I have this article growing in the back of my head that is currently mostly a rant about how impractical technology turned out by comparing the current state with the old days. It's hard as there are countless examples and I want to address only the most embarrassing ones. Dumb vs smart TV alone could fill a tomb worth of downgrades. Do you remember the variable resistor, the rotary knob that provided volume control? The ease of use, the granularity, the response time!
I currently have volume control on my TV, one on the OS on the computer that drives it and one on the application that makes the picture. That is only half the problem
The thing is, I want smart features, I just don't want those smart features to be tied to the display. A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience. Easily flashable firmware would be an acceptable alternative for the same reason.
I'd be happy with a setup box giving me the ability to add apps for streaming services or whatever, but I don't want that STB spying on my either. I feel like even if all TVs were dumb monitors we'd just be moving the real problem of insane levels of data collection and spying to another device. We need strong regulation with real teeth to prevent the spying at which point all of our devices should be protected.
Hi-fi and AV enthusiasts have known that "separates" is where it's at since the beginning. Unfortunately it's such a small segment compared to mass market junk "content" devices and it's only shrinking as more people are seduced by the convenience of the shit stuff.
A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience.
In the life of my last TV (10+ yrs), I've had to switch out that separate box three times. It would have sucked & been way more expensive to have had to replace the TV each time.
Firmware can be updated, sure, but there's the risk of some internal component failing. There's the risk of the services I want to use not being compatible. I'd also prefer to use an operating system I'm familiar with, because, well, I'm familiar with it, rather than some custom firmware from a TV company whose goal is to sell your data, not make a good user experience...
Of course, this ties back to the enshittification of the Internet. Every company is trying to be a data broker now though, because they see it as free passive income.
Regarding the failure of internal components--there are some 'failure' modes which I had not even contemplated previously.
I have a TV that's only about 5-6 years old and has a built in Roku. It mostly works fine, but the built in hardware is simply not fast enough to play some streaming services, specifically some stuff on F1TV. And before anyone asks, it's not a bandwidth problem--I have gigabit fiber and the TV is using ethernet.
Anyway, between that, general UI sluggishness and the proliferation of ads in the Roku interface, I switched to an Apple TV and haven't looked back.
We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?
And instead of a full brick, let's just downgrade to 360p and call it an "expiration of your complementary free Enhanced Video trial".
>We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?
Same thing that prevents your phone manufacturer from adding a firmware level backdoor that uploads all your nudes to the mothership 1 day after the warranty expires. At some point you just have to assume they're not going to screw you over.
That's not a good answer, unless you just want cable. YouTube, Netflix, etc won't work. Buying hardware is paying extra which is already a deterrent, but anyway just shifts the problem to that piece of hardware - is the stick vetted to not do any harm? Other solutions are often impractical or overly complex for non-technical people. I haven't seen any good answers to date. I guess your TV just shouldn't spy on everything you watch? Seems like a reasonable expectation.
My TCL/Roku TV recently started showing popups during streams with services like YouTubeTV and PlutoTV, that basically say, "Click here to watch this same program on the Roku Network". I poked around the settings on the TV, and sure enough, there were some new "smart" settings added and enabled by default. I disabled the settings, and the popups stopped. But it's only a matter of time before something else appears.
Because with a stick, I can easily decide to chuck it and replace with another. Over and over again. Hard to do with a TV. Even if I had the money, disposing of one is a royal pain.
For now. They’re about to undergo a CEO change, again. Who knows what will happen in the future, particularly if the shareholders expect the perceived value provided by enshittification.
John Ternus, SVP of Hardware Engineering, is considered the front runner for CEO right now. The board wants a more product oriented CEO this time. Things could change but makes me optimistic.
I do the same thing. My PC is hooked up via HDMI to a receiver which goes to the TV via HDMI. I use VNC on my phone to remote control it. It works well. The phone’s touch screen functions as a mouse and you can pull up the phone’s on screen keyboard to type. My wife is extremely non technical and does fine with it. Usually we just use the browser to watch ad-blocked YouTube or unofficial sports streams.
We just switched to a laptops and USB-HDMI cable that always dangles near our TV. Someone wants to see F1, sports or a movie, they just plug it and watch like it's a big computer screen. If 9yo can do it, anyone can do it.
