What is your boomer opinion

Single player modes in games shouldn't require internet connection.

That fact that's considered a boomer take makes me sad
Exactly this

I'm not subscribing to anything. If I buy something, it's fully functional, and it's mine. There is no ongoing relationship between me and the manufacturer. Done.

I mean, that's basically what FOSS is about.
- And that's why we use it.
Especially when it comes to expensive equipment like cars, computers, printers, etc.
- who doesn't want a subscription for heated seats on their $100k car? /s
The only thing I'm willing to pay a subscription for are the essentials that have no product alternative, i.e. utilities - power, water, Internet. I refuse to pay for streaming when they used to sell DVDs and CDs with the same content. I refuse to pay for game subscription services when you used to be able to buy the games outright. I refuse to pay for software-as-a-service or bullshit like cloud service integrations for smart home stuff. If I don't own it, I don't buy it.
- At least for utilities you can reframe it as paying for parcels of utility, and then consuming them, like you do for food. Middleman bullshit like cloud services that refuse to let you just self-host can screw off. Having to spend money to spend extra resources to deal with a 3rd party is obnoxious, doubly so when they just decide they don't want to support it anymore and pull the plug.
I'm working on this, the subscription model has gotten so expensive now that literally everything uses it. Do you have any tips besides "just pirate everything"?
- Just pirate some of the things?
- Unfortunately the only alternative for some things are becoming very tech literate and running an objectively worse mediocre open source software
- Use free or at least alternatives without a subscription model where possible
  For cars? Just buy one that's a bit older
  Movies etc? Pirate
- Depends on the media, buy from bandcamp, steam
Anything that doesn't incur an ongoing cost to provide should be legally prohibited from being sold as a "subscription."
- Not everything needs a law against it. I'm just not going to buy into their fucked up system.
@TheBaldness Do you pay taxes? It's literally a subscription on the state :)
- Only because the late fees and collection agencies are to die for :)

Music in restaurants and bars is just too loud. I know why the music is loud, but I am still going to shake my fist at it like Grandpa Simpson.

Same. It's getting worse over time too, I can hardly hear anything anyone is saying in restaurants and bars anymore.
I felt my inner boomer grow stronger after writing that.
- I think many grey hairs suddenly sprouted on peoples' heads after commenting on this thread.
I’ve thought this since I was young. Background music? Cool, keep it quiet so we can talk.
Does this mean loud music is bad? No, I’ve been a put my head in the PA speakers metal head since I was young too. But I don’t expect a waiter to serve me then.
Beyond that, it’s a known problem that as you get older audio distractions become more severe, and I’m sure there’s a neurodivergent dimension to it too, so it’s one of those things where we are actively punishing people for wanting to be out and socialise. Also sure it’s one of those things where everyone thinks they have to do it but don’t
If I know I'm going to one of those extra loud bar or clubs, I always being some earplugs. I have some pretty stealthy ones in a mint tin. I can't hear people talk either way, might as well not hurt my ears.

It was totally uncool to remove the headphone jack from my device, man.

Cars shouldn't be loaded with user-facing technology. Bring back analog dashboards and buttons for climate control!

I just want to be able to adjust the stereo without looking away from the road. Is that too much to ask?
- Interesting fact: I just got a new ev (so a battery hooked up to a computer with wheels) - and it has buttons! It also has dials for sound and climate.
  Now to be fair it also takes interacting with a touchscreen to turn on the heated seats, but I'd say it's progress in the right direction.
Bring back stick-shift, too. People shouldn’t be driving if they have no grasp of the mass and inertia of their car. We should be able to disengage the engine at will. And we should have to pay attention when we drive.
I hate the touch screen climate control, especially when's it's cold and it takes the touch screen awhile to get started...

GIVE ME BACK MY DAMN 3.5MM HEADPHONE JACK ON MY PHONE!!!

This but with SD cards
- User replaceable batteries
I've been voting with my wallet on this one for years- no headphone jack, no purchase
- It's becoming super difficult now to be honest. I think I'm about to bite the bullet this weekend and just get a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter although it pains me deeply.
  What phone do you use??? I'm looking at the S23 at the moment but I'm still on an S8 lol
Amen
hard disagree. had my headphone cord caught in so much shit over the years I don't miss it at all and the mild annoyance of bluetooth pales in comparison.

I don't want to have a subscription for everything. It used to be possible to pay a one-time fee for software and use it as long as I want. Now I have to pay a monthly fee and once I finish paying, I can't use the software anymore. And it's not like I constantly get updates for the software. Often it stays the same for months or years.

I understand that software has a price, but no way these prices are sometimes justified...

I agree, but from a !piracy perspective
I'm always on the hunt for self hosted/open source solutions.

Smart tech in general is annoying and dumb. I want my TV to just be a tv with inputs, I don't need built in firmware and updates to shove ads in my face. I don't want my car to have a touch screen to adjust the A/C, just give me a knob or buttons.

I DO NOT WANT MY TV TO HAVE A FUCKING CAMERA OR A MICROPHONE
We need electric vehicles with the interiors and exteriors copied from consumer cars from the 90s.
- Like that Hyundai concept? That thing was rad. I'd drive the hell out of an EV that looks like an AE86.
I think that one is pretty popular. Popular "smart" products are usually only smart to and make the manufacturer some extra scratch after sale.
And car touchscreens are either disliked, considered a status symbol, or considered necessary in order toobtains another feature. Very few people actually like them.
Car-ware is the absolute worst. I remember reading an article on Hacker News 10 years ago saying they should just be a blank canvas that our cellphone decides what goes on it.
You're just a thermometer! Why do you need to verify my email?!
100% agreed.
Like, cram android onto an underpowered SOC and it's just incredibly frustrating to use.

