I want to start farming and growing vegetables. My dream is to have a pantry filled with wall to wall canned and pickled stuff I grew myself... to live for an entire winter on good I grew and preserved...
I moved into a townhouse too late to plant anything but next year! Definitely not nearly enough to support myself but I'm saving to buy an acreage in the next few years.
In the 90s and 2000s, people made fun of me for constantly being on the computer whenever possible. Now those same people are completely hooked on their pocket computers and now I'm the one making fun of them.
I don't know how we got to this point, but all I know is that Steve Jobs is mostly to blame. The iPhone changed everything and now nobody knows how to interact with each other anymore, which is especially frustrating when trying to get assistance from anyone for anything. Even the simple process of returning a product to a store is now a lot more frustrating than it used to be, because the person running customer service absolutely refuses to interact with the customer.
The other day a mail informed me, that my battlenet account was locked due to suspicious activity. I went to the website to get support. Unlocking my account via the "support" did not do anything. I tried creating a ticket or talking to someone. You need to log into your account to do that.
Even the simple process of returning a product to a store is now a lot more frustrating than it used to be, because the person running customer service absolutely refuses to interact with the customer.
i kinda assume that businesses give out the guideline to hesitate when taking back objects, as they lose money that way (lower net revenue).
Corporates perfected the Marketing department, also known as the Department of Lies and Half Truths so well, that even they believe their own spiel these days.
Mass Psychosis, I think it's called, when everyone gets swept in a single line of thought and herd mentality sets in.
In 2000 the whole data hording apparatus hadn't been fully implemented yet, and AI surveillance was something more so seen as science fiction, nothing to worry about until possibly 2100. Sure there was some data collection but it wasn't like billions of people were walking around with surveillance tech in their pocket 24/7. Things have changed and drastically. Methods to monitor, model, predict, and control human behavior are now a thing and quite robust. If only people were aware of what's happening there would be a mass migration to secure hardware, OS's, comms, and of course not a single cloud based always on assistant in sight. IOT devices are cool when they are secure but they often get the least attention, few if any security updates. If you can get rid of robot vacuumes, smart home assistants, smart TVs, smart thermostats, switch to secure FOSS OS's on your computer and phone.
You can point a laser at someone's window and accurately record their keystrokes from the sound vibrations. Things go deep in the surveillance and intelligence world. Nothing is truly and absolutely secure, just more difficult to crack.
A lot of tech today is over priced subscription/data farming crap that is locked and dumbed down so the average consumer can use it without overloading their limited brain capacity.
I'm not going to sign up or use an app on my phone to activate a piece of tech.
Luckily there are still DIY projects I can tinker with. And it's much more satisfying making it yourself, although more time consuming. But that's part of every hobby, right.
Reformed computer programmer here (born in the 70's, techie in the 90's). My laptop is 16 years old and runs Linux. My phone is an 8-year old refurb I got off Amazon for $80. And I now do ham radio. I even send emails over RF just because I like knowing I can communicate with voice or text without needing cell service or an internet connection.
I've been getting interested in HAM, but it seems really intimidating to get started actually doing stuff and working towards a license. Any resources that you'd recommend for an absolute beginner?
If you're in Canada there's hamstudy. Im sure there are similar community projects worldwide depending on where you live. The duality of HAM is that they try to educate and bring more people into the hobby while also being unfiltered pricks if you violate unspoken HAM etiquette which drives away more people...
I made a website of sorts with a page for new hams. There's links to a cheap study guide and a free one, should have all the info you need. There are also some cheaper ham radio reviews, when I first got in I was on a severe budget. But the "New Hams" page tells you everything you need to know. The hobby can seem like a lot when you're new (there is A LOT of directions to go in ham radio). Feel free to ask if you have questions, you can post here or my email at the bottom of the page: https://sites.google.com/view/ki5ona/new-hams?authuser=0
20 years ago, I remember phones were cool and never had a crazy price-tag before the iPhone showed up. Tech in general was affordable and made sense. I mean look at the market now, you see companies forcing new tech upon us by skipping the rule of "need vs want" while making a purchase.
On a side note, I miss those fancy slider phones from the 2000s.
It's beautiful in the summer. A little dark and damp in the winter. You stop seeing the sun all together because it doesn't get high enough in the sky to clear the trees.
As a tech person, I try to do have a lot of smart devices that I can self host, try to use home assisntat, bridges to my own NAS, have some rpi for my own DNS filter (with pi-hole)
My TV is offline while I am using a Apple TV box for streaming
And yeah some stuff is unnecessary. I don’t have a smart fridge, but I have an old iPad with a custom home assistant dashboard in my kitchen
I haven't connected any appliances to my network, but I may try Zigbee.
I'm not optimistic about the future of home appliances. Without stronger privacy protections, there's little stopping manufacturers from adding cellular modems to avoid the need for wi-fi to collect and transmit user data, with features/usability locked behind accepting ToS.
Just came back from a 4 day camping trip in the mountains where I turned my phone off and forgot it existed and just sat back down in my seat in my cubicle at my IT job.
They grow towards any RF signals and their leaves are specially shaped to attenuate anything over 900MHz. They use the extra energy to increase their density to better resist harvesting and increase their height.
I read about a fungus found near the reactor in Chernobyl that seemed to be using the radiation as an energy source, so it seems plausible for a plant to evolve to absorb RF energy.
The actual energy in the RF is basically nothing. The sun has been outputing RF since the beginning of existence I'm pretty sure something would have evolved to make use of it if it had any sufficient energy density.
But if you think about it your phone is generating an RF field off the back of a tiny lithium ion battery, almost all of that power is going to power the screen anyway, the dribble of power that so left over is transmitted and then spread out over 50 kilometers of area. Anyone location is receiving less power than it would if it just absorbed power from sound waves
Re: running to the woods. We were here on the technology spectrum:
Not enough Too much
|--------------[x]--------------------------------------|
Now we're here:
Not enough Too much
|-----------------------------------------------[x]-----|
I'm not saying that techies are all neo-luddites in the making, but rather that everyone has a threshold for global-hyper-awareness and surveillance. At some point, it's just too much
I settled down on the specific sweet spot I like, and accept no further.
Small, digital, single purpose devices. I don't go back to analog, but do not embrace smart devices, always on, surveillance, subscriptions, premium tiers, one year cycles.
Digital FLAC player, wired headphones, digital watch, digital camera, portable emulator. All digital, all techie, all could have been in my backpack in 2007. Peaceful, functional, sometimes I buy lithium cells and replace the batteries.
I personally see all this bastardized tech as components in need of liberation, techno-mage style.
If I could get my hands on a flock PCB, I'd be writing custom drivers to allow others to liberate their own hardware.
Alas, nothing local, and eBay has not been kind.
12 years ago I had a board Chair of a major tech firm in my office and she explained how the future was going to be the internet of things. I divested stock within a week. My conclusion was they had zero innovation at that company, which extended to silicon valley.
Their stock then dropped 75% over the next decade.
10 years ago, I privately refused a gifted Alexa after Christmas, explaining "Hey I work in the industry, I know people who work for FAANG, Amazon spending billions on very smart engineers building systems to harvest data is a bet that they will be able to extract even more money from me, is it still within the return window." My aunt told me to go live in a cave.
I was gifted an Alexa by a (previous) girlfriend. I haven't even opened it because I have very little use for an AI companion. And I too know people working in FAANG and how invasive those smart devices are.
Then paint the whole thing flat white, really splurge on a granite counter top for the kitchen, and a deep single basin sink. (Single basin sinks were made by the devil to torment me)
Things like this is why I don't even bother.
"Thanks Aunt!" then just chuck it into the trash at home.
Or try replacing the brains with a Raspberry Pi, idk.
Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.
I am curious as to how out-of-touch your single downvoter is. Because you hit that nail right on the head.
Like, for my current place I’m still designing a CCTV system. But it will be using dumb PoE cameras, hardwired into a traditional NVR. But everything will be shielded, airgapped, and using dumb(ish) components that do not “phone home” to their manufacturer in any fashion.
I’m even looking into solid state and mechanical components for other home automation functionality. Like, nothing computerized to any degree, and therefore, incapable of being a threat or a data leak.
Almost every refuge in internet is for profit data hungry giants. Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
Honestly, here's the thing. My PC is still running Win10. It just works. My life is stressful and chaotic and my escape is gaming. I love modded Skyrim and I love gaming and when I get a chance to sit down at my computer I just want to fucking escape. I don't want to troubleshoot, I don't want to fiddle, I just want to load my game and have fun.
That is what has been keeping me from switching to Linux these past few years. I have Win10 tweaked in the registry so it can't run copilot or AI, the start menu can't connect to the Internet so it can't show me ads, it's still Microsoft and I don't love it but I don't have to think about it.
If someone came along and said hey, for $100 I'll install Linux on your computer, make sure all your drivers are installed, make sure all your hardware works, and get your games and files moved over, tested and working, and be around to troubleshoot in the future and teach you basic troubleshooting if you need me (for an additional reasonable fee), I'd pay it. I'm not made of money, but I don't want to spend my time or limited brain power doing that stuff and I'd be more than happy to offload it to someone else.
I understand that you do not want to fiddle with a computer, I was once like that and that is what kept me from switching to any OS on my computer. I want to let you know as an experienced Linux user though that once you setup linux, you do not need to do any more fiddling. For the files and personal stuff, just back it up to an external hard drive. That is pretty much it. I could help you for free, but I do not really have somewhere to message anyone.
This is completely false ime. Updates can break your setup, though on stable distros they usually don't. Also anytime I installed a game I'd have to invest time to set it up. For older games this could take an hour or more to get everything working. For newer games some features might not even work.
I ditched Linux for a reason. It was useable but I need my gaming machine to be stress free, not another work project.
As someone who does Linux tech support for 2 people as a hobby/because I love them, it would cost you more than $100 for all that.
But $300 for the setup and then $100 per year for support would be reasonable as long as you don't expect me to drop everything and rush over when something changes/breaks.
I hear you. It's a pain even when you have the skills to do it. I am looking for a secondary income stream and want more people using Linux, so maybe I should offer that for people. But ugh, the ways a computer can break can be so stupid.
Probably a good thing you haven't switched then. In my experience setting up mod manager and any external tools (like Nemesis) was not easy, but it's doable. Mods themselves may not work though, especially if they are more external to Skyrim. So, for example, you can forget about ENB shaders. I mean, when I tried them they worked, but basically no other mods and in an empty area with 7fps is not exactly playable (on Windows it was unstable ~30fps with mods).
Vortex is a flaming turd on linux. I recently deployed a 2300 mods collection for CP2077 with it. It took around 35 hours - with a premium nexusmods account, and thr download itself was only around 1 hour. In comparison, the multiplatform NexusMods App they mothballed completed the same task in about 3 hours, but since it never was really finished, it failed at the end of deployment. There is a community fork of the Nexusmods App available, but it sadly failed the same way - it can't cope with really large collections, and i am not good enough of a programmer to really help out - i can read code as long as it does stay simple, but writing it is a completely different thing.
Apparently there is such a thing as a "Nexus Collection Downloader" for Mod Organizer 2, although I've never tried it. MO2 generally works fine though.
Will give it a whirl. My experience with Vortex after seeing the NexusmodsApp, that was coming along nicely, being shelved to go back to their tech-debt ridden piece of shit client (even back when i used it on windows it was a buggy mess, and the experience on linux is far worse with awful r/w performance and loads of different UI glitches. Once the whole window just collapsed into a 1x5 cm square with one black and 3 white borders while i was doing something else on the pc not even involving the app - unrecoverable. I became so infuriated that i even posted on the nexusmods forums (https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/13543600-useable-linux-support/ - i was somewhat surprised that the mods approved the post at all, but since noone engages with the post, i will probably not get any response regarding their plans)
I had heard it was an issue in Linux. I'm running Lost Legacy and Yggdrasil (Skyrim VR) which are both 100+ gb mod packs (and highly recommend them both, Lost Legacy is breathtakingly beautiful). Lost Legacy is also very stable and runs very smoothly, especially compared to some of the other pre built mod packs I've tried.
If I did get brave and make the switch, is this something that theoretically could be run in a Windows VM or would it be better to dual boot and keep Windows hanging around for Skyrim?
Not sure unless you find people that want to switch over to non Microsoft etc products and you help them. I had a decent side gig getting people out of marketing companies by building them basic static websites and an email. Mainly plumbers, machine shops etc. They went from paying over a grand a month to like 20 bucks. It got out of hand from word of mouth and my lack of knowleges pretty quickly though
This might not be your issue but replace the subscriptions you use with FOSS ones.
Windows for Linux.
MS365 Office for LibreOffice (although I guess you could say Google docs too).
DropBox for Filen (or other services).
... Gameing for retro Roms?
Etc.
Theres also lots of foss support for pirating streamed media.
I couldn't belive how many my live at home 18yr old cousin was paying for.
Got a kickstarter for a cool idea, and a friend with a podcast with like 12 million subscribers? This is about the barrier to entry. But you're going to be OK, maybe you go take a boring, stable job like a state university, and make up the difference in pay by consulting during work hours. Maybe it's not so bad.
