That’s the biggest mjndfuck 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.
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.
i kinda assume that businesses give out the guideline to hesitate when taking back objects, as they lose money that way (lower net revenue).
In 2000 the whole data hording apparatus hadn’t been fully implemented yet, and AI surveillance was something more so seen as science fiction, nothing to worry about until possibly 2100. Sure there was some data collection but it wasn’t like billions of people were walking around with surveillance tech in their pocket 24/7. Things have changed and drastically. Methods to monitor, model, predict, and control human behavior are now a thing and quite robust. If only people were aware of what’s happening there would be a mass migration to secure hardware, OS’s, comms, and of course not a single cloud based always on assistant in sight. IOT devices are cool when they are secure but they often get the least attention, few if any security updates. If you can get rid of robot vacuumes, smart home assistants, smart TVs, smart thermostats, switch to secure FOSS OS’s on your computer and phone.
You can point a laser at someone’s window and accurately record their keystrokes from the sound vibrations. Things go deep in the surveillance and intelligence world. Nothing is truly and absolutely secure, just more difficult to crack.
I want to start farming and growing vegetables. My dream is to have a pantry filled with wall to wall canned and pickled stuff I grew myself… to live for an entire winter on good I grew and preserved…
Same with chickens. Fresh eggs and meat…
Do you have a garden?
I moved into a townhouse too late to plant anything but next year! Definitely not nearly enough to support myself but I’m saving to buy an acreage in the next few years.
You can have a garden on a small patio. Get wire shelves and put planters on them. Kinda like this:
They sell a “greenhouse” at Home Depot that’s basically a wire shelf with plastic thrown over it.
Or you can get a planter like this that sits on the patio or one that hangs on your fence
Nosy apt complex would complain about “excessive plants”.
I guess it depends on the apartments? I’ve got a friend who grows lots of veggies on their small patio
Dude, we just gotta restart civilisation by this point.
The first generation of the post-apocalypse be filled with enthusiasts and nihilists alike.
Nihilists embracing absurdity can be positively enthusiastic.
20 years ago, I remember phones were cool and never had a crazy price-tag before the iPhone showed up. Tech in general was affordable and made sense. I mean look at the market now, you see companies forcing new tech upon us by skipping the rule of “need vs want” while making a purchase.
On a side note, I miss those fancy slider phones from the 2000s.
I miss the phones that slid open sideways and had a mini keyboard :/
a modern sidekick would go so hard, discord kids would absolutely love it.
i’m really tempted to get a clicks communicator if it doesn’t suck.
Absolutely. Seeing a $2k price tag for a phone is mind-boggling to me.
At least the phones from the 2000 had character, not like today’s simple cuboid phones.
Long term techie switched to ecological field work in habitat restoration, mainly wetlands with some scrublands. In the field over 80% of the time. Bliss.
Fuck I need to do something like this. I’m terrified of the loss of income though. I need to make my life cost less.
It’s not easy but you can do it. Not uncommon to find people who came to this field late. As you say, downsizing lifestyle for affordability is often necessary. But you can do it.
A lot of tech today is over priced subscription/data farming crap that is locked and dumbed down so the average consumer can use it without overloading their limited brain capacity.
I’m not going to sign up or use an app on my phone to activate a piece of tech.
Luckily there are still DIY projects I can tinker with. And it’s much more satisfying making it yourself, although more time consuming. But that’s part of every hobby, right.
Reformed computer programmer here (born in the 70’s, techie in the 90’s). My laptop is 16 years old and runs Linux. My phone is an 8-year old refurb I got off Amazon for $80. And I now do ham radio. I even send emails over RF just because I like knowing I can communicate with voice or text without needing cell service or an internet connection.
I’ve been getting interested in HAM, but it seems really intimidating to get started actually doing stuff and working towards a license. Any resources that you’d recommend for an absolute beginner?
