Reposting this from here from 2023, after I stumbled across it tonight and it hits hard.
The text in the image:
I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it’s trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it’s downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it’s being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my usage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology
I remember the ancient times when you could buy something, turn it on, then have it do what you want it to do. Setting the clock was the difficult part. Other than that, it just worked.
Learning ESPHome has been the most liberating thing. Take back control of your home. Local first. Privacy respecting.
I spy a research rabbit hole in my near future … 🐰
Edit: ESPHome is a system to control your microcontrollers by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
Maybe give https://nowsci.com/only-sensor a shot? I built the guides/schematics/models for ESPHome devices as a learning experience for myself.
@SkyNTP@lemmy.ml I felt the same way. Now I just keep making new things for it, currently on garage door opener, blinds opener, and may even automate turning on my DIY solder fume extractor.
Esphome is limiting though. Want to have a sensor that spawns a camera stream only on PIR detection, and then sleeps? Forget about it, those two will run in parallel, and the debug messages are terrible.
I find it more liberating to write in C, and then setup my own mqtt protocols when I want for HA to interact with
I agree. A few years ago I wanted to activate a fan based on temperature in a server cabinet, and offer a REST and MQTT APIs (for HA). It was impossible with ESP Home for some reason, if you added the Bosch 280 sensor you couldn’t use MQTT. Very arbitrary limitations.
It took me less than 2 hours to build it with an ESP32 + Arduino. It’s all libraries that you just need to put together at this point, barely any logic at all.
Its only a matter of time.
Is Sony actually a good guy for holding this patent so that no one else can go and do this shit either?
either
Is there any indication that they won’t implement this shit at some point?
Also, should we be trying to come up with the most insane “features” in this vein that we can imagine (knowing full well that some corporation will come up with them eventually), and then patent them to protect humanity from them?
Is there any organization that collects patents just to block them (in the consumer’s favor)? A kind of white-hat patent troll? And, if not, should we create one?
These fucking televisions have less ram than my fucking 8 year old phone
At some point it’s just better to factory reset this bitch and paste an RPI in the back with my own android TV so it can actually run with 8gb ram 256gb space
There is a brand that makes dumb TVs.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.html
The smart ones are sold at cost or at a loss, and your privacy is then sold to subsidize the profits. A dumb tv costs more money up front (since it’s not subsidized by your privacy), but it costs far less in overall value. It’s a tradeoff that the consumer needs to make. The lovely thing, is that (for now, at least) it is still a choice we can make.
Which is an entirely fair compromise for people who use Lemmy, but means precisely nothing to the majority.
Good luck finding them though, we’ve never found a place either offline or online that sells them.
Keep in mind that these are low-end TVs with, according to reviewers, generally subpar picture and sound quality, with quality issues that make them worse to look at than even old TVs. If you just need “a TV” and your only concerns are that the device is flat, the image in color and some sort of noise is escaping the speaker holes, they’ll do, but don’t expect anything more than that. To me at least, it makes more sense to not connect a smart TV to the network and use a separate streaming device attached to it.
I would even buy a slightly older used dumb TV from a reputable manufacturer over one of these sketchy things, since it’s not like LCD TVs are finicky technology - they tend to last for an incredibly long time in my experience, easily 15 years or more. On my parents’ 2008ish Toshiba (1080p and every analog and digital input in the known universe, which, in combination with an excellent analog upscaler, makes it awesome for old games consoles - but it’s of course no looker in terms of colors by modern standards), the only thing that has broken so far is the spring of the power button, so I bent a wire press it in and a switch at the plug to be able to turn it off completely.
This is getting a bit off-topic, but a relative of mine replaced her flatscreen TV from 2002 (!) just two years ago - and it was still working fine, but since it only had an analog tuner and SD resolution, she was looking for an upgrade. I got her a small 4K OLED from Samsung (since discontinued) and she’s very happy with it (even the “smart” features are quite inoffensive), although I did have to get her a soundbar as well, because if there’s one thing that has regressed on TVs, it’s sound quality, in part due to how ever thinner and lighter designs have reduced speakers to little more than phone speakers on some devices.
Generally it’s not too hard to disable the smart TV part of it and just use HDMI for TVs running Android. But on Roku TVs for whatever reason you need to connect them to the internet and a Roku account at least once to unlock the picture settings. Hardware features of a TV like brightness adjustment have no business relying on some random server.
