Consumer technology is moving backwards and it is quite irritating.

Think back to, say, 2012 when Netflix had released their streaming service and you could pretty much find everything on Netflix. Then Netflix started losing licenses to competing streaming services, and netflix and other streaming services got more expensive. We're at the point now where people are actually starting to back to physical media just to avoid the nonsense rotations of license agreements and ever increasing volume of different streaming subscriptions. For me the straw that broke the camel's back was the introduction of Peacock which is easily one of the worst streaming services I've ever used with a perplexingly large amount of media that they have a monopoly on.

But think about it from a technological progress standpoint. We went from being able to watch basically anything at any time for a low price subscription fee, to the absolute mess we have today. This is going backwards and there is no way around that.

Then there's "Smart TVs." Real talk, who cares? The proprietary software used in smart TVs are terrible. The hardware on board smart TVs is pathetic. There's a reason I used dedicated hardware for smart TV functionality, but the "Smart TV" is actually just plain annoying. Just a bunch of very slow moving menus before you are allowed to go to the TV thing you want to get to. Also to have an annoying pop up every now and then telling me that the license agreement to use the TV has changed. On top of that most smartphones do crappy things like "enhance the visual quality" when it never needed to be enhanced to begin with. I do not want interpolated TV images.

One of my TVs broke and I had a spare TV 720p 14 inch TV that I bought in 2008. Holy crap it was so refreshing just to turn the TV on and it just worked. Like I turned it on, selected my channel and it just plain WORKED. And it had massive buttons on the side. Why in the world did we get rid of buttons on TVs? I tried searching up "Dumb TV" and apparently they're not made anymore. But the real reason for smart TVs seems to be to shove ads in your face every chance that you unfortunately end up on the home menu.

Next we come to gaming. Now the games themselves are fine, but their system requirements keep expanding even though graphics technology peaked with the PS4. Now, I know I am about to get someone who "UMM ACKCHUALLY" me on this point, but here's my real point. Yes games do technically look better, but do you care? Like is the difference noticeable enough to care? I could complain about how we're at a point where buying new hardware feels more like an obligation than an actual upgrade, but that's not the real point. These days it is all about upscaling. Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, Frame generation. Effectively speaking we went from 480i, to 720p, to 1080p to 4k all the way back to 720p again. And now we're interpolating frames in gaming so now games aren't shooting for 60fps, they're shooting for around 40fps now.

The reason we want 4k and 60 fps is for that clarity and responsiveness. If a game is clear and responsive, it feels good. With upscaling, it is fake clarity and fake responsiveness. Upscaling actually gives me a headache because it makes the image so blurry and framegen doesn't give me the responsiveness I crave. This is all to compensate for modern devs inability to make games run well on low end hardware, and one of the biggest culprits of this problem is Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine sucks so bad, but it is used everywhere because it comes with a lot of tools to streamline the development process and, get this, makes it easy to make games look high end. Unreal engine sucks though because it makes games terribly and it has horrible stuttering problems.

This is all to chase some imaginary need to make your game look "cutting edge" but actually very few people care. For real, do you actually care about raytracing? I don't notice honestly because games in 2013 looked perfectly good. Some devs are now requiring raytracing to be on to play which is complete nonsense and I do not understand why they do that. So you are making me keep raytracing on to make the game look negligibly better only to force me to using upscaling and framegen to kill the clarity and responsiveness of my game. It is maddening.

So what's the big technological innovations happening these days? It pretty much comes down to cryptocurrency and AI.

Cryptocurrency tech of wasting electricity so that the wealthy can launder money and addicts can gamble. That is pretty much it. I can, and should, go off about how big of a problem gambling is in modern day and it is estimated that HALF of Gen Z has a gambling addiction in some form due to the infantilization and accessibility of gambling. But my real point is that this crypto crap does not have a tangible benefit to our society, and in fact has a great many negatives.