I have three:

They don't make things like they used to
We don't need all these damned computers in everything
Modern music sounds like crap

I'm 17.

I think two out of those believes stem from survivorship bias. You think of old music and consumer products as superior because the only ones that "survived" are the good ones. No one remembers bad music from 50 years ago, and for every old thermos flask/blender/knife that you see around there are dozens that broke years ago.
- There was song from the 60s (supposedly the best music everyone tells me) called "7 little girls". The chorus went "7 little girls sitting the back seat kissing and hugging with Fred"
  Thankfully a mostly forgotten song now, but a clear example of how bloody awful pop music is not a new phenomenon.
- That's fair.
- I say yes for the music one, maybe not for the first. There are literally different materials being used and increasingly optimised-for-profit-to-effort-ratio processes. Many things are just straight up made more cheaply because we have the technology to do that.
  Although for the music one, a relevant lyric comes to mind:
  Hip hop? Buddy, don't get me started
  So how do you get yourself charted?
  Kids love this stuff 'cause it's so new
  Put in a sample from a pop song too
  You've got a hit, how come it sold?
  The melody and it's 30 years old!
My theory on the first one is that it's usually hard to make things cheap and consistent, so it often starts off as bad, then good but expensive, and then trends towards and past "good enough"
Modern music is fire when you know where to look but I've always felt like pop music has been taking a very slow weird turn. It seems like 1970s and earlier it was mostly good, and mostly good after, but at this point I'm just confused

Cities are too car-oriented

I agree with the sentiment, but this feels like the least boomer opinion ngl
- I think it's simultaneously an opinion held by very old people who remember when they could just walk to the store and younger urbanists that want us to return to that. The people in the middle grew up in a car oriented society that hadn't completely lost small businesses and been locked down by traffic. And they now have a house way out in the burbs with a disdain for the traffic of the city. Urbanism threatens their way of life now. That's my opinion.
Depends on the city. In my city, you could walk across the whole thing in maybe an hour, and anything major the furthest you would have to walk is about 30 minutes.

Sneaker culture is incredibly weird. Shoes made by children in China with a limited edition color are in such high demand that there are sites where people refresh F5 constantly hoping to have the honor to pay hundreds and hundreds for shoes that cost $7.50 to make. Then half of the time people won't even wear them outside, they'll put them in a bag and change shoes when they get to work or whatever. Or some might not even wear the shoes at all and just display them.

I'm an old soul in this sense. I love a quality goodyear welted shoe, and made in USA, UK, or Italy usually. An Allen Edmonds strandmok is a fantastic everyday shoe for me. I like to purchase nice things in general, use them, take care of them. I really hate throwaway culture as well.

Please nobody hate me for this, I'm a bit self conscious being an admin of my own instance and don't want to piss people off haha. If you're into gym shoe culture that's awesome. If I knew you in real life I'd probably make fun of you for a minute if I saw you walking outside in socks carrying your $400 limited edition sneakers, but then you can make fun of me for one of the thousands of things I do and it's all in good fun.

I don't think you're alone in that. I don't even think it's a thing that makes you sound older. That's a niche hobby that some folks have like collecting miniatures.
- I unserstand miniature collectors more than sneakerheads. There are only so many variations of sneakers but almost infinite miniatures of whatever

Digital privacy is important, and it's important to be anonymous on the internet

I feel like this could go either way whether it's a boomer opinion or not. Real boomers are not very tech literate and probably don't have much of a notion of online privacy.
On the other hand for those that were adults in the early years of the internet, they likely think we're all giving away too much of our private information.
- Boomers (my parents' generation) were telling us 90's kids how dangerous it was to put your information online, but then it seemed once social media happened they all forgot about such privacy concerns entirely. They were right the first time!
- You're right, i guess i am mistaken

The internet was way better before it became a giant shopping mall.
Those cars that don't have the flecks in the paint look like children's toys.

Then, I have a couple that pre-date even boomers by many years 😅:

Handkerchiefs kick the shit out of paper tissues.
Cars have made the world a worse place.

I miss the era when the web was just this
Handkerchiefs are the bomb. I carry one everywhere I go (when I don't forget 🥲). Really feel like they could make a comeback with the right marketing.
- Go pick up a heap at your local hospice shop. I've gotten a lot of mine there and made a few more out of scrap fabric. I use old flannelette cotton sheets for our spill rags.
Those cars that don’t have the flecks in the paint look like children’s toys.
Finally I can out my finger on what bothers me about them
Those cars that don't have the flecks in the paint look like children's toys
Actually, why do so many modern cars straight up look like oversized toys?
Electric cars are the worst for this IMO. Aside from the Tesla model 3, Nissan leaf and a handful of other ones... everything else looks like an oversized replica remote control toy to me. Some are nice, like the VW minivan, but most look like cheap wannabes. I can't quite put my finger on it
I always bring half a dozen hankies with me camping. They're so useful on a limited inventory. They help you grab hot things. As napkins. Allergies. Wounds. Cleaning knives. Storing spare fish hooks/lures i.e. pocket tackle. I handwash them in the river and they sun dry quiet quickly.
Love hankies. I miss the old web too.

Algorithms that try to suggest me content are universally bad, and all searches should provide results based solely on the terms, syntax, and language entered. Same with anything that tries to provide me content based on data harvested about my location or demographic.

