I prefer how Nazis were dealt with in the past
Programming. Telling a machine “build x feature” is nervewracking because I do not know what it’s doing and more importantly boring because it takes all the joy out of writing code. Even the LLM completions I do not use because I have seen what it has done to my coworkers’ brains. I will think about the problem. I will write the code. I will know what it does. It will be of me, not of some averaging machine.
May the LLM era end in darkness and the gnashing of teeth amen.
You sound like a C developer complaining about interpreted languages lol
Amen
Fixing a car.
I’d much, much rather twist some carburetor screws or replace a fuse than have to try to troubleshoot some encrypted CANBUS acceleration sensor that is required for my suspension to work properly.
My last car with a carburetor was decades ago, are they not all fuel-injectors now?
Not the ones from decades ago!
Duplicate post, sorry!
Socializing.
No social media to distract people. Nobody staring a phones. Nobody recording themselves for streaming.
You memorized phone numbers or wrote them down. You called or got called to meet up at some place and everyone went from there.
True
I miss physically owning software, movies, and music, not having to pay a subscription for car features like heated seats or more horsepower. I miss getting a complete game that was usually mostly glitch free on day one you got it on CD/DVD.
Photography. Film was so advanced, having a layer for each major colour, every film stock has a different feeling. The only downside was cost, but you only took a picture when you were sure it is a good picture. Now we have tons of digital garbage because we take 100 pictures at once.
The old family picture books had so much value, now I can’t remember if I ever even looked at any past photos I took with my phone, it’s all just digital waste now
I feel the opposite. Film sucked so bad. I love pointing my phone at things and shooting a hundred shots and finding something good there or not finding anything and continueing with my day. Old photography was a pointless torture.
Film is crazy advanced. One of those “how did humanity figure this out?” kind of things. Smarter Every Day YouTube channel did a thorough tour of Kodak and it’s pretty fascinating all that goes into it.
The deliberate act of shooting that the financial and time cost definitely makes better photos. You can do that with digital as well but it takes more discipline. Far easier to shoot a dozen and hope one works than to think and come up with the right one from the start.
Both have their place I think. Any time I shoot a race, wedding, or a once in a life trip I’m so glad it’s digital! Being able to do a 10 shot burst and nail the facial expression is pretty awesome. Then slowing down and going on a local hike and setting up my 4x5 to take one shot, or a photo walk around town with an old SLR is a blast too.
Maybe I just like photography?
Shaving with a double edged razor rather than a cartridge one. The whole process is much more meditative and rewarding when you actually focus on the moment and take the time to do it properly. Gives a better shave too.
I want back my Dumb TVs!! I dont want everything to be connected!
I prefer pressing buttons and turning nobs in the car.
It’s actually safer to have tactile buttons, too.
Don’t get me started on those fucking digital handbrakes
Those fucked me up so much when learning to drive. Ah yes let’s try starting uphill with the handbrake. Could not do it because I had no fucking clue when it was going to release.
First time I had to do it in my dad’s car which has a normal handbrake I had zero issues.
My old civic is so nice.
One of the many reasons I’ll hang onto my 2012 Toyota Corolla until I drive it into the ground. It has a touch screen for just the radio and Bluetooth, but it must be some sort of gen one prototype because it’s pretty awful. Thankfully, everything else is tactile. I can’t imagine giving it up.
Fwiw, I’ve just got a '22 corolla and everything has a physical button. I love it.
My 2004 F150 just works, no guessing what button does what, twist the fucking knob.
Japan mostly skipped PCs (outside of offices). Since their phones were ahead of the curve, a lot of stuff was designed for them. That means that a bunch of stuff is either exclusively done through some shitty mobile app, fax, or in person. There was a brief phase where PC versions did exist, but those are almost all being neglected or decommissioned now. I much prefer to do things on a PC with a nice, clear, big screen, especially if I need to use some translation tool since the text tends to expand (learning thousands of kanji for stuff like legal and taxes is hard).
I do miss physically owning media. A lot of physical media still decays, though, so not a panacea.
Software programs that were much more tested and completed before release.