I've spent the past couple of years moving away from Apple devices and commercial software, into self-hosting as much as possible. While at this stage I wouldn't go back to my previous set up, there's no denying that it's nowhere near as stable and easy to maintain.
Home Assistant, for example, is an incredible tool; that fails to turn some lights on and off far more often than Alexa ever did. It's frustrating. Not so much that I'm going to bin it off and go back to relying on Amazon, but enough that I mostly just end up feeling kinda pissed off that the big companies have pushed me into a place where I've had to learn how to be a part time sysadmin, alongside my 9-5.
This is the biggest issue I have with smart gadgets and home automation - they fuck up. Not even getting into the additional pains of fixing the automation when it fails, I've literally never gone wrong with pressing a light switch, or possibly pulling a cord. Full 100% success rate without rounding, even when the wifi's down. I have to walk past the switches (and cords) to enter and exit rooms, so not pressing them on the way past doesn't even save me any actual time.
Most of the automation I see seems to be the same - it introduces a chance of failure to something that already works, and/or imagines itself a solution to something that isn't actually a problem. Boilers, fridges, toasters, beds - these were basically solved technologies until someone came along and decided to reinvent the wheel.
There's a handful that do provide quality of life improvements to disabled people, but the overwhelming majority just seem to be parlour tricks that don't reduce the human workload.
For me, the utility is in being able to turn a bunch of lights on and off at the same time. We have a number of lamps, or light strings or what have you, rather than one or two big lights. Put them all in Home Assistant and I can set all the ones I want to turn on half an hour before sunset without having to touch a button. And 99% of the time it's fine.
Equally, I can have a few lights turn on in the bedroom shortly before I go up to bed, then turn off half so there's enough light to read by, then turn off every light in the house with the press of a button. And it is a button, because I don't have a voice assistant set up.
Also, I have a bunch of temperature sensors around the house.
None of it is essential, but it's a nice quality of life upgrade for my wife and me.
Technology nowadays is basically a cult, a coercitive cult.
They often take technology as an end in itself rather than as a means to other ends, they reify it and even deify it, and they treat any moderate stance as an enemy and as a brake on their shitty eschatology.
I do not recall any tech resistance by the masses. In fact a couple years later there were people camping out overnight waiting for the release of the latest gadgets like the iphone.
Ffw to today…those same masses dgaf about their lives being tracked and monetized today; in fact, many are active and willing sycophants pushing being social media personalities as careers while using that personality to shit on higher education and intelligence.
I do agree that the limited tech community capable of independent thought and action are against the surveillance corporate state we’re headed into, but the rest are doing their best to hurry and profit off it while the dumpster fire flames get closer and closer to them.
In 2006, cell phones were cool, smart phones like PalmOS and Blackberry devices existed but they were for nerds and/or businessmen who just could not wait to get back to the office to send an email. iPods were huge, it was the glory days of DVD, youtube launched that year, Facebook is where the cool kids were, you didn't need an invitation to get a Gmail account anymore. You could buy more than just books on Amazon now. It was...possible to say things were getting better. It was easy to see a future of increasing convenience and capability.
Looking back I'm not sure where the tipping point was.
I think the tipping point was in the early 2010s when all of a sudden everyone and everything hitched their wagons to Facebook. Facebook as SSO, Facebook messenger instead of email or SMS, Facebook marketplace dethroning Craig’s List, etc. Once people from elderly relatives to local business centralized all of their online identity into Facebook, it was over. To this day, Facebook is still the only way to see info for community events and small businesses (and instagram is the platform Facebook used to sequester musicians and artists).
It didn’t have to be Facebook, of course, but there needed to be a networked service that people trusted enough to give it every thing. Remember check-ins? People would post their location at restaurants, jobs, theaters, and shops. Public profiles that listed jobs, homes, family members and relationships, pets, children’s photos, and hobbies all under real names (I remember when Facebook started the purge of pseudonyms and aliases).
I deleted my Facebook account over a decade ago and people panicked and warned me that it was a bad idea. The craziest thing someone said to me was that it would make me un-hire-able since there’d be nothing for people to snoop to see if I was a good fit. The only “bad” thing that happened is that I lost contact with some old acquaintances, but that’s just life.
Regardless of all the other tech stuff in the past 20 years, I think that convincing people that it was okay to let a company like Facebook exist will the explicit goal to transparently harvest personal data was what opened the floodgates. Facebook (and other social media) demonstrated that people will willingly exchange privacy for digital errata. Once governments and corporations saw that, the future wrote itself.
The tech resistance slowly faded away with the first smartphones released after the iPhone I would say and really took off after the release of the iPhone 3GS. Think back to the boomers who complained about young people staring at their phones all day, now they do that themselves.
20 years ago, technically competent people had an integral role in the development and use of tech. That position is now infested with people who think economics is a science and money is real.
Technically economics is a subset of sociology and thusly is a science. But the people your probably referring to probably wouldn't consider a backyard blacksmith to be under goods manufacturing either so ditto. This is just a reminder that economics isn't just dumbasses who think that the only thing that matters is line go up, but the actual science side of it are generally in secondary fields or quietly working for the government or certain consultants.
As an intellectual discipline, economics is closer to theology than physics, with finance an entirely arbitrary, cherry picked subset of rules to justify a particular economic model.
Economics is the control mechanism that filled the void in society, vacated by religion, after the Enlightenment. Every economic model is functionally equivalent to any flavour of religion, just with a little extra accounting blended in.
We did away with one unhinged narrative construct, things can’t get better until the current dominant fantastical conjuring is dispelled.
As an intellectual discipline, economics is closer to theology than physics
Absolutely. Ask any economist where clean air sits in any economic model, and they would call it an “externality”. Or a healthy forest. Or clean water. Or any of the other hundreds of millions of things that make life on this planet - or even a vibrant civilization - possible.
It’s also why capitalism is the most cancerous economic system possible, and leads only to ugly fascism-adjacent authoritarian feudalism and (eventual) systemic civilizational collapse and the early death of billions just so a few obscenely wealthy people can accumulate even more wealth before the end.
Ecunomics is a science. It is not hard science, and like all science, what you derive from it depends on the hypotheses you made.
True economist can work with unreal hypotheses and get wrong conclusions. The fact that it's not hard science allows a bench of idiots to decide they know better an come up with flat-earth level theories like trickle down economics.
That's the history of enshitification in a nutshell (sorry to people who hate the term, it's just apt).
Engineers had some social power in these institutions for a brief moment. Sadly, we weren't able to get to any kind of class consciousness before the space was enclosed by capital, not even basic trade unionism.
All they had to do was make some of us millionaires and the rest basically comfortable until our skills were devalued enough that we'd lost our bargaining power as workers.
Anyway, best time to plant a tree 20 years ago and all that....
Installing Linux and bucking the yoke of Microsoft from my private life has reminded me that using a computer used to be fun and rewarding. Not even kidding.
My brother wanted to play Project Zomboid on a private server, and I've had more fun setting up and managing the server than I've had playing a lot of games that came out in the last few years. I need to get the time to setup CRON to jobs backup and update the server and mods. I'm trying to figure out if I can do it all from my Proxmox OS, or if I need to build separate cron jobs both inside and outside the VM and schedule them with enough buffer that they won't run at the same time... Trying to get a nice and quiet hour to myself to really dig into it.
Dude exactly the same here. I didnt realize computing had become depressing to me. Linux made me feel young again!
side note one of my co workers said it got so bad and he hates windows so much he just pretends he doesn't have a laptop and uses his phone for everything. I'm like...bro go mint. Its so much better.
I have to use a Windows 11 machine for work, and I feel better every week about my decision to switch my personal computer from Win 10 to Mint. I'm trying to get my wife to switch over, but she swears up and down that she needs Microsoft Office to do basic document functions... I'd love nothing more than to get her away from that, and stop the $160 or so that I spend every year on Microsoft office.
seems like we have the same life. I also am forced onto 11 for work, and i DESPISE IT. every second i'm on win11 makes me so thankful i got rid of that garbage in my personal life. My SO actually did switch to Mint with me and we've worked through issues together, now we joke that she's "Defeated Lynux" xD. So far, not a single thing has needed windows, except one time i tried to do a firmware update on a mouse through a linux vm with windows and bricked the mouse, and needed actual windows to reflash it. But thats a very small use case. and we can't play spyware trash games like pubg or fortnite (which are brainrot anyways). I do miss pubg a little bit tbh, just driving around and causing havoc ha.
ah, unfortunate that they need office. Libreoffice won't work at all?
NGL. I kinda miss League of Legends. I've been looking for ways to run it from a VM, no dice. I may end up making a portable installation of Windows 11 and keep it on a removable SSD, and then only boot it when I really get a hankering for playing Ivern.
Libreoffice would work fine, but it looks different, and for the layman, that can be completely unacceptable.
Techies stopped jumping on the newest gadgets when the newest gadgets became plastic slop that did nothing but track what you said, did, where you went, etc, and reported it back to the company so they could build a profile of you and sell that data.
normies buy the shit now because its affordable (Because of the afformentioned creepware) and because they cant be bothered to do a modicum of research to realize theres a 98.6% chance that the device will be non-functional in a year because the company collapsed (having harvest all the information it needed before rebranding as a new company to do it all over again) and took the online servers with it, because of course your fucking toaster totally needs online servers to operate.
But while going bankrupt, it will sell all information about you to the biggest bidder. Terms and services for you fryer included sharing data with "partners", so now your health insurance can jack up your premium because you used the fryer "too much for your own good".
I have been told I am complaining too much about my company moving to windows 11 and that I need to grow up.
I will then watch those same people slowly but surely start to complain about changes and things not working.
I got laughed at today for fighting the updates and windows 11 by a few people who are probably going to be made redundant by this change. (I'm not angry, making people laugh and being a loudmouth idiot is my favourite thing)
I have been in IT support since 2007 and I know that all the change is bad.
My personal computer is on Win10 LTSC IoT and I'm moving to Linux Mint (Thankyou to the people on this forum that recommended it).
Change in tech can be good but not when it's Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.
Users have been complaining about every piece of software forever. They do not do it more on Windows 11 than they did on Windows 7 or XP.
I also work in IT support for more than a decade.
And switching to Linux just is not an option. They just do not have a decent answer to Active Directory. And retraining users to use a completely different operating system will have bankrupted plenty of businesses.
Users have been complaining about every piece of software forever.
Not really. People stood in lines for Windows 95. I don't think I ever heard a complaint specifically about that OS. 2000 brought the 95 interface to the NT kernel. XP got mild criticism for looking childish, but people liked it as a stability improvement from 95 and 98.
Vista was the first Microsoft OS that saw a lot of backlash. It was more secure, but ran slowly on anything that wasn't very new hardware. 7 was widely enjoyed, 8 was mixed (very tolerable with something like ClassicShell), 10 was beloved, and 11 is widely hated for a huge variety of reasons.
Can you find someone with a complaint about any of these OSes? Sure, but that's meaningless. The fact is that MS has released both beloved and hated OSes, and Vista is the only one to receive as much hate as 11.
The company I work for has, until now, not really given much of a shit about cybersecurity. Sure, we had some basic stuff in place, and had managed to avoid any issues, but it's fair to say that the boss' focus isn't on the computing side of things. But we recently took on a big contract from a BIIIG customer, and that customer has a contractual requirement that we achieve the UK government's Cyber Essentials rating at the very least.
So out with the old Win10 PCs and in with some new Win11 units. They're still shitty, but at least they're compliant.
Trouble is, because the company broadly didn't care, I was able to put Kubuntu on mine. You could argue that my PC was the most secure because I ran timely updates, where my colleagues were still using unsupported Win10.
Well, I've lost my Linux privileges because now the IT guy needs everyone to be in line, and on the same hardware.
So I've spent the past few weeks poking and prodding at Windows 11 to figure out how to bend it to my will without admin access. It's been quite good fun actually. Aside from the whole using WIndows thing.
I moved to Linux Mint 2+ years ago. Zero regrets. 10/10, would recommend. Win 11 getting bloated is what finally drove me there. FWIW, Claude is amazing support for Mint and Linux in general.
It's not just you, though. There's a post on Hacker News right now about the 170k non-profit orgs just had their data deleted my MS recently. There's a whole comment thread about how MS is no longer a serious company. Silicon valley professionals have lost faith in the company. It's not just you (and me).
Oh no, you've triggered my occasional whine about Linux Mint. I was so happy to finally have a Linux distro to play with, twenty years after first wanting to try it after my dad brought home a copy of Linux Format someone left on the bus.
Linux just doesn't like me. It was okay at first, though I couldn't get my art programs to work (sorry, I love my SAI and psp 7, I don't like krita and always hated gimp). But I could use it for intrewebz and storing my mp3s. I was so proud of my first sudo apt update. But after a while it wouldn't connect to the internet so I can't update it and now it's just gathering dust taking up an entire SSD. I wish I was brave enough to reinstall it or replace it with a different distro, but I'm too scared I'll brick my entire PC.
That is the end of my occasional whine about Linux.
I found that bottles is quite good. It creates all the WINE prefixes etc and can run exe installers from there. I needed to use it to get ableton live to work and that was the method that worked.