If you’re in Canada there’s hamstudy. Im sure there are similar community projects worldwide depending on where you live. The duality of HAM is that they try to educate and bring more people into the hobby while also being unfiltered pricks if you violate unspoken HAM etiquette which drives away more people…
I made a website of sorts with a page for new hams. There’s links to a cheap study guide and a free one, should have all the info you need. There are also some cheaper ham radio reviews, when I first got in I was on a severe budget. But the “New Hams” page tells you everything you need to know. The hobby can seem like a lot when you’re new (there is A LOT of directions to go in ham radio). Feel free to ask if you have questions, you can post here or my email at the bottom of the page: https://sites.google.com/view/ki5ona/new-hams?authuser=0
I did it. I’m in the forest now.
how is it like in there
It’s beautiful in the summer. A little dark and damp in the winter. You stop seeing the sun all together because it doesn’t get high enough in the sky to clear the trees.
Life long techie here. I have retreated to the forest.
More like 40 years ago
I am one of the few people in my office that still has a normal (digital) wristwatch.
I love my 13-ish(?) year old citizen eco-drive solar analog watch.
My G-Shock is my everyday watch. Solar powered and multiband 6, nothing is more accurate.
G-Shocker user here. Mind is still going strong too, but I’m hoping to get a AE-1200 Casio one of these days
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.
Hear me out… anti-WiFi trees.
They grow towards any RF signals and their leaves are specially shaped to attenuate anything over 900MHz. They use the extra energy to increase their density to better resist harvesting and increase their height.
I read about a fungus found near the reactor in Chernobyl that seemed to be using the radiation as an energy source, so it seems plausible for a plant to evolve to absorb RF energy.
The actual energy in the RF is basically nothing. The sun has been outputing RF since the beginning of existence I’m pretty sure something would have evolved to make use of it if it had any sufficient energy density.
But if you think about it your phone is generating an RF field off the back of a tiny lithium ion battery, almost all of that power is going to power the screen anyway, the dribble of power that so left over is transmitted and then spread out over 50 kilometers of area. Anyone location is receiving less power than it would if it just absorbed power from sound waves
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.
I am curious as to how out-of-touch your single downvoter is. Because you hit that nail right on the head.
Like, for my current place I’m still designing a CCTV system. But it will be using dumb PoE cameras, hardwired into a traditional NVR. But everything will be shielded, airgapped, and using dumb(ish) components that do not “phone home” to their manufacturer in any fashion.
I’m even looking into solid state and mechanical components for other home automation functionality. Like, nothing computerized to any degree, and therefore, incapable of being a threat or a data leak.
the scythe was peak technology, actually
Almost every refuge in internet is for profit data hungry giants. Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
they’re right here actually
All over the place, they just don’t get indexed high in search…
I still blog. Nobody reads it because search sucks, but I keep blogging. Others do too. There are dozens of us.
Me too. With no telemetry or interaction I don’t even know if even a single person has read my dump of thoughts.
WordPress has the ActivityPub plugin, which is the only way I’ve managed to disseminate my articles and have people interact with them.
Who’s your webhost? The data is almost certainly there.
It’s just a static jekyll server I host on my own.
I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging
I don’t know though
Maybe this is it
Neocities exists
YouTube?
Just seeing all those thumbnails with the shocked face and stupid arrows makes me want to scratch my eyes out.
Just seeing all those thumbnails with the shocked face and stupid arrows makes me want to scratch
mytheir eyes out.But without the red circle and arrows how will you know you’re supposed to be looking at the exploding police car?
But also open source, self hosting, and diy tech is booming
But also open source, self hosting, and diy tech is booming
how can I use it to feed my family? I’m genuinely asking, I lost my enterprise job I hated.
Honestly, here’s the thing. My PC is still running Win10. It just works. My life is stressful and chaotic and my escape is gaming. I love modded Skyrim and I love gaming and when I get a chance to sit down at my computer I just want to fucking escape. I don’t want to troubleshoot, I don’t want to fiddle, I just want to load my game and have fun.
