Microblog Memes

Have a regular PC hooked up to the TV. That's my smart machine. I control every aspect of it. Fuck Smart TVs.

I believe you can still get "dumb" flatscreens, but they're getting rare, and they cost at least hundreds more than their "smart" brethren. So of course those sell very slowly.

The older I get the more I miss the sheer freedom that was built into our daily lives back when technology was just a notch or two less advanced. Phones that stayed trapped on their wall, not in your pocket, tracking you. TVs that were made of dumb stuff that could still pull free content from the air. You had to be part of a special "Nielson family", fully set up with a little tracking box and all that, for the TV to tell anybody what you were watching.

People expected you to basically fall off the earth for 8 hours at work, and didn't expect to contact you for less than a housefire-level emergency, which meant you spent most of the day free, and not just while you were at work. Nobody blinked if you stepped out for the evening to go shopping and could not be contacted for hours. Now people end up in screaming arguments because they didn't answer that text fast enough. It's misery.

I had a shock the other day, watching some YouTube short featuring a young woman (an adult, not a minor) complaining humorously about her mother, who always knows where she is, and thus has all sorts of unwanted opinions on her location. Mother always knows because of an app called Life360, which is basically the kind of spying app that an abusive spouse would hide on your phone. But it's not hidden. You force your children to install it on their phones. It's a leash. So now this adult woman, who of course cannot quite afford to leave home, because economy, cannot simply delete this spying app from her phone without consequences and arguments, so she has no privacy in her movements, from anyone, never mind the government and such. Never mind what actual minors are now putting up with.

We have officially left the era where the adults pissed and grumbled about them damn kids wanting them damn phones they don't need, and we are now in the era where some kid has absolutely been beaten with a belt because he tried to leave his phone in the bedroom and slip out of the house in privacy.

Things like Life360 are normalized among children and parents, so other people will now expect to track you and treat a refusal of tracking as a violation of trust, and probably a sign that you are elderly, thus your rights are becoming debatable.

Again, 5 minutes ago this was evil shit that abusive spouses snuck onto people's phones, suddenly, it's normal, and people will just expect it.

I guess the ongoing shock is that we expected Big Brother to somehow slap a shackle on our necks that we can't take off, but this is all worse. This is putting the shackle on your neck, every morning. It doesn't even lock. You could, theoretically, throw it into the lake at will. Nobody would stop you. But you don't. All the chains are made of other people. The whips at your back are the opinions of children, and what they think is normal. The surveillance cameras do not loom from posts in the sky, no. They're in every pocket. They're much harder to hide from than a security camera ever would be.

I hope I'm just melodramatic, or something.

The whole point of Internet of Things (aka CONNECT EVERYTHING TO THE INTERNET) was to make customers' life miserable in the medium-long run. Anyone who couldn't figure that out was massively deluded by the propaganda

I buy TVs with Android TV built in because the freedom is great. I love I can install APKs, and generally they have every app that Android has. Whereas Roku doesn't even have an official Twitch app.

Despite that, my fucking GOD they're slow. Both my $2000 and $650 Android TVs are such a fucking lag fest. Even trying to pause a YouTube video is such shit.

They both run Android TV 9, despite Android TV 12 being out, and 14 in beta.

My CCwGTV is a lot better, but I only use that on my non smart TV because I hate juggling remotes.

Still wont stop buying Android TVs, though. Roku is so empty, those TVs with their own built in OS have even less apps. My sisters $5500 OLED TV only has Plex, no Emby. Which is insane. I think her TVs app store has a total of like 20 apps?

Twitch updated in January with a shitty UI that lags. I just disabled updates and installed an older version of the app via APK. That's the benefit of Android TV.

EDIT: also can we please get some people on the Android TV custom ROM scene? It's weird to me that NO TVs have any sort of custom ROM or rooting. You'd think they would?

I'm not an advocate for smart TVs, but my experience has been different. I found a deal for an 86 inch LG, and it's been nothing but smooth for me. No advertising built into the os, always has the apps I use right on the bar. The air mouse onnthe remote is reminiscent of owning a wii.

As an aside, isn’t the whole point of the Fediverse that we should be able to move content around? It’s sad that the only way to upvote a Mastodon post on Lemmy is through a screenshot or a link. Why can’t it just be a post that we can upvote?

Guys, I think this is missing a "/s" . Not sure though...

My solution: Buy a very large monitor.

Then connect some streaming box to it you can easily replace if/when it gets shitty, instead of having to replace the whole TV.

When I buy things like this, I try to buy hardware that supported by open source projects. Like routers that can run OpenWRT or Android phones that are supported by LineageOS.

It's amazing that sometimes free projects that are made for people are better than commercial one.

Some years ago around the advent of smart home devices I bought a huge fullhd Hisense tv for cheap. It has zero smart capabilities, and essentially acts as a big second screen for my computer, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

I am scared once it is time to replace it for something more modern I won’t be able to find one without all the smart crap I don’t use and don’t want.