As a side note: If you ever try again, I got SAI2 working on Zorin OS out of the box, while I just could not make any version of it work properly on Mint. As far as I know psp is out of the question, though. (And I am still stuck on Windows, since I have not yet found a way, to get the Surface Pro pen work well enough, on any distro.)
Sounds good. What I need is a bunch of local nerds starting a computer club with some old PCs we can practice installing Linux on. I would actually be willing to talk to people for that. And then once I knew what I was doing, I'd have so much fun making other people learn it too.
Psp7 is my staple, been using it since around 2001 ish, still does most things better than XI. Although I can't save presets on Win10.
That sounds like you ran into a few hardware issues, which may just be bad luck with your machine. Sure, Mint isn't for everyone or every machine. But the vast majority of people gave good luck with it.
Not sure what your opinions are on AI, but I would guess that a day or so using paid tier Claude would have you safely running some Linux distro on nearly any laptop. I used it to guide me through a home server setup that took a couple hours total. If you're worried about bricking the machine or want the SSD back, it's an easy way to get that, one way or another.
Change in tech can be good but not when it’s Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.
Now, yeah.
I remember when a new microsoft OS was a great thing that brought wonder and excitement instead of bullshit.
3.11 to 95 was revolutionary
Upgrading from 98 to XP was amazing.
XP to 7 was like being blessed by a digital god.
7 was truly the pinnacle of OSes. Everything after 7 started to take the crap and fall apart though. 8 with its stupid tablet design for desktop, 10 for its spyware and bullshit, 11 because you've become the product instead of the OS, and also laying the foundations for a restricted, walled garden like apple has.
I've been on linux for several years now, but god damn do I miss windows 7. It was the peak of operating systems. sleek, stable, usable, and the first OS from microsoft that didnt need regular reformating to maintain stability. It didnt need babying. Things almost never went wrong, and when something did go wrong it was easy to figure out and fix.. I went years between reformats, and those only typically happened because of hardware changes (which often werent necessary, but used as an excuse for digital spring cleaning, basically)
I never had 95, my family couldn't afford a PC back then.
But getting out families first PC running Windows ME and spending so many afternoons trying to fix it is that got me into IT support.
Moving to Windows XP was a huge step up and moving to Windows 7 was another step up.
Microsoft has never ever made an OS as good as Windows 7.
7 and XP are equal until in XP you try to drag a full screen window and cannot.
I'm on 10 LTSC IoT and I think (Thanks to people on the Linux sub) I'll be moving to Linux mint Cinnamon.
Linux has made astonishing progress, and it is in a state where it is every day usable by alot of people, but its not at the polish and usability of windows 7.
I remember when a new microsoft OS was a great thing that brought wonder and excitement instead of bullshit.
Trouble is, what can the OS makers offer these days?
Apple brought it on themselves by insisting that their platforms had to be updated annually, presumably because it made it easier for them to blacklist older devices more frequently. An unsupported device is basically landfill, right? So you'll have to toss it and buy a new one. Because...reasons.
But really, what are the functional differences and benefits to the end user of moving from Win10 to Win11? Of moving from macOS Sequoia to Tahoe to Golden Gate? I'm not massively au fait with Windows, but from my experience, the only real difference that could be sold as an upgrade is "Moar Copilot!".
We're at a point where hardware from five years ago is every bit as functional as hardware released today. So all of the companies have latched onto AI. But users don't really care about AI. And that leaves Microsoft and Apple and Google with... nothing. This is particularly obvious in the mobile space, where they've run out of hardware features to hang a new device off of. Even the cheapest new smartphone has a still/video camera with surprisingly high quality sensors. They can all connect to high speed wifi and cellular networks. They can all do all of the things people need of them. What else can they add?
Trouble is, what can the OS makers offer these days?
Corporate OS makers like Apple and Microsoft?
Nothing.
The sad reality is we have hit the point where every OS for the last 15 years have been able to do everything necessary, and would still be able to do everything today if driver and security updates had continued.
Theres always the need to release a new product, from a corporate profiteering perspective, but there is no longer significant progress in the product itself. There is no revolutionary improvement like you saw from,(using windows as an example) say 3.11 to 95. or 98 to XP, or XP to 7.
Beyond that we've just kinda gotten minor iterative improvements(to be fair, we used to get iterative improvements as well bad then, with ME and Vista, as examples), along with a lot of creep and spyware because even the big OS makers realize that the OS as a viable, continuing product is coming to an end, and now they are shifting their attentions towards harvesting your data, tracking you, spying on you, and profiling you, so they can sell/lease/etc that data to others.
The only alternative to this corporate hellscape that exerts ownership over our OS and Computers is to use something like Linux.
and I know some people might cringe at hearing linux, because there are rabid proselytizers for linux, but as of this moment Linux is the only OS that for the most part lets you use modern computing without the creepware thats invaded modern paid-for OS's.
The ease of changing over to linux depends a lot on what you do, and may not be viable for everyone of course.
Until a couple of years ago I was hard in the Apple ecosystem. I saw things like Universal Control come along and how cool it was that I could control my iPad from my Mac; but only if both were new enough to support it.
Then I began to dabble in Linux, before immersing myself in it. And then I realised that Universal Control was just Deskflow, (or one of the numerous forks of the same project). Which led me to realise just how many of those incredible Apple innovations over the past 10/20 years were mostly just polished versions of things people could do with far cheaper hardware.
Take iPhone mirroring. That's been available to Android users as SCRCPY for god knows how long. But if you use Linux or Windows and an iPhone, it's not for you. For a long time, my iPad got very little use because I can't integrate it with Linux very easily at all. And that's by design. That's how Apple sells more stuff.
I think you are misremembering how bad XP was on launch. It took a year or two for it to be stable. Windows Vista was an even worse nightmare before we got to 7.
I didnt have many big headaches with XP. In fact, the only headache I recall having was getting some very old games working, but there were workarounds and eventually they ran fine.
Vista was only a nightmare because vista changed how drivers worked from all previous windows editions, which meant every old legacy device had to have new drivers made and signed for it, which caused major headaches for a lot of people not on the absolute latest and greatest, but that storm did eventually pass.. it should have passed in testing instead in public, which is partly why I didnt mention it, the other part being i never used it on a personal system, but Vista was ultimately a stopgap release due to delays with 7. basically a windows 6.5 if you will.
Yah even "disruption" in tech has been captured by the rich. Nothing shakes up the established order unless it's taking from someone who has less to give to someone who already has too much.
"Electric Vehicles? I don't know, we need to go very slowly, and then consider how disruptive this technology is to the economy. A lot of big companies might not be able to divest quickly enough...... (etc)"
then cut to LLMs and it's like
"AI is here to stay. You can't put the genie back in the bottle (or stop spending billions and billions of dollars desperately pushing the technology into every crevasse). We're literally incapable of acting ethically if it contradicts with short term profits. Business = nature, we're just following an evolutionary maxim — our hands are actually tied! Look, fascism and endless war are just good for business, I don't make the rules (bribes government to make rules for them)......"
It's actually deplorable, and it's lead to a more impoverished future for everyone.
If they mean 20 years ago in the Covid Timewarp sense that the 90s were twenty years ago, then yes.
Literally 20 years ago the horror was already upon us. It was around that time that fear of the government chipping us to track our every movement was peaking, and hey, by the way, please buy and pay a monthly cost for this tracking device that has audio and video recording but also plays silly cat videos ANYWHERE!!!
20 years ago was 2006. I will point out that at that juncture the original iPhone wasn't even out yet. It released the following year. Normal people who were not turbo-nerds or high powered businessmen did not own smartphones in any significant number at that point.
If your device was even capable of downloading a cat video, we were still in the era when your cell phone carrier would have charged you $1.99 to do it.
If your device was even capable of downloading a cat video, we were still in the era when your cell phone carrier would have charged you $1.99 to do it.
Or companies like Jamba/Jamster would have buried a clause in their T&Cs allowing them to send you periodic promotional texts and bill the fuck out of you for it.
What you think is them selling a $1.99 video of an anthropomorphic frog with a visible schlong making car noises is actually a predatory subscription scam.
I remember them wanting me to pay for that, but I also remember getting a cable that allowed me to connect my PC to my phone and do whatever I wanted with the filesystem. The ringtones were in a different format but I got a converter and had the FF7 battle music for a ring tone.
I also recall some phones supporting MP3s for listening to music (though storage space was tiny) but not supporting them as a ringtone once connecting to PCs to share files was more common.
They also sold wallpapers, emoticon packs, and themes.
Yes, but I was fortunate enough to never actually get as far as ponying up the 99 cents. I got an MPX200 pretty early in my cell phone career which ran Windows CE and basically let the owner do whatever the fuck they wanted, including using .wav or .mp3 files as ringtones.
The hospital thing is a big one. My wife and I had considered moving to a remote location but the risk of significant injury without nearby medical facilities was one thing that changed our mind. It's hard to accept that risk, even when you think it would probably be worth it. Medical problems ƒ suck.
20 years ago, the Patriot Act was already in place and privacy was essentially dead (and other countries were not exempt from US spying), people just didn't know the full extent until the Snowden leaks. But it was clear enough then, if you weren't gripped by the hysteria, that the "emergency measures" were there to stay, and get worse.
Stuff like that was also kind of present in the past.
My non-gamer friends suddenly became gamers thanks to 3D games.
I remember people telling me not to buy a video game controller, because everything will be motion controls in the future.
My stepfather wanted to cut our cable TV internet the moment 3G modems came out. He even talked about Soviet TVs with wired remotes to try to convince me and my mother.
My late stepmother accepted that I won't go to a trade school to become some kind of repairman after Facebook became popular, although she thought "software developer" was the same as "CNC machine programmer".
I call this phenomenon "normietech", and AI is the worst example of it.
As someone else mentioned, in 2006 the overwhelming amount of 'tech' was not designed with slop and spying in mind. If you bought a super high end stove/oven or toaster it would NOT need constant software updates or Internet connection and be forced to give telemetry and have microphones or cameras to listen and watch you as you use it.
The absolute first 'always online' device was the juicero in 2013 and it was an abject failure on every level. Not only were people confused as to why it needed to be online in the first place, it was a horribly designed and extremely inefficient machine... Someone at the time brought in the proprietary bag of juice it uses and squeezed it out by hand, and he was faster and more efficient in doing it than the machine was.
I personally did not hear about online appliances until I took a course on IoT in late 2020. And that one showed how you can use an arduino to make device an internet connected device.
But even then... Both young and old heads just don't like this shit. A toaster does not need to be online... A lamp and its lightbulb do not need to be internet connected. I am confident that if and when they make it legally required to do so (as they are absolutely going to do with cars) there will be so much disregard for the law that it will be unenforceable.
I’m mildly interested in one of those coffee mugs that heats your coffee, as I drink mine slowly while working.
But I don’t want an app for that. I just want a wireless charger puck and a temperature dial, with maybe a failsafe so it doesn’t overheat when empty.
So much tech should be small little closed systems, but then you lose the ability to shove pop up ad notifications at the user, or scrape and sell their location, or preinstall residential prices you rent to highly suspicious companies.
If you close it, the rate of heat loss in even a cheap vacuum flask is minimal, as in "scalding hot coffee poured in the morning is too hot to drink 8 hour later" minimal.
Do you need it to be scalding hot the next day or something? My thermos keeps things insanely hot for like 12 hours. It's actually pretty ridiculous because sometimes the coffee I made before 8 am is too hot to drink even by lunch.
Nice. I've been hesitant to buy anything off such sites after a bad experience. I have doubts about the quality of their offerings.
I bought mine mainly because it fit into a bicycle water bottle cage. When I punctured the outer shell and it lost it's vacuum, I bought another one, but for some stupid reason, they redesigned it and the new one didn't fit into a bottle cage any more. A bit disappointing, but it's still a good cup.
Then buy a knockoff. Thermo cups from Stanley are actually good even when considered overpriced. The Stanley and the knockoff I have are the best termocans I had up until now and I have a few
Tea candles are wonderful for this. I keep my Chemex over a candle and pour myself smaller cups from it, but I'm sure you can find solutions where you put the coffee cup directly over the candle as well. A coffee cup with built-in heating elements and electronics sounds insanely overkill.
Or you could use a spirit lamp instead of a candle. Top up the lamp and your drink with alcohol!
Don't actually do this unless you have some very high % drinking spirits, fuels usually have various toxic things added to them to prevent you from having fun.
Look into getting a burnout mug. They have an extra layer before the vacuum layer that quickly absorbs heat then retains it to cool hot drinks to a drinkable temp then holds them there for hours. Zero electronics.
I got gifted an Ember and while it had an app, I never installed it or used any smart tech. Out of the box it was set to some temperature that was reasonable, so that was that
But my 4K120hz VRR Oled just never connects to the internet. gAmInG-rig is on Linux. Pixel got the Graphene treatment. Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me(personally, if you have usecases, good for you). If there were ready to use iot devices which doesnt suck and respect my privacy by just beeing on the local network: sure i would think about it. But hacking together something good with arduinos wasnt worth my time for now atleast.
