I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)
Roku boots: 10 seconds
Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds
Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries)
Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds
Select profile: 3 seconds
Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in
Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)
Start and buffering: 5-10 seconds
Ad: 20-40 seconds (depending on platform)
And that's all if you're concentrating on getting through it and the device isn't a laggy UI toxic waste dump. Some TVs you have to press each button and wait for each one to register.
At least there isn't an FBI copyright warning at the start I suppose (when you don't live in the US).
Except, anything written with a large JavaScript framework is allowed to be slow. In fact slow as syrup is strongly encouraged. To prove it just ask the developers. Mention it could be 8-50x faster just by not using their favorite framework and note the response. Even better, show them a proof of concept and take note of their unemotional objectivity.
Constructive reply: What would be an approach to writing a large web frontend (large as in, many pages and controls) without using a large framework?
I'm asking this because I know how to do it in React but also how to do it "the old jQuery way" (or equivalently, using today's standardized builtins). Productivity is easily 100x larger with React.
edit: Ideally, together with a link to an example open-source application that does it that way, to understand how it works and feels at (code) scale.
I have explained this countless times. It rarely sinks in and quite often is met with hostility, so I don't bother any more. The problem is simple: its where people stake their career. Do they build their career upon writing original applications or upon using a tool? This difference is rather extreme.
By the way, without React shouldn't default to jQuery. If that is your perspective of reality you are already at the maxim of your potential.
I never claimed it does. I stated my experience to give context for my question for other solutions than React.
> The problem is simple: its where people stake their career
I meant my question to be about building a large frontend without a large framework, purely in technical terms. This has nothing to do with career choices.
My experience is with this: https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr (what I currently work on is quite similar, but it's not open source).
It works fine. Clients don't complain about the interface. The project has been going on for 20 years or so now, and doesn't need big refactors every time a dependency gets updated because it avoids dependencies.
This is embodiment of worse (for the customer) is better (for the business) adage.
This is a new and interesting insight to me. Can you please elaborate it a bit further, if you wish?
also word, excel, ...
(which might actually be a large javascript framework on azure nowadays)
My TCL TV runs Android/Google TV, wakes from standby in 2s while also waking the surround in ~3s via HDMI CEC (and I don't need to hear anything until I've chosen something to play) so really it only take me 2s before I can start to open a streaming app (via a button on my remote) vs your 16s to get to the same point.
It's the choosing what to play that's the slow bit for me - every app puts what you were last watching in a different place, and not all apps notify Google TV so its own attempt at letting you resume is incomplete...
It also frustrates me that profiles streaming apps don't link to profiles for the OS (e.g. Google TV) - seems obvious to me that by now they should all be seamlessly linked together in a way that delivers the most personalised experience, instead of muddling up everyone's profiles and watch history!
So it's been a long time since I had to wrestle with the TV's built-in OS.
I just use the pleasant UI of the FireTV Stick to watch Netflix, Prime, Disney+, etc. on that decade+ old TV. That FireTV becomes sluggish if I keep multiple apps open, so I have learnt to exit out of an app before switching to the new one.
I may get a new FireTV stick this year, rather than splurging for a new TV, since the old TV is still doing well.
As the Americans say: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
My LG TV is more than a decade old (non-smart LED TV), the FireTV stick is around 6 years old.
But apart from the FireTV stick (whose remote controls the TV too) taking 15 seconds for a cold start (the TV tends to go to deep sleep mode after idle for long time or when switched off via remote), or 5 seconds for a warm start, the FireTV GUI is quite snappy thereafter (I can briskly move the cursor/selection across icons/thumbnails, menus and apps), till I switch it off again. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Discovery+, Apple TV - they all work well on this old setup.
You may want to uninstall some apps on the FireTV stick to give it some breathing space when it runs.
Try the FireTV stick on a PC monitor having HDMI input. If you face same issues there, then it may be time to buy a new FireTV stick or Chromecast, or splurge for a new smart TV.
Which of the two devices/companies is getting enshittified quicker?
The chromecast is much cheaper, so that’s a straight win.
