It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.
“Smart” TVs. Somehow they have replaced normal televisions despite being barely usable, laggy, DRM infested garbage.
You’re not kidding. It’s pretty difficult to not buy them.
It’s a $250 smart TV vs a $2000 non-infested TV.
Nothing is smart if you dont connect it to the internet.
That my strategy when I have to buy one of those dumb TVs. Just leave it ignorant of the internet
The concept confuses and infuriates me. I’m just going to stick a game console or Blu-ray player on it, but you can’t buy a TV these days that doesn’t have a bloated “smart” interface. The solution, for me at least, is a computer monitor. I don’t need or want a very large screen, and a monitor does exactly one thing, and that’s show me what I’ve plugged into it.
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Man, I haven’t really faced this yet. My flat screen is a really old Panasonic plasma and it is"barely" smart. It came with a few apps on it. I ignore them and use it as a dumb monitor, running everything through my receiver instead. When it dies, I don’t know what I’ll do.
You can disconnect them from the WiFi and block their ability to connect and then use a third party device for any apps you want.
I recently bought a TV on behalf of a friend( because it was cheaper at Costco) and when we got it to his house and connected it, it asked him to give up his privacy like 11 times. If he said no, would it still have worked?
Mine had the ability to turn of WiFi in settings. I provided it no real information, didn’t create and account, and didn’t use their app or interface.
It was a Samsung. YMMV with other brands.
They’re more expensive, but check out commercial displays. They’re basically just big “dumb” TVs for businesses to display menus and whatnot, usually with a single HDMI and no sound, but those limitations can easily be bypassed with a stereo receiver.
They are surveilance- and ad delivery platorms. The user experience is as bad as the consumer can tolerate. They work as intended.
I don’t buy it, they would be better at whatever nefarious crap if they didn’t take a full second to navigate between menu options, or had a UI designed by someone competent. Even people who have subscriptions to the services the TV is a gateway to have a hard time figuring out how to use them. These things aren’t even good at exploitation, they are decaying technology.
If every smart TV you buy is the same, then you have no viable choices, and as such they’re doing the bare minimum of what’s expected for the bare minimum of cost.
You can choose not to have a TV. I only know about the current state of smart TVs because of sometimes being around the ones other people have, I would never buy one myself, there’s no need. Any media you want to see can be viewed in other ways.
Do you have a 55" OLED laptop screen to watch movies and play games on?
I mean, all power to you, but I really like having a nice sized TV.
That’s fair. I think if I wanted a larger screen I’d look into big monitors and some kind of expansion of my homelab setup to display things to it, but I can see why people might want a dedicated device with less setup required, even one where the setup is still pretty confusing.
I looked up some statistics and it seems, depressingly, that consumers are in fact buying more televisions and it’s projected to increase, so I guess I have to concede the point that what they are doing is successful despite all reason.
you can buy business-grade stuff without all the spyware shit, it’s just much more expensive
Only if you use it as a smart tv - I just never signed the user agreements, and now have a big TV with OLED. I switch to the source I want - off I go. Television can still just be television!
Encryption with unexploitable backdoors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad
The one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked in cryptography. It requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent.
OTPs have a safe, unexploitable backdoor feature?
Oh, nice catch, thanks. I read it as “safe, without exploitable backdoors”, but that’s not what he was saying.
I read it the exact same. Didn’t notice until reading this, that that is not what was said
“unexploitable backdoor” is a contradiction.
Since at least 1970, every decade there seems to be a, “The VR take over is here!” fad and it falls flat every time.
Those VR rollercoaster shuttle rides in malls during the 1980s and early 1990s, thinking that is the future, oh boy, we were all so silly.
cars.
we’re in too deep now, investment bias prevents changing strategy
No no no. There will always be solutions to the problems they cause.
They kill billions of animals every year but we can build nature overpasses. They kill millions of humans every year but we can blame pedestrians for wearing headphones or not looking properly. The tires shed about a quarter of all microplastics in the environment in Canada but surely we will find a technological solution for that eventually. The parking spaces still cause heat islands but we can just cover them with solar panels. Parking also causes flooding because of impervious surfaces but we can just resurface all of them with new materials.
And soon cars will all run on hydrogen and be totally environmentally friendly.And soon cars will all run on electricity and be totally environmentally friendly. Everyone on the planet just has to buy a new car eventually, keep buying cars, and spend (buy!) energy to move them everywhere they go. But they will be environmentally friendly! Except for all the other issues but surely we will find solutions for them. Save the planet by getting an electric car, the biggest and most expensive consumption object, and have a taste of freedom when paying to fill it with energy./s just in case.
the automobile is the perfect vehicle for a speedy fuite en avant ! not sure how to translate that, flight forward ? rush forward ?