VR headset OS is hacked and nerved to the best of my knowledge.
For now there are still ways to enjoy tech even though overall its a fucking hellscape.
Home Assistant is a great way to achieve home automation without handing everything over to random organisations. Not perfect, but better than relying on Amazon.
I can only speak for myself, but the things that home automation usually automates don't spark joy for me. Like they're the kind of friction that I don't hate, and ideally would want to just have more time to do.
Also I guess I just like being able to go somewhere in my house and there are no computers there
And ESPhome works very well together with Home Assistant if you want to build stuff yourself.
Just get an ESP32 and a sensor or other device that is supported by ESPhome and you will be able to program and connect it very quickly.
There are also ways to use sensors that are currently not supported by ESPhome by writing a custom component, but that is something that I don't do, too much effort and it's not that easy.
It's also crazy just how many different devices can be connected to Home Assistant. If it is at least somewhat widely used chances are good that someome has already written a plugin to make it work.
I just ordered a mechanical watch. Primarily because I think they're cool, but it not even having a battery feels as far away from a smartwatch as you can get to me, and I like that too.
honestly, I like my Seiko mechanical watch, but there would be periods I wouldn't wear it and then have to re-set the time often enough that it irritated me and I got a Citizen Eco-Drive, and I fucking love the thing. It does everything I need from a watch: tells me the date, tells me the time, has an easy way to switch on/off DST, even automatically accounts for leap years and has a few functions like a stopwatch and a timer that I never use; but it doesn't play stupid games like modern tech and it never needs winding.
Having said that, seeing the winding mechanism through the clear back glass of my Seiko is magical in a way you can't get from any electronic watch.
In all seriousness though, I have a case with a winder for a mechanical watch, and while it keeps the mechanism ready the watch still needs to be reset regularly. Mechanical watches can't match the precision of quartz crystal timing. They will gain or lose a few seconds every day even if kept perfectly wound, and after a week in the winder it will be noticeably off.
A $10 digital watch keeps time more accurately than a $1000 Swiss mechanism.
they do, but I'm not enough of a watch collector to necessitate owning one (I have a grand total of two, the two I just listed, and one is usually on my wrist)
Yeah, I bought an Eco-Drive 10 years ago and it's still working great. I never have to worry about it, it just works. I've bought two more since, the very cheapest basic model I could find (BM-8180 https://ebay.io/m/wZhDp4), and a fancier dressier one (CA-4553 https://ebay.io/m/TbSiJ5). My original GN-4W-S has taken a real beating over a decade, the glass and body are scratched all to hell, it's been dropped and banged against door frames &etc. It doesn't seem to mind, still keeping time like it did brand new.
If you want a watch that just does its job and doesn't really need anything from you, the Citizen Eco-Drive models are great.
This weekend, found my old motorola phone. For giggles, i plugged it in- still boots! Can I do anything with it or did I just wasted a bit of electricity on nostalgia?
Depends on what the other poster meant by "old". Motorola made Android phones from very early on, and those would definitely be considered old. You can probably do some possibly useful stuff with those even if they are stuck on 3g.
Solid point. I was definitely assuming a StarTAC rather than an old Android phone that could be turned into a Home Assistant dashboard or digital photo frame.
Beyond what's been said about data harvesting, 20 years ago new devices very often represented genuine improvements in form and function on each new iteration. Physical and functional differences were easily apparent between each model of early smartphones.
The only thing we have right now that's similar was model releases from AI labs. And it seems like even those are slowing down because the urgency to release anything incrementally better undermines huge, stable jumps.
Tech used to be fun for some reason and innovative and you knew when something new was made it was better than the previous model and you would notice the improvements, now when something new comes out there's no more excitement because it's the same shit with a new model number and that's why it seems like techies aren't interested in tech because they already tried everything 5-10 years ago and the new stuff just isn't "new" anymore, it was just simplified for non tech savy and rebranded as "new".
It's just that the focus shifted from nerds doing nerd things to economists enslaving nerds because they realized there is a lot of money in there.
Tech is still exciting. The constant enshitification and "profits!!!!" is what is annoying, depressing, and outreagous.
Take WASM for example. It's absolutely stunning. Imagine what we would have done with it 15 years ago. Now, it is still some niche because they haven't figured how to squeeze money out of it.
k, if its so stunning, why didnt it take off? why didnt asm? Sure it enabled processing nearer to local data sets. I have no use for that and I dont want the data near me processed.
Yeah, 20 years ago they weren’t a self paid tracker that reported my every action on the web - tracking was minimal and limited. But now maybe not a forest as much as just limiting what tech I have in my house - for instance last week I bought an analaog scale to replace my 15 year old smart one from Withings that has been without WiFi for years.
I also limit how much time I have my phone on my person, or total screen time.
the iPhone was released 19 years ago, and even though I love carrying a camera/map/walkman/bubble-level device in my pocket, it fucked up our world real bad.
Normal people never avoided tech. TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Nintendos, Atari 2600s, Colecovisions, Selectavisions, DirectTV, WebTV, Tivo, Cell phones, beepers, the list goes on and on. If you're using a smartphone to read this, you're using a glorified Blackberry. This stuff was what Dr. Stephen Falken from War Games and the real life people the character was based on were fleeing to the woods from in the 20th Century.
If you call websites "apps" and download them from a store, you're not using tech. I don't view my Smartphone as "tech" anymore than a VCR was "tech". Smartphones are just a crappier version of landlines and computers. They try to be both and they're not good at either.
People owned flip phones in 2006. Kids were expected to graduate high school with basic computer skills. There's a good chance they got a laptop for college. The internet was already a standard part of life.
Apple made tech cool in 2001 with the iPod and in 2007, "normies" went apeshit for the iPhone. Not to mention how half the business world was using Blackberries and the early Windows-on-a-phone (forgot the name lol) already.
60 years ago techies decided that technology couldn't be trusted, because it is programmed by humans. I've yet to meet any programming wizards or seasoned IT personnel that adopt the latest crap. We've always distrusted our creations. We know how many mistakes we made while making them, that we weren't able to fully fix.
The team behind MeeGo are still around and still offer linux phones. :)
Sailfish OS’s heritage lies in Nokia times, especially in the MeeGo operating system. Prior to 2011 Nokia and Intel had a vision of an open mobile operating system. Together they invested around 1 billion USD to the project and created an open source based operating system called MeeGo, which was used as a basis for several devices, such as the iconic Nokia N9. Although the Nokia N9 became the beacon of open source operating systems, Nokia decided to end the project and chose instead to continue with Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. The rest of that is another story.
The passionate team behind MeeGo refused to quit working on the project they’ve believed in. They, or currently ‘we’ saved MeeGo by setting up a new company, Jolla Ltd., to develop the swipe-based MeeGo into the flowing user experience that is Sailfish OS. We quickly enhanced Sailfish OS to run Android apps and it became hardware compatible with Android chipsets. In November 2013, we launched the beta version of Sailfish OS to the market with the Jolla smartphone.
Nah, there are still good products being produced. You just have to look for them and they will never be the most popular option since they get advertised like crazy by big corporations.
Techies on the verge of retreating into the forest are an absolute minority, blown out of proportion by people on internet forums like this. most techie people still like gadgets.
Come on, this isn't facebook, we should be better than this type of post here.
It was about 10 years in the making because it also involved opening an arcade as a way to make money. I had to find all those machines, learn to fix them, and get the arcade up and running as well.
Techies self host a Kubernetes cluster on their server rack at home. They set up completely isolated IoT devices with no access to the internet. They host their own Lemmy instance. Setup their own pirated Netflix using Jellyfin.
Someone who retreats to the forest because they are too scared of technology are most definitely not techies.
I do my own tech stuff so do some of my friends but it's a very niche thing compared to the majority of people who describe themselves as "techies". Many more are the types I described.
Being able to host my own shit is the reason I haven't abandoned it altogether and I'm still on the verge of giving it all up and living in the woods. Things in tech are not improving for us.
That's because the IoT gadget is now a cheap option on the shelf; they're prolific, but any technically inclined person can see the realities...versions going out-of-date quick, people neglecting patching, etc.
Huh? There's more and more local-only options. Out of of my whole smart home (300+ devices) maybe 10 require an internet connection, the rest either work locally or don't connect to wifi at all (zigbee, zwave).
Most of the cheap IOT crap is still insecure, requires a signin and a cloud connection to spy on you and steal your data. Of course there are options to secure the devices (always have been) but for the nontechnical person this is out of reach, not only because doing that requires knowledge but also bc most people don't even know about these issues or care about their privacy.
Most new devices come with matter, which is local and allows you to choose your own gateway (including apple or ikea devices, which are pretty decent when it comes to privacy).
We are in an interesting moment where we can reimagine how we want our tech to behave and AI is good enough to hack a lot of the smart devices and make that happen.
I'm not a tech person, and I truly enjoy my phone, but the only smart device I've ever had was a puppy cam I've gotten rid of and a convection oven you can turn on with an app, which I don't have on my phone. My car is a newer model and has Android Auto and I do not use it at all. I have never voluntarily used AI beyond having it forced upon me by companies. Zero interest.
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More like 40 years ago
I want to start farming and growing vegetables. My dream is to have a pantry filled with wall to wall canned and pickled stuff I grew myself... to live for an entire winter on good I grew and preserved...
Same with chickens. Fresh eggs and meat...
Do you have a garden?
I moved into a townhouse too late to plant anything but next year! Definitely not nearly enough to support myself but I'm saving to buy an acreage in the next few years.
Dude, we just gotta restart civilisation by this point.
The first generation of the post-apocalypse be filled with enthusiasts and nihilists alike.
That's the biggest mjndfuck for me.
In the 90s and 2000s, people made fun of me for constantly being on the computer whenever possible. Now those same people are completely hooked on their pocket computers and now I'm the one making fun of them.
I don't know how we got to this point, but all I know is that Steve Jobs is mostly to blame. The iPhone changed everything and now nobody knows how to interact with each other anymore, which is especially frustrating when trying to get assistance from anyone for anything. Even the simple process of returning a product to a store is now a lot more frustrating than it used to be, because the person running customer service absolutely refuses to interact with the customer.
The other day a mail informed me, that my battlenet account was locked due to suspicious activity. I went to the website to get support. Unlocking my account via the "support" did not do anything. I tried creating a ticket or talking to someone. You need to log into your account to do that.
i kinda assume that businesses give out the guideline to hesitate when taking back objects, as they lose money that way (lower net revenue).
Corporates perfected the Marketing department, also known as the Department of Lies and Half Truths so well, that even they believe their own spiel these days.
Mass Psychosis, I think it's called, when everyone gets swept in a single line of thought and herd mentality sets in.
In 2000 the whole data hording apparatus hadn't been fully implemented yet, and AI surveillance was something more so seen as science fiction, nothing to worry about until possibly 2100. Sure there was some data collection but it wasn't like billions of people were walking around with surveillance tech in their pocket 24/7. Things have changed and drastically. Methods to monitor, model, predict, and control human behavior are now a thing and quite robust. If only people were aware of what's happening there would be a mass migration to secure hardware, OS's, comms, and of course not a single cloud based always on assistant in sight. IOT devices are cool when they are secure but they often get the least attention, few if any security updates. If you can get rid of robot vacuumes, smart home assistants, smart TVs, smart thermostats, switch to secure FOSS OS's on your computer and phone.
You can point a laser at someone's window and accurately record their keystrokes from the sound vibrations. Things go deep in the surveillance and intelligence world. Nothing is truly and absolutely secure, just more difficult to crack.
A lot of tech today is over priced subscription/data farming crap that is locked and dumbed down so the average consumer can use it without overloading their limited brain capacity.
I'm not going to sign up or use an app on my phone to activate a piece of tech.
Luckily there are still DIY projects I can tinker with. And it's much more satisfying making it yourself, although more time consuming. But that's part of every hobby, right.
Reformed computer programmer here (born in the 70's, techie in the 90's). My laptop is 16 years old and runs Linux. My phone is an 8-year old refurb I got off Amazon for $80. And I now do ham radio. I even send emails over RF just because I like knowing I can communicate with voice or text without needing cell service or an internet connection.
I've been getting interested in HAM, but it seems really intimidating to get started actually doing stuff and working towards a license. Any resources that you'd recommend for an absolute beginner?
If you're in Canada there's hamstudy. Im sure there are similar community projects worldwide depending on where you live. The duality of HAM is that they try to educate and bring more people into the hobby while also being unfiltered pricks if you violate unspoken HAM etiquette which drives away more people...
I made a website of sorts with a page for new hams. There's links to a cheap study guide and a free one, should have all the info you need. There are also some cheaper ham radio reviews, when I first got in I was on a severe budget. But the "New Hams" page tells you everything you need to know. The hobby can seem like a lot when you're new (there is A LOT of directions to go in ham radio). Feel free to ask if you have questions, you can post here or my email at the bottom of the page: https://sites.google.com/view/ki5ona/new-hams?authuser=0
20 years ago, I remember phones were cool and never had a crazy price-tag before the iPhone showed up. Tech in general was affordable and made sense. I mean look at the market now, you see companies forcing new tech upon us by skipping the rule of "need vs want" while making a purchase.