That is what has been keeping me from switching to Linux these past few years. I have Win10 tweaked in the registry so it can’t run copilot or AI, the start menu can’t connect to the Internet so it can’t show me ads, it’s still Microsoft and I don’t love it but I don’t have to think about it.
If someone came along and said hey, for $100 I’ll install Linux on your computer, make sure all your drivers are installed, make sure all your hardware works, and get your games and files moved over, tested and working, and be around to troubleshoot in the future and teach you basic troubleshooting if you need me (for an additional reasonable fee), I’d pay it. I’m not made of money, but I don’t want to spend my time or limited brain power doing that stuff and I’d be more than happy to offload it to someone else.
modded Skyrim
Probably a good thing you haven’t switched then. In my experience setting up mod manager and any external tools (like Nemesis) was not easy, but it’s doable. Mods themselves may not work though, especially if they are more external to Skyrim. So, for example, you can forget about ENB shaders. I mean, when I tried them they worked, but basically no other mods and in an empty area with 7fps is not exactly playable (on Windows it was unstable ~30fps with mods).
Vortex is a flaming turd on linux. I recently deployed a 2300 mods collection for CP2077 with it. It took around 35 hours - with a premium nexusmods account, and thr download itself was only around 1 hour. In comparison, the multiplatform NexusMods App they mothballed completed the same task in about 3 hours, but since it never was really finished, it failed at the end of deployment. There is a community fork of the Nexusmods App available, but it sadly failed the same way - it can’t cope with really large collections, and i am not good enough of a programmer to really help out - i can read code as long as it does stay simple, but writing it is a completely different thing.
Apparently there is such a thing as a “Nexus Collection Downloader” for Mod Organizer 2, although I’ve never tried it. MO2 generally works fine though.
Will give it a whirl. My experience with Vortex after seeing the NexusmodsApp, that was coming along nicely, being shelved to go back to their tech-debt ridden piece of shit client (even back when i used it on windows it was a buggy mess, and the experience on linux is far worse with awful r/w performance and loads of different UI glitches. Once the whole window just collapsed into a 1x5 cm square with one black and 3 white borders while i was doing something else on the pc not even involving the app - unrecoverable. I became so infuriated that i even posted on the nexusmods forums (https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/13543600-useable-linux-support/ - i was somewhat surprised that the mods approved the post at all, but since noone engages with the post, i will probably not get any response regarding their plans)
After using https://github.com/Anon00b/MO2 to install MO2 for Linux I just used MO2 the same way I used it in Windows and all my mods played nice.
I had heard it was an issue in Linux. I’m running Lost Legacy and Yggdrasil (Skyrim VR) which are both 100+ gb mod packs (and highly recommend them both, Lost Legacy is breathtakingly beautiful). Lost Legacy is also very stable and runs very smoothly, especially compared to some of the other pre built mod packs I’ve tried.
If I did get brave and make the switch, is this something that theoretically could be run in a Windows VM or would it be better to dual boot and keep Windows hanging around for Skyrim?
As someone who does Linux tech support for 2 people as a hobby/because I love them, it would cost you more than $100 for all that.
But $300 for the setup and then $100 per year for support would be reasonable as long as you don’t expect me to drop everything and rush over when something changes/breaks.
I’d happily pay that if it allowed me to not have to deal with it.
I’m not a technological idiot, it’s just not my thing and I find it very stressful to deal with. It would be worth it to me to not have to.
I hear you. It’s a pain even when you have the skills to do it. I am looking for a secondary income stream and want more people using Linux, so maybe I should offer that for people. But ugh, the ways a computer can break can be so stupid.
I understand that you do not want to fiddle with a computer, I was once like that and that is what kept me from switching to any OS on my computer. I want to let you know as an experienced Linux user though that once you setup linux, you do not need to do any more fiddling. For the files and personal stuff, just back it up to an external hard drive. That is pretty much it. I could help you for free, but I do not really have somewhere to message anyone.
