@0xabad1dea Setup old wifi router with throwaway network, never attach wifi router to the rest of your network.

Ridiculous the age we live in.

@0xabad1dea mine randomly shows a fullscreen popup (obscuring HDMI video entirely) to nag me to enable voice command

i hate that the thing has a microphone to begin with, and no clue when it’s actually off or not

@0xabad1dea For unknown reasons, my shitty chinesium roomba clone speaks instead of doing charming beep boops.

I would hate it except it speaks english with a very thick chinese accent and I can't understand half of what it says, which makes it slightly more endearing.

@0xabad1dea

When the TV that exists for the sole purpose of displaying its HDMI inputs has the nerve to paint “WiFi not connected” over the signal

It shows the owner overlooked the word smart, I had a hard time ginding a dumb TV, maybe now the only way to avoid crap is buy a big computer monitor and a tv tuner. Or feed the monitor with signals from a Linux computer.

@0xabad1dea

A thousand times YES.

Machines have no intentionality. They cannot be sincere or thoughtful or kind or generous or empathetic. Pretending so is patronizing, and wastes my precious seconds of life.

Sadly, many people like it when machines pretend to be sentient. I am frustrated by these people. Like the ones who "marry" chatbots.

@0xabad1dea Oh, don't start me about how much tech makes itself useless to huge areas of the planet solely because it can't (or won't) function without an Internet connection. that's usually not necessary for the entire function of the device. (Or is like that if the Internet connection fails at any point, or is intermittent, or it's so data hungry for no clear reason...)

I live in a country generally considered highly developed. Even now, there are still *massive* areas of it that are very much inhabited by people (as well as being transited through by people) where the only option for Internet access is satellite (and so many don't, or those networks are solely for essential operations, not getting rid of a popup on your TV so you can watch free to air or another option that doesn't require Internet connectivity). There are places within a few hours' drive of me that, thanks to quirks of geography, have extremely patchy mobile network coverage.

Until a few years ago, *you couldn't get a mobile data signal in the main train station of my city*. Because it was underground. I'm not joking. I still lose signal at some of the busier stations along the track during peak time because there's just so many people (and devices).

Shit, I'm going through it right now because the last person who lived in my house destroyed the phone wiring (literally, hacked a good 20cm out of the exposed cabling to one point, and ripped the other plug out of the wall and cut it off). Somehow, the owner never found out until we tried to get connected and... couldn't. And now because everyone in our area is getting the fibre upgrades (but booked in earlier), we have to wait another week to get fibre boxes installed to bypass the whole issue.

In the meantime, because I didn't expect this to happen, the only devices I can use online are the ones I can hotspot off my phone easily, which is exactly one of them. I don't have a data cap that allows for streaming either, and I guess Australia is the only country left who still imposes data caps or something. (See also - why the amount of data used to just show ads or do tracking pisses me off. I'm paying for that! I'm literally paying to be allowed a certain amount of connection usage, and if I go over that I have to pay more. Apparently this system is unique to Australia, and has never existed anywhere else, with the way most software, websites and apps treat your Internet connection.)

Thankfully, my TV is still usable if I got it together and got myself a cheap DVD player. If it was just new enough to have an Ethernet port it would be more usable, but alas. (And I have yet to find one that's that new, but no so new that it's a 'smart' TV, is in working condition, and isn't more than 3-4 hour's drive away. I'm sure it's because most people with them are sensibly hanging onto them.)

@0xabad1dea @hax404 my theory is that this is done to make these TVs unusable for digital signage applications.

There are "commercial" variants of these that cost a five-figure sum each, for special features like "ignores IR remote control" and "turns on after power loss", but there's still a lot of customers hacking their way around cheap consumer TVs, e.g. by taping over the IR receiver and using CEC control.