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What items are made better than they used to be?
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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What has you grumping old curmudgeon lol? I can see both sides personally. Things are lesser in many ways, but also better. Electronics are way improved from a reliability and size perspective, but they are becoming closed off and made without repairability in mind. Cars are way more efficient, powerful, and reliable, but they are also affected by a lack of thought to repairability, and sometimes use a poor choice of plastic over metal.
Just to your specific examples...
Most of your electronics sell your personal data to a myriad of third parties. They mostly prevent you from replacing the whole OS or turning off anti-features. All in a way they didn't at one time. And of course there's the repairability issue. (I just discovered about a week ago that my phone with a non-replaceable battery is bulging. sigh)
We live in a world where our vacuum cleaners go down when some AWS service nobody has ever heard of has an outage and our robot vacuum puctures take pictures of us on the toilet that eventually get leaked to the internet.
Your car too. I bought a car recently. The car I had before was a low-end 2005 model. This one's a 2021 Subaru. The backup camera is kinda nice I admit. But it's got StarLink and a mic in the cabin. And the privacy policy basically says "we can record you and use the recordings for whatever we want." I have half a mind to see if I can't disconnect the microphone one day. And despite being impossible to disconnect from the internet at any time, the clock hasn't updated for the daylight savings time change yet. (Having that happen automatically seems like about the simplest possible convenience.) And SiriusXM is spamming my mailbox now. And the tire pressure gauge is slightly off and it nags me in cold weather. And it tries to get me to accept the EULA every time I start the car. (I haven't hit the accept button yet. Not that I'm under any illusion that affects my legal standing on any issue in any particular way. It's just my own tiny little protest.) And the touchscreen I have to look at while driving instead of physical buttons I can use by feel seems less safe. Plus, this car has a lot more bells and whistles. I did go for one that had more manual things like a non-power rear hatch and manually/mechanically adjustable driver's seat and a keyed ignition rather than push start. But still. Is the car going to brick and incur a big repair fee if the rear view camera (that wasn't a feature of my previous car) breaks?
Finally, have you heard of Wirth's Law? There are tons of memes out there about how in the nineties they crammed really impressive software into small amounts of storage and they worked on very low-power computers. Now the ads alone on a lot of recipe sites and news articles (previously seen as about the lowest power things one could do on a computer) will bog down a fairly powerful computer.