On a side note, I miss those fancy slider phones from the 2000s.
I miss the phones that slid open sideways and had a mini keyboard :/
a modern sidekick would go so hard, discord kids would absolutely love it.
i'm really tempted to get a clicks communicator if it doesn't suck.
Absolutely. Seeing a $2k price tag for a phone is mind-boggling to me.
At least the phones from the 2000 had character, not like today's simple cuboid phones.
Life long techie here. I have retreated to the forest.
I did it. I'm in the forest now.
how is it like in there
It's beautiful in the summer. A little dark and damp in the winter. You stop seeing the sun all together because it doesn't get high enough in the sky to clear the trees.
I am one of the few people in my office that still has a normal (digital) wristwatch.
I love my 13-ish(?) year old citizen eco-drive solar analog watch.
My G-Shock is my everyday watch. Solar powered and multiband 6, nothing is more accurate.
G-Shocker user here. Mind is still going strong too, but I'm hoping to get a AE-1200 Casio one of these days
i am retyrn to monke
As a tech person, I try to do have a lot of smart devices that I can self host, try to use home assisntat, bridges to my own NAS, have some rpi for my own DNS filter (with pi-hole)
My TV is offline while I am using a Apple TV box for streaming
And yeah some stuff is unnecessary. I don’t have a smart fridge, but I have an old iPad with a custom home assistant dashboard in my kitchen
Yeah, just setup a zigbee or z-wave network for your smart home, and just block the MAC address of the controller on your router.
None of the IoT devices will be able to contact anything on the internet, and you can still access them while you are connected to your own wifi.
I haven't connected any appliances to my network, but I may try Zigbee.
I'm not optimistic about the future of home appliances. Without stronger privacy protections, there's little stopping manufacturers from adding cellular modems to avoid the need for wi-fi to collect and transmit user data, with features/usability locked behind accepting ToS.
Home assistant is so fucking good.
Just came back from a 4 day camping trip in the mountains where I turned my phone off and forgot it existed and just sat back down in my seat in my cubicle at my IT job.
I'm fucking over this.
Hear me out… anti-WiFi trees.
They grow towards any RF signals and their leaves are specially shaped to attenuate anything over 900MHz. They use the extra energy to increase their density to better resist harvesting and increase their height.
I read about a fungus found near the reactor in Chernobyl that seemed to be using the radiation as an energy source, so it seems plausible for a plant to evolve to absorb RF energy.
The actual energy in the RF is basically nothing. The sun has been outputing RF since the beginning of existence I'm pretty sure something would have evolved to make use of it if it had any sufficient energy density.
But if you think about it your phone is generating an RF field off the back of a tiny lithium ion battery, almost all of that power is going to power the screen anyway, the dribble of power that so left over is transmitted and then spread out over 50 kilometers of area. Anyone location is receiving less power than it would if it just absorbed power from sound waves
Re: running to the woods. We were here on the technology spectrum:
Now we're here:
I'm not saying that techies are all neo-luddites in the making, but rather that everyone has a threshold for global-hyper-awareness and surveillance. At some point, it's just too much
I’m still onboard with more tech but not where it has the wrong answers:
I settled down on the specific sweet spot I like, and accept no further.
Small, digital, single purpose devices. I don't go back to analog, but do not embrace smart devices, always on, surveillance, subscriptions, premium tiers, one year cycles.
Digital FLAC player, wired headphones, digital watch, digital camera, portable emulator. All digital, all techie, all could have been in my backpack in 2007. Peaceful, functional, sometimes I buy lithium cells and replace the batteries.
I’m all for smart devices but only the ones I own, that talk to where I say they can. Zigbee and z-wave for the win.
Unfortunately also too many surveillance devices that don’t have an alternative
I personally see all this bastardized tech as components in need of liberation, techno-mage style.
If I could get my hands on a flock PCB, I'd be writing custom drivers to allow others to liberate their own hardware. Alas, nothing local, and eBay has not been kind.
Deflock knows where you can get one...
12 years ago I had a board Chair of a major tech firm in my office and she explained how the future was going to be the internet of things. I divested stock within a week. My conclusion was they had zero innovation at that company, which extended to silicon valley.
Their stock then dropped 75% over the next decade.
10 years ago, I privately refused a gifted Alexa after Christmas, explaining "Hey I work in the industry, I know people who work for FAANG, Amazon spending billions on very smart engineers building systems to harvest data is a bet that they will be able to extract even more money from me, is it still within the return window." My aunt told me to go live in a cave.
My brother has/had a Google nest router, and that absolutely floored me.
I was gifted an Alexa by a (previous) girlfriend. I haven't even opened it because I have very little use for an AI companion. And I too know people working in FAANG and how invasive those smart devices are.
Has she seen the price of caves lately?
"Alexa, list local cave prices."
"If you have to ask, you can't afford it."
duh... you don't buy a nice cave, you buy a starter cave and install grey click flooring and a pot faucet over the stove.
Then paint the whole thing flat white, really splurge on a granite counter top for the kitchen, and a deep single basin sink. (Single basin sinks were made by the devil to torment me)
Things like this is why I don't even bother.
"Thanks Aunt!" then just chuck it into the trash at home.
Or try replacing the brains with a Raspberry Pi, idk.
Something tells me that aunt calls for help when they have tech issues.
Maybe just personal experience...
For help, you know what you talk about. But if it is about privacy or safety, I am hyperbolic... apparently
Caves seem pretty cozy tbh
Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.
I am curious as to how out-of-touch your single downvoter is. Because you hit that nail right on the head.
Like, for my current place I’m still designing a CCTV system. But it will be using dumb PoE cameras, hardwired into a traditional NVR. But everything will be shielded, airgapped, and using dumb(ish) components that do not “phone home” to their manufacturer in any fashion.
I’m even looking into solid state and mechanical components for other home automation functionality. Like, nothing computerized to any degree, and therefore, incapable of being a threat or a data leak.
the scythe was peak technology, actually
Almost every refuge in internet is for profit data hungry giants. Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
they're right here actually
All over the place, they just don't get indexed high in search...
I still blog. Nobody reads it because search sucks, but I keep blogging. Others do too. There are dozens of us.
Me too. With no telemetry or interaction I don't even know if even a single person has read my dump of thoughts.
WordPress has the ActivityPub plugin, which is the only way I've managed to disseminate my articles and have people interact with them.
Who's your webhost? The data is almost certainly there.
It's just a static jekyll server I host on my own.
I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging
I don’t know though
Neocities exists
Maybe this is it
YouTube?
Just seeing all those thumbnails with the shocked face and stupid arrows makes me want to scratch my eyes out.
But without the red circle and arrows how will you know you’re supposed to be looking at the exploding police car?
But also open source, self hosting, and diy tech is booming
how can I use it to feed my family? I'm genuinely asking, I lost my enterprise job I hated.
Honestly, here's the thing. My PC is still running Win10. It just works. My life is stressful and chaotic and my escape is gaming. I love modded Skyrim and I love gaming and when I get a chance to sit down at my computer I just want to fucking escape. I don't want to troubleshoot, I don't want to fiddle, I just want to load my game and have fun.
That is what has been keeping me from switching to Linux these past few years. I have Win10 tweaked in the registry so it can't run copilot or AI, the start menu can't connect to the Internet so it can't show me ads, it's still Microsoft and I don't love it but I don't have to think about it.
If someone came along and said hey, for $100 I'll install Linux on your computer, make sure all your drivers are installed, make sure all your hardware works, and get your games and files moved over, tested and working, and be around to troubleshoot in the future and teach you basic troubleshooting if you need me (for an additional reasonable fee), I'd pay it. I'm not made of money, but I don't want to spend my time or limited brain power doing that stuff and I'd be more than happy to offload it to someone else.
I understand that you do not want to fiddle with a computer, I was once like that and that is what kept me from switching to any OS on my computer. I want to let you know as an experienced Linux user though that once you setup linux, you do not need to do any more fiddling. For the files and personal stuff, just back it up to an external hard drive. That is pretty much it. I could help you for free, but I do not really have somewhere to message anyone.
This is completely false ime. Updates can break your setup, though on stable distros they usually don't. Also anytime I installed a game I'd have to invest time to set it up. For older games this could take an hour or more to get everything working. For newer games some features might not even work.
I ditched Linux for a reason. It was useable but I need my gaming machine to be stress free, not another work project.
I was referring to stable distros. But once you got all your games set up, aren't you kinda good to go? But I get your point still, though.
As someone who does Linux tech support for 2 people as a hobby/because I love them, it would cost you more than $100 for all that.
But $300 for the setup and then $100 per year for support would be reasonable as long as you don't expect me to drop everything and rush over when something changes/breaks.
I'd happily pay that if it allowed me to not have to deal with it.
I'm not a technological idiot, it's just not my thing and I find it very stressful to deal with. It would be worth it to me to not have to.
I hear you. It's a pain even when you have the skills to do it. I am looking for a secondary income stream and want more people using Linux, so maybe I should offer that for people. But ugh, the ways a computer can break can be so stupid.
Probably a good thing you haven't switched then. In my experience setting up mod manager and any external tools (like Nemesis) was not easy, but it's doable. Mods themselves may not work though, especially if they are more external to Skyrim. So, for example, you can forget about ENB shaders. I mean, when I tried them they worked, but basically no other mods and in an empty area with 7fps is not exactly playable (on Windows it was unstable ~30fps with mods).
Vortex is a flaming turd on linux. I recently deployed a 2300 mods collection for CP2077 with it. It took around 35 hours - with a premium nexusmods account, and thr download itself was only around 1 hour. In comparison, the multiplatform NexusMods App they mothballed completed the same task in about 3 hours, but since it never was really finished, it failed at the end of deployment. There is a community fork of the Nexusmods App available, but it sadly failed the same way - it can't cope with really large collections, and i am not good enough of a programmer to really help out - i can read code as long as it does stay simple, but writing it is a completely different thing.
Apparently there is such a thing as a "Nexus Collection Downloader" for Mod Organizer 2, although I've never tried it. MO2 generally works fine though.
Will give it a whirl. My experience with Vortex after seeing the NexusmodsApp, that was coming along nicely, being shelved to go back to their tech-debt ridden piece of shit client (even back when i used it on windows it was a buggy mess, and the experience on linux is far worse with awful r/w performance and loads of different UI glitches. Once the whole window just collapsed into a 1x5 cm square with one black and 3 white borders while i was doing something else on the pc not even involving the app - unrecoverable. I became so infuriated that i even posted on the nexusmods forums (https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/13543600-useable-linux-support/ - i was somewhat surprised that the mods approved the post at all, but since noone engages with the post, i will probably not get any response regarding their plans)
After using https://github.com/Anon00b/MO2 to install MO2 for Linux I just used MO2 the same way I used it in Windows and all my mods played nice.
I had heard it was an issue in Linux. I'm running Lost Legacy and Yggdrasil (Skyrim VR) which are both 100+ gb mod packs (and highly recommend them both, Lost Legacy is breathtakingly beautiful). Lost Legacy is also very stable and runs very smoothly, especially compared to some of the other pre built mod packs I've tried.
If I did get brave and make the switch, is this something that theoretically could be run in a Windows VM or would it be better to dual boot and keep Windows hanging around for Skyrim?
Not sure unless you find people that want to switch over to non Microsoft etc products and you help them. I had a decent side gig getting people out of marketing companies by building them basic static websites and an email. Mainly plumbers, machine shops etc. They went from paying over a grand a month to like 20 bucks. It got out of hand from word of mouth and my lack of knowleges pretty quickly though
This might not be your issue but replace the subscriptions you use with FOSS ones.
Windows for Linux. MS365 Office for LibreOffice (although I guess you could say Google docs too). DropBox for Filen (or other services). ... Gameing for retro Roms? Etc.
Theres also lots of foss support for pirating streamed media.
I couldn't belive how many my live at home 18yr old cousin was paying for.
Got a kickstarter for a cool idea, and a friend with a podcast with like 12 million subscribers? This is about the barrier to entry. But you're going to be OK, maybe you go take a boring, stable job like a state university, and make up the difference in pay by consulting during work hours. Maybe it's not so bad.
I've spent the past couple of years moving away from Apple devices and commercial software, into self-hosting as much as possible. While at this stage I wouldn't go back to my previous set up, there's no denying that it's nowhere near as stable and easy to maintain.
Home Assistant, for example, is an incredible tool; that fails to turn some lights on and off far more often than Alexa ever did. It's frustrating. Not so much that I'm going to bin it off and go back to relying on Amazon, but enough that I mostly just end up feeling kinda pissed off that the big companies have pushed me into a place where I've had to learn how to be a part time sysadmin, alongside my 9-5.
This is the biggest issue I have with smart gadgets and home automation - they fuck up. Not even getting into the additional pains of fixing the automation when it fails, I've literally never gone wrong with pressing a light switch, or possibly pulling a cord. Full 100% success rate without rounding, even when the wifi's down. I have to walk past the switches (and cords) to enter and exit rooms, so not pressing them on the way past doesn't even save me any actual time.
