With UlyssesT out there touching grass, I haven’t seen this thread in a while. What in the past do you NOT miss? It could be very personal or just something everyone experienced but doesn’t anymore.
For me, I am so fucking happy the food scene in burgerland has changed since the 2000s. People seem to enjoy more well-seasoned foods and healthier options seem to outstrip the unhealthy slop I remember in the 2000s. Even my yee-yee ahh Ohio suburb has changed somewhat noticeably to support fresh ingredients. Less WASPslop is always good.
How about y’all?
Yeah the start of the digital age was rough. Basically the quality of everything got downgraded in pursuit of being fully digital. The first flatscreen TVs were worse than CRTs, video and audio quality was rough, consumer grade cameras were bad, the internet was slow as a snail. But then it advanced to a quality that we could only dream of back in the day before everything was digital. Now we gave gigantic 4k HDR TVs, videogames that look like movies, cellphone cameras with incredible quality and zoom, and high quality digital video and audio formats that blow analog out of the water, and internet that downloads hundreds of gigabytes of data in a reasonable time. So it was all well worth it in the end.
I still think its a mixed bag at best but mostly because tech companies’ greed and AI bullshit have utterly poisoned the well.
The web is bigger and flashier and capable of doing more than ever, but it requires a pretty hefty CPU to even do basic things that you could do as fast or faster on a midrange tower from 15 years ago. And all the sites are designed to be addictive. Mobile devices are technological marvels more than ever before, but they’re also always within like 2 years of being e-waste, and have become almost completely proprietary and locked into surveillance capitalism, locking out DIYers as much as physically possible. The cameras are great but “processing software” (it was verging into outright editing/enhancement for years even before the latest AI boom) has gotten so “good” that photos often no longer look like real life, they look “better”. The 4k HDR screens come from the factory with baked in ads and dead pixels, the videogames are all building in gambling mechanics to make money, etc etc. And thats not to mention “AI” shit
I was mainly focusing on the technical specifications to be honest. There were some doomers out there that thought we would never get anything better than the high resolution CRTs, that we would never get anything better than vinyl, that cameras had peaked with the high quality film models, etc. That digital meant a permanent insurmountable reduction in quality. I’m just glad that wasn’t the case. Though on the screen front we had to wait for OLED, and some of the early LCD and TN panels were shockingly bad when compared to contemporary CRTs, and the only way to get good picture quality was to spend your life savings on a plasma TV. Glad that’s over.
This sucks :(