I have this smart lightbulb that I got for halloween last year because I thought it’d be cool to make the porch glow purple for trick or treaters. Now I have to replace it because the app that controls it has decided to try and blackmail me for camera and location access and the bulbs default state without the app is to flash on and off in a way seemingly deliberately designed to cause headaches.
My poor tv is like, “connect to the internet? I need to call home! Help, i’ve been abducted by a luddite!”
Tv, you are never getting my wifi password.
Did you know that Ryobi has an app that lets you register tools you’ve bought?
Try plugging in a fork. Those still do what they are supposed to do
The internet has become more and more complex. I miss the early 2000s when I was a kid and everything was open and easy to use. No need to register ,no need to download this or that app. Everything was easy, even the laws.
Omg yes preach !!! I feel it’s everything these days, coffee maker…app Vacuum…app Scale…app Electric shower nozzle…fucking app Everything needs a password and an account and my mind is crumbling because of it.
I totally agree! I’m trying to avoid logins and download this and that, as possible as I can.
I’m half on one side, half on the other.
The line I draw is between safety and convenience. On the safety side, I want things to be very manual. I don’t want some app or external system managing whether or not the lights stay on, or whatever, on the convenience side, I 1000% want a way to manage things like the lighting from an app.
So anywhere that safety is a concern, like the kitchen, bathroom, a handful of other places… There’s zero “smart” anything. Everywhere else, yeah, I can turn off my lights from an app.
When I’m in my office/living room, where safety isn’t really a concern, I don’t have to get up to turn on the lights, I can yell at my Google home to do it for me, or use an app. If I want the lights to be some shade of turquoise, I use the app…
In the kitchen, as an example, no such control exists. You have to push the light switch, and you get basic bitch white light. You don’t get an option. You want the light off? Take your fingers and do the thing that makes the light switch go click and turn off the lights.
The decision to make anything smart relies on whether or not I’m going to be in danger if the lights go out and there’s no way to turn them on again because the Internet is down.
I remember when games asked you to register and it was optional… and people joked that they never did because there was no benefit to them whatsoever.
Now it is obligatory. No wonder I prefer retrogaming.
I recently renovated and said fuck no to all the smart home shit. Just the idea of having to troubleshoot the WiFi because my kitchen light won’t turn on drives me into a rage.
No waiting for firmware updates
Buy old stuff
Use open source
Downdate
etc
It is incredibly difficult for me to describe just how powerful a Linux desktop experience can be. You can buy a cheap computer that suports emulation and put QubesOS on it. Bonus points to putting a GPU in it and playing on either Windows or Linux with that GPU.
I don’t think Linux people entirely understand just how uninviting the prospect of messing around with an operating system is for the vast majority of the public.
As bad as Windows is, and it is it getting worse by the minute, it honestly does just work. I dual boot my computer, mostly into Linux everyday and even now I occasionally come across problems that don’t exist on the Windows side. The community need give up with this idea that Linux doesn’t have major usability issues.
The fuck are you doing, that you need to mess with the OS?
So Linux is just going to magically appear on your computer is it?
Not to mention all the dependencies for everything, I’ve gone multiple layers deep trying to install dependencies for the dependencies just to use a single module. Tbf I’ve mostly used Linux for bioinformatics so perhaps the problem for me is biologists creating software for other biologists and none are truly computer scientists (including myself)
It very much depends on the build of Linux you’re getting but there’s definitely quite a lot of builds out there that were designed for enthusiasts, where after you’ve installed it you have to spend the next several hours configuring everything. Your average computer user has very limited patience for this assuming they’re prepared to even do it at all.
I bet that 99% of people don’t even really know how you would go about installing a new operating system. It’s not exactly intuitive.
Enter your pazswird; enter the code from your authenticator
Yup.
Comcast “updated” their network yesterday and broke every fucking smart plug in my house. None of them will work anymore.
I really wanna ditch the smart TV I have and just get a display that only displays the picture of the devices I have plugged into its inputs and doesn’t get online, doesn’t receive updates or “improvements” and has inputs for everything:
3.5mm AUX audio
Composite
S-video
RGB
Hdmi
That optical audio jack made by (IIRC) Sony I can’t remember the name of right now. It’s what my stereo uses and it’s amazing. Used to be super common on TVs.