Most of the automation I see seems to be the same - it introduces a chance of failure to something that already works, and/or imagines itself a solution to something that isn't actually a problem. Boilers, fridges, toasters, beds - these were basically solved technologies until someone came along and decided to reinvent the wheel.
There's a handful that do provide quality of life improvements to disabled people, but the overwhelming majority just seem to be parlour tricks that don't reduce the human workload.
For me, the utility is in being able to turn a bunch of lights on and off at the same time. We have a number of lamps, or light strings or what have you, rather than one or two big lights. Put them all in Home Assistant and I can set all the ones I want to turn on half an hour before sunset without having to touch a button. And 99% of the time it's fine.
Equally, I can have a few lights turn on in the bedroom shortly before I go up to bed, then turn off half so there's enough light to read by, then turn off every light in the house with the press of a button. And it is a button, because I don't have a voice assistant set up.
Also, I have a bunch of temperature sensors around the house.
None of it is essential, but it's a nice quality of life upgrade for my wife and me.
Technology nowadays is basically a cult, a coercitive cult. They often take technology as an end in itself rather than as a means to other ends, they reify it and even deify it, and they treat any moderate stance as an enemy and as a brake on their shitty eschatology.
Theyre still tools, still utilities. Just because douchebags are using them in power games more often doesn't make them any less so.
Techies were just in the loop enough to see what happened to technology.
20 years ago was 2006.
I do not recall any tech resistance by the masses. In fact a couple years later there were people camping out overnight waiting for the release of the latest gadgets like the iphone.
Ffw to today…those same masses dgaf about their lives being tracked and monetized today; in fact, many are active and willing sycophants pushing being social media personalities as careers while using that personality to shit on higher education and intelligence.
I do agree that the limited tech community capable of independent thought and action are against the surveillance corporate state we’re headed into, but the rest are doing their best to hurry and profit off it while the dumpster fire flames get closer and closer to them.
In 2006, cell phones were cool, smart phones like PalmOS and Blackberry devices existed but they were for nerds and/or businessmen who just could not wait to get back to the office to send an email. iPods were huge, it was the glory days of DVD, youtube launched that year, Facebook is where the cool kids were, you didn't need an invitation to get a Gmail account anymore. You could buy more than just books on Amazon now. It was...possible to say things were getting better. It was easy to see a future of increasing convenience and capability.
Looking back I'm not sure where the tipping point was.
I think the tipping point was in the early 2010s when all of a sudden everyone and everything hitched their wagons to Facebook. Facebook as SSO, Facebook messenger instead of email or SMS, Facebook marketplace dethroning Craig’s List, etc. Once people from elderly relatives to local business centralized all of their online identity into Facebook, it was over. To this day, Facebook is still the only way to see info for community events and small businesses (and instagram is the platform Facebook used to sequester musicians and artists).
It didn’t have to be Facebook, of course, but there needed to be a networked service that people trusted enough to give it every thing. Remember check-ins? People would post their location at restaurants, jobs, theaters, and shops. Public profiles that listed jobs, homes, family members and relationships, pets, children’s photos, and hobbies all under real names (I remember when Facebook started the purge of pseudonyms and aliases).
I deleted my Facebook account over a decade ago and people panicked and warned me that it was a bad idea. The craziest thing someone said to me was that it would make me un-hire-able since there’d be nothing for people to snoop to see if I was a good fit. The only “bad” thing that happened is that I lost contact with some old acquaintances, but that’s just life.
Regardless of all the other tech stuff in the past 20 years, I think that convincing people that it was okay to let a company like Facebook exist will the explicit goal to transparently harvest personal data was what opened the floodgates. Facebook (and other social media) demonstrated that people will willingly exchange privacy for digital errata. Once governments and corporations saw that, the future wrote itself.
The tech resistance slowly faded away with the first smartphones released after the iPhone I would say and really took off after the release of the iPhone 3GS. Think back to the boomers who complained about young people staring at their phones all day, now they do that themselves.
20 years ago, technically competent people had an integral role in the development and use of tech. That position is now infested with people who think economics is a science and money is real.
Technically economics is a subset of sociology and thusly is a science. But the people your probably referring to probably wouldn't consider a backyard blacksmith to be under goods manufacturing either so ditto. This is just a reminder that economics isn't just dumbasses who think that the only thing that matters is line go up, but the actual science side of it are generally in secondary fields or quietly working for the government or certain consultants.
Economy is a social construct. It is a liberal arts, not STEM.
So is history, but a whole lot of it is still scientifically based. The term soft science has existed exactly for this purposes for decades.
As an intellectual discipline, economics is closer to theology than physics, with finance an entirely arbitrary, cherry picked subset of rules to justify a particular economic model.
Economics is the control mechanism that filled the void in society, vacated by religion, after the Enlightenment. Every economic model is functionally equivalent to any flavour of religion, just with a little extra accounting blended in.
We did away with one unhinged narrative construct, things can’t get better until the current dominant fantastical conjuring is dispelled.
Absolutely. Ask any economist where clean air sits in any economic model, and they would call it an “externality”. Or a healthy forest. Or clean water. Or any of the other hundreds of millions of things that make life on this planet - or even a vibrant civilization - possible.
It’s also why capitalism is the most cancerous economic system possible, and leads only to ugly fascism-adjacent authoritarian feudalism and (eventual) systemic civilizational collapse and the early death of billions just so a few obscenely wealthy people can accumulate even more wealth before the end.
Ecunomics is a science. It is not hard science, and like all science, what you derive from it depends on the hypotheses you made.
True economist can work with unreal hypotheses and get wrong conclusions. The fact that it's not hard science allows a bench of idiots to decide they know better an come up with flat-earth level theories like trickle down economics.
Economy is a social construct.
That's the history of enshitification in a nutshell (sorry to people who hate the term, it's just apt).
Engineers had some social power in these institutions for a brief moment. Sadly, we weren't able to get to any kind of class consciousness before the space was enclosed by capital, not even basic trade unionism.
All they had to do was make some of us millionaires and the rest basically comfortable until our skills were devalued enough that we'd lost our bargaining power as workers.
Anyway, best time to plant a tree 20 years ago and all that....
I still like technology. It's still possible to find technology that doesn't spy on you and that you can control yourself. I use Mint, by the way.
It's not the technology that's the problem (mostly), it's the corporations that control 99% of it.
Foss got me back into computing and seeing how fun it is. And turning my back on corpos as much as possible.
Installing Linux and bucking the yoke of Microsoft from my private life has reminded me that using a computer used to be fun and rewarding. Not even kidding.
My brother wanted to play Project Zomboid on a private server, and I've had more fun setting up and managing the server than I've had playing a lot of games that came out in the last few years. I need to get the time to setup CRON to jobs backup and update the server and mods. I'm trying to figure out if I can do it all from my Proxmox OS, or if I need to build separate cron jobs both inside and outside the VM and schedule them with enough buffer that they won't run at the same time... Trying to get a nice and quiet hour to myself to really dig into it.
Dude exactly the same here. I didnt realize computing had become depressing to me. Linux made me feel young again!
side note one of my co workers said it got so bad and he hates windows so much he just pretends he doesn't have a laptop and uses his phone for everything. I'm like...bro go mint. Its so much better.
I have to use a Windows 11 machine for work, and I feel better every week about my decision to switch my personal computer from Win 10 to Mint. I'm trying to get my wife to switch over, but she swears up and down that she needs Microsoft Office to do basic document functions... I'd love nothing more than to get her away from that, and stop the $160 or so that I spend every year on Microsoft office.
seems like we have the same life. I also am forced onto 11 for work, and i DESPISE IT. every second i'm on win11 makes me so thankful i got rid of that garbage in my personal life. My SO actually did switch to Mint with me and we've worked through issues together, now we joke that she's "Defeated Lynux" xD. So far, not a single thing has needed windows, except one time i tried to do a firmware update on a mouse through a linux vm with windows and bricked the mouse, and needed actual windows to reflash it. But thats a very small use case. and we can't play spyware trash games like pubg or fortnite (which are brainrot anyways). I do miss pubg a little bit tbh, just driving around and causing havoc ha.
ah, unfortunate that they need office. Libreoffice won't work at all?
NGL. I kinda miss League of Legends. I've been looking for ways to run it from a VM, no dice. I may end up making a portable installation of Windows 11 and keep it on a removable SSD, and then only boot it when I really get a hankering for playing Ivern.
Libreoffice would work fine, but it looks different, and for the layman, that can be completely unacceptable.
I use mint too! Only switched last year and i have never looked back.
Techies stopped jumping on the newest gadgets when the newest gadgets became plastic slop that did nothing but track what you said, did, where you went, etc, and reported it back to the company so they could build a profile of you and sell that data.
normies buy the shit now because its affordable (Because of the afformentioned creepware) and because they cant be bothered to do a modicum of research to realize theres a 98.6% chance that the device will be non-functional in a year because the company collapsed (having harvest all the information it needed before rebranding as a new company to do it all over again) and took the online servers with it, because of course your fucking toaster totally needs online servers to operate.
But while going bankrupt, it will sell all information about you to the biggest bidder. Terms and services for you fryer included sharing data with "partners", so now your health insurance can jack up your premium because you used the fryer "too much for your own good".
It took extra effort to find a damn washer and dryer that did not want internet access.
I have been told I am complaining too much about my company moving to windows 11 and that I need to grow up.
I will then watch those same people slowly but surely start to complain about changes and things not working. I got laughed at today for fighting the updates and windows 11 by a few people who are probably going to be made redundant by this change. (I'm not angry, making people laugh and being a loudmouth idiot is my favourite thing)
I have been in IT support since 2007 and I know that all the change is bad.
My personal computer is on Win10 LTSC IoT and I'm moving to Linux Mint (Thankyou to the people on this forum that recommended it).
Change in tech can be good but not when it's Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.
Your confirmation bias will not prove anything.
Users have been complaining about every piece of software forever. They do not do it more on Windows 11 than they did on Windows 7 or XP.
I also work in IT support for more than a decade.
And switching to Linux just is not an option. They just do not have a decent answer to Active Directory. And retraining users to use a completely different operating system will have bankrupted plenty of businesses.
Not really. People stood in lines for Windows 95. I don't think I ever heard a complaint specifically about that OS. 2000 brought the 95 interface to the NT kernel. XP got mild criticism for looking childish, but people liked it as a stability improvement from 95 and 98.
Vista was the first Microsoft OS that saw a lot of backlash. It was more secure, but ran slowly on anything that wasn't very new hardware. 7 was widely enjoyed, 8 was mixed (very tolerable with something like ClassicShell), 10 was beloved, and 11 is widely hated for a huge variety of reasons.
Can you find someone with a complaint about any of these OSes? Sure, but that's meaningless. The fact is that MS has released both beloved and hated OSes, and Vista is the only one to receive as much hate as 11.
The company I work for has, until now, not really given much of a shit about cybersecurity. Sure, we had some basic stuff in place, and had managed to avoid any issues, but it's fair to say that the boss' focus isn't on the computing side of things. But we recently took on a big contract from a BIIIG customer, and that customer has a contractual requirement that we achieve the UK government's Cyber Essentials rating at the very least.
So out with the old Win10 PCs and in with some new Win11 units. They're still shitty, but at least they're compliant.
Trouble is, because the company broadly didn't care, I was able to put Kubuntu on mine. You could argue that my PC was the most secure because I ran timely updates, where my colleagues were still using unsupported Win10.
Well, I've lost my Linux privileges because now the IT guy needs everyone to be in line, and on the same hardware.
So I've spent the past few weeks poking and prodding at Windows 11 to figure out how to bend it to my will without admin access. It's been quite good fun actually. Aside from the whole using WIndows thing.
I moved to Linux Mint 2+ years ago. Zero regrets. 10/10, would recommend. Win 11 getting bloated is what finally drove me there. FWIW, Claude is amazing support for Mint and Linux in general.
It's not just you, though. There's a post on Hacker News right now about the 170k non-profit orgs just had their data deleted my MS recently. There's a whole comment thread about how MS is no longer a serious company. Silicon valley professionals have lost faith in the company. It's not just you (and me).
Oh no, you've triggered my occasional whine about Linux Mint. I was so happy to finally have a Linux distro to play with, twenty years after first wanting to try it after my dad brought home a copy of Linux Format someone left on the bus.
Linux just doesn't like me. It was okay at first, though I couldn't get my art programs to work (sorry, I love my SAI and psp 7, I don't like krita and always hated gimp). But I could use it for intrewebz and storing my mp3s. I was so proud of my first sudo apt update. But after a while it wouldn't connect to the internet so I can't update it and now it's just gathering dust taking up an entire SSD. I wish I was brave enough to reinstall it or replace it with a different distro, but I'm too scared I'll brick my entire PC.
That is the end of my occasional whine about Linux.
I just had a little chuckle that you are having a whine and that to get those apps running in linux you need WINE.
WINE no like me either :(
Edit: sorry that's not actually true. I got mp3tag to work on wine or playonlinux which I think uses wine?
I found that bottles is quite good. It creates all the WINE prefixes etc and can run exe installers from there. I needed to use it to get ableton live to work and that was the method that worked.
