‘Tesla syndrome’ explains why tech is making us miserable | Hacker News Reader

‘Tesla syndrome’ explains why tech is making us miserable

thedailybeast.com

32 pointselorant37 comments

I whole-heartedly believe that a good fraction of what we have come to think of as innovation and progress is utterly useless. Technology and innovation have become products that often have no intrinsic value, but that marketing efforts convince people to desire, like popular caffeinated soft drinks.

Since I'm more or less just getting some stuff of my chest, I'll continue to say that I'm sick of everything these days having to have a battery, and need frequent charging. One of my favourite pieces of "tech" that I own is a pair of good quality binoculars. They make things far away look big, all in glorious super-HD and with no battery! We should have awards for consumer tech that doesn't have a battery!

Prime example of this is "innovating" away the 3.5mm headphone jack, forcing people to replace perfectly fine $20 headphones with $150 wireless headphones that need to be charged all the time, have frequent connection problems and are easy to lose.

My Verizon Fios set top has a feature where it periodically flashes a warning on the TV when the remote's batteries are low. The problem is, these warnings start when the batteries still have several months of life left. So my choice is to consume batteries much faster than I need to, or put up with the garbage warnings on my screen interrupting my viewing.

I choose the latter, and yes it's a more miserable experience than I've had with TV remotes before this new "innovation."

Also, the power button on the remote doesn't reliably turn off my TV. 10% of the time it puts the set top in its sleep mode, keeping the TV on. Never in my life before this did I not trust a TV remote to do its basic functions. This was a solved problem.

I feel your pain.

assuming the remote batteries are standard AAA or AA batteries, get a set of rechargeable batteries and stop worrying about it? I have a bunch of equipment that runs on standard rechargeable AA and AAA and I feel like its not a big deal.

Can't really help you about your controller turning off the wrong device. Normally the fancy remotes these days have a device selection near the top, but sometimes its just buggy garbage.

While I agree with using rechargables, this may make it worse. Most rechargables will have a voltage of 1.2 instead of alkaline battery 1.5. depending on the level set for a low battery, this may trigger the warnings much sooner.

Really it’s an obnoxious feature. I can tell the battery is dead when it stops working. If the message is deemed useful then it should happen when it’s not obnoxious, say just before an “off” event triggered by said remote.

I've wondered why apparently no one makes an adaptor that fits where AA batteries fit and holds a NiMH AA with a built in DC/DC converter that adjusts the output voltage to emulate an alkaline discharge curve.

I used to think it was because if the adaptor has to fit in an AA slot and contain an AA it obviously would have to larger in length and/or diameter than an AA battery and might not fit.

But a few years ago some company was pushing an AA to AA adaptor for use with non-rechargeable batteries that they claimed significantly increased the battery life. Electrically it was just an ordinary Joule thief [1] and in most devices would not really noticeably increase battery life so most reviews considered it to be pretty much worthless and because of its misleading marketing probably a scam.

It was a flop for its intended purpose but it did demonstrate that there is enough wiggle room in the size devices will accept for an AA battery that the extra volume added by an AA to AA adaptor would not be a problem in most cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_thief

Yeah, maybe. I’ve seen big clive play with a joule thief. He certainly thought it was sort of nifty. Might not be a bad idea for certain electronics. My experience with nimh, is that while they have a lower starting voltage, their discharge curve is much better. I found some devices would last longer on a single charge than with some of the alkaline batteries I was using.

I recently bought some roughly AA size lifepo4 batteries. They’re nice in that if you have an even number of batteries you can use one and a dummy battery to replace 2 alkaline to get 2v7-3v6. Not sure how I feel about increasing amounts of lithium batteries though lying around my house. I probably wouldn’t put them in a random remote since the cost of a short is super high.

This exists, there are 3.7v lithium rechargeable cells with buck converters tacked on so they act like 1.5v alkalynes. They still have poor performance because the converters aren't perfectly efficient and rechargeables don't have the density of primary cells, but they do work

The ones I've seen claim to be "constant voltage", which I took to mean that they are always 1.5 V right up to the point that they need recharging. That would make the battery level indicator in many devices report 100% right up until the end, which would be pretty annoying in a lot of cases.

What I want is a variable buck converter (if the real cells are lithium) or variable buck-boost (if the real cells are NiMH) that adjusts the output so that a battery level indicator that expects alkaline batteries will show the correct battery level.

I would just switch them to a different pair of batteries when the message came, and charge the ones you just removed. Whether thats every 3 months or 5 months is sort of a shrug.

I gave up on rechargeable batteries. They break down after about half a dozen charges.

Then I wanted to buy alkaline batteries. Nobody could tell me how much charge the different models have. Corporate has managed to omit this important information and prevent an informed buy.

Maybe if you changed the batteries, the TV remote might work properly?

(jk!)

