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Smart speakers with personal assistants like Amazon Echo etc. Not remotely useful enough to be worth placing spying Equipment all over my home.
Wireless headphones. So now I'm supposed to recharge my headphones and get worse sound quality for it? In a few years they become e-waste, while good wired headphones can last decades. No thanks.
So much this
No smart speakers
It's a mic sitting there waiting for your commands and everything it does I can do myself easier
That's true, smart speakers and wireless gadget are the waste of the century, things factories can't even recicly and that fills the world of trash.
I have good wired headphones (10 years old) and good earbuds (5 years old) and use both. There's a place for each.
You mean, you don't want a 1984-esque always-on listening device in your home?
Everything that need a pay subscription to work.
For me it's anything I have to download an app to operate.
Except for public transport :-D
Virtual assistants, e.g. Alexa, Cortana, Siri
I don't want to interact with the companies they represent basically at all, let alone give them nearly unfettered access to my electronics and their data.
Apple anything
Patiently waiting on Asahi Linux to get more and more features done β the stuff theyβve achieved to reverse-engineer so far already is frankly incredible.
The hardware is quite nice, after allβ¦
Voice commands on anything. It just feels silly.
Voice typing long messages is IMO faster than using a phone keyboard, even with gesture typing.
Voice typing is a game changer if you break a hand. I did a semester of college writing several essays a week with 99% voice typing.
I have only very recently come around on that. When voice commands first came out, they were absolute garbage. I am still conditioned to never expect them to work, and am always pleasantly surprised when they do.
To be fair, I largely only use them for things like setting my alarm, because I still have an engrained expectation that they won't work otherwise.
Smart watches.
Couple of reasons:
I like my mechanical watches. They aren't the expensive flashy ones, but I like the way they look and especially like the mechanical engineering. It's one of the (maybe only?) Item I can think of that I use daily and 'does something' without electricity. Smart watches are nothing like that.
When I want to be offline I can just ignore my phone or flip it upside down. Having notifications on my wrist all day long wouldn't be good for my mental health. It annoys me so much when I see people looking at and using their smartwatch mid conversation because they are so addicted to it. And I know I would be the same once I start using it.
It's expensive and e-waste after a few years.
Agreed on the watches. I had one smart watch (moto 360) and while cool was very gimmicky for actual functionality and I personally believe that was one of the best looking smart watches. Also the notification reason. My phone is on silent unless my spouse is out somewhere.
Most social media.
I used to use reddit, I have moved all my presence over here. That's about it.
I have a FB Messenger account because that is how a lot of my family keeps in touch with me, and I have this. I had a proper FB account back when I was in uni and Facebook was still only for uni students, but I think I dropped it shortly after that.
It's not some grand principled stance, I just don't get most of them because I am apparently an old man. Like Instagram, why do I want to share pictures with just random people? How am I networking with anybody by doing so? I honestly don't get why it is so popular.
Any of the camera doorbells or security systems that ship all the footage to their own cloud. Itβs unsettling to have devices with cameras semi controlled by a third party like that.
I'm lazy but opted for POE cameras in a system that I just hooked up because of this. It took a couple days of crawling around the attic and drilling holes in the wall, but now I don't have to worry about Amazon or Google selling/giving my personal camera feeds to whomever requests it/cuts them a check.
Yeah, I like having cameras but don't want that video being sent elsewhere. I ended up getting Tapo cams which are cheap cloud cameras but they also have RTSP streams and local username / password settings. That means I can send the footage to a locally hosted NVR and lock the cameras behind a parental option in my router that blocks all external in and out communication to them.
expired
I go out of my way to avoid cloud-based products. Which- is funny, because I do a LOT of home automation, and many of the cheap products, are cloud-interconnected shit, which will go obsolete in a few years.
Need... a list of reasons? I got you covered. https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2022/reasons-to-avoid-cloud-based-automation-products/
Itβs there a list somewhere of good non-cloud home automation devicesβ¦ I donβt want to install custom app per brand of lightbulbs ffs
Smart Watches.
I don't want to take care of charging for yet another device. Plus, analog watches are beautiful!
Already trying to limit my screen time, no reason to check notifications the instant they pop.
Don't want to be conscious of my heart rate and sleep schedule all the time. Also have some privacy concerns about real time data associated with me making its way into big tech's servers.
Anything "smart" exepct smartphone.
I dont want more stuff collect my data, and I am lazy to selfhost it.
LLMs. Despite how absurdly useful they are, I can recall a time when I had the skills of remembering phone numbers naturally and being able to easily navigate with no maps of any kind.
These skills have deteriorated significantly in the past 10 years, and they're not the only ones. The common thread they all have is my smartphone replaced them.
I fear losing a skill that is less innocuous, from the new tech effectively replacing my need to practice it.
Try not having a smartphone with you when you leave the house. Actually many starting returning back to basic phones just for calls and SMS.