Then there is AI. AI is something that we can potentially see the benefits of but at the present it is only negatives. AI consumes a mountain of electricity to use and for what benefit? AI assistants are unbelievably frustrating, AI chat tools are extremely unreliable and AI art just plain sucks. AI right now is putting a lot of careers out of work while the wealthy face no threat to their labor because they own the AI's labor.

But the scariest thing about AI is that AI is now being used to spy on people, dredge data and create propaganda through flooding the zone. In my home state of Colorado we are currently fighting the AI tech firm "Palantir" (You know, that evil device in Lord of the Rings that Saruman used to spy on people) whose explicit purpose is to develop AI technology for all of its most evil uses. It should come as no surprise that Palantir was founded by billionaire neo-nazi Peter Thiel. AI needs to be designed with the well being of the working class in mind but there is absolutely no momentum in that direction.

All of this tech is just introducing new problems into our world with no benefit. I can't remember the last time any new consumer tech was an actual improvement over what we had before and it is getting really irritating how tech keeps getting worse.

What do you think? Am I wrong and tech is getting better? Am I just a grouch?

That is essentially DRM, outside of that technology is getting better.

Damn_Underscore posted...

That is essentially DRM, outside of that technology is getting better.

Hey you hit the nail on the head.

As tech advances it is pretty much exclusively being used to implement new forms of DRM.

No and on that note smart phones were perfected 10 years ago, there's no improvement between generations and tech users like that Marcus guy (who got caught going 90 in a school zone) just write fluff pieces because the cameras are technically better, and sponsors keep kissing his ass, even though not a single person on the planet can perceive any modern camera looking differently than another.

They design them so that they're fragile enough for you to inevitably drop and have to buy a new one, clog up the largely unprotected USB port, and if all else fails, the battery will eventually die, so you have to buy a new phone that's exactly like your old one for $1000 (instead of buying a new battery). And if that fails, they'll simply stop providing you with updates, so none of your apps will work anymore. That's a total scam.

They keep pushing garbage like foldable phones (investor's wet dream, yes, make them more fragile and expensive, I'm slobbering), and of course AI, which by every measure, the only people who like AI are investors and students who really want to grow up to be as dumb as possible. And billionaires who jerk off to thinking it will somehow help them mind-control people at some point.

The only pushback I'll give is that game developers do not in any way make games perform worse on purpose, because they're using modern engines that streamline everything, and it would be really hard to not have a perfectly tuned game. I don't want to hear people complain that games are too big... games are largely the same size on disk as they were on the PS3... that was 20 years ago guys. That's unbelievable. Game devs are simply not in cahoots with hardware manufacturers and make money by making good games. (or at least slop that people will play, but it has to be competent slop at least)

Yellow posted...

Game devs are simply not in cahoots with hardware manufacturers and make money by making good games.

I don't think that this is true because I see games that are promoted by nvidia all the time that tantalizes some new technology coming out.

Like Dune Awakening released a trailer to show off DLSS4 which is a tech that Funcom could not possibly have if they didn't make some kind of deal with Nvidia.

VioletZer0 posted...

I don't think that this is true because I see games that are promoted by nvidia all the time that tantalizes some new technology coming out.

Like Dune Awakening released a trailer to show off DLSS4 which is a tech that Funcom could not possibly have if they didn't make some kind of deal with Nvidia.

They still have a pretty large incentive to optimize the game as much as possible.

Is it possible that they just don't unload things from VRAM so that it gets wasted as quickly as possible? Yeah. At some point they might do that, but why do that when you can use the graphics cards to their fullest extent and get a noticeable improvement out of it? Also the "minimum specs" for that game is a 960. They have a financial incentive to make their game run on as many platforms as possible. You take a deal like that from Nvidia because it sells video cards when people think it must be technically better.

Games being unoptimized on purpose to sell video cards is generally just a myth. There's no proof of it. They don't optimize games because it hurts the bottom line when a deadline is coming up. There would be tons of leaks if such things were going on, devs would not keep their mouths shut about that.

