Ask Lemmy

I prefer pressing buttons and turning nobs in the car.

TV.

I hate the smart-TV workflow, its a terrible user experience: Turn the TV on... wait for the smart-TV OS to load... land on an app menu... navigate around and choose an app... wait for the app to load... select a profile... wait for the list of shows to load... scroll almost endlessly through shows... choose a show, finally... wait for the video to load...

I miss when you turned the TV on and it was just instantly playing whatever channel you last had on, with one single interaction. I miss not having to make the conscious choice of what to watch and feel overwhelmed by so many options. I miss TV programs being a common experience, like an event, that everyone would be talking about together the next day, instead of everyone watching their own thing on their own schedule.

Software engineering.

Back in my day(™), it was an engineering role, where science reigned. Anyone even attempting "vibe coding" would've been rightfully laughed out of the room.

It's a task that should take concerted effort, with specific goals and performance metrics in mind. Just getting the task done wasn't and shouldn't be good enough.

many countries need to go back to reasonable inconvenience for superior and ethical product. same-day shipping is accelerating the speed of climate change so no you don't get to have it actually. no, fruits and vegetables are not available 24/7, seasons matter again. etc and etc. we need to go back to all of this. we have to reduce the strain.

Dating. It's hard to manufacture that initial spark in an app.

I prefer how Nazis were dealt with in the past

It grinds my gears that programs are called 'apps' now. On phones it was normalized immediately, so, sure. Computers run programs, though, god dammit.

This is kind of niche, but I mix concerts for a living and newer consoles and shows are all scene based, every song has a scene, and most of the time every verse and chorus in the song has a sub scene. It is a breath of fresh air to be able to mix with no scenes and have to rely on pure skill and intuition. Those shows tend to have a better feel and be more energetic, albeit less polished. They are also more fun, and a little bit more stressful.

I want back my Dumb TVs!! I dont want everything to be connected!

Using Windows - before onedrive, online integration, new control panel, telemetry. Using the internet - before tracking, bloated sites, paywalls, cookie boxes and ai garbage. Using my car - before telemetry, beep, driver "aid" systems.

I want a phone where I am able to reach the top and the bottom of the screen without shifting my grip. Also being able to comfortably store in a pocket would be nice

I don’t like electric can openers. I strongly prefer to just use a manual one. I just see an appliance that has but one use and requires electricity to be tremendous waste.

Anything to do with the internet. I'd go back to 2010 in a heartbeat.

As a software and electrical engineer who has worked in life system critical projects as well as foundational financial systems with strict uptime and performance requirements....

My home is as basic as humanly possible, no automation, manual systems for everything. Anything that must be digital is untrusted, isolated, and has a backup. A cabin in the woods off grid is the only way I feel comfortable

I miss physically owning software, movies, and music, not having to pay a subscription for car features like heated seats or more horsepower. I miss getting a complete game that was usually mostly glitch free on day one you got it on CD/DVD.

I've never brought a computer/laptop to class in uni except when I needed to do a presentation. I vastly prefer to take notes by hand because I find that I retain info much better. And I'm a massive doodler. I'm pretty pen and paper playing ttrpgs as well.

Socializing.

No social media to distract people. Nobody staring a phones. Nobody recording themselves for streaming.

You memorized phone numbers or wrote them down. You called or got called to meet up at some place and everyone went from there.

Literally anything involving AI bullshit.

Photography. Film was so advanced, having a layer for each major colour, every film stock has a different feeling. The only downside was cost, but you only took a picture when you were sure it is a good picture. Now we have tons of digital garbage because we take 100 pictures at once.

Buying stuff online using a phone or app. I still feel safer and more secure on a desktop browser with uBO.

I love a manual shift car, feels so much better to drive than automatic. Make bread from just flour, water, and salt, sourdough is an older method than dry yeast but it works better for me.

I also love radio, literal airwaves, works when the wifi goes down, battery radios can work during emergencies but also I just love the tech it is so old and so cool. And getting music curated by humans (we have a local community station) is great.

I prefer D&D 3.5e over all revisions.

Shadowrun 3E is so much better in so many ways, not least of which is that the "Wireless World" additions make hacking so boring and easy compared to how it worked prior. Don't even need a party

Physical controls are better than touch sensitive controls.

Wireless controllers last way longer when you can turn off the vibration, speakers, microphones, lights and other things that don't NEED to be there to control something (but I do like adaptive triggers when not just used as a secondary vibration motor; clicky tension feedback for shooting guns feels awesome tho).