All the content on my feed should come from unpersonalized suggestions, or the communities i choose to follow. 👍
I like that Lemmy and Masto don’t have those fucking algorithms. It’s a relief.
- What is your opinion on Bluesky? Their default feed is chronological, but they do have algorithms. They're actually moving towards custom algorithms, so you can build your own or use someone else's, delete, pin, reorder them. It's like different feeds. I like that implementation personally.
I think it has its place but it should absolutely be optional. Yeah they suck but the YouTube algorithm is responsible for like 70% of my knowledge base.
- I miss accidentally finding the most random stuff on YouTube way back before they started pushing monetized content, but it's been a very long time
- I feel like algorithms when done well are amazing. Like, the YouTube Music algorithm is so great for music, I just start playing a song and it takes it from there. Unlike Spotify, which has gone downhill these days, I never feel the need to skip a song on YTM.
The issue is that they rely on "related" content. I would much prefer an elimination system.
Some alternative frontends resolve this. Invidious for example is a youtube front end. There are public instances. Most popular sites have them.
- Yes! I've started using Invidious more and more when I'm on PC, but there are also addons that make YouTube itself more tolerable.
  I've been using LibreTube on my Android phone, and it's so much better.
Never have I ever benefited from Google or Amazon or anyone changing my search string for me. Even if I do misspell something, I'm gonna click on the "did you mean x instead?" link myself, because I don't trust the 50/50 mixed results anyway. But 90% of the time I'm gonna be immediately scrambling to put the double quotes back in, which it's also gonna ignore half the time.
- Hard agree. Sometimes I'm searching for something very specific and esoteric, and the results spam me with unrelated nonsense because the search engine thinks it knows better than I do

The only exceptions I can think of are streaming services that simply couldn't exist as standalone one-off products (Spotify, Netflix etc). But yeah, there's no logical reason something like Photoshop should ever require more than one transaction.
I bought FL Studio back in 2017 and have received free updates since then.
Meanwhile, most other software companies: "nooo, you can't own the software, you have to pay for a subscription and you can't keep using it when it's over! Also if you want updates you have to pay for the premium subscription"
(this comment is not sponsored lmao)

CLI > GUI on PC.

- I mean, i have things like window manager and browser graphical, but most other things are just way faster and easier to use as cli.
Thank you for your correct opinion.
I'm ready to die on this hill!
Truer words have never been spoken
What's CLI
- Command Line Interface
Sure, if you live and breath the same tools 24/7.
I like the concept but feel like an idiot everytime I have to google "How do I [insert simple task here]" because I can't remember the syntax, where a GUI would handheld me in a much better way through finding back what I used to be familiar with.
- I do -h or --help in those cases. Usually, this is enough.
Gui with keyboard shortcuts is the right mix of efficient and approachable imo

You should be able to repair your own things, without too much money and effort

Right to repair for life!

In cars knobs are better than touch screens.
VR was a gimmick 20 years ago, VR is a gimmick today.

I've never met someone who prefers touchscreen climate controls in a car tbh. Everyone I know agrees that it's stupid and unsafe
Strong agree on the first, and on the second VR is like most over-hyped technology: useful and unique, but not for the reasons people believe
- As over-hyped tech goes VR is bad, but 3D cinema is not far behind.

Smart TVs are stupid and only exist to make ad revenue and sell user data. I'd pay extra for a TV like an LG C2 OLED but with no OS. Just a monitor that displays sources plugged in.

Look at commercial displays… and look to pay a lot more for them, which is probably what you'd expect.
Had a samsung TV I caught with a pihole trying to call home. Had no way of disabling it.
Switched to a sony TV that lets you turn off smart TV mode. So far data from the router and pihole shows no attempts to bypass that and I don't think it has hidden mobile network connectivity.
What was really worrysome was that the thing tried to connect to one of those services that scan whatever you're watching - I am just using my TV as a playstation screen, even watch Netflix on playstation
also my boomer opinion on a tangent topic is that I should be able to rearrange or delete the bloatware that comes on my PS (or any device for that matter) angry fist intensifies

Alcohol is toxic, carcinogenic garbage and we'd be noticeably better off if everyone voluntarily stopped drinking it.

Nah, all boomers drink beer. You sound like Zoomer.
- Technically I'm not, but fair point
Anecdotally, this is a position I've seen held more often by young people than by boomers. Not sure what the statistics are exactly, but regardless it would be nice to see a cultural shift away from alcohol.
- I hold this opinion because I've watched family die from alcoholism, and I myself am a recovering alcoholic. It's a miserable way to go.
I think that's a more modern opinion. Maybe the religious boomers want tight legal controls on alcohol but the youth today are more into weed than alcohol from my experience.
- True, or maybe I've actually gone too far back to the pre-boomer era with this one

Basically any opinion of the modern Internet I give.

I'm a certified computer expert, but I sound like a Luddite when it comes to anything mainstream.

I’m a certified computer expert, but I sound like a Luddite when it comes to anything mainstream.
I thought it was pretty well known that the magnitude of one’s ludditism related to their computing expertise as a U-shaped curve. That is, (actual) experts and non-experts are equally Luddite. It’s the mediocre and peri- technologists that drive hype. Right?
- Hah, I haven't heard that analogy before, but I see what it's getting at. I wouldn't say it's a rule to live by, but as you learn more about technology you (usually) also learn more about its constant abuse and its critical flaws.
  It’s the mediocre and peri- technologists that drive hype. Right?
  I'm not sure exactly who you mean, but never believe the hype:
  Steve Jobs didn't know shit about computers and took the fame from people who did, just like Edison and Musk.
  Most people studied in machine learning hate the term "Artificial Intelligence", it's a marketing gimmick used by marketing.
  There's a similar, but lesser, sentiment in security being called "cyber".
  Anything saying "better privacy" or "more secure" without giving a specific threat scenario (like, more secure against [x] attack) - they don't know shit. Privacy and security are not linear values you can have more or less of.
  Internet of Things ('smart devices') is a privacy and security NIGHTMARE, and we've known that since day 1. Companies don't care. It's easy money.
  If you can't (hypothetically) run it yourself, you're the product.

