Every waking day of every waking use of the devices I have, I find myself constantly fighting a lot with the shitty input and recognition of said input. Things I swore I clicked once but having to click twice or sometimes three times. Such lag input between the last time I clicked and to the time the function of whatever I had to click fucking functioned.
With phones it is obviously worse, with finger input being either too sensitive or too dulled to register, inquiring more touches just to get somewhere or to type something, along with the separated frustrations aside trying to type on awful keyboard interfaces.
You can blame the USA government for setting standards for light bulbs that planned obsolescence became a thing. They recommended to make light bulbs with filament that burns after a certain time of use to prompt more purchases of light bulbs. And that’s where everyone else got the brilliant idea to make things not last as long. As well people didn’t have the funds to buy new appliances all the time, they were still a relative luxury so if you made something that broke in a year and cost $300 back then you might have a mob with shotguns at your door.
I never experienced this in ~46 years of life. Not sure what you mean. Nothing ever worked, I learned how to be a systems administrator because computers have always sucked and don’t just work.
There was a schism where all of a sudden profit became more important than quality. That’s when capitalism started showing it’s purely destructive roots. We rode that train for a while though but now it’s time to get back to being the best we can be, not fucking our brothers and sister up for a token that represents some sort of vague value.
I say it every day: “Nothing works any more.”
You pay for an item, and you get the absolutely least quality they can get away with. Customer service is disappearing quickly. Now it’s like “Here’s your thing, you got your thing, why are you still here, go away.”
Like my son says: “America is getting dumber and meaner.”
It’s crazy to me these days how much work I have to do to do such simple things on Windows now. I wanted to auto-hide the task bar the other day and instead of just right clicking on the taskbar like I used to I have to crawl through pages of poorly organized settings in the new ugly fucking block format.
I just buy old shit now. Old TVs, old stereos, old fridges. Anything that doesn’t need modern features doesn’t need to be modern.
Because software is cool so let’s just add more stuff!!
My Samsung S9+ still works. Original battery, too.
to all the people saying it never worked: there was a period from about 2006-2016 when it worked a helluva lot better than before or after.
Thats what I keep saying about Windows 10.
When it dropped it was fucking amazing. Every last thing just worked and they werent trying to milk us for every last cent or scrap of personal info just yet.
I remember the Windows 7 launch more vividly. IIRC they released a free public beta before launch. I immediately downloaded and installed it. Light as a feather and it ran like a top, everything worked.
Windows 10 was absolutely not a miracle on launch, it had its own host of problems that got fixed or ‘features’ removed over time. I distinctly remember the indexing and search being completely worthless for the first year. Forums were filled with posters declaring they’d hold onto Windows 7 until their PC crumbled to dust, and then they would finally switch to Linux. Such is the cycle of Windows releases.
I also remember Windows 10 being annoying at first, but I think it mostly gets overshadowed by how many issues I had with 8/8.1
Maybe I do have some rose tinted glasses because I hated 8 oh so fucking much.
You did still have to install a third-party app to get the start menu not to take up the whole screen, though
that’s windows 8
No i never had windows 8. Unless they retroactively updated windows 7 to go fullscreen it had to be 10
I’ve had Windows 10 from day 1 and I never had to do such nonsense.
remember when shit not working was abnormal and would tank a product so they’d test shit and ensure it had basic functionality?
pre-software days… they were a thing
Once upon a time, wizards pondered their orbs and created technological solutions to satisfy their intellect and quest for progress.
Everything changed when the dollar nation attacked, seizing the orbs and enslaving them to profit.
thinga can still work … you just have to put a shit ton of effort
Host your own cloud, de-google your phone (Recommend /e/OS) run a piehole … etc
It’s basically a full time job
Privacy fatigue is real. It’s best to have a threat model before implementing countermeasures. I’m absolutely worn out from it, and I still might suck. Additionally, nextDNS, which is one if my privacy tools, seems to have almost forwarded to Googlehosted.com, which it blocked due to my rules, but still. How exhausting!
So how do you feel about e/OS ecosystem? I think I will delete MicroG, and then maybe do that for every update, but other than that it is pretty cool. I still might download Fdroid but too afraid to install more things yet.
As far as I know those days have never arrived.
In the 1980’s you’d buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..
In the 1990’s the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!
It’s the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn’t going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It’s the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?
It’s 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we’ll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.
It’s 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to “write” software and said AI’s insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.
