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Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

blog.smartere.dk

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Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#371

Post by mcny »

ctm92 wrote: post #367
tete wrote: post #3

> Modern TVs are very poorly suited for kids. They require using complicated remotes or mobile phones, and navigating apps that continually try to lure you into watching something else than you intended to. I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)

Kids grow up with it and know everything way before the grown ups. They can't even stand up but already know how to unlock an iPhone (back in the days when there was slide to unlock)

I always find it amusing when I see a toddler knows to press skip ad on YouTube.

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#372

Post by ale42 »

pwg wrote: post #151
mrweasel wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the TV, it's the weird take that tuners are bad, apparently. I helped my mother-in-laws friend, a lady in her 60s, getting her TV working after a move. The local cable providers don't care to offer their coax solution anymore, you need their box. To be fair, the box is nice enough, but it's way more complicated than simply hooking up the tuner. Modern Samsung TV are also awful, there's no longer a sourc…

> you need their box. This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now, lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.

I'm mostly thinking that the awful box is required because then your TV provider can sell data about what you watch.

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#373

Post by austin-cheney »

bayindirh wrote: post #368
austin-cheney wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a rather generous comment. As a former JavaScript developer I can tell you the qualities of concern are not the business concerns of delivery. Delivery will increase just as dramatically by reducing the tech debt imposed from unnecessary code. All that really matters is solving for developer anxiety.

> All that really matters is solving for developer anxiety. This is a new and interesting insight to me. Can you please elaborate it a bit further, if you wish?

Imagine if you were an Uber driver and that is your full time job. Imagine it pays more than double the national average income. Also imagine you cannot navigate without a digital map and cannot work the car without AI assistance. If someone suggests taking the AI and the digital map away to increase road safety and driver performance you would likely lose your job for failure to perform. The very first thing you would do, as that driver, would make excuses and attack everything that threatens your career identity.

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#374

Post by Tanoc »

vel0city wrote: post #240
Tanoc wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems strange now how often the power goes out. I remember back in the '90s I could leave my PlayStation running for two weeks because I didn't have a memory card to save my progress in Syphon Filter or NASCAR Thunder '98. Nowadays I have to set up autosave on everything and make checkpoint safeguards or scheduled backups because the power flickers off and back on at least once a week. This, with much more power e…

This can vary greatly across locations, even within the same city and the same power distribution organization. Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery. I've lived in places where the power practically never went out, never experienced undervolt situations, etc. I've then lived less than a mil…

It tends to happen in the area in general where I live. My house, neighbour's house, a house a mile away, all have the same trouble. I live within about six hundred yards of a volunteer fire department and about seven hundred yards from an elementary school, and even they've complained about how often the power goes out. The worst part is it's not like it's off for a few minutes and then it's back on. It's a momentary tenths of a second thing, like someone flicking a light switch down and up once to get people's attention.

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#375

Post by moring »

austin-cheney wrote: post #359
georgefrowny wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn on TV: 3 seconds Roku boots: 10 seconds Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries) Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds Select profile: 3 seconds Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)…

Everybody complains about performance. Slow software feels like poison. Except, anything written with a large JavaScript framework is allowed to be slow. In fact slow as syrup is strongly encouraged. To prove it just ask the developers. Mention it could be 8-50x faster just by not using their favorite framework and note the response. Even better, show them a proof of concept and take note of their unemotional objecti…

Non-constructive reply: Developers have been burned too many times by snake oil vendors and "solutions" that only work for toy examples. Also, I've never seen being slow to be encouraged anywhere. Most consider it an acceptable tradeoff though.

Constructive reply: What would be an approach to writing a large web frontend (large as in, many pages and controls) without using a large framework?

I'm asking this because I know how to do it in React but also how to do it "the old jQuery way" (or equivalently, using today's standardized builtins). Productivity is easily 100x larger with React.

edit: Ideally, together with a link to an example open-source application that does it that way, to understand how it works and feels at (code) scale.

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#376

Post by SkiFire13 »

brabel wrote: post #203
tantalor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest gripe is how terribly slow it is to navigate UI on a TV. The latency between user input and the UI responding can be upwards of 10-20 seconds. Just incredibly user hostile.

I had a 75-inch TV I inherited, it was on the higher end and the TV UI was supper snappy. Then, I broke it accidentally and got only 1/4 of the money from insurance. Because I barely watch TV, I thought I would just buy a TV of the same size, but on the lower end... both TVs were Samsung anyway. What a huge difference. The image quality is a little worse, barely noticeable after you get used to it. But the UI is agon…

With a $3000 price difference you can buy a frigging gaming pc and attach it to the tv instead.

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#377

Post by viraptor »

austin-cheney wrote: post #359
georgefrowny wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn on TV: 3 seconds Roku boots: 10 seconds Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries) Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds Select profile: 3 seconds Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)…

Everybody complains about performance. Slow software feels like poison. Except, anything written with a large JavaScript framework is allowed to be slow. In fact slow as syrup is strongly encouraged. To prove it just ask the developers. Mention it could be 8-50x faster just by not using their favorite framework and note the response. Even better, show them a proof of concept and take note of their unemotional objecti…

This has nothing to do with the frameworks though. Almost every listed step of delay there is due to specific software design choices, not JS level stuff. For example search - why isn't every possible next letter prefetched before you even select it? It's trivially cacheable at local nodes anyway. Why isn't the first few seconds buffered by the time you open movie description? How is the UI even possible to be laggy - there are way larger services using react without issues.

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#378

Post by greenavocado »

kmarc wrote: post #326
greenavocado wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clearly remember my grandfather telling me how much it physically hurt to learn a few years before his death. He was highly motivated and figured out a lot on his Android tablet but could only really try to learn for a few minutes every few hours.

I'm 40 and sometimes I feel the same. Should I be worried...

Noopept

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#379

Post by johnisgood »

usrnm wrote: post #342
johnisgood wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do not know any better, I suppose. Reading these threads just makes me wonder: if you guys have so many problems, why do you not torrent?

Torrenting is easy, but what are you goung to do with the torrented files then? Without additional external hardware you probably won't be able to play your downloaded files on your large TV, and most people prefer a laggy simple route over having to do more work. I do torrent from time to time, but the hassle associated with the whole process really highlights why streaming apps took over.

I do not understand what hassle. There has never been a hassle associated with it, not even back when I had to burn DVDs... Oh well.

Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

#380

Post by seszett »

moring wrote: post #375
austin-cheney wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody complains about performance. Slow software feels like poison. Except, anything written with a large JavaScript framework is allowed to be slow. In fact slow as syrup is strongly encouraged. To prove it just ask the developers. Mention it could be 8-50x faster just by not using their favorite framework and note the response. Even better, show them a proof of concept and take note of their unemotional objecti…

Non-constructive reply: Developers have been burned too many times by snake oil vendors and "solutions" that only work for toy examples. Also, I've never seen being slow to be encouraged anywhere. Most consider it an acceptable tradeoff though. Constructive reply: What would be an approach to writing a large web frontend (large as in, many pages and controls) without using a large framework? I'm asking this because I…

> link to an example open-source application that does it that way

My experience is with this: https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr (what I currently work on is quite similar, but it's not open source).

It works fine. Clients don't complain about the interface. The project has been going on for 20 years or so now, and doesn't need big refactors every time a dependency gets updated because it avoids dependencies.

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