Things should be made to last and not be made to intentionally break after a short time.

let me see:

physical media is Just Better (cds, game cards, etc.)
the Internet is a technological dumpster fire
devices are too "smart" nowadays

- i know, and i'm really ticked about it
Remeber guys to buy your intelligent smart home frigde freezer that sinks up to your phone and uses the latest GPT models to...... I would certainly be inclined to agree on that last point
- not only that, but "smartness" and longevity seem to be inversely correlated. your grandma's alarm clock she bought in the 70s most definitely still works and will still work fifty years later, while that fancy smart display your rich neighbor has is going to break after three
I signed for a storage unit this week, and they require me to use an app to access the unit. Of course their servers were down when I first tried using the app. 🤦
what do you mean by technological dumpster fire? too much tech?
- yes exactly. there's so much tech that it's literally impossible to make a new browser engine from scratch
I bought a gas stove/oven a few months ago. Took me a couple of weeks to notice that I can connect it to my wifi for some reason. I haven't, and don't intend to, but I am a little curious what features could possibly be in there.
- it's probably something like remote control, which is handy but ultimately not worth it imo
Physical media generally has less aggressive DRM. Buy a DVD and the movies your's for life, you can even rip it and put it on a media server to make your own little streaming site.
"Buy" a movie/audiobook on Amazon and it's yours as long as the company wants you to keep it.
As always, there is an relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/488/

Do not share your name online.

:) or 🙂 is nice and not passive-agressive

Same, I always saw it as being friendly rather than passive aggressive
:)
- Noooo... its gotta be a FULL smiley, lest I think you secretly want to eat me! :-)
:)
oh damn, I didn't know people thought that was passive aggressive. Great, something else to over think about

I do not like comic book movies.

They're just so tired
- It’s funny because people were talking about how they were bad before they even got really big.
  I remember a “Every Frame A Painting” episode talking about how their scores are basically rubbish (this was specific to marvel). Similarly about their bland color palettes, repeated story lines and CGI sky monster endings. I think in hindsight it will be a little cringe.
  Spielberg and Lucas were on the money when they compared them to Westerns, and I’ve always wondered if there’s a sociological phenomenon buried in there. Some sort of nostalgic cultural ideal that gets seeded in one generation to sprout a generation or two later?
I quite liked them at first but how many do we need? It's become so over saturated and I've long burned out of the genre.
- Not the person you replied to, but I doubt it personally. Usually "comics" refers specifically to the western Marvel/DC stuff, not Japanese manga where things are very different (from an outsider's perspective like myself anyway)

Buy a ThinkPad. They still make 10lb beasts with 3 m.2 slots and a dedicated GPU!
Why do laptops need to be thin anyway? I kinda understand it for phones because they need to fit in tight pockets, but even then they were thin enough years ago we don't need to lose features to make them thinner
- I just bought a gaming laptop to replace my business laptop. Gaming laptops are generally better at everything. The hardest part was finding one I could have in meetings that didn't scream it was a gaming laptop. Sometimes I like to play SimCity while I'm sitting in meetings.
- I guess it depends on what you want it for. I have to travel and take my work laptop with me everywhere, so I certainly appreciate a smaller, thinner and lighter device.
You can still get chunky laptops, they're just inconvenient to haul around.

I believe physical books are better than e books.

However, physical work documents are not better than PDFs! Why the hell do boomers print so damn much?

I'm with you on this. Ebooks are super convenient, and I love them for that, but I do like a physical book.
Give me a PDF of a manual I'm rarely going to look at. Let me search that shit.
Have you found a good way to read a PDF? I can't stand reading for an extended period of time on a monitor or tablet. It is so much easier on the eyes to print things. Maybe you could use a color e-ink reader, but the're so friggen expensive.
- Ahh that's a fair. I don't really have that issue but I use computer glasses with a blue light filter and when my eyes are feeling sensitive I usually just put some eye drops in. That happens regardless of if I'm using a computer or not though

Not meeting up with friends at a loud venue, I like to talk to them not try to shout over the music.

I hate QR code menus, just let me see the damn food options without squinting at my phone

I don't mind the ones that take me to the official website and an optimized UX, but the ones that just download a shitty pdf to my phone are garbage
Yeah I hate this and usually the menu is just a huge PDF you have to zoom in on and move around.
- I don't mind the qr menus sometimes but this drives me insane. Plus the prices will be right aligned, so you have to pan back and forth to figure out how much something costs. It's just pure laziness.
  Also, menus linked on the restaurant website where they've obviously uploaded the menu 3 years ago and never bothered to update it.
- This is a huge frustration, at least format it intuitively for phones since you're actively encouraging their use.
- There is a place near me with great food, but their webpage menu is a scan of multiple pages of their menu set up in a slide show that will automatically rotate through the pages every ten seconds or so, and there is no way to stop it except to keep your thumb on the current page and kind of wiggle it. And if you want to scroll to a different page of the menu you can’t just flip through the pages, you have to wait at least 5 seconds before attempting to scroll but if you wait too long your scroll input and the auto scroll both happen and the menu has jumped past what you want to look at and by the way you can’t scroll backwards, only forwards so you have to make a full loop.
  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I'll trade the large phone display for a physical keyboard.