I also remember the 1980s. A computer with 64k of memory cost $300, about $1,000 in today’s money. In 1986 my company bought a 10 MB hard drive. I believe it was around $1,500, or roughly $5,000 today.
My first modem in 1987 ran at 300 baud, slow enough that I could read incoming text as it arrived.
When I went to Africa in 1988 as a volunteer, the only way to communicate with my family was by mail, and a letter typically took one month each way. Now that village in Africa has a cell phone tower.
Moving to Japan in the early 1990s, telephone calls home cost $2.50/minute. I was using email, but almost no one I knew had it.
Even cars, for all their faults, are tremendously safer, more efficient, more reliable, and longer lasting than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s.
At the same time tho, our ability to shrink dies, to create displays of millions of pixels flipping perfectly day in, day out for decades - I recycled a Dell LCD monitor at work from 2003 yesterday, still working - to build cars that are more dependable than ever in history with actual moving parts - we take for granted the things that become dependable, even in ways that would have seemed miraculous a generation ago, because we’re always on the bleeding edge of tech where it isn’t working perfectly, because we’re shipping the minimum viable product, and now on a yearly schedule.
I think we could just chill with having smartphone wars for a few years, since there’s not a huge need to upgrade often, and people can’t afford to eat right now, but they’re releasing more and more foldable phones, making them standard as folks adopt. People will complain about how the hinges don’t work, how they fail a lot more. But that won’t stop them from buying them, from kids demanding them at Christmas, etc. And you know what? Aware of all this, and being chronically broke myself, I have still been subconsciously noting the intro prices for next year’s folding phones because part of me wants the cool little toy first.
I would like google to work like it used to. Youtube search is freaking useless nowadays also.
Google is evil and hopeless. We all got bamboozled by the big G.
YouTube has been enshittified so badly it’s barely usable these days.
I find Duckduckgo, specially lite.duckduckgo looks like the old Google search.
Nope, in fact I got good at IT shit because it seldom worked and I had to do the work of troubleshooting and figuring things out. And times were better because we had that ability.
There’s been this stupid drive of “user friendliness” = removing useful power features from software.
Now everybody just expects things to work, and they don’t care about having any ability to learn about it or fix it, and we’re all paying for it. Things are likely getting shittier over time specifically because of people refusing to learn and accepting “If it doesn’t work, I guess I need to buy a new thing”. Fuck that line of thinking - if it’s digital, it can be done eventually. It’s just a case of figuring out how, or waiting a bit for hardware to get to the point where it can be done.
Reminds me of my Samsung phones. I got a new battery for my Galaxy S5 and one for my S22. One from around 2015, and the other released in 2022. You can take the back cover off the S5s and replace the battery in a few seconds. By 2022 they disabled serviceability to the point that removing and replacing the back cover alone took an hour to do, just so people will buy another rather than use a heat gun and learn about proper adhesive removal and reapplication. They just made it a monumental pain in the ass so they could sell more phones.
I’ll dissent here: early technology didn’t just work. Computers in the 80s and 90s (at least early 90s) required quite a bit of technical know-how to use competently.
Eh, it was fine once you got your autoexec.bat configured with the proper IRQs and whatnot, and telling DOS to load in high memory, and set up to ask you on boot if you wanted extended or expanded memory (and knew which one the software you wanted to run needed, but, I mean, just RTFM like a normal person, we at least had good manuals back then!), and which drivers you really needed to waste memory on…
We had a computer sitting for like 3 years in the mid 90s, totally unusable. It was assumed it had some sort of major virus because everything seemed to be working and making the right noises, but no interface. We didn’t have the money for repair services, and nobody knew how to fix stuff yet, so there it sat.
Until one day, when someone hooked the tower up to the monitor for a newer computer, to see if they could figure out why it wasn’t working, or at least reformat the drives and stuff.
Turns out, someone, or some program, messed with the resolution, and set it to something the original monitor couldn’t display, and this was before automatic rollback, so it just didn’t display it. That’s all it was. Unusable for 3 years because we didn’t have another monitor to use to roll back the changes.
It never “just worked”.
it just didn’t display it
Wait, what? From what I remember CRT monitors might display something weird when set to an unsupported resolution or refresh rate… scrolling partial lines and whatnot… but they wouldn’t go black, it’d be pretty obvious they were trying to display something they couldn’t…
Also, the monitor would’ve worked perfectly when booting and displaying the BIOS POST, and when running DOS…
