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Comment by FiniteLooper | Hacker News Reader

I've still got a 55" Sony HDTV from around 2008. Zero network or smart features at all. Just a way to display images from another box. It's been so good and still is. I kind of of want to upgrade to something larger and in 4K, but every time I see an article like this I remember what is actually available in the market I feel like I'd rather just save my money and keep what I have that works how I like it

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I have a 56" Panasonic plasma TV of the same vintage. It's great -- dumb as hell and displays images and turns on right away (not as fast as an old CRT, but compared to a modern TV fuggetaboutit). Its internal input switching is janky so I bought an external HDMI switch and I couldn't be happier with the setup.

It's mounted on a wall and weighs a ton. Every time I think of upgrading I see the mess of software that they shove on a TV and it's horrifying. I would love to see a dumb TV but I think the best I can do is to have a smart TV that I don't connect to the network, lock on to HDMI1 and never touch the TV remote ever again.

Or just use pihole to block all ads

Youtube is now embedding ads midstream - I think it's just a matter of time before other providers adopt similar approaches. When adblockers were tools exclusive to nerds it didn't make sense to build countermeasures - as advertising has grown more pervasive and obnoxious adblockers have gone mainstream and there is now an arms race that adblockers are currently on the losing side of.

With adblockers disabled, I was seeing ads midstream ages ago. Ads that I don't see with an adblocker. Anecdotally, my subjective experience when adblockers are disabled seems to get exponentially worse whereas my adblocker experience seems to degrade at a much slower rate (e.g. manually skipping author recited ads on a podcast). Currently the TV is the weakest link, and people should be publishing layman's guides to pihole, or as others elsewhere have mentioned, refer them to a adblocking DNS redirect from an adblocker company. Midstream ads are especially obnoxious with music streams and I hope the majority's intolerance tips them over the edge.

Em... Adblockers still work perfectly? It's an annoyance to keep uBlock Origin updated, but it still blocks all ads on youtube. So it seems they're keeping up just fine.

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