I remember being one of the many who thought touchscreens wouldn't catch on because people loved physical keyboards too much. Of course, touchscreens weren't quite what they are today. Haptic feedback and multi-touch were game changers.
- The bizarre part is how popular the keypad phones like the BlackBerry or Nokia 9000 series were, or the multitude of Windows Mobile, Psion and other devices. As soon as iPhone came out, suddenly nobody wanted keypads anymore. People are just chasing after the latest shining trends.
You can consider using a USB keyboard or Bluetooth keyboard with your phone. Can't really use them on-the-go though, so it is quite limiting, but it does allow a keyboard experience on a phone. This works on Android; not sure if it works with iPhone.
- I used to have a bunch of keyboards but it's not a workable solution. If I have such a surface or environment as to use one, might as well just use a laptop or something.
  My old qwerty keypad phones worked so well.
You don't have to. The Droid 3 had a large display and an excellent slide-out keyboard the same size as the display. Why no other phone manufacturers did this, I cannot fathom. Typing on a screen is supremely annoying.
- There were a few that did that, I used to have a Sony Xperia Mini Pro. It probably is the best solution, but I can understand not willing to do such a mechanism. A keyboard itself bolted right in the body is trivial however, compared to all the other design shenanigans manufacturers have to do.
- Which one

I hate touch screens.

Dating should go back to face to face meetings. People need to get out and see others more, just generally.

- Because dating hopefully takes place with individuums, to whom this limitation does not apply.
I think dating should be more accidental, as well. Meet someone at the bus stop and ask them out, that sort of thing.
Barry Schwartz (if you want more boomer opinions, look him up) made the excellent point that it's very difficult for us to be pleasantly surprised these days. Everything we do now comes with expectations. Before a date, we look at their profile. Before a meal, we look up the restaurant ratings. Before buying anything, we read all the reviews, etc. Before we experience anything, it's already been marketed to us. It's great in a lot of ways, but it means that the best we can ever hope for is to be not disappointed. It's becoming very very rare that something will exceed our expectations and we will be pleasantly surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if this has impacts on our psychology.
As it relates to dating, I think it's nice when you stumble upon a good connection when it's least expected, rather than swiping through 1000 pictures. And on your first date, you should probably have no idea what the other person might be like.
I agree. Robert Putnam has some great points in “Bowling Alone” in that, we need that socialization—something to bridge the gap. And the human, as an animal, in us needs the socialization just because that’s how we are as a species.
Face to face is key, in my opinion.

Headlights on cars are so bright now. I also wish headlights as well as overhead road lights they went back to a warmer temperature. I really don't like driving when it is dark due to the light brightness and color temperature now.
OLED screens cause eyestrain.
They do? That's strange. I don't get any noticeable eye strain from the OLED screen on my phone. Do you get eye strain from LCDs as well?

When I was a kid, I could go out and play with other kids on the streets, without fear of being snatched or hit by a car or worse. We made Judas ragdolls before Easter just to burn them, and use them for practical jokes. We used to play some child version of cricket, I've even broke a window of a neighbour doing it.

Children nowadays do not do any of those things dammit. What the fuck? How exactly are you growing up without leaving home? For some it's lack of desire, but for most of them it's outright lack of possibility.

Screw this shit. The world is becoming worse.

"no mow may" and "bee friendly lawns" are just an excuse to justify being too lazy to take care of your property. Idgaf if you don't want to have a lawn, but plant flowers or plants that actually help pollinators. Leaving 2ft tall grass just harbors ticks and looks terrible.

As a person who works in tech and is an early adopter for almost every new gizmo out there, I feel that we were better off back in the day when stuff was all analog and things were done manually.

Sure it was inconvenient, but it made us experience the world more and actually interacted with real people. I have crappy social skills and I have seen the change in myself over the years. I get anxious when my phone rings now, as opposed to being excited back in the day.

This makes me think of a quote by Kurt Vonnegut:
“I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterward I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “Okay, I’ll send you the pages.” Then I go down the steps and my wife calls, “Where are you going?” “Well,” I say, “I’m going to buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in the closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
I really believe that part of the loneliness and lack of community many people feel nowadays can be attributed to automating everything for convenience. We miss out on these brief interactions and meaningless smalltalk, giving us less chance to practice our social skills in low-stakes situations. I see the change even in myself; in my college days I didn't really experience much social anxiety since I was always surrounded by people, but now I sometimes find a quick trip to the grocery store somewhat difficult. It's really troubling to think about, and it makes me long for the analog past.
- Favorited. Thanks for the quote.
  I'm working at a liquor store as a cashier right now. It isnt where I want to be in six months but it's been a joy overall. The amount of chitchat I get to engage in is voluminous and I learn a lot every day about people's lives.
- Wow... thank you for this. This captures my feeling exactly and this is what I and many others miss from life.
  I feel you and I experienced the same. I was quite social back in my college days too, even though I was still an introvert. I used to strike up conversation and small talk with people. However, now, just the thought of making eye contact with a stranger is enough for me to avoid going outside or skipping the thing/event altogether.
  I mean, I can still do the small talk, but it comes with immense effort, and a bit of awkwardness. Internally I just want to run away and hide in a corner. Never used to happen before.
- We miss out on these brief interactions and meaningless smalltalk, We lost this when "smart" phones took over, people use them to shield themselves from these brief interactions and small talk.
I also work in tech and love to buy gadgets and stuff. I've lived the majority of my adult life with a smart phone, pretty much my entire career. One thing I really wish I got to experience more of was working, dating, socializing, etc when you were very hard to get ahold of once you left the house. You'd have a phone at work, a phone at home, you'd check your messages and read the mail. Beyond that, you would be on your own when you were out in the world and not at the beck and call of anyone who who can contact you via one of hundreds of ways on a smartphone.

Google Docs Editors is inferior to any office productuvity suite, and it's overused in the professional world.

I don't want your fucking Sheets link. Email me the Excel file with _v1 at the end.

- I'm not the one who downvoted you (which clearly means the consensus is you're wrong, ratios be damned)
  You and I are now workplace enemies
  I hope you have a good day!
Newer versions of office allow for "sharing" the excel sheet via a link but I don't know if they allow track changes to be on/visible for the "live" edits.
- Remaining on-theme for boomer opinions, I hate track changes even more than I hate all the Google suite nonsense 😛 Markup in Word can get fucked, too.
- I don't think they do, but that would be a great feature!

