You must log in or register to comment.
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.
This is the future that Stallman warned us about. They mocked him and said it didn’t matter. It’s not going to get better until everyone stops buying TVs with spyware built in.
Vote with your wallets or quit bitching. Self hosted is an option these days. But that means not being lazy. And people are really lazy.
Vote with your wallets or quit bitching.
I never bought one but I can’t do anything about people who have AirBnB’s who buy them or hotels that install them in every room.
There are ways around that as well. Call ahead and ask what kind of TVs they have. Tell them why you are concerned and you might just get the hotel to worry about this as well if enough people start bothering them. If you don’t have a choice unplug the TV and bring your own laptop.
I can’t call ahead if someone else made the reservation though.
Yes, there are many situations where you will not have control of what room you stay in. Are you going to list them all one by one? JFC
If you don’t have a choice unplug the TV and bring your own laptop.
Screw TVs, digital signage is the way. With every new smart TV I am more convinced that I’m just going to buy this display from this Jeff Geerling video
The most egregious action I’ve seen was from a Vizio smart TV I bought several years ago. It shipped with a simple remote control, and a tablet with a control app preinstalled. One day I turned the TV on and was notified that in order to use the updated UI I would need to reach out to support to order (and pay for!) a new remote that had additional buttons.
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.
Because the vast majority of times people complain about this stuff, they have no idea what they’re talking about.
If you buy a nice TV and spend 2 seconds going thru the options you won’t have a single issue OP is complaining about.
Edit:
Apparently OP banned me for saying their meme doesn’t make sense…
The only thing that a “cheap” TV would do is slow down overtime, because it’s cheap and has the absolute bare minimum processing speed.
You need that processing speed to properly up sample to 4k from streaming.
If you want a cheap one, buy a decent 1080p so it doesn’t have to upsample.
Rtings.com is a good resource.
But it should be common sense that buying a cheap product will give you poorer results.
Why should you have to buy a nice TV for this issue to not be an issue? Why should shitty TVs have built-in advertising and glacially slow “smart” functions? Either don’t include that as TV software or fix it.
Have a regular PC hooked up to the TV. That’s my smart machine. I control every aspect of it. Fuck Smart TVs.
Raspberry pi with Kodi hooked up to a projector and a NAS serving files works well for me.
I mean that’s nice but can you run Netflix/Hulu/AppleTV/HBO through that thing? Or can you only play media that you illegally downloaded?
What about the rest of them?
Do your own googling, I got bored after 3 :p
My 2013 Highest End Samsung was pretty much E-Waste three years later. 80% of the Apps broken, no new Apps for new services.
UTTER BULLSHIT.
I plugged in a FireTV 4k which was on Sale for €25. Perfectly supported since many years. TONS of software, channels and so on. Best buy ever.
When I had to buy a new TV for my bed room I bought a “dump” monitor and plugged a FireTV in.
