Physically possessing the music that you bought, having the actual vinyl records (or later, CDs and DVDs of shows). That you don’t have to keep renewing subscriptions for to continue being able to listen to (or watch), that you can lend out or pass down to your kids or sell to a used record store, where you can buy the ones someone else sold to them. Those were the days.
Literally anything involving AI bullshit.
I want mobile phones with actual keyboards back. I hate touch screen keyboards with the passion of a thousand suns and I swear they’re getting worse.
Give me an LG enV2 with Android and I’ll be happy.
Buying stuff online using a phone or app. I still feel safer and more secure on a desktop browser with uBO.
Good news: Firefox on Android supports extensions, including uBlockOrigin
Though Im in the same camp, much prefer desktop over mobile for big purchases, banking, or anything that feels important
Using Windows - before onedrive, online integration, new control panel, telemetry. Using the internet - before tracking, bloated sites, paywalls, cookie boxes and ai garbage. Using my car - before telemetry, beep, driver “aid” systems.
Yessss
- I prefer to operate the clutch and shifting on my truck myself.
- I’ll rather do manual labor than any work that involves sitting on a computer.
- I’m chronically online but without a smartphone addiction.
- I prefer long-form media.
- Mowing grass with a scythe instead of a mower
- Splitting wood with an axe instead of an electrical splitter
They both are quieter and calming to the mind and soul, meditative even. And you kind of feel like an NPC in Anno 1602.
Software engineering.
Back in my day(™), it was an engineering role, where science reigned. Anyone even attempting “vibe coding” would’ve been rightfully laughed out of the room.
It’s a task that should take concerted effort, with specific goals and performance metrics in mind. Just getting the task done wasn’t and shouldn’t be good enough.
Uh oh. The ice carvers are complaining about the evils of refrigeration again…
Uh oh, the bad faith AI bros are conflating luddites with anyone that disagrees with them again…
I prefer pressing buttons and turning nobs in the car.
It’s actually safer to have tactile buttons, too.
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.
My 2004 F150 just works, no guessing what button does what, twist the fucking knob.
The only commercial technological advancement from the last ~30 years I think I would miss if it were all to revert to how it was before then would be GPS navigation. I don’t like the prevalence of technology in classrooms, dating, shopping, and vehicles today.
I would have liked discovering music, film, and events by word of mouth or just playing a tape I borrowed/rented even though a lot of people would probably defend the convenience of having it all readily available today.
I don’t like electric can openers. I strongly prefer to just use a manual one. I just see an appliance that has but one use and requires electricity to be tremendous waste.
3000% honesty, you are right. It is a waste, using a good manual can opener is far more satisfying. Like the electricity needed for the electric one is miniscule at best but its still wasted since it rakes 10 seconds to open one with a manual. I get people who are differently abled and need these, but the average person gets no real value from an electric one.
I love my P-38 can opener. It was made 80 years ago and it’s still opening cans like tin foil.
Came here to rep the P38. What a boss of a can opener.
I didn’t even know electric can openers were a thing
Never seen back to the future? One in the opening scene.
Making things electric was the “adding AI” of 20 years ago. Make something that works more complex and difficult to use, but the future!
More like 40 years!
That said, I loved my electric opener from 92’.
There was a knack to it, but I could be done opening a can before someone even started with a manual opener.
Not to mention they’re kind of hard to clean! Electric can openers are the worst. When the top pops off, they often send the contents of the can all over, too.
As a software and electrical engineer who has worked in life system critical projects as well as foundational financial systems with strict uptime and performance requirements…
My home is as basic as humanly possible, no automation, manual systems for everything. Anything that must be digital is untrusted, isolated, and has a backup. A cabin in the woods off grid is the only way I feel comfortable
No… this is me
it's me
I daily drive a clapped out 80s sports car with no AC and a broken radio. The true connection you can feel to a classically engineered machine when there’s zero distraction or convenience is hard to describe. You learn every noise, every smell, every quirk of handling and weight transfer, gain intuition about how the chassis will react to every abnormality in the road surface, have the shifter and clutch become subconscious muscle memory where you don’t even realize you’re doing it, etc. There’s a variety of reasons the average person should drive a newer car but I personally love an old hooptie.
As an EV driver, this sounds like someone talking about how they preferred the days when you had to have a feel for the temperature and pressure of your steam engine, hear the hiss of the steam, really feel the heat from the firebox.
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.
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.
I have cable. It doesn’t really work like that anymore. I used to be able to click through ALL the basic cable channels, catching a frame or two of every single channel, with zero delay between channels, all within like under a minute. These days every channel change or menu selection has a built-in delay of at least a second or two. Channel surfing just doesn’t vibe the same anymore. That form of TV is mostly if not entirely dead.
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.
Dating. It’s hard to manufacture that initial spark in an app.
Lack of third places has been a real thorn in society, especially third places that you aren’t expected to spend money.
The definition of a third place is that you can spend time there without the expectation of buying something. If you’re expected to spend money to occupy space, it’s not a third place.
(Fully agree that the loss of such spaces is killing us, though!)
Absolutely. Good point.
It’s like fishing. You throw a bunch of hooks in the water, see what happens. I did very well with online dating, until I found my forever girl.
