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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.
Theyre still tools, still utilities. Just because douchebags are using them in power games more often doesn’t make them any less so.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
very slowly
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.
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’m really happy with my Nextmug. No app, all manual. Basically it’s exactly what you described.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
My brother has/had a Google nest router, and that absolutely floored me.
Caves seem pretty cozy tbh
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.
Old tech wasn’t spying on you and selling your data.
It would if the worst people on earth were buying it back then.
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.
I use mint too! Only switched last year and i have never looked back.
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.
That’s the biggest mindfuck 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.
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.
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 first part maybe, but not the second. That’s a wholly new thing since electronic has come to mean being tracked.
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
Holdon let me screenshot…
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.
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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.
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
Home assistant is so fucking good.
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.
