Google glass. Sounded like we’d all be wearing these glasses that we’d not be able to do without, but even looking back that sounds like such a poor idea. I try to not be on my phone as much as I can, I can’t imagine wearing glasses with an interface in my direct vision constantly, especially when a lot of it would be shit like emails, LinkedIn notifications of people I might know, and my siblings sending me 12 Instagram posts in a row.
Guess what, they’re already working on the 3rd version.
Would’ve been awesome for maps though
smartwatches are surprisingly good for directions/routing. they vibrate one way for left turns and another way for right turns.
I wanted to be like the kid from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide and have a mouse wired up to it. Lol.
Companies keep trying to recreate something similar for motorcycle helmets
I want smart glasses that are a scaled down smartwatch. Give me like 3 lines of text & a vibration function.
If I could insert the interface from my Pebble into a pair of glasses I would be content.
I just wanted to be able to read a book without (possibly) straining my neck :(
Are audiobooks with subtitles still audiobooks?
‘multimedia device’
They’re just not the same for me, unfortunately. They have a place, but I prefer reading.
Smartphones in general.
But the convenience of being wired in every possible second of your life!
Dictating notes into my journal (eg obsidian/mediawiki/dokuwiki) is very nice though.
They were cool until the industry decided tall, skinny rectangles were the final form factor.
I’m on the last week of my dumb phone challenge (been daily driving a flip phone for the last 3 weeks), and I think I’m gonna keep it.
my dream is a dumb phone that can access the internet and act as a wifi gateway for my laptop or tablet. oh also a local webpage for managing the phone.
There is an OS for dumbphones of certain types that makes them smart phoens to an extent a browser and facebook etc on tbem skyoe is on some dumber phoens to already, You can do the opposite with certain launchers as well convert a smartphonex o dumbphone eg. the oddly named Baldphone on F-Droid for elderly peolle needing bigger buttons andxless modern sh@t I mean bloatware sorry lol it also adds an ease of opening the dialpad oviously in bold digits and other simplicities.
Baldphone remember to oot out of extra tracking it has anti-features
BaldPhone (Replace your phone’s interface with a big, simple and friendly one) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.bald.uriah.baldphone/
Other alternative maybe YAM Launcher or similar apps.
YAM Launcher (YAM Launcher is a minimalist text-based launcher for Android with weather!) https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.ottop.yamlauncher/
Nothing dumber looking than text for your items and apps installed
Here Techcrunch come up with ideas on dumbing smartphones down in this article
https://www.techlockdown.com/guides/dumb-phone-android
With launchers you don’t struggle to buy a dumbphone with 4g and 5g signals for the sim you dumb a modern phone down you could also strip the apps off if you root it or maybe just get Android AOSP on it and use a simple launcher for it then a text based one.
I mean its not about the interface as much as the way that smartphones feel like tracking devices. yeah any cellphone can be tracked but the ios and android are made seem to be at its core. Then there is the expense and don’t last as long. I just don’t want to be paying for a pocket computer when I just want a pocket phone/wifi
On AOSP they aren’t tracked it’s a De-Googled OS it has no Google Service Framework or Google related apps to track you, you’d use the F-Droid marketplace for none tracking apps to install on it if needed.
Expense I can understand, but something of a natively compatible format for installing the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) sounds fine to use as a kind of capable dumb phone if you like and by capable I meam it can be used as both a smart phone or dumb phone with the use of a launcher being installed for the dumbing down, say some text based or other simplistic launcher available via F-Droid.
Cost is not to viscious for Android phones of just ok spec like an old mid range octa core running Android 11 or Android 12 with say 64gb storage to 128gb storage but 32gb is fine even less really but you begin dropojng soc performance fast going to 32gb storage devices really but in those 64-128gb eras of hardware ranges are pretty cheap now for second hand ones with warranties sometimes to. AOSP is lighter on resources trick also is enable developer options and turn off
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Window Animation Scale
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Transition Animation Scale
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Animator Duration Scale
This makes a device fly scrolling and opening and tapping things to open them because the you aren’t waiting for transitions to take place for the UI that often has a momentary pause or animated effect to look cool but this might look cool but it slows the waiting time to ooem things right down, I always disable that on all phones or other Android devices that run Android on initial setup.