The Internet of Shit is all around us

https://twitter.com/internetofshit

There’s a reason people fetishize retro products and it’s not only the aesthetics. For example turning on a radio and having it instantly work, not dealing with boot times, glitchy screens, unresponsive controls, failed Bluetooth connections, etc.

Yeah but a lot of it is survivorship bias. There was plenty of crap in the old days too, but we’ve thrown it all away by now, leaving only the good stuff.

That is true

I don't know about you, but the quintessential "retro" product in my mind is the record player, and while it might not have "boot times, glitchy screens, unresponsive controls, failed Bluetooth connections, etc.", it's still decidedly less convenient than something modern like your phone + wired speakers. I'm not really sure how reliable wireless speakers are, but in my experience bluetooth headphones are reliable enough that establishing a bluetooth connection is less hassle than putting in records/stylus and swapping them out later. People might like record players for other reasons (eg. they like the ceremony of all that), but I'm skeptical that people like them because they like "having it instantly work".

Maybe you took me a little too literally. There are obviously many disadvantages to record players and having an infinite library of music on your phone is amazing. I don’t even own a record player or an old radio anymore, but the next time car play freezes up or my Bluetooth speaker decides to unpair I will wish I did.

Ironically Tesla solved all of the above to the perfection

IMO enshittification happens when companies try to copy Tesla/Apple and fail

> It’s hard to understand how we got to a place where “efficiency” is adding an extra step to using a car door handle.

Another great example is the removal of the scrollbar. The scrollbar was invented before IT was being influenced very much by the "Tesla Syndrome", and it shows because it's functional genius: It shows you where you are on the page, how big the page is (though this wasn't in the original implementations), and allows you to interact with your page location using a physical simile (the scrollbar), or by dragging on it if you don't have one.

So of course it was banished by Apple.

Newer tech has added vast amounts of new functionality at the expense of making the older, simpler functions a bit more cumbersome and less reliable. Not everyone likes that trade off. For example, in the early 1980s, landline phones were indestructible, never dropped calls, and had 99.99999% uptime. VOIP phones are nowhere near that reliable, by any metric, but that's the price for fully redirect-able calls/messages among dozens of other useful features.

I'm one of the "not everyone"s.

I've gone back to analogue radios, amps from the 90s, physical notebooks, old TVs, and even old gaming consoles. Why? Because they just work. There are no updates changing the interface, bugs to workaround (usually also from updates), annoyingly poor interface design to deal with, and the need to handle them with cotton in case they break.

That old tech is so good, it works 30+ years later. Can you imagine anything you bought in the last year working thirty years from now?

I understand where you are coming from. I've done that with a few selected items, but in general I have chosen the newer options. There always seems to be a feature or two I find worth the hassle.

Well stated. I've been trying to find the words to make pretty much this case for years.

very opinionated article

Oh no!

Curious to what people think is actual innovation - hardware, software, anything.

I think you can only tell what true innovation is when looking backwards in time.

Meaningful technology never really goes away. We still use the wheel, all the mechanical fasteners that were invented through human history (cordage, mechanical joinery, nails, rivets, screws, bolts etc), simple machinery (e.g. mechanical presses), simple electronics.

Each new meaningful invention - that was once the pinnacle of technology - proves its worth by settling down in to a niche that will never go away. I wager that smart toasters will not be in this category...

I have just one thing to say to you: Casio F105W.

SmartWhatevers will come and go, but the Casio will stay.

I wonder if smart toasters could be in this category if the technology and APIs were made open in the way that a car is open (maybe not modern cars). You can swap out and replace components, fix broken parts, etc. even if the company no longer exists.

My Tesla Model Y works great. As an "appliance" I am super happy with it.

Most other smart appliances I've used, however, have not created joy in my life, and I try to buy the oldest and dumbest appliances I can. For our new oven last year, we specifically looked for something with real knobs and an LED display, zero smart features. (Viking is the last company that makes these afaict.)

Turns out software is hard, if you're gonna make a smart appliance you have to build an entire software company. Tesla managed to do that but not other companies have.

Not only is software hard, but software is disposable, i.e. we don't set out to maintain it long term, instead we throw it away.

Lots of companies make ovens with physical knobs still. Smart features are creeping in but more in fridges than ovens.

"The only problem is that Teslas suck." Don't you love when articles are based on opinions not supported by any rigorous arguments? I've owned two Teslas (and still own a Model X) and I drive between 10 and 20 different other car brands/models every year due to travel. I also test drive any electric car that catches my eye. And I can say very confidently that Tesla's don't suck if you compare them to other cars available out there. They are quite refined and well-engineered. Model X is really quite a marvel from the technical and comfort standpoints.

Since when do opinions have to be supported by rigorous arguments? They're just opinions, not arguments.

Is this all just FOMO and jealousy?

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