I want my Final Fantasy games turn-based not this action-RPG garbage, now get off my lawn!

We've become increasingly the minority on this but I agree wholeheartedly.
God yes

Drinking is not fun and loud parties too. Just understood, that I haven't had fun there most if the times.

Also don't understand people, who chose drinking as their hobby, compete in how many and what drinks they drank, how bad it was in the morning and what weird stuff they did under influence.
I like alcohol beverages, but not a stupid culture being built around drinking.
- I'd through pot into this too. I don't get those people who's every waking moment is talking about getting high or what type of bud is the best.
- It's actually really odd to travel to a place like Spain where the drinking culture is far more tame. Just see people put their achohol down for a bit after a couple of cups

The Windows 98 UI was the pinnacle of desktop computing.

I'd vote for Windows 2000, but the point stands. All it needed (in hindsight) was virtual desktops
For some reason the Start button got so bad I went from using it to run everything to actively avoid it and just run everything using... Everything, the software.
Amen to that. Not sure what the heck happened over the last 25 years.
I was 13 when Windows '95 came out. And there was so much hype around it. There were commercials on TV and newspapers and radio - seriously everywhere. And I remember using it for the first time and being so excited and then thinking "...stfw? How is this different than 3.1?" And realizing the OS doesn't really mean anything. But then we got a gateway with a gaming package a few months later, and that blew my nips off pretty good.
I don't even care if it looks more modern. I just want a consistent UI in Windows.
- Don't worry, I'm sure with Windows 12 they will have a new UI design that fixes all the problems with the Metro interface. It wont replace it of course, it will just be another UI standard.
- I love how you can find ui from every windows version in even the newest stuff. To be fair, I dont envy microsofts position - developing an OS that gets used on modern devices to old industrial PCs cant be easy to update
It was actually the result of quite a lot of research and analysis of human machine interaction. Then we let “pretty” take over “functional”

I hate music streaming services and rather buy the songs to play them locally on my smartphone.

This, but I'm a bit of a pirate myself
Yes! I use Plex and Plexamp to stream it all to my different devices.
Streaming services for discovery, then buy the best stuff to support the artists.
Also need to download mp3/flac/wav/whatever for sampling, remixing, and DJing. Or to put on a usb to leave in my car 🙂
Don't listen to anything on my phone but definitely agreed, I much prefer having the songs on my computer and using ncmpcpp to play them (and with a cool visualiser too).

Microservices and general "everything in the cloud" sentiment is stupid, it has ridiculous oerformance overheads and adds single points of failure that can easily prevent half the world from functioning.

I agree and I hate it. As much as possible I want to work with files locally.
I will disagree on microservices. I think it gets used for things that don't really require it like anything that gets hype, it gets overused. But I will give you example of exactly why and how it can be used correctly.
My company was early on the Kubernetes bandwagon. Before Amazon and Google provided hosted Kubernetes solutions, I had to write and bootstrap clusters automatically.
We had all our microservices deployed on k8s when covid hit. We went from about 4000k visitors/hour to 400,000k visitors an hour. This happened over a single week. k8s scaled out perfectly, our services scaled out perfectly and we had zero hiccups or downtime. We didn't have to do anything from an engineering perspective except increase our hard limits on the compute scale outs. During evening hours when load went down, the cluster would scale down.
If we were using a monolith application, we would have been really fucked. No way we could have scaled like that.

Advertisements shouldn't have anything sexual in them

- Easier solution: ban all advertisements
  The world would be so much prettier

Containerization seems overrated. I haven't really played with it much, but as far as I can tell, the way it's most commonly used is just static linking with extra steps and extra performance overhead. I can think of situations where containers would actually be useful, like running continuous integration builds for someone you don't entirely trust, but for just deploying a plain old application on a plain old server, I don't see the point of wrapping it in a container.

Mac OS 7 looked cool. So did Windows 95.

Phones are useful, but they're not a replacement for a PC.

I don't want to run everything in a web browser. Using a browser engine as a user interface (e.g. Electron) is fine, but don't make me log in to some web service just to make a blasted spreadsheet.

I want to store my files on my computer, not someone else's.

I don't like laptops. I'd much rather have a roomy PC case so I can easily open it up and change the components if I want. Easier to clean, too.

Idea is that you can have different apps that require different versions of dependency X, and that could stop you with traditional package managment, but would be OK with containers
Haven't seen macOS 7,but 100% agree on Windows 95. 2000 is better though.
Still can't believe someone actually believe they are
100% agree
Sometimes you just have 1 hour free, and that's not enough to go home, but too big to just kill it. That's when laptop is great. Also, sometimes going outside and do stuff feels better than doing it at home.
- Idea is that you can have different apps that require different versions of dependency X, and that could stop you with traditional package managment, but would be OK with containers
  That's what I mean by “static linking with extra steps”. This problem was already solved a very long time ago. You only get these version conflicts if your dependencies are dynamically linked, and you don't have to dynamically link your dependencies.
- In case you're curious, here's a browser-based emulator running Mac OS 7.1.

Tv was better 30/40 years ago. When TV became all marathons was when it all went to shit. There's no curated mix of video content outside of YouTube anymore and we're all worse because of it.

Also binge watching sucks. I never want to do anything for more than 2 hours in a row unless its sleeping.

Agreed. Anything designed to be binged is all filler no thriller.
I'll one-up the boomerness and say youtube ruined youtube
- I miss YouTube actually being YOU tube. It was originally supposed to be a place for the common person to post their videos and find an audience, but now it's devolved into YouTube Music, YouTube TV, and even regular YouTube is heavily dominated by for-profit, high production value full-time content creators. It's become just as commercialized as old TV was except that instead of commercials it's sponsorships and paid reviews even if you adblock away the actual ads. Everyone panders to YouTube's inane rules now because heaven forbid they get DEMONITIZED!