But your post in general is on point I just take issue with that, and I don't blame people for looking for a pattern in something that you really aren't expected to understand. (Yeah your average person knows what a CUDA core is)

Also, to be fair, the release cycle for consoles should really slow down soon because we're going to reach a point where games just look good enough for anything you could reasonably want to do, and at that point they will resort to scamming, I just don't think we're there yet.

One more thing about AI.

I am so sick of people calling me an AI.

I am autistic and the way it feels is that my social center of my brain feels underdeveloped so I had to force a lot of language development through my logic center through reading and listening to people a lot. This is incidentally same way LLMs were trained to talk so people see the way I type and instinctively recognize it as similar to the way that AIs type.

It's very frustrating.

I hate that modern technology means way less buttons. I don't like that if I have an issue with my smart TV's settings I can't do anything without a remote.

im not reading any of these books

Yellow posted...

the only people who like AI are investors and students who really want to grow up to be as dumb as possible. And billionaires who jerk off to thinking it will somehow help them mind-control people at some point.

You forgot the execs that think they will be able to replace all of their staff with AI.

VioletZer0 posted...

Yes games do technically look better, but do you care?

It is more like a cursed wish situation. Today's games have the graphics I always wanted to see back then with Battle Arena Toshinden and Soul Calibur 2, but now everything else about fighting games blow.

We're at the point now where people are actually starting to back to physical media

About time. You might have to wait a minute for MAX to release their shows on Dvd again. I was thankful the other day to rewatch some Yolo crystal fantasy (literally the show where I first heard of Tame Impala). Good luck in Warner brothers releasing a three-disc YoLO gift set with a Tame Impala t-shirt. (Tame Impalaaaaaaa)

All of this tech is just introducing new problems into our world with no benefit.

Back when we had televisions and telephones with dials, someone probably said the exact thing about remote controls. Just like with any technology, the bugs and kinks have to be worked out so that we can look back on what used to be and call it even.

We identified much of these problems a decade ago and since then they got worse.

We're at a point with a lot of technology where there aren't many opportunities to sell us improvements anymore, so in order to keep the fantasy of infinite growth going, companies have to charge more for the same amount, provide less without reducing their prices, and/or create new problems to which they sell solutions.

It's not going backwards, it's losing the arms race against corporations. The technology is objectively better, it's just used against you since there's enough slack in the market to do that.

tl;dr

modern tech companies need a kick in the ass tho.

Worse its all designed to just keep you addicted over any quality or benefit. For every 5 video of "I learned this from a professional chef" of someone buttering their toast with a potato masher you'll get maybe an actual mildly interesting or humorous clip. For every skin you buy the game might just happen to play magically tighter somehow. For every crippling update to your current phone, your fresh phone is going to be that much snappier even though the usage and processing demand isn't much different than it was 10 years ago and certainly isnt year to year.

Holy Wall of Text! I ain't reading that!

Damn_Underscore posted...

That is essentially DRM, outside of that technology is getting better.

Oh, yeah, that about sums it up.

It is of my strong belief that the sole purpose of generative AI is and always has been to gaslight and groom society into the perfect, obedient consumer. Eliminate personal agency, eliminate human connection and interaction, eliminate critical thought and groom them to trust blindly in the algorithm and obey.

Salrite posted...

It is of my strong belief that the sole purpose of generative AI is and always has been to gaslight and groom society into the perfect, obedient consumer. Eliminate personal agency, eliminate human connection and interaction, eliminate critical thought and groom them to trust blindly in the algorithm and obey.

That's a whole topic unto itself and in fact a whistleblower at facebook revealed that facebook was doing precisely that.

Basically what facebook would do is dredge user data to create psychological profiles and the algorithm would prioritize the kind of propaganda that was statistically shown to work on that kind of user.

It wouldn't work on everyone, but it would work on enough people to move the middle in their direction.

Then Twitter started doing the same thing too.

Algorithmic content is a plague on our society.