Or if you want true dumb phones a 4g doro lol
For iphone’s I just found this it’s pretty interesting turning it into a light phone by a launcher.
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I was actually surprised to learn that most current dumb phones (at least ones that run KaiOS like most of the Nokia ones) do actually support acting as a wifi hotspot. Not sure of any that have a REST API for management, though. They also have at least primitive web browsers.
Actually, you might be able to make a REST API (and web app to use it) with NodeJS or Python with Termux, though that requires an Android device (so not applicable for a dumb phone). Termux has an API that lets you interact with the phone hardware, though I’ve had issues with some things not being implemented (I’ve only briefly played with that, so I may just be missing something or it doesn’t fully work in Android 14 yet).
The “dumb” phone I chose for my challenge is the CAT S22 Flip which runs Android 11. I disabled most of what made it “smart” for the challenge, though. At the end of the week when the 30 days are officially up, I’m going to re-enable some of those features just for convenience. (That device was $20 cheaper than the true dumb phone I was looking at, so I figured I’d just dumb it down for the 30 day challenge and then use it as the unique smartphone it is after that).
you know someone told me this one on chat and all I really remember was it did not really seem to be that way. There was something I believe but it was as expensive as a smartphone which I get it may not be as cheap as a typical dumb phone it should not really be that much more with just the one function.
Apple Vision Pro
Ok so I do agree that the Vision Pro is crazy overpriced and never gonna succeed by itself.
But remember the first gen iPad? That thing sucked!
The iPad 2 was a genuine quantum leap forward for the form factor, so I’m waiting to see the next Vision device before making a proper call.
The iPad had the Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field to save it
Seems only the influencers took the bait. And then they returned it once the channel had its run. Anyone know of any real world users/ uses for it?
Probably nothing beyond normal VR stuff. It’s still pretty new and it sounds like Apple is still trying to figure out the chicken or the egg problem when it comes to developing an entirely new platform and have decided to try putting the egg first to see if anyone will incubate it for them. Who knows if they’ll commit long enough for it to pay off. Tbh I can see VR enthusiasts still getting something out of it since it sounds like people have figured out how to get it working with steamvr. Other than that though, I don’t really see any uses for it. I think they’re going to have to spend a lot of time looking for problems that are worth paying $1,000~$2,000 to solve (I’m assuming that’s what a “consumer” version would cost), and then refine their solution until it feels natural before widespread adoption will be a thing.
It’s actually got traction in industry where we were already exploring AR for things like using 3d models to enhance maintenance on large facility equipment.
Compared to the value prop of increased reliability and enhanced frontline accessibility of consumable model data its cost is not a barrier and its quality is a MASSIVE step up from the equipment we had.
I’ve heard about it being used in high cost per unit sales experiences too, like jets or whatnot, it haven’t seen that directly.
I recall talking to a vendor back… 8 years ago? Who had a colleague trialling hololens augmented maintenance. I personally felt it would be amazing to be able to look at equipment, bring up a model and explode it to get a look at (Yeah I know you can do that with a laptop, manufacturing lines have notoriously shitty wifi, not to mention greasy around equipment), assisted procedures were a cool idea too, helps people who may not be super familiar with your specific equipment, like shift or loaner maintenance people.
Over a decade ago, different company, they had a bounty on video procedures, you’d strap a go pro to your head and record something like changing batteries, replacing o-rings, removal of electronics etc for a cash bonus. I’m a text and photo person but I totally see the value in video documentation.
