Technology

Smart TVs are honestly one of the dumbest inventions.

All they did was take power away from people so corporations could sell it back to them.

I bought a cheap TCL TV last year. If you can, turn off the wifi (I literally just wanted the TV, not the "smart" part). I play everything either through a hard drive, laptop or my PS and that works for me. You can also change the settings to open up to the last channel instead of the landing page. I can still connect my TV to Bluetooth. When I turn it on, I see the TCL logo, but after that, nothing.

Does anyone know if there's something similar to universal android debloater for android tvs?

This is annoying. Idk how we fix it.

Product placement was the least annoying. I’m pretty sure we all wanted to know why the original Daredevil law office had Progresso bread crumbs in their coffee corner, so it’s not like it went unnoticed.

TCL - That Cheap Life

Can I just get a goddamned monitor? Like, please can my TV just be a damn 70" monitor with hookups for whatever actual tech I want to use to watch stuff?

Is that too much to ask? My TV has to have its own shitty, unintuitive, slow, buggy OS stuffed with ungodly amounts of bloatware and bullshit?

For some eyebleach:
A film written by AI, 11 years ago (it was Cleverbot).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkNA7sy5M5s

I wish i could wipe the OS on my TCL tv

I have a tcl tv but it uses a roku os. Not sure how this will play into that

OTOH people who aren't in the entertainment industry will use generative AI to make original films they otherwise never would have been able to. It seems like a great tool for individual creators who aren't able to produce images by themselves. Yes, they won't hire artists to do this, but they wouldn't have anyway, and we'll get to enjoy their work, which wouldn't have existed otherwise. I don't think we should demonize a very promising technology because we don't like how some people are using it.

For those (like me) who bought a TCL tv at a stupidly cheap price on Black Friday, you have options.

• buy an AppleTV (even second hand) and don’t connect the tv to the internet. You won’t see any adverts on your Home Screen and be done with all this bullshit. What’s that? What’s the point in buying a £200 TV if you need to buy a £150 accessory? I hear you, read on…
• if you’re broke like me, you can disable the stock launcher with adb and install projectivy launcher. I needed to use some software called launcher manager from xdaforums to replace the stock launcher. I also used adb to uninstall the pre-installed apps I had no intention of using.

Hopefully there are enough key words in there for you to google / research what you need to get going. Good luck!

This is really the of stuff dystopian scifi.

A somewhat cliched saying comes to my mind when reading this article.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” [1]

Hopefully, there will eventually be pushback against this techno-feudalism and oligarchy. For what it's worth this seems to always happen in history. Ruling elites (in our case oligarchs and their promoters; the media, economists, politicians) consolidate their power and start to become disconnected from reality.

As a side note, it's funny that AI-generated videos have themes of dystopia and rebellion against the system.