Home printers
I’m long-term bullish on VR, if you mean having a HMD designed to provide an immersive 3D environment. Like, I don’t think that there are any fundamental problems with headsets, and that one day, we will have HMDs that will probably replace monitors (unless some kind of brain-computer interface gets there first) and that those will expand do VR, if dedicated VR headsets don’t get there first. Be more portable, private, and power-efficient than conventional displays.
But the hardware to reasonably replace monitors just isn’t there today; the angular resolution isn’t sufficient to compete with conventional monitors. And I just don’t think that at current prices and with the current games out there, VR is going to take over.
I do agree with you that there have been several “waves” by companies trying to hit a critical mass that haven’t hit that point, but I think that there will ultimately come a day where we do adopt HMDs and that even if it isn’t the first application, VR will eventually be provided by those.
VR is expensive and bulky.
Honestly, I kinda want VR theatres. You don’t gotta wear glasses that block half the light and you can individually adjust the screen size per user, but still have the audio/snack/social experience theatres are today.
That would combine the downsides of a cinema with the downsides of VR.
The social experience suffers immensely when the audience wears bulky headsets. Can’t kiss your sweetheart for example.
Shoes
ai
pretty much, we will never make it like CYLon level, or skynet level intelligent. the former requires a human mind in a convoluted process, which is probably more realistic than skynet/kaylon.
Cinema movies in 3D with the stupid glasses.
I’ll go against the grain and say literally all of it. Every piece of technology that exists is a compromise between what the designer wants to do and the constraints of what is practical or possible to actually pull off. Therefore, all technology “fails” on at least some metric the designer would like it to achieve. Technology is all about improvement and working with imperfection. If we don’t keep trying to make things better, then innovation stops. With your example of VR, I’d say that after having seen multiple versions of VR in my lifetime, the one that we have now is way more successful and impactful, especially in commercial uses rather than consumer products. Engineers can now tour facilities before they are built with VR headsets to see design flaws that they might not have seen just with a traditional model review, for example. Furthermore, what we have now is just an iteration on what we had before. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, people take what came before, look at what worked and what didn’t, and what could be fixed with other technologies that have developed in the meantime. That’s the iteration process.
Iteration isn’t a claim that the predecessor was a failure though, you iterate on the successes of the prior generation. It used to be that technology advanced so rapidly that the cutting edge became obsolete in a matter of a few years, but for that time it was a success.
I think there’s also an assumption of design philosophy here. One designer might put many generalized requirements into their design, then you get Google glasses, AI, NFTs and so on. This means everything is a failure because it couldn’t achieve the requirements. Others may pick a small set of very specific requirements, then you get the iPhone or a Toyota hilux. These are massive successes because they had cohesion in the idea and planned as to about compromise.
Politics: IF the political-mechanism selects-for DarkTriad, putting that in authority,
THEN … it’s only going to make our world non-viable.
Eventually fatally.
Other criteria & selection is required, XOR humankind self-extinguishes, this-century: The Great Filter.
You can’t have a world-species be rampaging/tantruming for toddler-ego, through planetscaping industry & militaries, being ruled by DarkTriad in authority, without extinction being raised into maximal-likelihood.
Could be, although we’ve had a few psychopaths in charge of world-ending nuclear arsenals and avoided the worst of it for now.
Flying cars. The idea has intuitive appeal — just drive like normal, but most congestion problems go away!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car
We’ve made them, but the tradeoffs that you have to make to get a good road vehicle that is also a good aircraft are very large. The benefits of having a dual-mode vehicle are comparatively limited. I think that absent some kind of dramatic technological revolution, like, I don’t know, making the things out of nanites, we’ll just always be better off with dedicated vehicles of the first sort or the second.
Maybe we could have call-on-demand aircraft that could air-ferry ground vehicles, but I think that with something on the order of current technology, that’s probably as close as we’ll get.
Flying cars lose al appeal the moment you encounter other drivers on the road. Just imagine that, but flying.
There are many models of flying cars. They usually are bad cars and bad planes and very expensive. Only good for niche wealthy enthusiasts.
The thing is how is a flying car different from a aircraft?
We have (ultra) light aircraft not much more expensive than a good car, we have helicopter with vtol abilities. Licencing isn’t that more complex than for a car.
The problem are the maintenance cost as a failure would be dramatic, and the noise meaning people don’t want them over their bacxyard/balcony
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I don’t think any government will ever allow flying cars.
Too prone for accidents, and way too much freedom.
Flying cars.
Maybe like super-thin phones and foldables/rollable phones. Most people have no need or use for them tbh
I don’t want a phone so thin and slippery I can’t hold it in my hand. I want a phone as thicc as an old gray brick Game Boy. When I drop it on the floor I want to have to replace the floor. I want a battery that will outlast the lifespan of the sun.
Printer drivers.
Apparently sending data serially at glacial speeds is impossible.
The LaserJet 4P driver was the GOAT. It worked on every HP printer for years. It’s been all downhill since.