Microsoft had a demo at an ignite conference in 2020 if I recall of hololens doing ar metrics, person looked at things like the elevator and would give them real-time performance data, definitely a gimmick but I still think AR could be useful in an industrial setting.
Microconsoles in general never really became a thing. Guess there isn’t much of a market for them.
It would have been good if they didn’t lie so much about what you can do with it and fail spectacularly
I’m pretty sure I could get usb-c to HDMI and a Bluetooth controller and play phone games on my TV with just my phone.
Still have mine somewhere, I wonder if it would be possible to take a Shield and put it in there or a RPi…
3D TV
The 3d stuff was great! The NVIDIA glasses were wild!
It’s a shame it died off tbh.
I found 3D theatre experiences underwhelming and sometimes headache inducing, but watching Transformers on a friends’ TV with all the properly rendered depth was fantastic.
anything that was shot in 3D was fucking amazing, if you where underwhelmed it was because you watched some flat post production 2D conversion cash grab garbage, which I assume was the case for most people since no one makes 3D televisions anymore (yes, I know projectors are still being made with 3D capabilities)
movies are inherently passive entertainment and the friction of needing glasses for everyone watching was probably enough to kill it for the average user. I think some people got headaches from the effect too and you couldn’t really have some people watching without glasses at the same time.
The glorified pop-up books killed 3D. That’s most of what people saw, so that was their perception of it.
strangely never heard the phrase but it describes them perfectly
Based on what I heard it was mainly cost vs benefit. It was mainly an expensive gimmick, as not only you had to buy more expensive equipment that had its limitations (expensive glasses that had to synchronise with the TV or very narrow fields of 3D), but also had to have channels with 3D (which might’ve cost extra) or more expensive media that was capable of delivering 3D.
While streaming could have been a contributing factor, due to it killing traditional TV channels and basically DVD sales, it seems that overall 3D cinema declined very fast as well. This is probably because how expensive it was for both cinemas and production companies, and production companies often resorted to cheaper alternatives rather than equipment that would actually film in 3D, leading to a much less satisfying effect. So as the 3D effects got shallower, the whole gimmick in theaters died, and probably the whole 3D fad.
I never was able to see in 3D because my eyes can’t bloody focus to produce stereoscopic images. 3D movies were hell for me and there was nothing amazing about the headaches it gave me.
I also cant see 3D movies for the same reason. Cant see magic eye puzzles either.
I was the opposite and it was detrimental working in a lab with stereo 3d. One of the main guys could not see 3d and he was great at perfecting the calibration because of it. I was awful at calibration because 3d shot into view so easily.
Foldable phones - at least the early generations hat lots of troubles with the hinges and scratched screens.
Still as of today, testers are undecided if these category of devices really has a benefit compared to just buying both a tablet and a phone (and still saving money).
The people yearn for flip phones
Still miss my LG VX1 that closed with a nice <thwack>
I want one but I use a lot of apps still so I wouldn’t be able to replace my smartphone with it
Nah it was about feature phones. Cool phone though, I’m glad phone manufacturers realized the Game Boy Advance SP’s design is perfect
Oops, sorry ^^
yeah its cost. If the cost could be the same or only a slight increase then I would go for fold.
Well the folding aspect is pretty good.
Software otoh…
Fuck everything samsung touches for software but I love the zfold series. Only phones I’ve ever owned that I can carry without a case and not break the screen. Not sure if it’s still a problem with other phones as I don’t see as many cracked screens as I used to. I am clumsy as fuck amd drop my phone all the time but these plastic flexible screens never break. The early models were breaking from common use where the fold crease would break but they seemed to have improve that flaw. It also only happened to me after a year or more of heavy use and it was covered by insurance so never really turned me off to the phone.
Adulthood.
Wow… Maybe for you, but it was everything and more for me. Fuck childhood. Give me freedom, independence, and not having to follow the rules of my parents.
No curfew, no bedtime… You can figure out what you want and do it. Living with a girlfriend. Making and spending money. Driving your own car. I get that maybe adulthood may not be for everyone, but I’ll take it any day over childhood!
