A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
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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
Re: running to the woods. We were here on the technology spectrum:
Not enough Too much
|--------------[x]--------------------------------------|
Now we're here:
Not enough Too much
|-----------------------------------------------[x]-----|
I'm not saying that techies are all neo-luddites in the making, but rather that everyone has a threshold for global-hyper-awareness and surveillance. At some point, it's just too much
I personally see all this bastardized tech as components in need of liberation, techno-mage style.
If I could get my hands on a flock PCB, I'd be writing custom drivers to allow others to liberate their own hardware. Alas, nothing local, and eBay has not been kind.
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.
Techies were just in the loop enough to see what happened to technology.
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.
If they mean 20 years ago in the Covid Timewarp sense that the 90s were twenty years ago, then yes.
Literally 20 years ago the horror was already upon us. It was around that time that fear of the government chipping us to track our every movement was peaking, and hey, by the way, please buy and pay a monthly cost for this tracking device that has audio and video recording but also plays silly cat videos ANYWHERE!!!
20 years ago was 2006. I will point out that at that juncture the original iPhone wasn't even out yet. It released the following year. Normal people who were not turbo-nerds or high powered businessmen did not own smartphones in any significant number at that point.
If your device was even capable of downloading a cat video, we were still in the era when your cell phone carrier would have charged you $1.99 to do it.
Remember having to pay for custom ring tones?
I remember them wanting me to pay for that, but I also remember getting a cable that allowed me to connect my PC to my phone and do whatever I wanted with the filesystem. The ringtones were in a different format but I got a converter and had the FF7 battle music for a ring tone.
I also recall some phones supporting MP3s for listening to music (though storage space was tiny) but not supporting them as a ringtone once connecting to PCs to share files was more common.
They also sold wallpapers, emoticon packs, and themes.
Yes, but I was fortunate enough to never actually get as far as ponying up the 99 cents. I got an MPX200 pretty early in my cell phone career which ran Windows CE and basically let the owner do whatever the fuck they wanted, including using .wav or .mp3 files as ringtones.
This is why I use debian stable. New releases are three whole years apart and everything works. I just upgraded to debian 13 a few days ago.
my college roommate in 2008 was schizo, his handle was NetSecSatan, he predicted all this stuff
Sell your stonks! Go homesteadin' 😎
20 years ago was 2006.
I do not recall any tech resistance by the masses. In fact a couple years later there were people camping out overnight waiting for the release of the latest gadgets like the iphone.
Ffw to today…those same masses dgaf about their lives being tracked and monetized today; in fact, many are active and willing sycophants pushing being social media personalities as careers while using that personality to shit on higher education and intelligence.
I do agree that the limited tech community capable of independent thought and action are against the surveillance corporate state we’re headed into, but the rest are doing their best to hurry and profit off it while the dumpster fire flames get closer and closer to them.
The tech resistance slowly faded away with the first smartphones released after the iPhone I would say and really took off after the release of the iPhone 3GS. Think back to the boomers who complained about young people staring at their phones all day, now they do that themselves.
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."
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.
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
Caves seem pretty cozy tbh
As someone else mentioned, in 2006 the overwhelming amount of 'tech' was not designed with slop and spying in mind. If you bought a super high end stove/oven or toaster it would NOT need constant software updates or Internet connection and be forced to give telemetry and have microphones or cameras to listen and watch you as you use it.
The absolute first 'always online' device was the juicero in 2013 and it was an abject failure on every level. Not only were people confused as to why it needed to be online in the first place, it was a horribly designed and extremely inefficient machine... Someone at the time brought in the proprietary bag of juice it uses and squeezed it out by hand, and he was faster and more efficient in doing it than the machine was.
I personally did not hear about online appliances until I took a course on IoT in late 2020. And that one showed how you can use an arduino to make device an internet connected device.
But even then... Both young and old heads just don't like this shit. A toaster does not need to be online... A lamp and its lightbulb do not need to be internet connected. I am confident that if and when they make it legally required to do so (as they are absolutely going to do with cars) there will be so much disregard for the law that it will be unenforceable.
If there's fiber and a nearby hospital in the forest count me in.
Look at this fat cat able to afford a hospital.
There's lots of tendrils and medicinal mushrooms, will that suffice?
Deal
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.
Foss got me back into computing and seeing how fun it is. And turning my back on corpos as much as possible.
It's not the technology that's the problem (mostly), it's the corporations that control 99% of it.
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.
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.
This weekend, found my old motorola phone. For giggles, i plugged it in- still boots! Can I do anything with it or did I just wasted a bit of electricity on nostalgia?
If it's 3g-only, it won't get a network signal anymore. So mostly it's a novelty that can play badly written Java games.
I mean its true.
But my 4K120hz VRR Oled just never connects to the internet. gAmInG-rig is on Linux. Pixel got the Graphene treatment. Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me(personally, if you have usecases, good for you). If there were ready to use iot devices which doesnt suck and respect my privacy by just beeing on the local network: sure i would think about it. But hacking together something good with arduinos wasnt worth my time for now atleast.
VR headset OS is hacked and nerved to the best of my knowledge.
For now there are still ways to enjoy tech even though overall its a fucking hellscape.
< Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me
Home Assistant is a great way to achieve home automation without handing everything over to random organisations. Not perfect, but better than relying on Amazon.
Beyond what's been said about data harvesting, 20 years ago new devices very often represented genuine improvements in form and function on each new iteration. Physical and functional differences were easily apparent between each model of early smartphones.
The only thing we have right now that's similar was model releases from AI labs. And it seems like even those are slowing down because the urgency to release anything incrementally better undermines huge, stable jumps.
