fein

Maybe I'm just old fashioned or out of touch, but why is it such a barrier for people to treat their smart TV as a dumb display? Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.

I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.

And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.

I've been a windows/linux/mac guy since forever (I do not care at all about the OS, I just care about getting shit done), and Windows is worse than the XP and 7 days, but not by much. A caveat here is that I'm assuming windows people are savvy enough to know about massgrave, and as such remedy 90% of the shit experience with vendors filling up an otherwise acceptable OS with a bunch of garbage.

The only thing in Win11 user experience wise that absolutely drives me up a wall is the new right click menu forcing me to hold shift to get the usable menu instead of the "Win 11 is smart and this new menu UI is easier to use" menu.

Other than that, it feels like win 10 (and 7 for the most part) for anything else that matters (for a normal user).

All of that being said, yes, the experience of a naive consumer buying a windows laptop is awful, but not due to the OS itself, rather the amount of bloated useless shit vendors ship with the installed OS.

> but they've all made major compromises

Not entirely sure about that. With the coupons/ deals HP does, I landed a brand new HP 17" (17t-cn500) laptop with a intel core ultra 5 225u, 16gb ram and the 1920x1080 fhd screen upgrade for $588 tax included. Obviously not the same form factor as the Neo, but this is also a laptop for my kitchen that will spend most of its life streaming media and displaying recipes. I'm sure you can find something closer to the size of the neo with better specs for a similar price.

For my stereo setup, around $4000 for everything. It's also used for game emulators, kids to watch movies and cartoons, wife to watch whatever she feels like, etc.

Projector (Optoma laser) - $1200

110" powered retractable projector screen - $100

Mid tier PC - $600

DAC (Schiit modi 2) - $180

Amp (Behringer A500) - $100

SVS prime towers - $1000

SVS Sub - $750

All of my music is running off Jellyfin. I have a turntable that barely gets used but that's because I don't have enough space for it to keep it out of the reach/ damage radius of my kids.

You can of course do this for much less if you don't spend 2 grand on the audio part.

No one (corporate) supports it unless it comes enabled by default with whatever compliance service/ plugin used on their sites. The best combo I've found so far is Waterfox + uBO. I'm sure there are others, but this works well if you don't want to use a chromium based browser.

> dip and dots

Just replying for others because this confused the hell out of me until I said it out loud - Dippin' Dots, the ice cream treat you find at amusement parks.

Seniors had the fortunate, and unfortunate now, opportunity to grow up in a considerably more high trust society than we currently live in. I've seen multiple elderly fall for this same style of scam - in some cases it is due to aging and not having all of the mental faculties that were once available, but in many other cases it's because these people lived most of their lives when you weren't conditioned to assume everyone is lying to you until proven otherwise.

In some ways I envy them for living in a time period where immediate distrust wasn't the status quo.

Had I been able to work on it for an entire day, it probably would have been around 3-4 hours, but took longer because I had about 30-45 mins a night and then had to clean up so the kids didn't get into the mess. The oven was down for about a week as a result, but you can make do with an air fryer and a toaster oven for quite a bit.

For an experienced tech I assumed at least $50 for the house call and then a few hours for the disassembly and reassembly.

> Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable

Just had to deal with this recently. My gas oven control panel died and one would think to replace the control panel ($300 ish part), but I had my doubts. Pulled everything apart and hooked up a meter to what should be the power coming from the cord, no continuity. Took apart everything on the top two levels of the stovetop to find a thermal switch buried under there that had failed. That thermal switch is forever OOS (was $35 at least for a replacement if you could find one), so I hopped on amazon and bought a 5 pack of microwave thermal safety switches with the same cutoff temps for $6 that fit the push connectors. 10 year old higher end gas oven was fixed for about $1 in parts.

Probably would have been at least $200 from an appliance repair company just for the labor of having to take apart the entire stovetop to get there. Not sure how many people would even bother although it was about $2k new.

If they're all placebo, then yes.

Yes. No one learned any lessons the last time around with "put everything on the blockchain". Or maybe they did learn you can make a profit off of hype alone, but it's not making the end user or anyone else's life better as a result. Who cares - line goes up, people get promotions.

I assume that bitters must have a base of alcohol, but only because I'm not aware of any bitters that don't use alcohol as the solvent to create the extract.

Perhaps I'm being particular here, but that wouldn't be a cocktail - it would be a mixed drink (and is called such in the article) based on the definition of a cocktail at the time:

"a stimulating liquor comprised of spirits of any kind, with sugar, water, and bitters included"

You aren't dealing with the enterprise site at that point - rather a public frontend that uses some enterprise-y backend. The real fun begins when you get into the actual enterprise frontends for internal use like SAP Netweaver and Sailpoint, which end up being quite a lot like the broadcom experience in the article.