You know, I’m genuinely happy for you.
Apple Vision Pro. It’s incredible for the first days. Then there’s no reason to keep using it.
Really? This sounded promising to anyone?
Why, don’t you buy anything Tim Apple the marketing master tells you to?
VR - It has been through a few hype cycles, but never quite makes it. Cost, weight, battery life (or tethers), lack of highly desirable games, required floor space, nausea (in some people), etc.
Starlink - when announced it sounded like the solution to ISP monopolies and rural broadband access. But the roll out was so slow that other solutions have caught up. For people with no option other than satellite internet, it is still great (if they can get it) but for a lot of people, better options now exist.
Disagree on VR, depending. I use a VR dry fire training system, and it’s def. improved my real-world shooting.
Playstation vr has been worth it for me. Great games and very good tracking. The library overall is underwhelming but the quality is there.
Beatsaber (obviously) Arizona Sunshine Walking dead Gun Range VR Swordsman VR Moss RecRoom
Those are some of the top games.
Also, it’s way overpriced tbh. Sure I get that it’s internet from space and all but I just see the price keep rising instead of dropping over time.
These ones I think had drummed up a lot of hype but failed to deliver:
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“ai” a.k.a. “Plagiarized Info Synth System”. the magic is gone. it doesn’t make decisions. hallucinations show how limited it can and doesn’t match how it was marketed.
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“smart” cars. all the powers (and tracking) of smart phone apps inside your car.
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“smart” ref/ fridge/ icebox. plays skyrim. supposedly orders for you when eggs go out of stock. tracking. dedj in a year or so.
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“smart” tv. more ads. more tracking.
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NFT. owning the “receipt” of a digital resource is a funny idea. as long as you aren’t the one owning.
- digital ownership. those online and cloud libraries of your music, books, etc. I have seen news of amazon, steam, and others de-listing items here. if you own one of those, they’re gone.
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“google+”. touted fb-killer. nobody was there.
- which leads to: any google product that was scrapped. because google killed it.
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hyperloop. vaporware. I mean, we can dream.
below are products that are solely in my opinion and YMMV:
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4D movies. oh, seat is vibrating. i got wet.
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1gb/2gb/4gb internet. promises up to advertised speeds. flat payment as if said speed was delivered.
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iphone. all the bright colors and jumping people on the ad. I don’t see iphone owners being high as that. imo, the money i dropped on it is stockholming me – i love it.
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salad. what’s all these girls smiling and laughing at their salad?
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Cybertrucks
Except it didn’t really sound promising
I’d say Tesla in general became a disappointment. The Cybertruck was just the blister on top.
I wish other used EVs were anywhere close to teslas… I ended up buying Model 3 as everything else fell flat on its face. The worst one was the “Mustang”. There sadly is no alternative that’s feasible to me. I took a loan for 15k and got 2021 plate model 3 with okay miles. Nothing else was anywhere near it and the thing I has been stellar. And trust me, I have tried A LOT of EVs as my diesel costs pay for my tesla. It’s as close to " free" for my case as I can get.
I’m sorry to hear that, but I take some solace and knowing that Elon had minimal input with the original vehicles, and they were modeled after something that was designed by other companies.
My solice is the used car value doesn’t go back to him and I contribute to these cars being cheaper.
My uncle is a Musk Stan and bought one. Ugly as fuck but 0-60 in under 3 seconds blows your mind enough to get past it. It’s his Lamborghini or Ferrari. The vehicle will be used as a truck as often as a Ferrari is used to race. It’s really something out of this world if you come from an area that has more cows than people. Uncle has money and still has his RAM TRX for everyday use. He enjoys his cybertruck so I can’t hate… till I see that mother fucker stuck in a snowbank then I’m guna do donuts around it in the snowbank in 4 wheel drive real truck and leave him to wait for AAA for being an ass and buying a stupid star wars truck as my grandpa calls it.😂
I was very excited one year to get an early Roomba vacuum. It looked so fun and convenient.
