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The tech monoculture is finally breaking

jasonwillems.com

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Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#181

Post by majormajor »

lemax wrote: post #122
sylens wrote: post #29

I think the author is correct to a point but I don't believe the examples they've chosen provide the best support for their case. Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services. You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software po…

Yeah, I guess this take is tempting for a technologist, but Gen Z is buying iPods and walking around in wired headphones because it's cool and nostalgic, not because of usability. Cycles of nostalgia are well understood to be getting smaller. The creative industry is creating new things less frequently and referring back sooner (the old 20 year cycle of fashion repeating itself is contracting). There is an element of…

Aren't we roughly right on schedule for 20 years? Plus or minus a few years here and there (giant jeans, for instance, were more 90s, which is 30 years now. lots of 90s or even 80s influences still popping up in fashion that were definitely not there 10 years ago).

The article has a niche example of some pulls from 2014 too, but the dominant thread is older. 2004 kids not-infrequently went through Nirvana/Pearl Jam grungy phases too for a 10 year loop.

iPods certainly are 20-25 years ago. iPhones and iPod Touches are about to hit 20. N64s are 30.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#182

Post by mullingitover »

at1as wrote: post #137
mullingitover wrote: post #116

> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use Literally the only time I've heard of anyone using these in the wild was some guy being an absolute creep and using them to secretly film women to create social media content[1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go

There are two claims you're making 1) they're rarely used 2) when they are it's nefarious To the first point, they've sold at least 2M pairs, and are reported scaling production to handle up to 10M units per year. To the second point, do you believe that all or most of those 2M people using it for those purposes? Or to take videos of travel, music festivals, etc. Lots of companies are rushing into this space, so you…

> There are two claims you're making 1) they're rarely used 2) when they are it's nefarious

I'm not making any claims, just sharing my observation. The claim I'm reacting to is that "they're totally used by normal people now!" and my observation is that I personally don't know anyone in my fairly tech-savvy peer group who has even uttered their name, and the only time I have heard of them outside their marketing is over-the-top creepy.

It's not helping their case that if you google "meta glasses recording light" you find "Adjustable LED Light Blocking Covers for RayBan Meta Wayfarer" in the top-of-the-fold hits[1]. Clearly being a creep with the glasses is popular enough to create a whole cottage industry.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Adjustable-Headliner-Accessories-Reco...

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#183

Post by majormajor »

idiotsecant wrote: post #44
sylens wrote: post #29

I think the author is correct to a point but I don't believe the examples they've chosen provide the best support for their case. Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services. You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software po…

>You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s wat. I'm curious how an ipod from 2000 is better than, for example, the Fiio jm21. It's worse in pretty much every possible way, other than the ipod might be appealing to a certain kind of 'old man shakes fist at clouds' type of user.

Took a quick look. All screen. Usability downgrade.

And near-200 bucks is WAY more than a lot of used iPods for budget-conscious groups that are also looking to make a fashion statement on the side.

Going to all-glass made sense for adding "app" functionality. It's a loss if you want a dedicated device.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#184

Post by rendaw »

claudiulodro wrote: post #72
sylens wrote: post #29

I think the author is correct to a point but I don't believe the examples they've chosen provide the best support for their case. Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services. You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software po…

AGPTEK makes decent and affordable MP3 players that still have buttons, and the battery life is really solid (~40 hrs!). I think they also use a dedicated MP3 player OS rather than an Android reskin. That's my recommendation if you want a 2007-style MP3 player with more modern hardware.

I had a few. They advertised ogg support but it didn't actually work. The directory ordering was random, and it would lose metadata or not show tracks with non-ascii characters in the filename. It didn't remember position on stop. IIRC the sorting didn't work either. The buttons were awful, it felt cheap. It was typical Chinese manufacturing slop. But it had solitaire or some other game installed.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#185

Post by theandrewbailey »

zahirbmirza wrote: post #113

I find this discussion interesting. I have been thinking about the declining appeal of a device that does everything, but on which you can only really do one thing at a time well. Ie, you put the iPhone in a cage and add a tripod and you could make a high quality video. But, then you can't use the phone like a phone... Solution, a DJI osmo pocket 3, which is something that does video brilliantly. And you can set it u…

> I recently serendipitously found my sansa clip+ which to my delight has a battery that has somehow and miraculously not failed.

