Reposting this from here from 2023, after I stumbled across it tonight and it hits hard.
The text in the image:
I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it’s trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it’s downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it’s being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my usage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology
I remember the ancient times when you could buy something, turn it on, then have it do what you want it to do. Setting the clock was the difficult part. Other than that, it just worked.
Learning ESPHome has been the most liberating thing. Take back control of your home. Local first. Privacy respecting.
I spy a research rabbit hole in my near future … 🐰
Edit: ESPHome is a system to control your microcontrollers by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
Maybe give https://nowsci.com/only-sensor a shot? I built the guides/schematics/models for ESPHome devices as a learning experience for myself.
@SkyNTP@lemmy.ml I felt the same way. Now I just keep making new things for it, currently on garage door opener, blinds opener, and may even automate turning on my DIY solder fume extractor.
Esphome is limiting though. Want to have a sensor that spawns a camera stream only on PIR detection, and then sleeps? Forget about it, those two will run in parallel, and the debug messages are terrible.
I find it more liberating to write in C, and then setup my own mqtt protocols when I want for HA to interact with
I agree. A few years ago I wanted to activate a fan based on temperature in a server cabinet, and offer a REST and MQTT APIs (for HA). It was impossible with ESP Home for some reason, if you added the Bosch 280 sensor you couldn’t use MQTT. Very arbitrary limitations.
It took me less than 2 hours to build it with an ESP32 + Arduino. It’s all libraries that you just need to put together at this point, barely any logic at all.
Get in car after SO used it. Her BT connects. She goes into BT settings and disconnects. The phone auto reconnects. She turns BT off. The phone turns it back on. She is stuck in a loop. I can never connect phone ever again.
Technology is amazing.
Its only a matter of time.
Is Sony actually a good guy for holding this patent so that no one else can go and do this shit either?
either
Is there any indication that they won’t implement this shit at some point?
Also, should we be trying to come up with the most insane “features” in this vein that we can imagine (knowing full well that some corporation will come up with them eventually), and then patent them to protect humanity from them?
Is there any organization that collects patents just to block them (in the consumer’s favor)? A kind of white-hat patent troll? And, if not, should we create one?
As if they’d ever let you skip adverts, even by dancing for them like a monkey.
Insert verification can copy pasta
Last I looked, we could still buy commercial displays. They’re dumb TVs. They cost more, of course.
Can you give a recommendation? I too looked for big displays and found commercial ones to be used as digital billboards but the specs weren’t all that good (no oled, no hdr).
OK, but it’s edge-lit and extremely tiny. You can get much better Smart TVs for less money, and then just never connect it to the internet
I can’t, unfortunately. I still have an old Smart TV that isn’t too offensive and doesn’t show me ads. If it starts showing me ads sometime, then it’s gone. But I’m not really a videophile and I’ll watch shows on anything so I haven’t really looked at what’s better, only at what’s cheapest. I do hear it can be tricky because the commercial displays are meant to be brighter than TVs and maybe it can be hard to get them dialed in the way you want.
We have a Samsung “smart” TV, hooked up to an AppleTV box. The TV’s original remote is in a drawer somewhere, forever unused.
I have the apps that I need, the tiny Siri Remote turns on the TV and handles volume, and, apart from the aggressively, insanely, mind-blowingly horrible on-screen “keyboard” / text input (we don’t have Apple phones we can use to mitigate this, sadly. Also, what the fucking fuck, Apple?!) we’re happy. For now. I trust Apple to make the experience incrementally worse as a fact of life.
Not perfect, but leagues better than dealing with Samsung’s interface.
These fucking televisions have less ram than my fucking 8 year old phone
At some point it’s just better to factory reset this bitch and paste an RPI in the back with my own android TV so it can actually run with 8gb ram 256gb space
There is a brand that makes dumb TVs.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.html
