Welcome to the modern world

I treated myself to an airport hotel last night. Switched on the TV and was completely blown away by the image quality. A David Attenborough programme felt like some sort of virtual reality theme park experience. It was INCREDIBLE. But I realise that this is totally normal for most people – it’s just my TV is about 10 years old, half the size, and I’ve rarely seen any other TVs along the way (my rare hotel stays aren’t usually of a calibre to have nice TVs!). So while it was incredible, I also feel like some sort of techno-hermit. Or maybe just an old person.

Anyone else had an ‘OMG, welcome to the modern world’ technology moment?

WhatsApp group share real time location still amazes me 😁

Nope not just you. Had more or less the same experience in John Lewis a while back. My TV is a cheap-assed 15 year 32″ Sony, It’s OK…until you stand in front of a modern TV.

Felt like a country rube gone to the big city to ride the escalator.

I had very similar, stayed in holiday rental with a 55″ TV and watched Planet Earth in HD. I have a >15 year old 32″ TV that is technically HD but doesn’t come close.

Anyone else had an ‘OMG, welcome to the modern world’ technology moment?

Sort of more or less exactly the same as you, but I found the TV repulsive. All subject to personal tastes of course, if someone is getting an awesome experience out of it then fair enough. Kind of having the same thing with cars where I’m finding they’re being crammed with more and more tech I dont want.

I can’t be far off being the old man shouts at sky meme.

Sometimes stuff on the phone. For example scanning the chip in my French passport with my phone and taking a selfie to prove I’m me on a British government web site.

Every time my teenager precedes with flip top moaning head “I can’t believe you don’t know it can do this…”

I know what you mean… but then again, I thought a ten year old television set was new… the only time I would think; oh, that’s an old telly would be if it had a curvy screen or wood on it.

Same. 32″ Samsung died after 12 years.

Also now have a washing machine that tells me what’s going on…

Suspect Paul Weller isn’t impressed let alone Damon Allbran

I’ve a kettle with a funky light in it. 🤘

HiDef freaks me out sometimes. There will be a close up shot, usually of some high drama, of someone’s face and all I think about is why are their pores so obvious or why is the rufty tufty action hero wearing so much obvious make up?

All the things I can do with my mobile phone, banking, booking tickets, checking train times, translating etc

I still can’t get my head round my tea still being hot when I open my flask hours later! 😳

Why worry? The last time we bought a new TV was when the 14 inch TV with a CRT broke the morning the TDF was about to start so I went and bought a 26 inch TV which we still have. We only ever seem to replace things when they are beyond repair or use.

This is often quite a longer time as I can often repair things.

The big TVs in John Lewis do look a bit better than ours.

Driving a modern car with lane assist, adaptive cruise control and automatic lights and wipers. Add automatic transmission and driving becomes a lot simpler than my 2007 S-Max. Had a hire car for a 200 mile work journey which I was dreading and it was pretty relaxing compared to driving my own vehicle.

Android auto connecting my phone to use Waze was also very cool – no need to stick cradles to the windscreen.

ChatGPT. As part of my role I subcontract people to build connectors between our systems and other platforms. Usually this takes the dev guys about a week, but with ChatGPT I can build a new connector myself in about 2 minutes. It comes out properly polished with good code comments and is consistently good performance wise. You can even give it hints in natural language like “this service doesn’t do paging so you might have to handle that” or “they’ve dumbly not built a GetALL API for group objects” and  it’ll tune things accordingly. It’s so damned good that we’ve actually banned ourselves from using it until we work out what it does with its knowledge in the background.

Google translate photo thing – you can use your camera to view a menu in Thai (& any other language) and it automatically translates it to English. Pretty handy if you like to know what your eating.

To our our car fleet, both designed in the 20th century, one built in the 20th century, a few months ago we added a one year old car with a lot of added extras; a totally different (and better) driving experience.  I still shake my head that the sat nav display goes into night mode when the light levels drop.

Electric cars.  Compared to the expectations ingrained in me when I started driving, my current car is quieter and smoother than a Rolls-Royce and accelerates like a Ferrari.  It costs a fraction of a petrol car to run. It will effectively drive by itself on the motorway, modulating speed to match traffic conditions and steering by itself. It’ ll actively avoid accidents that I don’t have the reactions to prevent. It is imbued with all sorts of actual witchcraft.

It’s a Hyundai. (Albeit a posh one)  The Hyundai Pony was the Dacia Sandero of my youth. One kid at my school used to get his Dad to drop him off 2 streets away so he didn’t get laughed at for the weird far eastern noddy car.
Now I get asked if it’s a Bentley or an Aston Martin.

I  wish my Dad had lived long enough to see it. It would have genuinely freaked him out.

I’m still amazed that a phone that is the same size as my first transistor radio when I was 13 can connect me with someone the other side of the world in NZ instantly.

There’s a chambered cairn by my house, it is estimated to be 4000 years old

On the winter solstice the sun rises and shines in directly through the opening passage

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how incredible that is

Electric cars.