I wouldn’t say it was bad, but it was very meh compared to the high hopes I had.
It went in a senseless pattern without setting up the electronic boundaries. It had trouble docking. It filled up very fast and had to be manually emptied. It was loud and slow. It just overall felt like it took longer and required more manual handling and maintenance than a regular upright and couldn’t even clean everything, so I still had to vacuum.
On top of that, the battery died after about a year. I got an expensive rebuild with supposed better cells from a local reman company, and that died again in about a year. The new battery was more than the Roomba was worth by then, so I gave up on it.
Not sure if they’re a “leader” but I got two shark robot vacuums (same model) that are excellent. In the past I have purchased the “bump around and vacuum in circles and hope they don’t get stuck” type and they were just ok. The new ones I have can map the room with IR and you can program no go spaces in the app. I have two because the downside is it can only map one floor at a time so if I wanted it to run on two floors one would be mapped and the other would be “random bumping around” method.
The new one also came with a tank so if I run it on the whole first floor and it gets full it’ll go empty itself and start back up again.
I got em last year and ran me around $350 each I believe.
Neato looks to have gone kaput last year. The shape seemed to have positive benefits over the typical round ones. I wonder why no one else has gone that direction.
The 2-in-1 mop and vac Roombas looks exciting, though at a heck of a cost at the price of a Miele or 6 of my Shark uprights.
It’s wild these are on their tenth generation. I think mine was a 2nd.
Oh, that’s such a shame. Neato made some really good vacs and cost somewhat less than iRobot.
I’m interested in trying one of those combination mop vacuums as well. Whenever one of mine dies, I’ll probably try that. They’re both going strong for now, however.
What I would not recommend is going for a cheap brand. We got one (before getting the Roomba) as a housewarming gift and it did not work well and it broke after a few months. So we ponied up and bought a Roomba to replace it.
Mine is alright, it doesn’t mao the room but kind of finds the perimeter and start to just do lines back and forth. It’s nice to vacuum when I leave the house.
It’s loud, but at least it’s doing something if only evidenced by how much I empty the damn thing. Every couple months I have to take it and the dock out to the garage to blow it all out with their air compressor.
I do think it makes me keep shit off the floor more. It wants to eat cords a lot. I want a second one with mapping so I can have it do specific rooms and this one can get sent to the basement where it doesn’t need to be as fancy.
I really hate the space it takes up, I would love one that was shorter so it could be stored underneath the side tables, or the dock and empty bin were flatter so it could be under the couch or something.
Yea. All the self emptying docks make them really tall, but I’d love it if the bin was on the side and pulled out forward.
Someone should make one specifically designed to be hidden underneath shit. It’s not a decoration or talking piece.
At least now they have ones where the base station cleans out the robot. The old style was basically not worth it. It vaccums by itself but then you have to clean the little compartment out which is sorta more annoying than just vaccuming yourself. It was only useful when you literally needed to be able to do two things at once which was what I needed at the time as my wife had just had knee surgery and was laid up. so it would run cleaning up while I was getting her stuff or what not and when I did not have something else to do i could pick them up and clean them out.
I’ve seen the ones with the trash station, but then I’d think you’d still need to dump that into the regular trash, fluffing up all that dirt again.
My house is a single story, open design, so I don’t think it really works well without setting the boundaries, as it just spreads itself too thin trying to do the whole place, and as it’s slow, it makes whatever room it’s working in somewhat off limits as you dont want to step on it or block it. The timer would help with that though, but it still seems more complex than the 10-15 minutes it takes for me to grab the upright and do all the floors, plus hit the nooks and Crannies and ceiling corners as well.
It’s still no Rosie from the Jetsons. 😕
I’ve got the station that empties the Roomba and it actually takes forever to completely fill (I run it often too).