This is completely false ime. Updates can break your setup, though on stable distros they usually don’t. Also anytime I installed a game I’d have to invest time to set it up. For older games this could take an hour or more to get everything working. For newer games some features might not even work.
I ditched Linux for a reason. It was useable but I need my gaming machine to be stress free, not another work project.
I was referring to stable distros. But once you got all your games set up, aren’t you kinda good to go? But I get your point still, though.
Not sure unless you find people that want to switch over to non Microsoft etc products and you help them. I had a decent side gig getting people out of marketing companies by building them basic static websites and an email. Mainly plumbers, machine shops etc. They went from paying over a grand a month to like 20 bucks. It got out of hand from word of mouth and my lack of knowleges pretty quickly though
This might not be your issue but replace the subscriptions you use with FOSS ones.
Windows for Linux. MS365 Office for LibreOffice (although I guess you could say Google docs too). DropBox for Filen (or other services). … Gameing for retro Roms? Etc.
Theres also lots of foss support for pirating streamed media.
I couldn’t belive how many my live at home 18yr old cousin was paying for.
- hotspot WiFi
- playataton online
- game pass to play whatever game
- Netflix
- Spotify
- YT premium
- … let alone the mobile plan itself
Got a kickstarter for a cool idea, and a friend with a podcast with like 12 million subscribers? This is about the barrier to entry. But you’re going to be OK, maybe you go take a boring, stable job like a state university, and make up the difference in pay by consulting during work hours. Maybe it’s not so bad.
I’ve spent the past couple of years moving away from Apple devices and commercial software, into self-hosting as much as possible. While at this stage I wouldn’t go back to my previous set up, there’s no denying that it’s nowhere near as stable and easy to maintain.
Home Assistant, for example, is an incredible tool; that fails to turn some lights on and off far more often than Alexa ever did. It’s frustrating. Not so much that I’m going to bin it off and go back to relying on Amazon, but enough that I mostly just end up feeling kinda pissed off that the big companies have pushed me into a place where I’ve had to learn how to be a part time sysadmin, alongside my 9-5.
that fails to turn some lights on and off
This is the biggest issue I have with smart gadgets and home automation - they fuck up. Not even getting into the additional pains of fixing the automation when it fails, I’ve literally never gone wrong with pressing a light switch, or possibly pulling a cord. Full 100% success rate without rounding, even when the wifi’s down. I have to walk past the switches (and cords) to enter and exit rooms, so not pressing them on the way past doesn’t even save me any actual time.
Most of the automation I see seems to be the same - it introduces a chance of failure to something that already works, and/or imagines itself a solution to something that isn’t actually a problem. Boilers, fridges, toasters, beds - these were basically solved technologies until someone came along and decided to reinvent the wheel.
There’s a handful that do provide quality of life improvements to disabled people, but the overwhelming majority just seem to be parlour tricks that don’t reduce the human workload.For me, the utility is in being able to turn a bunch of lights on and off at the same time. We have a number of lamps, or light strings or what have you, rather than one or two big lights. Put them all in Home Assistant and I can set all the ones I want to turn on half an hour before sunset without having to touch a button. And 99% of the time it’s fine.
Equally, I can have a few lights turn on in the bedroom shortly before I go up to bed, then turn off half so there’s enough light to read by, then turn off every light in the house with the press of a button. And it is a button, because I don’t have a voice assistant set up.
Also, I have a bunch of temperature sensors around the house.
None of it is essential, but it’s a nice quality of life upgrade for my wife and me.
Technology nowadays is basically a cult, a coercitive cult. They often take technology as an end in itself rather than as a means to other ends, they reify it and even deify it, and they treat any moderate stance as an enemy and as a brake on their shitty eschatology.
Theyre still tools, still utilities. Just because douchebags are using them in power games more often doesn’t make them any less so.
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
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.
Home assistant is so fucking good.
