Me when new smart devices are created

10 years ago, I privately refused a gifted Alexa after Christmas, explaining "Hey I work in the industry, I know people who work for FAANG, Amazon spending billions on very smart engineers building systems to harvest data is a bet that they will be able to extract even more money from me, is it still within the return window." My aunt told me to go live in a cave.

This weekend, found my old motorola phone. For giggles, i plugged it in- still boots! Can I do anything with it or did I just wasted a bit of electricity on nostalgia?

If there's fiber and a nearby hospital in the forest count me in.

That's exactly my plan. Self-sustaining house at the edge of the forest. Just need the money to buy land.

I mean its true.

But my 4K120hz VRR Oled just never connects to the internet. gAmInG-rig is on Linux. Pixel got the Graphene treatment. Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me(personally, if you have usecases, good for you). If there were ready to use iot devices which doesnt suck and respect my privacy by just beeing on the local network: sure i would think about it. But hacking together something good with arduinos wasnt worth my time for now atleast.

VR headset OS is hacked and nerved to the best of my knowledge.

For now there are still ways to enjoy tech even though overall its a fucking hellscape.

I still like technology. It's still possible to find technology that doesn't spy on you and that you can control yourself. I use Mint, by the way.

Techies stopped jumping on the newest gadgets when the newest gadgets became plastic slop that did nothing but track what you said, did, where you went, etc, and reported it back to the company so they could build a profile of you and sell that data.

normies buy the shit now because its affordable (Because of the afformentioned creepware) and because they cant be bothered to do a modicum of research to realize theres a 98.6% chance that the device will be non-functional in a year because the company collapsed (having harvest all the information it needed before rebranding as a new company to do it all over again) and took the online servers with it, because of course your fucking toaster totally needs online servers to operate.

I have been told I am complaining too much about my company moving to windows 11 and that I need to grow up.

I will then watch those same people slowly but surely start to complain about changes and things not working. I got laughed at today for fighting the updates and windows 11 by a few people who are probably going to be made redundant by this change. (I'm not angry, making people laugh and being a loudmouth idiot is my favourite thing)

I have been in IT support since 2007 and I know that all the change is bad.

My personal computer is on Win10 LTSC IoT and I'm moving to Linux Mint (Thankyou to the people on this forum that recommended it).

Change in tech can be good but not when it's Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.

We are in an interesting moment where we can reimagine how we want our tech to behave and AI is good enough to hack a lot of the smart devices and make that happen.

If it wasn't so difficult to do so legally, I would already be in the forest.

the iPhone was released 19 years ago, and even though I love carrying a camera/map/walkman/bubble-level device in my pocket, it fucked up our world real bad.