were the first Pokemon games I finished, but none of the 3D Pokemon games I've played since have felt as complete.
Yeah I heard ORAS were pretty decent, and honestly would be the only 3D ones I'd like to try out, because I love gen 3 so much
Yeah, this is the one where I most feel like an out of touch boomer because I know people love the newer games. Honestly, like you say, the shift to 3d was such a massive turn off to me, it just doesn't look right
Yeah, somehow there's something not Pokémon-y about them. Maybe it's just nostalgia speaking hehe, but the 2D ones had way more charm!
Sports video games peaked in the mid 2000s and are all garbage cash grabs now. They only make money because they have no competition (Madden is the only NFL game, 2K is the only NBA game, The Show is the only MLB game, etc).
They also take 15 minutes loading through their awful bloated menus just so you can play a game. Yeah sports games are awful these days and they used to be the games I played the most
NFL Blitz was mad fun
Sensible soccer was the GOAT.
I'll take your Sensible Soccer and raise you Kick-off 2 (on the Amiga of course).
Making tech thinner and sleeker doesn't always make it better, I think devices that follow their function look great!
Doesn't mean there should be no product design, but don't try to hide things for the sake of hiding them, leave the screws visible, show off the internals, try to complement them!
Majority of the music today is just plain trash. I can't even bring myself to listen to these tracks
"I grew up on this stuff." - any food that someone had as a child is now, likely, a bad thing.
Theres a great theater near my house. Comfortable reclining and heated seats, plenty of leg space, nine screens and sounds. I watched The Batman there and I cannot imagine experiencing the movie in any other way.
Prices can still be pretty bad tho
Half the problem is that people use either TV speakers or a cheap sound bar that completely ruins the experience
In my opinion, theater movies are blurry. And I'm sure someone will come along and tell me why I'm wrong, but the 24 or 28 FPS thing needs to take a hike. Motion blur in movies is over-relied upon and looks bad on the big screen.
I need to start going back to the theaters more. The ones near me had awesome leather seats. I could hang out there all day and watch movies if it wasn't for the costs and need for natural light haha
I saw the new thing from Heinz which is like a Coke Remix machine but with dipping sauces, and the machine mixes it in front of you with a countdown and flashing lights. I envisioned a world where fast food places stop producing their own ketchup packets and just buy one of these giant machines because it's cheaper.
Hell no. I am not asking a robot to make me ketchup when you could just hand me ketchup packets.
When I listen to 100 gecs I just grit my teeth and smile, as if some Jehovah's Witness were proselytizing to me in my front door. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's very nice.
I like them but I get it when people don't like them. I describe their music like an ice cream brain freeze. It's something that's plain and pleasurable with all it's qualities pushed to the point of blowing out your senses. I like the grating overblown insanity but I understand it's not for everyone.
Physical media is superior. Don't get me wrong, I love the convince of being able to stream any song I want, whenever, from my phone. But you don't actually own that music, not even the digital music you bought.
So having that physical backup is good. But also, it's just a fundamentally different experience, to have to put a record on a turntable, or a tape in a cassette deck, and listen to an album from back to front.
There seems to have been a huge drop off and loss of knowledge related to retailer websites. For some reason if you want to buy something at all popular, you need to compete simply to get an order in. There is no longer the concept of back order or first-come first-serve, and it’s maddening. Discovering products has never been worse than it is now.
___Netflix’s disc-by-mail service is better and more convenient than streaming in basically every way. Instead of having to look for the films/shows I want to watch on various streaming services only to find out they’re not streaming anywhere, or on some obscure/expensive service, I can be confident that if they’ve had a physical release, they’re probably in Netflix’s catalog of 100,000 titles on Blu-Ray or DVD. The I can just add it to my queue, and movies will show up. Then when it’s time to watch a movie, I don’t have to waste time mindlessly scrolling my trying to find something to watch, I just pop the disc in the player. Easy. It’s really a shame that it’s going away. My public library has a massive DVD collection that I’ll probably use, but they’re lacking in Blu-Ray discs, and nothing beats the convenience of having the discs come right to your home.
Boomer opinions:
On the other hand...
I know this opinion is wildly unpopular, but I think pirating is unethical. If you can’t afford something, or you disagree with spending money for it, then fine. Don’t watch that show/listen to that song/play that game. But the people who make things deserve to get paid. It’s not right to refuse to pay for something while also consuming that content. Many of the justifications for pirating just feel like entitlement to me.
On the gripping hand, they were right - the Ringworld would fall into the sun, but after books 3/4 of that series, it would have been a blessing if nobody ever brought a single one of its attitude jets back home.
Notifications fucking suck, if it isn't either my alarm or my grandma's emergency button, my phone ain't gonna do a damn thing to alert me.
Now, I fart in public and really don't care. It's liberating.
That OSes peaked with Windows XP.
I disagree, windows peaked with XP, Linux be popping off these days
Peak was either Win2k or 7. XP was great, but only eventually. Most people forget what XP was like before SP2. And I was at the XP launch event lol
I strongly recommend doing a deep dive into some genres over at Bandcamp if you haven't already.
I was of the same opinion for a while, but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if you check into the lesser known music corners.
Indeed, popular music has become highly commercial, but music as a whole is popping off
Yeah I've been very happy with all the new sounds and genres to discover. You do have to parse through a bunch of mediocre stuff, but there are soooo many diamonds in the rough.
I second this, there are few gems hiding there, and even some newer bands, that aren't in the mainstream are making some nice tunes. Since I got off spotify and went old school, found like dozen bands that never knew existed.
ah yes because independent artists just stopped existing after 2000