I’m always amazed that the first cars were leccy but dino juice was easier.

Not tried them myself, but people I work with who have lots of up to date tech are amazed with their Meta Quest headsets.

It’s so damned good that we’ve actually banned ourselves from using it until we work out what it does with its knowledge in the background.

Same as what your contractors do 🙂

Just get a big pc (or something with the right gpu board)and run one of the coding Llms  locally, it’s too good a resource to not take advantage of.

I stay in reasonably good hotels – I have never seen a TV in a hotel room that I would consider in anyway high quality by current standards. If you by some chance did luck out, then I can guarantee the picture would have not setup in any way optimally, and I’ve never seen a hotel room TV being fed a source of any quality, so would say with reasonable confidence there’s plenty of scope for you to be even more impressed!

Thats nothing.

Marvel at how easy it is these to be a lazy bastard.

Can’t be arsed popping out for 5 quids worth of shopping. Pop on the app and Pay Tesco Whoosh* to do it for you.

Truely the modern age is the utopia we all dreamed of.

*Other lazy bastard options are available

Google translate photo thing – you can use your camera to view a menu in Thai (& any other language) and it automatically translates it to English. Pretty handy if you like to know what your eating.

Apple translate app does the same. Blew my mind on holiday recently.

I went round to my mates house for the first time this weekend……and had a poo indoors! His toilet is inside the house! When did that become a thing?

@rustynissanprairie you have just reminded me of the Techno Toilet! We stayed in a house with a modern toilet in the USA and even my kids were impressed. It had a heated seat, lights, and a front and back bum washer and dryer! I can’t say that I’d want one, though it would be useful if you’d broken both elbows.

We hung onto a 32″ Sony CRT until 7 years ago. We replaced it as it was starting to get a red hue to the picture.
We swapped it for a relatively budget 43″ LG 4K TV and to be honest that did blow me away a bit. Wished we’d done it sooner.
It still impresses me, when you get a well recorded bit of nature footage or something similar.
The Smart bits are also very useful & still working fine – I was led to believe that all the smart functionality would stop working within a year or so of getting it.

Mobile phones – I always try to appreciate what a modern smart phone can do. My Pixel 4a is getting on for 4 years old now & still does the job perfectly. Last year it got an update so now in the camera app I can do that magic eraser thing and it can just remove things from the image that I don’t want.
It doesn’t always get it quite right & if you really zoom in you can see the fill-in section. But, it is still bonkers impressive. You can even do it on any photo on your phone, not just those taken with the camera.

Stuff like Amazon, click-and-collect shopping, deliveroo etc….all of that stuff is bonkers when you think about what is actually going on behind the scenes & how it all works.

Smart speakers and their ilk. Playing music in my office, go downstairs to lunch & just say “hey google, transfer music to kitchen speaker” and a few seconds later it has done it. Or go downstairs and realise I haven’t paused the podcast I’m listening to; “Hey google, pause office speaker”……it’s done.

You have a TV?

There is a group of holograms doing very well at the moment,other hologram bands will be available soon.

I fully intend to enjoy this transition time before AI takes over 😉 😆

I went round to my mates house

He has a house! We live in a hole in the road.

qwertyFree Member
WhatsApp group share real time location still amazes me

FB Messenger does it too…

He has a house! We live in a hole in the road.

Luxury….

Modern Tv’s may be be amazing but its compensated by 97.6% of anything on TV being rubbish, and maybe on average a handful of films worth watching a year… and one or two streamable series max….

everytime I go round to the in-laws the TV seems to get a little big bigger (and louder), some stuff looks really good but cheap content, daytime TV and upscaling just looks horrific.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think there has been much advancement in the last 20 year.  In fact, I’m not sure there has been that much advancement in the last 50 years.

The way we live and work (and most of our recreation time) would be 100% recognisable to my grandparents and possibly even to my great-grandparents.

We definitely have more stuff.  And that stuff is pretty undeniably better (for the most part).  But the stuff we have, the work we to do buy this stuff, and what we do with the stuff is pretty much unchanged.

But yeah, it could just be me.  It probably also depends on your definition of advancement and improvement.

and maybe on average a handful of films worth watching a year… and one or two streamable series max….

Obviously it depends what you’re after, but check out the Netflix thread, its become a wider guide for TV and the movies, and I’ve found dozens of programmes,  documentaries, drama series, and movies that have been really excellent that otherwise would’ve passed me by. Certainly more than the handful you’re suggesting.

There’s some dross to be sure, but there’s also some really excellent stuff being made.

We have a 4k LG OLED from 2017 in our living room, and I am still amazed by the picture – after 7 years.  Although you can see the difference in the picture quality from our newer 2023 LG 4k OLED in the front room.

I like a good picture – but I do get surprised by the picture quality difference because I don’t replace televisions until the old one breaks.  I had a 25” analogue 4:3 set for over 15 years – because it didn’t break.