Software development where we think things through, define requirements, define states, etc. before any code is committed. I do think PoCs are fine to throw something against a wall but, if it works, the proper version should go through those design phases before anyone writes a line of code. Cheap components and fast machines and networks have made people lazy which makes software worse in a number of ways quite often. No vibecoding. No AI/LLM shoved into everything. I think they can have uses in certain contexts (rephrasing questions, generating examples/docs in projects with bad/no docs, etc.), but hate how they are being shoved into everything.
An internet not run by corporations. I think a lot of people do see it through rose-tinted glasses (we still had trolls on BBS, UseNet, IRC, etc. and other bad actors), but a lot of things were much better.
Third spaces. Places where people of different backgrounds would interact in some common way. Sure, some were echo chambers just like online communities today, but many were not and let people interact together rather than just being othered to the point of fear and reviling.
I much prefer AD&D 2.5 rules to anything around today (and TSR still existing, but that ship has sailed).
I do miss physically owning media. A lot of physical media still decays, though, so not a panacea.
I prefer digital media that is locally stored. Many complaints I see about digital media revolves around DRM or a service’s ability to remove media that you think you “own”.
I think locally stored media solves that without taking us back to the days of a shelf of hundreds of DVDs.
I do own some physical media like certain very old PC games but only because there is no good digital option available that’s more convenient.
I use locally stored digital media, but I still love my shelves of DVDs, CDs, and paper books. The CDs get ripped to FLAC and mostly left on the shelf thereafter, but I do still enjoy taking a movie off the shelf and loading it into the player.
I want a phone where I am able to reach the top and the bottom of the screen without shifting my grip. Also being able to comfortably store in a pocket would be nice
And less weight and no camera cluster sticking out making the phone not lay flat when put down would be nice
Yes! Make smaller phones! Why do they all have to be getting bigger and bigger?
I like the bigger phones (at least however big a pixel 6 is – that seems about a perfect balance to me). Good to view web pages and videos as well as to use as the nav for my motorbike and still fits in the pocket. I find the smaller phones just too cramped.
I think we all know the answer to that one.
i’m actually this close to just going back to a dumb phone.
Buy one
Ventrillo / Teamspeak > > > Discord
I liked connecting to irc servers and setting up a znc bouncer (also an on ramp into self hosting!) way better than anything matrix and discord do.
We had mumble for voice chat and that was perfectly serviceable.
TV.
I hate the smart-TV workflow, its a terrible user experience: Turn the TV on… wait for the smart-TV OS to load… land on an app menu… navigate around and choose an app… wait for the app to load… select a profile… wait for the list of shows to load… scroll almost endlessly through shows… choose a show, finally… wait for the video to load…
I miss when you turned the TV on and it was just instantly playing whatever channel you last had on, with one single interaction. I miss not having to make the conscious choice of what to watch and feel overwhelmed by so many options. I miss TV programs being a common experience, like an event, that everyone would be talking about together the next day, instead of everyone watching their own thing on their own schedule.
It was truly exciting to look forward to a weekly show on TV.
Except when you couldn’t know in advance when your show skipped a week and they had to play some crappy rerun of a completely different show.
A group of us used to meet every week to watch Twin Peaks. We’d unplug the phone, drink coffee, and eat cherry pie (or apple for a bit of variation). Then we’d watch the episode again having just recorded it and try to figure out wtf was going on. Happy days.
On the plus side people with jobs other than 9-5 can now be included in the experience.
If you haven’t used free Over-the-air TV these days you might be surprised that most cities have a few dozen channels of live TV right now. If your in a large metro area get the simplest of cheapest TV antennas, plug it into your TV, and do a channel scan. You’ll be surprised how many channels there are now.
If you’re in suburbs or rural, you’ll still likely have quite a few but may need a more substantial antenna.
I do have an antenna and get some decent channels with it
You can still do that by paying for cable.
You’re not wrong, although I think I’d still have to wait for the smart-TV OS to load and navigate the menu to select the Cable input.
In the 90s, I felt like I knew so much about computers, both the hardware and the software, but I’ve definitely fallen off from all the improvements in the past 20 years, and I’m so Goddamn lost now. I miss those simpler times when it was more about the physical aspects of a PC and less about the technical aspects.
What do you feel like you’re out of the loop on?