Not saying you should buy a Roomba; if I could go back in time I’d probably get a Roborock due to the S9+ having atrocious navigation and constant strange errors (“battery not found”).
Large language models
Yep they’re a great tool if you know what they excel at. But instead if you’re not familiar and you hear the over hype in the media, companies leaders etc, you’re going to have a bad time.
3D internet/web.
Self-driving cars
I bought into the hype 10ish years ago. I had expected it to revolutionise road transport.In my (in the industry) experience: Agile killed safe development by pushing superficial internal deadlines that look good instead of are good. Safety requirements therefore are never met, but people keep looking like they’re approaching at least one, but end up sacrificing other things that no one is concentrating on, causing more set backs than improvements. Self driving will not be legally commercialized until either someone lobbies bad development onto the roads, or capitalism realizes that quarter profit isn’t as important as ten year profit and Agile finally burns in a god damn fire.
Interesting take. Do you have any material about the shortcomings of agile? Podcasts or articles or w/e
I’ve seen a few, but it’s still kind of controversial. That being said, there is a time and a place for agile where it works, but also there is a team composition and a style of agile which works and that style tends to piss off micromanaging middle managers, so it rarely is allowed.
I had an article saved in my work slack before I left that company (for health reasons), but a currently popular one seems to be this one: https://johnfarrier.com/agile-failure-what-drives-268-higher-failure-rates/
My take is based on years of interaction with companies and friends in other companies. The biggest problem isn’t necessarily Agile, but instead that agile is not intended for long term projects. Agile is fantastic in short turnaround interactions such as web dev, and because these short turnaround places have such easily visible results, managers take them to be gospel. Thus comes Corporate Agile: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524230754/https://bits.danielrothmann.com/corporate-agile Link is from the Internet archive because I can’t find his new site if he moved.
Long story short, corporate agile is the agile the bosses want, as it allows them to be constantly involved with more and more “agile” meetings. You know. Meetings. The antithesis of Agile. The place productivity goes to die. I had to remind our bosses that Agile dictated that stand ups included the developers and the scrum master ONLY multiple times and pointed them to the agile training they gave me. Didn’t matter. They’re the boss. This is a pretty common breakdown in Agile. So, that turned daily standup into daily meeting, since the quick status updates now had to be broken down for the boss. Every. Single. Day.
Agile at its most basic is intended to reduce meetings to once a week so the rest of the time can be spent developing. Every company I know starts including devs in at least 300% more meetings (even junior devs) after switching to Agile for at least 6 months. And on average, it takes half an hour for a programmer to return to the level of productivity they hit before any interruption. This is generally due to the limitations of working memory. (Many research papers on this if you want.)
But to get back to the original point. Because agile concentrates on short immediately tangible and verifiable benefits, any progress that takes longer than a sprint isn’t allowed. (It actually is, with proper implementation, as Agile is supposed to be edited on a team by team basis to make things work, but companies want everyone on exactly the same page.) Guess what doesn’t have immediately tangible and verifiable benefits? That’s right, research. Guess what it’s still in a research phase? Aside from basically anything that isn’t in market yet, self driving technology is very much research driven. Lots of trial, error, and long development cycles. Longer than a sprint for sure. And anyone who says self driving is in market should try an exercise if finding one level 5 self driving car that hasn’t been recalled due to false marketing or safety concerns. The technology isn’t there yet. It could be getting there, but profits are getting in the way of progress.
Realistically. Trains will revolutionize road transport of goods and people if the train industry properly maintained their rails, operated above board (unlike the one that had the chemical spill in Ohio and other issues), and expands a bit. The largest expense in good transport is long haul and no one wants to drive long haul. Last mile will probably need trucks and drivers for at least 3 to 5 more decades. And taxi services have similar challenges to last mile delivery. Personal self driving systems need even more consideration than taxi services, and will likely take five to ten years after taxi services become recognized as safe.