As a side note: If you ever try again, I got SAI2 working on Zorin OS out of the box, while I just could not make any version of it work properly on Mint. As far as I know psp is out of the question, though. (And I am still stuck on Windows, since I have not yet found a way, to get the Surface Pro pen work well enough, on any distro.)
Sounds good. What I need is a bunch of local nerds starting a computer club with some old PCs we can practice installing Linux on. I would actually be willing to talk to people for that. And then once I knew what I was doing, I'd have so much fun making other people learn it too.
Psp7 is my staple, been using it since around 2001 ish, still does most things better than XI. Although I can't save presets on Win10.
That sounds like you ran into a few hardware issues, which may just be bad luck with your machine. Sure, Mint isn't for everyone or every machine. But the vast majority of people gave good luck with it.
Not sure what your opinions are on AI, but I would guess that a day or so using paid tier Claude would have you safely running some Linux distro on nearly any laptop. I used it to guide me through a home server setup that took a couple hours total. If you're worried about bricking the machine or want the SSD back, it's an easy way to get that, one way or another.
LLMs are really good at resolving all of these issues for you
i wouldn't say "all" but some. i've gotten the compose key and some edits to my xkbmap working with it.
Now, yeah.
I remember when a new microsoft OS was a great thing that brought wonder and excitement instead of bullshit.
3.11 to 95 was revolutionary
Upgrading from 98 to XP was amazing.
XP to 7 was like being blessed by a digital god.
7 was truly the pinnacle of OSes. Everything after 7 started to take the crap and fall apart though. 8 with its stupid tablet design for desktop, 10 for its spyware and bullshit, 11 because you've become the product instead of the OS, and also laying the foundations for a restricted, walled garden like apple has.
I've been on linux for several years now, but god damn do I miss windows 7. It was the peak of operating systems. sleek, stable, usable, and the first OS from microsoft that didnt need regular reformating to maintain stability. It didnt need babying. Things almost never went wrong, and when something did go wrong it was easy to figure out and fix.. I went years between reformats, and those only typically happened because of hardware changes (which often werent necessary, but used as an excuse for digital spring cleaning, basically)
I never had 95, my family couldn't afford a PC back then. But getting out families first PC running Windows ME and spending so many afternoons trying to fix it is that got me into IT support.
Moving to Windows XP was a huge step up and moving to Windows 7 was another step up.
Microsoft has never ever made an OS as good as Windows 7.
7 and XP are equal until in XP you try to drag a full screen window and cannot.
I'm on 10 LTSC IoT and I think (Thanks to people on the Linux sub) I'll be moving to Linux mint Cinnamon.
I agree, windows 7 was the best OS microsoft ever made.. maybe the best OS ever.
It was the peak, and microsoft could do nothing to improve on it..which is why every OS afterwards has relied on slop and creepware.
Best OS ever? Nahhh. I don’t think it’s controversial to say modern linux distros have eclipsed 7.
No they havent.
Linux has made astonishing progress, and it is in a state where it is every day usable by alot of people, but its not at the polish and usability of windows 7.
Trouble is, what can the OS makers offer these days?
Apple brought it on themselves by insisting that their platforms had to be updated annually, presumably because it made it easier for them to blacklist older devices more frequently. An unsupported device is basically landfill, right? So you'll have to toss it and buy a new one. Because...reasons.
But really, what are the functional differences and benefits to the end user of moving from Win10 to Win11? Of moving from macOS Sequoia to Tahoe to Golden Gate? I'm not massively au fait with Windows, but from my experience, the only real difference that could be sold as an upgrade is "Moar Copilot!".
We're at a point where hardware from five years ago is every bit as functional as hardware released today. So all of the companies have latched onto AI. But users don't really care about AI. And that leaves Microsoft and Apple and Google with... nothing. This is particularly obvious in the mobile space, where they've run out of hardware features to hang a new device off of. Even the cheapest new smartphone has a still/video camera with surprisingly high quality sensors. They can all connect to high speed wifi and cellular networks. They can all do all of the things people need of them. What else can they add?
But the shareholder value must increase.
It's exhausting.
Corporate OS makers like Apple and Microsoft?
Nothing.
The sad reality is we have hit the point where every OS for the last 15 years have been able to do everything necessary, and would still be able to do everything today if driver and security updates had continued.
Theres always the need to release a new product, from a corporate profiteering perspective, but there is no longer significant progress in the product itself. There is no revolutionary improvement like you saw from,(using windows as an example) say 3.11 to 95. or 98 to XP, or XP to 7.
Beyond that we've just kinda gotten minor iterative improvements(to be fair, we used to get iterative improvements as well bad then, with ME and Vista, as examples), along with a lot of creep and spyware because even the big OS makers realize that the OS as a viable, continuing product is coming to an end, and now they are shifting their attentions towards harvesting your data, tracking you, spying on you, and profiling you, so they can sell/lease/etc that data to others.
The only alternative to this corporate hellscape that exerts ownership over our OS and Computers is to use something like Linux.
and I know some people might cringe at hearing linux, because there are rabid proselytizers for linux, but as of this moment Linux is the only OS that for the most part lets you use modern computing without the creepware thats invaded modern paid-for OS's.
The ease of changing over to linux depends a lot on what you do, and may not be viable for everyone of course.
Until a couple of years ago I was hard in the Apple ecosystem. I saw things like Universal Control come along and how cool it was that I could control my iPad from my Mac; but only if both were new enough to support it.
Then I began to dabble in Linux, before immersing myself in it. And then I realised that Universal Control was just Deskflow, (or one of the numerous forks of the same project). Which led me to realise just how many of those incredible Apple innovations over the past 10/20 years were mostly just polished versions of things people could do with far cheaper hardware.
Take iPhone mirroring. That's been available to Android users as SCRCPY for god knows how long. But if you use Linux or Windows and an iPhone, it's not for you. For a long time, my iPad got very little use because I can't integrate it with Linux very easily at all. And that's by design. That's how Apple sells more stuff.
I think you are misremembering how bad XP was on launch. It took a year or two for it to be stable. Windows Vista was an even worse nightmare before we got to 7.
I didnt have many big headaches with XP. In fact, the only headache I recall having was getting some very old games working, but there were workarounds and eventually they ran fine.
Vista was only a nightmare because vista changed how drivers worked from all previous windows editions, which meant every old legacy device had to have new drivers made and signed for it, which caused major headaches for a lot of people not on the absolute latest and greatest, but that storm did eventually pass.. it should have passed in testing instead in public, which is partly why I didnt mention it, the other part being i never used it on a personal system, but Vista was ultimately a stopgap release due to delays with 7. basically a windows 6.5 if you will.
Yah even "disruption" in tech has been captured by the rich. Nothing shakes up the established order unless it's taking from someone who has less to give to someone who already has too much.
"Electric Vehicles? I don't know, we need to go very slowly, and then consider how disruptive this technology is to the economy. A lot of big companies might not be able to divest quickly enough...... (etc)"
then cut to LLMs and it's like
"AI is here to stay. You can't put the genie back in the bottle (or stop spending billions and billions of dollars desperately pushing the technology into every crevasse). We're literally incapable of acting ethically if it contradicts with short term profits. Business = nature, we're just following an evolutionary maxim — our hands are actually tied! Look, fascism and endless war are just good for business, I don't make the rules (bribes government to make rules for them)......"
It's actually deplorable, and it's lead to a more impoverished future for everyone.
If they mean 20 years ago in the Covid Timewarp sense that the 90s were twenty years ago, then yes.
Literally 20 years ago the horror was already upon us. It was around that time that fear of the government chipping us to track our every movement was peaking, and hey, by the way, please buy and pay a monthly cost for this tracking device that has audio and video recording but also plays silly cat videos ANYWHERE!!!
20 years ago was 2006. I will point out that at that juncture the original iPhone wasn't even out yet. It released the following year. Normal people who were not turbo-nerds or high powered businessmen did not own smartphones in any significant number at that point.
If your device was even capable of downloading a cat video, we were still in the era when your cell phone carrier would have charged you $1.99 to do it.
iT wAs 19 yEaRs AgO
Or companies like Jamba/Jamster would have buried a clause in their T&Cs allowing them to send you periodic promotional texts and bill the fuck out of you for it.
What you think is them selling a $1.99 video of an anthropomorphic frog with a visible schlong making car noises is actually a predatory subscription scam.
2004 I payed 5€ to play a Splinter Cell game build with java on my SonyEricsson Walkman cell phone.
Remember having to pay for custom ring tones?
I remember them wanting me to pay for that, but I also remember getting a cable that allowed me to connect my PC to my phone and do whatever I wanted with the filesystem. The ringtones were in a different format but I got a converter and had the FF7 battle music for a ring tone.
I also recall some phones supporting MP3s for listening to music (though storage space was tiny) but not supporting them as a ringtone once connecting to PCs to share files was more common.
They also sold wallpapers, emoticon packs, and themes.
Yes, but I was fortunate enough to never actually get as far as ponying up the 99 cents. I got an MPX200 pretty early in my cell phone career which ran Windows CE and basically let the owner do whatever the fuck they wanted, including using .wav or .mp3 files as ringtones.
If there's fiber and a nearby hospital in the forest count me in.
There's lots of tendrils and medicinal mushrooms, will that suffice?
Deal
We can do shrooms and connect with each other!
The hospital thing is a big one. My wife and I had considered moving to a remote location but the risk of significant injury without nearby medical facilities was one thing that changed our mind. It's hard to accept that risk, even when you think it would probably be worth it. Medical problems ƒ suck.
Look at this fat cat able to afford a hospital.
my college roommate in 2008 was schizo, his handle was NetSecSatan, he predicted all this stuff
20 years ago, the Patriot Act was already in place and privacy was essentially dead (and other countries were not exempt from US spying), people just didn't know the full extent until the Snowden leaks. But it was clear enough then, if you weren't gripped by the hysteria, that the "emergency measures" were there to stay, and get worse.
Exactly. The War on Terror was the beginning of the end of personal liberty in the West.
Now we live in a world of panoptic surveillance and illusory freedoms.
Me when new smart devices are created
Satan's got your back, mate.
Stuff like that was also kind of present in the past.
My non-gamer friends suddenly became gamers thanks to 3D games.
I remember people telling me not to buy a video game controller, because everything will be motion controls in the future.
My stepfather wanted to cut our cable TV internet the moment 3G modems came out. He even talked about Soviet TVs with wired remotes to try to convince me and my mother.
My late stepmother accepted that I won't go to a trade school to become some kind of repairman after Facebook became popular, although she thought "software developer" was the same as "CNC machine programmer".
I call this phenomenon "normietech", and AI is the worst example of it.
The difference is that the things you mentioned are mostly conspiracy shit or just people not knowing better and be afraid.
However we have intelligent people being afraid because they understand and normies not being bothered because they don't understand....
I think this is worse.
The first part maybe, but not the second. That's a wholly new thing since electronic has come to mean being tracked.
Old tech wasn't spying on you and selling your data.
It would if the worst people on earth were buying it back then.
It was, but not as much, and with far more subtlelty.
As someone else mentioned, in 2006 the overwhelming amount of 'tech' was not designed with slop and spying in mind. If you bought a super high end stove/oven or toaster it would NOT need constant software updates or Internet connection and be forced to give telemetry and have microphones or cameras to listen and watch you as you use it.
The absolute first 'always online' device was the juicero in 2013 and it was an abject failure on every level. Not only were people confused as to why it needed to be online in the first place, it was a horribly designed and extremely inefficient machine... Someone at the time brought in the proprietary bag of juice it uses and squeezed it out by hand, and he was faster and more efficient in doing it than the machine was.
I personally did not hear about online appliances until I took a course on IoT in late 2020. And that one showed how you can use an arduino to make device an internet connected device.
But even then... Both young and old heads just don't like this shit. A toaster does not need to be online... A lamp and its lightbulb do not need to be internet connected. I am confident that if and when they make it legally required to do so (as they are absolutely going to do with cars) there will be so much disregard for the law that it will be unenforceable.
I’m mildly interested in one of those coffee mugs that heats your coffee, as I drink mine slowly while working.
But I don’t want an app for that. I just want a wireless charger puck and a temperature dial, with maybe a failsafe so it doesn’t overheat when empty.
So much tech should be small little closed systems, but then you lose the ability to shove pop up ad notifications at the user, or scrape and sell their location, or preinstall residential prices you rent to highly suspicious companies.
All this tech will be hugely inefficient and destined for failure until it becomes self contained and independent of a subscription.
Just get a yeti mug. Keeps it hot for hours and no tech involved.
One issue is that it starts hot and very slowly loses heat.
A smart mug can be set to your desired temperature, get there immediately, and stay there.
That being said, as a former Ember mug user, there is no need for that thing to only be controllable through an app. A dial on the side would be fine.
If you close it, the rate of heat loss in even a cheap vacuum flask is minimal, as in "scalding hot coffee poured in the morning is too hot to drink 8 hour later" minimal.
Do you need it to be scalding hot the next day or something? My thermos keeps things insanely hot for like 12 hours. It's actually pretty ridiculous because sometimes the coffee I made before 8 am is too hot to drink even by lunch.
