LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
They killed third-party apps, which were way better than their garbage app and they don't seem to realize how much it annoys their users.
I’ve got six digits of karma, and I’d rather walk away than suffer through its awful UI.
Redit from a text based place, became a place driven by pictures (Can we call that "instagrami-zation"?).
The thing, is that discussion is what made reddit good. Now it's mostly low quality pictures, bots and comments written by marketers.
Then AI models and google search are trained on this garbage.
I wonder if someone will finally disrupt reddit
And that’s the point. They care about boosting their user base, not satisfying power users.
How is that "fine".
In the mobile app, even swiping from the left edge to go back doesn't work reliably.
Red Reader still exists.
But I’m thankful for the other little things.
I then went back to HN and turns out one of the hairs was real and I needed to clean my laptop screen :)
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The numerous layers of attempted monetization schemes since 2016ish hilariously touted as "features" are sort of band-aided on top of each other on new reddit in a way that makes it the worst possible way to display the information. It's like a terrible UI challenge.
I noticed a day or two ago they quietly turned on the 'show new reddit as default' preference option, it was still possible to change default back but they won't stop pushing it.
You should just use a browser extension to do it since those don’t rely on an auth state anyway.
If old.reddit ever goes away I’ll probably stop using it entirely.
ctrl+F doesn’t work anyway as the comments are also buried in a “load more comments” on old reddit too. New website and app have a search comments field.
New website is unusable for me.
Get the OLED panels from whoever makes them wholesale, spend on a beautiful enclosure / design, add just enough software to calibrate the image and switch between HDMI inputs with HDMI-CEC. Sell a premium soundbar as an add-on instead of including speakers in the base device.
I think a brand like Sonos could make a killing in this market selling a premium dumb tv to high end customers.
Look at how much markup Samsung adds to their standard LCD panel for a decent enclosure - it’s like $600-$1000 markup to get the Frame tv, which has a mid panel, JUST because the enclosure is actually nice/inoffensive.
According to a 2021 article about Vizio's user-hostile advert display devices, they boast of an average revenue of $13/yr - up from $7.30/yr, though consider this was 2020 when more people were at-home watching TV instead of going outside, meeting people, touching grass, the usual.
https://deadline.com/2021/03/vizio-smart-tv-streaming-ipo-12...
> A range of advertising opportunities drive revenue, including revenue sharing with programmers and distribution partners as well as activations on the device home screen. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the company said average revenue per user on SmartCast was $12.99, up from $7.31 in the same period of 2019.
-------------
If you'll allow me to make an arbitrary assumption that a new TV set bought today will last about 10 years, then $13/yr means the advertising revenue implies Vizio has reduced the sale-price of their TVs by $130 compared to before we had no-opt-out advertising displayed on our own property as a condition for the privilege of using said device.
In the race to the bottom, ads will outcompete others by pushing price lower. But how much lower?
The rest is almost unnecessary in this day and age.
If everyone were to do this, it would open a bigger market for a well-made upgradable combo smart device and air TV tuner that the TV manufacturers could produce if they wanted to.
Probably wouldn't be too much more than the default cost of a TV to sell the screens, and users could select what technology they are willing to pay for, LED, QD, MiniLED, OLED, etc.
The problem comes from things like upscaling, color tuning, refresh rates and resolution handling. That would require a custom compute module, and the module would need data on the attached screen that the screen itself cannot likely provide.
If you had access to a TV manufacturer who would be willing to work with you to create this platform, you might be able to start shipping TVs for only a few million dollars, but you need the money and the connections to make it happen.
I imagine you would need to go to Shenzhen, find a manufacturer, talk them into working with you, put a lot of money down upfront, and then hire programmers and UX designers and hardware designers to craft the perfect TV, design a unique TV brain module and have it manufactured, standardize the system so that other manufacturers can get in on the platform, make thousands of extra parts, and then hire a marketing team to let purchasers around the world know of the new product, pay for UL certification, standardize some sort of testing system so the panels can be calibrated to the brain...
It's a lot.
Although, now that I think about it, the calibration could be done with a set top camera system like the one used by those companies that sell RGB LED systems for TV backlighting, so if that were bundled in by default then it would do a lot to simplify the calibration and add a cool standout feature to the TV.
These TVs would be pricey to start with, like Sony Bravia pricey, so you're never going to move a lot of product. And you'll have to deal with tariffs, pushback from TV manufacturers, cheapskates, rude customers, and the risk that if you start to approach success then some other TV manufacturers with deep pockets might use their brand name power to make a competitor to blow you out of the water for a few years until your company goes bankrupt and then stop competing with you.
The only way to prevent that would be to open-source the entire platform, and even then you would be in a constant dogfight just to stay alive.
Despite all of that I say go for it. If you can deliver a 65" OLED Open Source TV with customizable inputs for under $3,000 then assuming I'm not financially worse off than I am right now then I'll buy one.