Kid who doesn't remember a time without a phone, using a "dumb" phone is impossible despite a want for it. So many things are qr based or require a phone at my college. I learned this the hard way when my phone broke and I didn't replace it for 2 weeks. Couldn't even access my accounts cause of 2fa.
I would love to use a "dumb" phone for text only but the most random shit will require a "smart" feature.
Generative AI. Dall-E just produces dumb images. ChatGPT is absolutely useless, nothing more than some kind of novelty toy. The fact that people are asking it questions and believing it is just so plain stupid. And if i need to do research to be able if it just talks bullshit again - why bother asking it in the first place?
IMO the use case for ChatGPT is stuff that's not important but still tedious to write. For example, I'm applying for engineering work and my resumΓ© "looks" like shit, so I'm going to need to write a shitload of cover letters. I don't want to write them, like literally at all. It's boring and stupid. But ChatGPT will happily write them. Sure there might be factual errors, but I'll read the output and correct errors by hand. I still save time not having to write boilerplate or structure sentences.
Also, ChatGPT can work with programming languages. For example, I had ChatGPT write me a matrix algebra class in C++ just for fun. The first iteration didn't compile, but it had the jist of how to represent a matrix and matrix multiplication. The second iteration compiled and worked on what I tried it on. Would I use it in production? Probably not while Boost exists. However, I probably could have used it to start writing a matrix algebra library if I really wanted to.
The fact that people are asking it questions and believing it is just so plain stupid.
The fact of the matter is that people are more gullible than they think. People have been encouraged to blindly trust authority figures since the dawn of civilization. We are simply reaping the consequences of our continued complacency.
It's not unreasonable to ask ChatGPT (or anyone/thing) else questions. The issue is when they are treated as all-seeing oracles. ChatGPT in particular makes for a poor search engine because it is particularly likely to output convincing-sounding lies, because it is designed to optimize the convincing-sounding-ness of outputted text.
And if i need to do research to be able if it just talks bullshit again - why bother asking it in the first place?
Well, it can point you in a direction to begin your own research. However, the main use case is really when you don't want to do the work and you don't care about the quality of the work. I don't think people fully realize that workers generally don't want to do their work (would you do your job for free?), because that would contradict the assumption that work under capitalism is natural, voluntary, and not imposed upon the world.
Apple Ecosystem. Since I learned that iTunes changes mp3 files when "sync" to iTunes I stopped using apple products. That was back when iPhone 5 was released.
Tiktok because Twitter already made me spend all my time raging out at random annoying assholes until I finally quit it and apparently tiktok is just that but with a more effective algorithm.
Also "ragebait but video" is like the last thing I need.
As far as possible I try to avoid:
All things from big tech because privacy, see Schrems II and their terms on use of personal information for own purposes
Non Open Source tech because privacy or other malicious functions
Tech that are prone to planned obsolescence because of special batteries etc. and can't be fixed with for example a custom ROM on Android
Tablets, I don't see the appeal of a big phone device that can't fit your pocket and can't make calls
I like bringing it with me when travelling, to watch movies on the plane. More portable than my laptop with a bigger screen than my phone.
for all the people saying smart devices/homes, you all should check out rhasspy/piper on github. It by itself is a TTS system but it's integrated into an offline smart-home system and a few other projects in the same vein. The links are on their git page and its pretty damn interesting. I personally use it for audiobooks after training my own voice but a lot of people want an amazon/google alternative. I may or may not have just trained a model on the same voice that amzn uses lol.
Voice commands. I get the utility if you're disabled or elderly, but it seems like a hassle to anyone else.
Any smart home tech that isn't fully self-hosted. I'm far from a privacy hardliner, but that's one line I won't let the corpos cross.
"The cloud".
In the end "the cloud" is just someone else's hard drive. Call me old fashioned, but I'll keep my data on my own hard drives.
Anything with a camera or mic in my house.Mit's plenty bad my phone doesn't have hardware switches, who tf wants to pay to wiretap their own house?
Almost all smart things, except a smartphone, which sadly I can't avoid. Maybe I just don't want to be connected 24/7.
@mayflower
Anything that has something to do with Meta.
I trying to ditch all non open source software, it's hard but I'm hopeful.
The air fryer π
A housemate owns one and I hate it. It pulls such an irresponsible amount of juice you gotta turn a bunch of other stuff off or it trips the circuit breaker. And literally the ONLY thing it actually cooks very well is french fries.
Sounds like janky electrical mixed with a junky air fryer. I love ours as it heats up quick and cooks almost right away. If you think that's bad, imagine how much more juice your full-sized oven pulls.
Honestly, this was one of the few kitchen gadgets that seemingly lived up to hype for me. We use ours all the time, even though our oven has convection mode which is essentially the same. The oven takes so long to warm up.. where as the "air fryer" is up to temp super quickly. For a small family, the air fryer is used way more. In general I am opposed to kitchen gadgets that are supposedly saving you time or effort versus the "old" way of doing things.