Have you thought of installing Rockbox on it? It made mine instantly better.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#186

Post by Tallain »

saulpw wrote: post #166
Retric wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They likely want to use the device without looking at it, thus the requirement is physical buttons not a specific OS. It’s the same issue with touch screens in cars. Anything that’s a touchscreen simply fails a core MP3 player requirement for many people.

Yup. I want to be able to use it to listen to music, start/stop/pause/skip/volume while I'm at the dentist.

I think Fiio and Hiby are the closest that exist today. They have dedicated hardware and physical buttons for the things listed in your comment. However, they do still ship with a custom Android OS and you need the touch screen to navigate your library and such. On the upside, this lets you choose your media library app. On the downside, it still isn't as good as the touch wheel on old iPods. I, too, am waiting for something like this to return. The Hiby is good enough until then for me.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#187

Post by eudamoniac »

CrimsonCape wrote: post #138
mikkupikku wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope Linux is never suitable for windows users, who's tolerance for abuse is matched in magnitude only by their lack of taste. You have no idea just how over I am with the very premise of Linux evangelism. I will go as far as find reasons or even just flimsy pretexts to oppose and criticize any change to Linux calculated to win over Windows users, because being co-users with such people is plainly against my own in…

I was ready to install Linux. I installed a new 1TB ssd in my laptop. I shrunk the windows volume using Windows' Disk Management. Then I started reading the Arch wiki on this task. It forced me to learn things like MBR vs GPT. Then it said Windows by default makes an EFI partition way too small so I have to re-create a new partition by temporarily mounting EFI, saving the files, deleting the EFI partition, and recrea…

How does someone browse this forum and get to the point of installing Arch without intimately understanding that Arch is infamously, abnormally difficult to install? Proving GPs point perhaps

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#188

Post by BeetleB »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #167
BeetleB wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then decline for every app you install after that. That's what I already have. And that's what I find painful. I don't want to have to decline at every install. I want a setting that is the default, and no prompts to grant permissions when I install.

How often are you installing apps that it's that frustrating?

It's the principle.

I get that you think it's not a major inconvenience, but if I now throw yet another (pointless) popup for you each time you install an app, are you OK with it?

When I install something on my PC (Linux), I never get such a prompt. If any Linux distribution started giving a prompt on each install, power users will stop using it.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#189

Post by BeetleB »

nine_k wrote: post #117
BeetleB wrote: post #2

> A Timex ad went viral this year: “Know the time without seeing you have 1,249 unanswered emails.” Having to micromanage notifications is why I have two phones - one without a SIM card. It's nice to be able to do stuff on the phone and know it won't bug you. I simply put the one with the SIM card elsewhere (other room, leave in car, etc). No - I'm not going to spend too much time learning how to "effectively" manage…

Android makes it really easy to disable notifications from any app. Pull down the notifications list, long press, select "Turn off" (or "Settings" if you want more details). It's also possible to make an Android device ask for every permission, including notifications, when a new app is installed. So it's also easy to deny most apps access to notifications, address book, camera, etc. I think it's the default on curre…

Yes, and this is a headache for me.

What I want: In global settings, say "No notifications." Then I don't want to be prompted when I install an app.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#190

Post by lukeschlather »

iammjm wrote: post #88
MarkusWandel wrote: post #17

I'm not sure I agree with all of that - that single-purpose tech is making a real comeback. But I do have one example in my daily life that supports this: A Garmin watch. Unlike "full" smartwatches (arbitrarily defined as: You can browse the web on them in some fashion) Garmin devices are intentionally limited but in return, what they do works very well and seems fully debugged. I spent several years recording outdoo…

> fully debugged And here I am each morning having to manually enforce sync multiple times to have my fucking Garmin watch sleep data show up in my iPhone Garmin app. I love this watch (Instinct 2) but it’s far from bug free even in its most fundamental functions like data sync

I had a phone I liked that was stuck on Android 7 and had increasing sync issues until I got a phone that can run current Android. iPhone should be better with support, but also, Apple is hostile to third-party apps that use Bluetooth, so I'm hesitant to say this is Garmin's fault and not Apple's.
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