Every time a new technology comes out we think it's going to make our lives so much more simple, but what really happens is the expectations of what we should be capable of doing increase and as a result we take on more responsibilities. One example is cars. You can travel further now, right? Only, now it's normal to drive an hour to commute to work. Or now you have a wider area of travel you're expected to make to visit people you know.

My boomer opinion is that smartphones have done this in a big way. I'm expected now to be available 24/7 to respond to texts on a moments notice. Not responding looks rude. I've been in workplaces that had a culture of checking work messages on Teams on cellphones outside of hours (which I refuse to do). My friends will have long group messages that I'm expected to keep up with. All of this responsibility adds up to more stress than we had in a pre cellphone era. And that hasn't translated to better lives for us in the end. There are advantages and I appreciate many of the things our high tech era gives us. But part of me longs for that era where we just had to trust that people would show up to get togethers at the agreed upon times. When conversations were special because we didn't just have 24/7 access to each other. Where we had to decipher maps to take road trips. Where we were more present with each other. I was born in the 90's which puts me in a strange generation of people that only kind of remember what it was like before.

Nobody should be able to profit off boring industries. Utility (power, water, telephony (which includes internet), banking, insurance.

Cap the profits at an arbitrary number that keeps up with inflation and allows for expanding business basic needs like staffing and inventory. Large investments should be reviewed and approved by regulating bodies and monies allocated and investments must be met with progress goals that achieve the completion of the project in full. None of this "Thanks for the monies, lol bye" bullshit.

Emphatically agree. I'm not really anti-free-market, but in the absence of informed consumer choice, all you have is de facto monopolies.
- It's worse - they are natural monopolies. I don't need to run fiber to my house from 3 different ISPs any more than I want to run pipes from 3 different water supply companies. Utilities like electricity are already regulated with price controls and some semblance of democratic oversight. It's time that internet hookups are too.

I use an iPod and physical media for most of my music

Phone bad.

Like they're objectively pretty useful but I find the experience of using one to just kinda suck and I avoid it as much as I can. I'd much much rather use a laptop or ideally my desktop if that's at all possible. No idea how some people manage so much time using their phones

You shouldn't walk through people's yard.

I caught myself asking the neighbor kids not to play on my lawn, and it's occurred to me that I've actually reached that age (although I don't care about the grass, I just don't want to be liable for injury)

Most weed sucks now

I don't care that it has 30% THC, it feels bad

Real weed has curves (in the distribution of cannabinoids)!

As someone who likes a mild, relaxing high, I concur!

We don't need a meeting for everything. It could have been an email.

Sadly superfluous meetings is a time-honored corporate tradition across all age groups.

When contacting government or a service provider I want to call and talk to a human, dammit.

Modern [insert any art style] has gotten worst and worse!

(although truth be told, it's more of a millennial "90s cartoons/music/films were so much better" opinion)

The Beatles are an amazing band

Now that doesnt count as an answer to the question
No way is that a boomer opinion
- There's a lot of Beatles hate in younger Milennials/Gen Z. I assume it's based in general resentment towards Boomers and not actual music analysis.

I don't think this is a boomer opinion but I got called a boomer for it once so maybe it is idk:

I think online dating is shit and I don't mean it in a "It doesn't work for me" kinda way but I believe it's objectively shit. In an ever faster world that demands more and more flexibility from people that also extends to dating. It introduces a certain arbitrariness to romantic and sexual relationships. We now have dating apps that you can use to scroll through potential partners like a furniture catalog. It reduces people to a commodity and I hate being confronted with that. I believe it could in combination with the realities of late stage combination harm our ability to establish deep and meaningful connections to people.

It's literally what my mom warned me off 20 years ago and now I believe she was right.

The best music is from the 70s and 80s.

After 2000 there is no music but commercial crap.

I strongly recommend doing a deep dive into some genres over at Bandcamp if you haven't already.
I was of the same opinion for a while, but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if you check into the lesser known music corners.
- Indeed, popular music has become highly commercial, but music as a whole is popping off
- I second this, there are few gems hiding there, and even some newer bands, that aren't in the mainstream are making some nice tunes. Since I got off spotify and went old school, found like dozen bands that never knew existed.
ah yes because independent artists just stopped existing after 2000

Majority of the music today is just plain trash. I can't even bring myself to listen to these tracks

I feel like all fast food chain food has gone down hill from when a grew up. I remember Subway being pretty solid growing up, but now it's like a last resort road trip stop.

Sports video games peaked in the mid 2000s and are all garbage cash grabs now. They only make money because they have no competition (Madden is the only NFL game, 2K is the only NBA game, The Show is the only MLB game, etc).

They also take 15 minutes loading through their awful bloated menus just so you can play a game. Yeah sports games are awful these days and they used to be the games I played the most
NFL Blitz was mad fun
Sensible soccer was the GOAT.
- I'll take your Sensible Soccer and raise you Kick-off 2 (on the Amiga of course).

Kinda mid one, but Pokémon Black/White 2 were the last real games. After that, they started being too 3D and lost a lot of their charm, imo. Gen 3, 4 and 5 as well are so freaking good! Love Emerald in particular (best end-game!) <3

The only 3D Pokemon game I really enjoyed were the Gen 3 remakes. Granted those were the first Pokemon games I finished, but none of the 3D Pokemon games I've played since have felt as complete.
- Yeah I heard ORAS were pretty decent, and honestly would be the only 3D ones I'd like to try out, because I love gen 3 so much
Yeah, this is the one where I most feel like an out of touch boomer because I know people love the newer games. Honestly, like you say, the shift to 3d was such a massive turn off to me, it just doesn't look right
- Yeah, somehow there's something not Pokémon-y about them. Maybe it's just nostalgia speaking hehe, but the 2D ones had way more charm!