And a guest wifi that is password free on by default. All it takes is a neighbor to get a new router from the ISP. I just had to turn my guest wifi off because I noticed a lot of bandwidth on it (likely coming from our neighbor who was bragging about cord cutting).
My Wi-Fi isn't. I live about 2 miles away from my closest neighbor, so it was an inconvenience.
The trick was finding TV's and what not that don't need an Internet connection. Vizio was the only brand I could find that still had just dumb tv flat screens, believe it or not.
I would much rather buy a dumb TV. I feel that the smart TV experience is an opportunity it eventually make TVs feel dated and slow. I would rather buy a standalone streamer that I can plug in. Buying a new $100 dollar streamer every couple years is cheaper and produces less e-waste than buying a new giant TV.
I isolate smart TVs and other IOT devices to a separate network/subnet, and usually block their network access unless they need an update.
A related alternative would be that the listed tv price included the price of time spent viewing ads, and the sale price of your usage data (and that changing the price, say by showing more ads, required agreement).
A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.
Look at "Commercial" TVs. This is what they call dumb TV's nowadays. I guess they're mainly targeted at businesses who want a TV to for things like informational displays, conferences, etc.
I only found this out because I thought my 15 year old plasma TV had died, but it ended up being the power cord.
The exist, for commercial/enterprise use (usually digital signage and meeting rooms). They cost a few times more than consumer-grade, because of the word 'enterprise'
Likely much smaller sales volume as well. Economies of scale are a thing, especially where marketing (largely through dealers / vendors / distributors) is a major expense.
That would again suggest that it's marketing (that is, the process of finding distributors and buyers) rather than production and design that are the principle cost-drivers. A seller of "dumb" devices has far fewer potential buyers (or at least perceives as such), and fewer channels for distribution, so they're going to have to focus more effort, and cost, on sales and marketing. It's not the cost of designing or producing the products, but of matching them to distributors and buyers, which would dominate.
I'm not certain of this, but I'm fairly confident it's a factor.
Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).
also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.
on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.
"Authorities have investigated whether his death could be connected to this weekend's Brown University shooting and, at this point, a senior law enforcement official briefed on both cases told ABC News there is nothing to suggest they’re connected."
Authorities and the university have also been asking for tips but then flipping the script as soon as they get them: "Accusations, speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous."[]
Also worth noting... at one point the arrested the wrong guy.
They have no clue. And become hostile when people try to come up with one. While scrubbing student profiles and simultaneously claiming they have no knowledge of doing so. The whole thing is a total clown show and nothing said by the authorities is to be believed without independent verification.
Without further context, I don’t blame them for being hostile towards “Accusations, speculation and conspiracies…on social media and in some news reports”. Remember the Boston bombing? Tips shouldn’t be public.
Tips should be "public" in this case because that's the only way they get noticed enough to garner attention. Wouldn't surprise me if "homeless man" was ignored by the cops if he tried earlier, or "homeless man" was too afraid to approach them directly because of how cops treat the homeless.
Well maybe they should have been a bit more open to "conspiracies" since they're now saying they think they're connected and that they found a link of the same make/model car at both. Seeing as the "homeless guy" who remembered the plate was seemingly ignored for 5 days, he should have just blasted it on X.
Absolutely useless without a name and reputation on the line. It's an absurd to publish that multiple academics killed within an hour drive within one week have "nothing to suggest they're connected".
Are you from Boston / have you lived there? I do, and thank you for your concern. But this is confusing to say the least.
1. No one should be stupid enough to put their name and rep on the line, in a fluid situation, where there’s 0 idea who did the first anyways, for days now.
2. Dunno what you mean by academics, students and professors? Usually academics refers to professors / grad students / has a job at university related to teaching, but Brown victims weren’t professors. Hard to see how that indicates a connection.
3. It’s a real stretch to put Providence to Brookline at a 1 hour drive. In general, it’s two different worlds, so it’s strange to use it as a clear indicator they must be related.
