Asklemmy

43336 readers

807 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

253

What's Some Tech That Was Better Than It Is Now? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

314 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When you connect a new device to a 'smart' tv, you must pay homage to the manufacturer with a ritualistic dance. Plugging and unplugging the device. Turning them on and off in the correct sequence like entering a konami code.

Every time you want to switch devices, the tv must scan for them. And god forbid you lose power, or unplug something. You are granted the delight experience of doing it all over again.

I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.

What is some other tech that used to be better?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I for-real misread this, as asking what is an example of tech that actually has gotten better, because the general rule is that things become more shit over time, as capitalism gets its hands on them

I was gonna say programming languages. Having come up in the time of C++ and Java, having Python and Go and Rust around is fuckin fantastic. Even Typescript is… well… it’s not JavaScript! See, things are getting better.

Literally everything else is getting worse over time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah developer tools have gotten easier and better. Never a better time to get into software. Even if its just to unlock your own devices. And repair things.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Dude, it's fuckin magic now

I was used to emacs + gdb + valgrind. That's actually pretty significantly powerful if you know how to use it, but I sort of bit the bullet really not that long ago and forced myself to learn VSCode, assuming that it would be a big over-feature-packed bunch of bullshit, and it's gold. It can debug any language. I can edit and run and debug code that's on the other side of an ssh connection in a git repo and all the different plugins and stuff just work (well, you know, for the most part, enough to be pretty massively useful).

Plus I can have GPT spit out boilerplate for me and it does it all semi-instantly, and it can teach me libraries and idiomatic patterns in environments I'm unfamiliar with way faster than I could do it myself from the documentation.

Fuckin magic man

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Yep and with docker/other containers it's easier to set up on new machines. Terraform and other like services also make provisioning potentially easier (depends on your setup).