I daily drive a clapped out 80s sports car with no AC and a broken radio. The true connection you can feel to a classically engineered machine when there's zero distraction or convenience is hard to describe. You learn every noise, every smell, every quirk of handling and weight transfer, gain intuition about how the chassis will react to every abnormality in the road surface, have the shifter and clutch become subconscious muscle memory where you don't even realize you're doing it, etc. There's a variety of reasons the average person should drive a newer car but I personally love an old hooptie.

Would love to pay a mortgage instead of paying rent

Driving manual (stick). I have an automatic now only because the model/trim I wanted doesn’t come any other way but if I could have got it in manual I would have. This car has less personality than my last one because I operate it rather than driving it. I literally have less of a connection with it.

Playing music on a record player. The ritual of removing the record from the sleeve, placing it on the deck, cleaning it, landing the needle. Listening to an album.

Cooking on gas instead of a halogen hob. Sure halogen is great and super easy to clean but gas is visceral and ‘real’. I also like to cook over charcoal or, even better, wood.

What was "the old way we did things" before social media?

I'd like to shout from the mountaintop that I do not care what you and your boring family did over the holidays.

I don't remember the last time I logged into any real social media account so I guess I'm kind of living as though it doesn't exist anyway.

Japan mostly skipped PCs (outside of offices). Since their phones were ahead of the curve, a lot of stuff was designed for them. That means that a bunch of stuff is either exclusively done through some shitty mobile app, fax, or in person. There was a brief phase where PC versions did exist, but those are almost all being neglected or decommissioned now. I much prefer to do things on a PC with a nice, clear, big screen, especially if I need to use some translation tool since the text tends to expand (learning thousands of kanji for stuff like legal and taxes is hard).

I do miss physically owning media. A lot of physical media still decays, though, so not a panacea.

Software programs that were much more tested and completed before release.

Software development where we think things through, define requirements, define states, etc. before any code is committed. I do think PoCs are fine to throw something against a wall but, if it works, the proper version should go through those design phases before anyone writes a line of code. Cheap components and fast machines and networks have made people lazy which makes software worse in a number of ways quite often. No vibecoding. No AI/LLM shoved into everything. I think they can have uses in certain contexts (rephrasing questions, generating examples/docs in projects with bad/no docs, etc.), but hate how they are being shoved into everything.

An internet not run by corporations. I think a lot of people do see it through rose-tinted glasses (we still had trolls on BBS, UseNet, IRC, etc. and other bad actors), but a lot of things were much better.

Third spaces. Places where people of different backgrounds would interact in some common way. Sure, some were echo chambers just like online communities today, but many were not and let people interact together rather than just being othered to the point of fear and reviling.

I much prefer AD&D 2.5 rules to anything around today (and TSR still existing, but that ship has sailed).

The only commercial technological advancement from the last ~30 years I think I would miss if it were all to revert to how it was before then would be GPS navigation. I don’t like the prevalence of technology in classrooms, dating, shopping, and vehicles today.

I would have liked discovering music, film, and events by word of mouth or just playing a tape I borrowed/rented even though a lot of people would probably defend the convenience of having it all readily available today.

Dumb phones. I've grown to hate smartphones, apps, and all that goes with them.

• I prefer to operate the clutch and shifting on my truck myself.
• I'll rather do manual labor than any work that involves sitting on a computer.
• I'm chronically online but without a smartphone addiction.
• I prefer long-form media.

I like old timey radio (dramas like Twilight Zone, etc...Bob Dylan had a cool modern retro show, also stuff like Coast to Coast with Art Bell) but never listen to modern radio basically ever. Used to be much more magical.

I want mobile phones with actual keyboards back. I hate touch screen keyboards with the passion of a thousand suns and I swear they're getting worse.

The sensation of physically holding and reading a book made from dead trees.

Yes they take up space, yes I use my phone as an e reader when at sea or travelling. No I will not give up physical books at home.

• Mowing grass with a scythe instead of a mower
• Splitting wood with an axe instead of an electrical splitter

They both are quieter and calming to the mind and soul, meditative even. And you kind of feel like an NPC in Anno 1602.

Dating, though i have met my partner online too. Not dating app but a forum.

Data, i LOVE PHYSICAL STUFF. TRY TO TAKE THAT AWAY STREAMING SERVICES!

And politics. Used to actually be honorable and people across the board worked together for the good of their country.

In the 90s, I felt like I knew so much about computers, both the hardware and the software, but I've definitely fallen off from all the improvements in the past 20 years, and I'm so Goddamn lost now. I miss those simpler times when it was more about the physical aspects of a PC and less about the technical aspects.