That's the exact problem a heated mug solves. It cools quickly then stays at your ideal temperature.
That's the point I was trying to make.
just get a cheap ceramic mug and drink your coffee faster. Are we putting caffeine into our bodies or are we just fucking around?
I think I’m fucking around because I drink my morning coffee slow and enjoy it
mm. I suppose theres nothing wrong with fucking around. I should fuck around more. OK I withdraw my grumpy comment. I think I've grown as a person.
I've got a nice vacuum Stanley coffee cup that keeps my coffee hot for several hours. No electricity or app involved.
I got a 5 dollar one off Aliexpress 10 years ago, still running strong.
Nice. I've been hesitant to buy anything off such sites after a bad experience. I have doubts about the quality of their offerings.
I bought mine mainly because it fit into a bicycle water bottle cage. When I punctured the outer shell and it lost it's vacuum, I bought another one, but for some stupid reason, they redesigned it and the new one didn't fit into a bottle cage any more. A bit disappointing, but it's still a good cup.
Sweet peak consumerism.
'Peak consumerism' would be using disposable cups from cafes. I've had it for about a decade and make my coffee at home. Grow up.
Why?
Then buy a knockoff. Thermo cups from Stanley are actually good even when considered overpriced. The Stanley and the knockoff I have are the best termocans I had up until now and I have a few
I’m really happy with my Nextmug. No app, all manual. Basically it’s exactly what you described.
Tea candles are wonderful for this. I keep my Chemex over a candle and pour myself smaller cups from it, but I'm sure you can find solutions where you put the coffee cup directly over the candle as well. A coffee cup with built-in heating elements and electronics sounds insanely overkill.
Or you could use a spirit lamp instead of a candle. Top up the lamp and your drink with alcohol!
Don't actually do this unless you have some very high % drinking spirits, fuels usually have various toxic things added to them to prevent you from having fun.
Look into getting a burnout mug. They have an extra layer before the vacuum layer that quickly absorbs heat then retains it to cool hot drinks to a drinkable temp then holds them there for hours. Zero electronics.
I got gifted an Ember and while it had an app, I never installed it or used any smart tech. Out of the box it was set to some temperature that was reasonable, so that was that
It's true.
I'm this 👌 close.
I'm only this 🤏 close.
I mean its true.
But my 4K120hz VRR Oled just never connects to the internet. gAmInG-rig is on Linux. Pixel got the Graphene treatment. Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me(personally, if you have usecases, good for you). If there were ready to use iot devices which doesnt suck and respect my privacy by just beeing on the local network: sure i would think about it. But hacking together something good with arduinos wasnt worth my time for now atleast.
VR headset OS is hacked and nerved to the best of my knowledge.
For now there are still ways to enjoy tech even though overall its a fucking hellscape.
< Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me
Home Assistant is a great way to achieve home automation without handing everything over to random organisations. Not perfect, but better than relying on Amazon.
I can only speak for myself, but the things that home automation usually automates don't spark joy for me. Like they're the kind of friction that I don't hate, and ideally would want to just have more time to do.
Also I guess I just like being able to go somewhere in my house and there are no computers there
And ESPhome works very well together with Home Assistant if you want to build stuff yourself.
Just get an ESP32 and a sensor or other device that is supported by ESPhome and you will be able to program and connect it very quickly.
There are also ways to use sensors that are currently not supported by ESPhome by writing a custom component, but that is something that I don't do, too much effort and it's not that easy.
It's also crazy just how many different devices can be connected to Home Assistant. If it is at least somewhat widely used chances are good that someome has already written a plugin to make it work.
More details please!
Meta Quest w/ blocked updates and DNS? Pico? Something else?
This is why I use debian stable. New releases are three whole years apart and everything works. I just upgraded to debian 13 a few days ago.
20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could.
Now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest
What flavor of astroturf is this?
Is this just retweeting, or whatever mastodon calls it?
Farting
re-queefing
Lets just say its tomato flavored, because tomatoes dont taste like much of anything anymore.
Holdon let me screenshot....
I just ordered a mechanical watch. Primarily because I think they're cool, but it not even having a battery feels as far away from a smartwatch as you can get to me, and I like that too.
honestly, I like my Seiko mechanical watch, but there would be periods I wouldn't wear it and then have to re-set the time often enough that it irritated me and I got a Citizen Eco-Drive, and I fucking love the thing. It does everything I need from a watch: tells me the date, tells me the time, has an easy way to switch on/off DST, even automatically accounts for leap years and has a few functions like a stopwatch and a timer that I never use; but it doesn't play stupid games like modern tech and it never needs winding.
Having said that, seeing the winding mechanism through the clear back glass of my Seiko is magical in a way you can't get from any electronic watch.
They should make a watch stand that rotates so they stay wound
Edit: patent pending, don't steal my idea pls
I have bad news for you...
In all seriousness though, I have a case with a winder for a mechanical watch, and while it keeps the mechanism ready the watch still needs to be reset regularly. Mechanical watches can't match the precision of quartz crystal timing. They will gain or lose a few seconds every day even if kept perfectly wound, and after a week in the winder it will be noticeably off.
A $10 digital watch keeps time more accurately than a $1000 Swiss mechanism.
they do, but I'm not enough of a watch collector to necessitate owning one (I have a grand total of two, the two I just listed, and one is usually on my wrist)
Yeah, I bought an Eco-Drive 10 years ago and it's still working great. I never have to worry about it, it just works. I've bought two more since, the very cheapest basic model I could find (BM-8180 https://ebay.io/m/wZhDp4), and a fancier dressier one (CA-4553 https://ebay.io/m/TbSiJ5). My original GN-4W-S has taken a real beating over a decade, the glass and body are scratched all to hell, it's been dropped and banged against door frames &etc. It doesn't seem to mind, still keeping time like it did brand new.
If you want a watch that just does its job and doesn't really need anything from you, the Citizen Eco-Drive models are great.
TIL about Citizen Eco-Drive watches. Looked them up. I like them!
I'll try living that mechanical watch life first, but if I have the same irritations, could see me going the same route.
If it wasn't so difficult to do so legally, I would already be in the forest.
Become that which they fear
This weekend, found my old motorola phone. For giggles, i plugged it in- still boots! Can I do anything with it or did I just wasted a bit of electricity on nostalgia?
If it's 3g-only, it won't get a network signal anymore. So mostly it's a novelty that can play badly written Java games.
Depends on what the other poster meant by "old". Motorola made Android phones from very early on, and those would definitely be considered old. You can probably do some possibly useful stuff with those even if they are stuck on 3g.
Solid point. I was definitely assuming a StarTAC rather than an old Android phone that could be turned into a Home Assistant dashboard or digital photo frame.
Beyond what's been said about data harvesting, 20 years ago new devices very often represented genuine improvements in form and function on each new iteration. Physical and functional differences were easily apparent between each model of early smartphones.
The only thing we have right now that's similar was model releases from AI labs. And it seems like even those are slowing down because the urgency to release anything incrementally better undermines huge, stable jumps.
Tech used to be fun for some reason and innovative and you knew when something new was made it was better than the previous model and you would notice the improvements, now when something new comes out there's no more excitement because it's the same shit with a new model number and that's why it seems like techies aren't interested in tech because they already tried everything 5-10 years ago and the new stuff just isn't "new" anymore, it was just simplified for non tech savy and rebranded as "new".
That's so not true.
It's just that the focus shifted from nerds doing nerd things to economists enslaving nerds because they realized there is a lot of money in there.
Tech is still exciting. The constant enshitification and "profits!!!!" is what is annoying, depressing, and outreagous.
Take WASM for example. It's absolutely stunning. Imagine what we would have done with it 15 years ago. Now, it is still some niche because they haven't figured how to squeeze money out of it.
k, if its so stunning, why didnt it take off? why didnt asm? Sure it enabled processing nearer to local data sets. I have no use for that and I dont want the data near me processed.
That's the whole point of the entire thread?
I wasnt replying to the whole thread, do you see that? I was replying to your comment. *sigh
Yeah, 20 years ago they weren’t a self paid tracker that reported my every action on the web - tracking was minimal and limited. But now maybe not a forest as much as just limiting what tech I have in my house - for instance last week I bought an analaog scale to replace my 15 year old smart one from Withings that has been without WiFi for years.
I also limit how much time I have my phone on my person, or total screen time.
the iPhone was released 19 years ago, and even though I love carrying a camera/map/walkman/bubble-level device in my pocket, it fucked up our world real bad.
Normal people never avoided tech. TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Nintendos, Atari 2600s, Colecovisions, Selectavisions, DirectTV, WebTV, Tivo, Cell phones, beepers, the list goes on and on. If you're using a smartphone to read this, you're using a glorified Blackberry. This stuff was what Dr. Stephen Falken from War Games and the real life people the character was based on were fleeing to the woods from in the 20th Century.
If you call websites "apps" and download them from a store, you're not using tech. I don't view my Smartphone as "tech" anymore than a VCR was "tech". Smartphones are just a crappier version of landlines and computers. They try to be both and they're not good at either.
Yeah, the premise of this post makes no sense.
People owned flip phones in 2006. Kids were expected to graduate high school with basic computer skills. There's a good chance they got a laptop for college. The internet was already a standard part of life.
Apple made tech cool in 2001 with the iPod and in 2007, "normies" went apeshit for the iPhone. Not to mention how half the business world was using Blackberries and the early Windows-on-a-phone (forgot the name lol) already.
60 years ago techies decided that technology couldn't be trusted, because it is programmed by humans. I've yet to meet any programming wizards or seasoned IT personnel that adopt the latest crap. We've always distrusted our creations. We know how many mistakes we made while making them, that we weren't able to fully fix.
Pry my old phone from my cold, dead hands
I'm ->||<- that close to getting like an old nokia 3310 and only using that
Haha remember when nokia used to make linux phones for a while? Maemo leste remembers.
The team behind MeeGo are still around and still offer linux phones. :)
Also doubles up as an improvised weapon!
Nah, there are still good products being produced. You just have to look for them and they will never be the most popular option since they get advertised like crazy by big corporations.
Return to monke
Yep, nowadays I avoid the latest tech the the plague.
Mate so true. 20 years ago there was no ai. Now we don't know where will we go. There are so many face ai as well so idk what's good and what not.
That's exactly my plan. Self-sustaining house at the edge of the forest. Just need the money to buy land.
Techies on the verge of retreating into the forest are an absolute minority, blown out of proportion by people on internet forums like this. most techie people still like gadgets.
Come on, this isn't facebook, we should be better than this type of post here.
4 years ago I quit my career in IT, moved out of the city, and now live in the woods. There are dozens of us.
I think about doing this all the time.
It was about 10 years in the making because it also involved opening an arcade as a way to make money. I had to find all those machines, learn to fix them, and get the arcade up and running as well.
It was risky, but I managed to pull it off.
Congrats, that sounds cool.
That's right.
Gargling corporate nutsack every time they release a new smartphone and rushing to install the latest spyware in your home doesn't make you a techie.
They never said that is what techies do.
Techies self host a Kubernetes cluster on their server rack at home. They set up completely isolated IoT devices with no access to the internet. They host their own Lemmy instance. Setup their own pirated Netflix using Jellyfin.
Someone who retreats to the forest because they are too scared of technology are most definitely not techies.
I do my own tech stuff so do some of my friends but it's a very niche thing compared to the majority of people who describe themselves as "techies". Many more are the types I described.
Being able to host my own shit is the reason I haven't abandoned it altogether and I'm still on the verge of giving it all up and living in the woods. Things in tech are not improving for us.
I know a game developer who works for Roblox who sends me Twitter links all the time and uses copilot. Blows my mind.
Tell me more!
He also uses... an iPhone shudder
All my "smart home" devices are local access only. I keep ignoring the occasional prompts to enable external access.
That's because the IoT gadget is now a cheap option on the shelf; they're prolific, but any technically inclined person can see the realities...versions going out-of-date quick, people neglecting patching, etc.
The S in IoT stands for Security.
Huh? There's more and more local-only options. Out of of my whole smart home (300+ devices) maybe 10 require an internet connection, the rest either work locally or don't connect to wifi at all (zigbee, zwave).
Most of the cheap IOT crap is still insecure, requires a signin and a cloud connection to spy on you and steal your data. Of course there are options to secure the devices (always have been) but for the nontechnical person this is out of reach, not only because doing that requires knowledge but also bc most people don't even know about these issues or care about their privacy.
Most new devices come with matter, which is local and allows you to choose your own gateway (including apple or ikea devices, which are pretty decent when it comes to privacy).
Sell your stonks! Go homesteadin' 😎
I feel this in my bones.
We are in an interesting moment where we can reimagine how we want our tech to behave and AI is good enough to hack a lot of the smart devices and make that happen.
I'm not a tech person, and I truly enjoy my phone, but the only smart device I've ever had was a puppy cam I've gotten rid of and a convection oven you can turn on with an app, which I don't have on my phone. My car is a newer model and has Android Auto and I do not use it at all. I have never voluntarily used AI beyond having it forced upon me by companies. Zero interest.