Making tech thinner and sleeker doesn't always make it better, I think devices that follow their function look great!

Doesn't mean there should be no product design, but don't try to hide things for the sake of hiding them, leave the screws visible, show off the internals, try to complement them!

I find incredibly strange that people think it's normal to walk around with earbuds in at all times. When did that become acceptable? (I know it's the release of the airpod, but still, wtf?)

I can't believe how many people I see with them in when they drive and ride their bikes.

Also looking at your phone while driving. How in the hell is that so common?

Theres a great theater near my house. Comfortable reclining and heated seats, plenty of leg space, nine screens and sounds. I watched The Batman there and I cannot imagine experiencing the movie in any other way.
Prices can still be pretty bad tho
In my opinion, theater movies are blurry. And I'm sure someone will come along and tell me why I'm wrong, but the 24 or 28 FPS thing needs to take a hike. Motion blur in movies is over-relied upon and looks bad on the big screen.
Half the problem is that people use either TV speakers or a cheap sound bar that completely ruins the experience

I know this opinion is wildly unpopular, but I think pirating is unethical. If you can’t afford something, or you disagree with spending money for it, then fine. Don’t watch that show/listen to that song/play that game. But the people who make things deserve to get paid. It’s not right to refuse to pay for something while also consuming that content. Many of the justifications for pirating just feel like entitlement to me.

What do you think about abandonware? Old games that companies never plan on selling anymore but won’t release them for free either?

I agree in 98% of cases. There are some cases (and this is splitting hairs so i apologize) where i'm fine with it. I think preservation for some near lost media that hasn't been purchasable for a long time (and maybe is tied to 30-40 year old hardware that isn't supported or buyable from the producing company anymore) i think is an exception i'm willing to make. This is particularly prevalent to older games that are tied to long defunct devices that aren't supported anymore like very old dos games.
But I'm also of the opinion those things shouldn't have to be "pirated" in the first place and if you haven't offered the ability to acquire it legally in decades it should fall into public domain.

"I grew up on this stuff." - any food that someone had as a child is now, likely, a bad thing.

I saw the new thing from Heinz which is like a Coke Remix machine but with dipping sauces, and the machine mixes it in front of you with a countdown and flashing lights. I envisioned a world where fast food places stop producing their own ketchup packets and just buy one of these giant machines because it's cheaper.

Hell no. I am not asking a robot to make me ketchup when you could just hand me ketchup packets.

Dude I don't wanna think about cleaning a machine like that... or rather the lack of cleaning....

When I listen to 100 gecs I just grit my teeth and smile, as if some Jehovah's Witness were proselytizing to me in my front door. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's very nice.

I like them but I get it when people don't like them. I describe their music like an ice cream brain freeze. It's something that's plain and pleasurable with all it's qualities pushed to the point of blowing out your senses. I like the grating overblown insanity but I understand it's not for everyone.

That OSes peaked with Windows XP.

I disagree, windows peaked with XP, Linux be popping off these days
- Peak was either Win2k or 7. XP was great, but only eventually. Most people forget what XP was like before SP2. And I was at the XP launch event lol

There seems to have been a huge drop off and loss of knowledge related to retailer websites. For some reason if you want to buy something at all popular, you need to compete simply to get an order in. There is no longer the concept of back order or first-come first-serve, and it’s maddening. Discovering products has never been worse than it is now. ~~___~~

Physical media is superior. Don't get me wrong, I love the convince of being able to stream any song I want, whenever, from my phone. But you don't actually own that music, not even the digital music you bought.

So having that physical backup is good. But also, it's just a fundamentally different experience, to have to put a record on a turntable, or a tape in a cassette deck, and listen to an album from back to front.

Netflix’s disc-by-mail service is better and more convenient than streaming in basically every way. Instead of having to look for the films/shows I want to watch on various streaming services only to find out they’re not streaming anywhere, or on some obscure/expensive service, I can be confident that if they’ve had a physical release, they’re probably in Netflix’s catalog of 100,000 titles on Blu-Ray or DVD. The I can just add it to my queue, and movies will show up. Then when it’s time to watch a movie, I don’t have to waste time mindlessly scrolling my trying to find something to watch, I just pop the disc in the player. Easy. It’s really a shame that it’s going away. My public library has a massive DVD collection that I’ll probably use, but they’re lacking in Blu-Ray discs, and nothing beats the convenience of having the discs come right to your home.

Boomer opinions:

Stop being so loud.
Get off my lawn and please leave me alone.
I work in tech, but sometimes tech is added to things needlessly. I just want my washing machine to be a washing machine. I'm tired of being the product.
Silicon valley's "disruptors" are usually full of shit. The vast majority of the time: it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Don't tell me what to do with my land if you're not willing to pay my taxes (or if you don't have good ecological reasons). I'll paint my shudders whatever color I want to.
Bring back the damn knobs, buttons, and switches in my car. I don't need more touchscreens.

On the other hand...

I recognize that the way I feel and some of the opinions I have are based on a context I grew up with that may no longer exist - or at least it may not exist in the form it once did. I recognize how I see things may die with me and my peers, and that's ok. It's a sad truth, but truth, nonetheless.

On the gripping hand, they were right - the Ringworld would fall into the sun, but after books 3/4 of that series, it would have been a blessing if nobody ever brought a single one of its attitude jets back home.

Notifications fucking suck, if it isn't either my alarm or my grandma's emergency button, my phone ain't gonna do a damn thing to alert me.

Now, I fart in public and really don't care. It's liberating.