It’s like every interaction is viewed as an opportunity to sell attention or get you to mis-click on an ad.
If a product needs to be tied to the vendor, it is a service and it should not be sold as a product.
Every TV would become a rental instead of a product you can buy
Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't see any way to be optimistic anymore. Every company now seems to behave like landlords instead of producers
This could arguably be a win for the environment.
Of course, many people would still want to own their products, so that would be a market opportunity then.
I give up. Go fuck yourselves Hacker News I'm done with this anti-human hellhole
Then companies start quibbling over what software is required for the system to function, so much that the courts give up trying to fight them
And please include DisplayPort inputs.
Don't get me wrong, tech is great when it's a value-add, but TV tech has gotten out of control.
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(\.|^)gracenote\.com$
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(\.|^)vidyard\.com$
(\.|^)wistia\.com$I haven't seen this level of anti-consumer nonsense from Microsoft since the late 90s when lots of circles called them Micro$oft.
It's a shame since Satya Nadella came in and made a lot of right moves. Support for Linux, open source, etc. I could stretch myself to forgive the other stuff as some kind of wrong headed thinking about a cloud-first strategy. But in the last few years that productive pivot stopped and the company moved back into high-risk money grab steps.
My current daily driver is a Windows machine, but my last few builds around the house have all been some kind of Linux. Last year I moved my home server infrastructure over. I kept a windows VM around for a few things but it ultimately corrupted itself and was replaced by a Linux VM that's been chugging along just fine.
I think when I rebuild my home desktop sometime next year Windows gets relegated to a "run when needed" VM. I've really only kept it around for games and a few other Windows only software but those days are fast fading thanks to numerous efforts by Valve and others and a fallback VM for other stuff works fine in my experience elsewhere.
I think I don't have the same concerns about LG because the relationship with me as the consumer seems different somehow, and I simply expect less from them?
Using such a TV as a computer monitor sounds dicey. There will eventually be a data breach of the uploaded screenshots, assuming they aren't able to fingerprint entirely on device.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/samsung-touches-lcds...
Even most cheap TVs now a days are 4k even if the panel is low end.
There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k which is usually quite noticeable if the TV is large but if it is a smaller size I can see how it would be less obvious.
I cannot tell the difference at normal viewing distances. Up close, sure.
This is how they get you to buy the 4K version, in the store you are standing 2 feet from the screen and you can see the pixels at 1080. Sitting at a normal viewing distance and 1080 looks great.
There is also of course the issue where people have bad internet (so netflix or whatever destroys the bit-rate, or they have the cheaper 1080p only plan... is that still a thing?) or old cable boxes plugged into 4k televisions.
There is a lot that people can do to inadvertently destroy their image quality without knowing which is not great.
Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
Except that on newer tvs all the nagging will still be there, all the ads will be "frozen" in time (mine has ads for stuff from 2023, the last time I connected it for some firmware update that _GASPS_ actually fixed some things) and some features may depend on internet connectivity. The manufacturer may care to release a final update and solve these issues, but you know they are much more likely to fraudulently just disable features that worked offline as a last middle finger.
Repeat with me, SaaS is fraud. Proprietary digital platforms are fraud.
The things stopped working because they were for you the consumer.
The modern smart tv will keep working as long is its piping data back to the data retailers, they have a vested interest in keeping it going.
I do connect them to a jailed LAN so I can control them over the network.
If rootmy.tv is working again for modern LG TVs, I'll run out and buy another one.
You need to go to Settings -> All Settings -> General -> System -> Additional Settings to make sure the "Live Plus" option is OFF.
Check it periodically, as it sometimes turns itself back on again after updates.
The enshittification of our world is beyond words.
TVs are for consuming video. As far as I know, Copilot doesn't generate videos yet, and it certainly won't be possible or cheap enough to generate anything on the level of TV shows or movies any time soon. So are they expecting people will sit in their living room home theater to... chat with Copilot... instead of doing it on their phone?
I genuinely can't come up with any realistic use case where it would be convenient or useful to use Copilot on a TV. It feels utterly deranged that they would put it there.
It is like these companies do not want to sell what people really want, but only want to spy on you. The way things are going, it will be back to the old crt TVs, which you can still find used if you look hard enough.
Just like I wanted!
The Korean car brands, Hyundai and Kia also have a terrible privacy story. They really do regard their customers as the product.
I only read the reddit comments down to the point where the slanted lines became mildly infuriating and switched new reddit to continue, and there only down to the "view more comments" button, and didn't see anyone saying what Copilot actually does on the TV.
The comments seemed to all be about the nefarious things people were speculating it could be doing, how to block smart TVs from updating, etc., and that's also how the comments here are going.
A bit of research suggests that it is just another app. If you don't open it it won't be doing anything. If you open it you can use it as a virtual assistant to do things like check the weather, search streaming service for content, and that sort of thing.
Is there any indication it does more?
Fewer even own a desktop or laptop computer. Using one as a media center is comparably fringe.