4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of trust. Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin put their name on the line because without that you wouldn't know the provenance of the information and wouldn't know if you should trust it. Citing an unnamed officer making claims that they have insufficient evidence for is not good journalism, so their reputation takes a hit. The officer also deserves this reputational hit since they are making the unsubstantiated claim.
To be very clear here, the claim is that "there is nothing to suggest the two sets of predmeditated murders within a week within an hour are related". The fact that they're the same demographic, high profile, using the same weapon, close in proximity, and close in time are all concrete things that relate them. It is embarrassing to state otherwise, so the officer was not named. However the reporters are not immune to this, so they take the hit.
I am not stating the positive "they are related", I am refuting the negative "they are unrelated".
And as for my identity: I am not a reporter or public official. You don't need to and shouldn't use me as a source of truth. I am a member of the public applying logic to facts. I am closer to this event than you but I won't say more. As a member of HN who respects privacy I'm sure that should be enough for you.
You aren’t refuting a negative because the statement isn’t “they are unrelated” the statement is “(with current information) there is nothing suggesting they are related”
If you’re close to the situation, and have a substantiated reason to believe the claim that there’s no current information suggesting they’re related is inaccurate, you should be able to back that up. Except we both know you can’t, because you’re attempting to refute something that wasn’t actually said.
Other comments cover the “logic” being applied here. Dunno who those two names are. I’m genuinely worried about your grip on reality based on your writing, I don’t say that lightly and am very, very, serious, to the point I’d prefer to eat downvotes and offend you than hide that and possibly contribute to you worsening.
I hope you’re extremely close to one of these events and are extremely distraught, even though that’s tragic, because it would indicate you’re not just comfortable disassociated from reality.
Note the difference in your approach this morning versus now, to wit, you this morning: “ We have no info but he was the department head of the MIT PSFC. It's easy to imagine a deranged individual picking a high profile target by browsing MIT's website. Or it was a domestic dispute or road rage or any number of things that would drive someone to shoot someone in their home.
We have no information and can only speculate.”
The gaslighting is touching, but I hadn't had a mental shift between the morning and evening. I had a big response to a public official lying. The right answer (and officers that were on the record actually said this on Tuesday) that "all options are on the table". You'll see from subsequent statements today that ABC's prior publishing of the statement that "there is nothing that suggests the Brown University and MIT murders are related" was baseless and untrue.
Not only did the public official lie, but was given voice and reputational cover by ABC. This is deserving of the criticism I give it.
"Gaslighting" - I came back to note you were right. Also, you weren't being gaslit, and you were incoherent. You could have replied to any one of us with anything explaining yourself and didn't. Like, the same weapon one was especially bizarre. Note that "No indication" is same as "all options are on the table", as was repeatedly noted to you.
>4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
Steve Lookner?
authorities believe Brown University shooter used rented vehicle that is same make and model of car connected to killing of MIT professor"
Tangentially related, but I was surprised to learn about the lax attitude towards placebos in trials. Classes of drugs have expected side effects, so it's common to use medications with similar effects as placebos. Last I heard, there is no requirement or expectation to document placebos used, and they are often not mentioned in publications.
> Classes of drugs have expected side effects, so it's common to use medications with similar effects as placebos.
This would be called an "active placebo" and would certainly be documented.
It's common to find controlled trials against an existing drug to demonstrate that the new drug performs better in some way, or at least is equivalent with some benefit like lower toxicity or side effects. In this case, using an active comparison against another drug makes sense.
You wouldn't see a placebo-controlled trial that used an active drug but called it placebo, though. Not only would that never get past the study review, it wouldn't even benefit the study operator because it would make their medication look worse.
In some cases, if the active drug produces a very noticeable effect (e.g. psychedelics) then study operators might try to introduce another compound that produces some effect so patients in both arms feel like they've taken something. Niacin was used in the past because it produces a flushing sensation, although it's not perfect. This is all clearly documented, though.
Those are documented, but not necessarily in the paper. You can find the info at clinicaltrials.gov. Check out this current trial for breast cancer treatment by Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC for example. For the control arm, they are allowing doctors choice from a set of alternatives. Assuming the doctors are selecting control treatments to improve chance of survival, this test is comparing the new treatment to "the best known treatment for this specific cancer".
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/airport-runway-names-shift-ma...
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