No, I work in corporate AV, so I’m buying higher end digital signage for most applications at work.

NEC and Philip’s I’ve been using lately, but they are just the cost effective ones now. LG, Samsung, Sony, all make good displays.

Digital sign usually dont have any smart apps, and if they do you can fully disable them.

They also have all the advanced features you could want. Serial and TCP api, multiple ports of various formats, auto on with sync detect, etc.

For personal use, my last three have been Visio from Costco, and while it has the apps, I just never connect to the internet.

I have seen guides online to open up a display and disable the smart elements, but that seems overkill to me.

One thing to watch for, I’ve heard but haven’t witnessed that many displays are getting way more aggressive about auto connecting to wifi for sharing data and updates. If someone has unsecured wifi near by etc.

Yes and no. This is for parents, so ease of use is a huge factor.

The processors in smart TVs are often crap, plus who know what updates and monitoring they are pushing on you.

With a dedicated media device you only have one company to deal with. Personally, I use my playstation for everything, but for my mom a Sony bluray with the apps works fine.

At the end of the day, they’ll want netflix, amazon, youtube, hbo max, etc, and you get a way better experience with a media player vs smart tv. Sony is a known evil as it were, their hardware is good, and they generally don’t fuck up firmware updates.

If you want a true dumb TV, buy a commercial grade display made for digital signage. Bit more expensive, but designed for 24/7 operation and has none of the smart tv fat.

My advice is never use a smart tv of any kind.

Use a third party device like an apple tv or roku, hell even a bluray player with apps on it.

Then get what ever TV you like and never let it see the internet.

I personally like Visio, but any mid grade display is fine.

The pace of change is about every five years, and some elements are always in transition.

All in one turn key solutions are always one to two cycles behind, so may work great with the stuff I’m already replacing.

I think these are honest attempts to simplify, but by the time they have it sorted its obsolete. If I have to build modules anyway to work with new equipemnt, might as well just write all the code in my native language.

These also tend to be attempts at all in one devices, requiring you to use devices only compatible with those subsystems. I want to be able to use best tech from what ever manufacturer. New and fancy almost always means a command line interface, which again means coding.

20 years ago at a trade show, a new module based visual coding tool was introduced in my field which claimed “You’ll never need another programmer”.

Oddly enough, I still have a job.

The tools have gotten better, but I still write code every day because procedural programming is still the best way to do things.

It is just now reaching the point that we can do some small to medium scale projects with plug and play systems, but only with very specific equipment and configurations.

TIL that both Voyager craft are still operating, simply amazing.

Not doing that from my work computer…

There is a non-zero chance that once they have a chip in your brain, they will find a way to stream ads in to it.

For that reason, I’m out.

Must have a low IQ cause that’s one box I’m not even going to try and open.

Yeah, I went console when I realised I wanted to spend time actually playing the game.

Sure I’m missing out on the absolute highest settings, mods, etc.

However, I spend 55 minutes out of an hour actually playing the game.

By lumping them all into the same category, it gives credibility to “religion”.

When you have a panel where “A priest, a rabbi, and a mullah discus spirituality”, it’s a level playing field, everyone is just there to compare notes on their LARPing rules.

If an atheist or a scientist join the panel, you now have an emperors new clothes situation, “Yeah, I don’t have all the answers, but more importantly, neither do they, and I’m not claiming to. Here are the facts and evidence as it is currently understood, and what that might mean”.

When you call atheism or science or woke a religion, they are trying to trap you by saying “ha! Your belief is just as meaningless as I mine is! We’re all equal and subjective rules apply”.

Mine has a brief brake assist, about 1.5 seconds it won’t roll backwards on a hill start.

It’s so subtle and I’ve had the car so long, I completely forget about it.

Any time I drive a car without it freak out when I come off the brake and the car starts moving backwards.

I’ve changed jobs, and moved, to get my commute down to 10 min each way.

As much as I can I ride my motorcycle.

There is nothing I can do to actually be rid of a car, and people who think that can change in American society are just fooling themselves.

Sure it would be great to have high speed rail, and a variety of public transit options, none of that is going to change the suburban sprawl.

I have 20 years experience, just cracked a project I’ve been working on for almost three years, and I still hesitate to consider myself an expert.

Now, I’ll tell any lay person who will listen that I’m an expert, but man, some days I just feel clueless.

I find the biggest issue I run into is lack of a peer group. I work in a large IS department, but other than one guy at my last company who works with a different language, I have no one to talk shop with.

My vernacular is a bit dated, not sure if I’m a tankie, pretty sure I’m not a corpo.

Either way, I’m perfectly happy with the community here as it exists, and if it leans toward the geek crowd I’m all for it.

For sure, if people are looking for an alternative, and are interested, I’ll recommend it, but I don’t think we need to advocate for Lemmy to drive the masses here.

That’s a fair point, I noticed if I open baconreader, I can still see my subscribed sub list. I need to learn how to make subs on here, and as you suggest, either find them, or get off my ass and make them myself.

On a nice side note, being an early adopter, I was able to get my username back without some damned number stapled on the end.

I can for sure see both sides of this one. I had ditched all other social media years ago, and baconreader was my one guilty pleasure.

If I had my phone in my hand, I was catching up with other old skaters like myself, reading about the latest trends in tech, or browsing the daily news.

The tag line of “Front page of the internet” was quite literally true for me. That was the portal through which I found content.

In the weeks leading up to the June 30th, I felt a strong sadness, what was I going to do with my screen time? I had created a very custom space using baconreader that neither the reddit app, or to be fair, Lemmy, could provide.

While I am really enjoying learning about Lemmy, and I feel the quality of the post and comments here are far better, it’s going to take time to find and/or develop those niche communities again.

I do however agree, and the ex analogy is spot on, that the last thing I want is for this community to just be a bitch fest about what once was.

Give people a bit of time to vent, it hasn’t even been a week since a decades long experience came crashing to a halt through no fault of ours.