Actually it is very much needed to say that. Manufacturers get away with crappy unbearably slow UIs even on expensive TVs because it's not something that gets enough consideration by reviewers or indeed buyers.
lol, it's not money. It's like windows 7 vs 11. each new generation of TVs have more intrusive bloated UIs.
I thought that smart tv native usage was for gen. pop. only. Its been an ongoing conversation on this site for years at this point.
Or it could be you’re using some niche service that has its own issues.
Even switching between 2 series in my currently watching list can take an exceedingly long time. Sometimes I try to switch back and forth to force and update and it feels like I’m back on 56K.
The Apple TV HD is old, technically legacy, but still supports tvOS 26. I have an Apple TV 4K in the house as well, which I’ve been meaning to migrate to, to see if it’s any better. But the HD works fine for pretty much everything else. Peacock as a service seems to have an extreme amount of lag.
The way developers use the UI toolkit that the Apple TV provides also seems to tend towards apps where it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection, which is of course _the_ critical challenge.
Apple left a large generational gap because they kept selling the HD for many years (until 2022) as an entry-level device alongside much more capable 4K models.
> ”it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection”
Yes, based on my observation this seems to be one of the biggest challenges people face with the AppleTV interface, along with accidentally changing the selection when they try to select it (because of the sensitive touch controls on the remote).
I don't think is the fault of the 3rd party devs, Apple seemed to start this and other devs followed their example.
I tend to make a small circle with my thumb in the center of the select button, or just slightly move it back and forth, to see what thing on the screen starts moving with me.
On an older Roku Ultra Peacock also isn't great but not nearly as bad as you describe - maybe they just ported over their Roku version somehow and it has horrible Apple TV performance.
Anecdotally I have heard the newer Nvidia Shields to be very fast
I hooked Peacock to the Apple TV app, and while it shows my next playing episode, launching from the Apple TV app just launches the Peacock app, which feels rather pointless.
Technically, you could also configure the pihole to allow the specific hosts that the Paramount+ app needs to access. However, I found that there were many hosts, and they also change from time to time, so it can be annoying to keep them updated when the app starts crashing again.
And don't even get me started on the times where the app opens and plays OK. Then you go to ff/rw and all it will let you do is pause. So you have to re-start the app to get control. Then it forgets where you are.
And, of course, the crashes. I don't think I've ever seen an app crash this much. It makes me very worried for the codebase.
Later I subscribed to paramount+ via amazon, and said goodbye to the glitches.
I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though, responsiveness being one of them.
Even a second lag is insane. I don't understand how people tolerate that.
I Piholed mine with an edge router and redirected port 53 traffic that didn’t come from the Pihole, back to the Pihole with a script.
However I’ve upgraded to a Dream machine pro, and haven’t worked out how to do that so just removed it from having any network access.
And that’s assuming the apps are well written, which they are not.
Absolutely kills me.
No one else in the house notices when sound is from the shitbox tv speakers rather than the soundbar. It’s a high end Sony, and it’s sound quality is shameful.
Can we sacrifice a few cm of thinness and have some sound?
That would let them glean information about you every time you use said app.
You’re still getting around this with a 3rd party device like an Apple TV for the most part but if it’s required to even turn it off or on it’ll be enough to sync any metadata that it holds
The tv remote sensor stopped working (and broke again after servicing), so now the only way to use the TV is by the LG app on my phone.. which asks for permissions to Nearby Devices, Location, Camera, Microphone, Notifications, Phone, Music&Audio...
I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.
It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)
Maybe a decade or two ago, but I looked into this last year, and the prices were just about the same.
Ticks all my other boxes though, powers on as soon as my finger leaves the button on the remote, same with input switching and any other interactions with the OSD. Its completely braindead, just how I like it.
Oh, they also sent me the model with the touch digitizer installed. So I've got capacitive touch and pen input, it has a USB-B port on the side to connect to a computer.
Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.
I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.
A much more fair retort is that an extra device to output video costs more, though I might argue that if you don't use the TV's built in system the manufacturer is losing ad revenue. So if you only use it as a normal TV you kinda are buying it subsidized by everyone else watching ads on theirs.
That way you can completely use it like a monitor instead of a TV.
I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.
You know, for your own protection of course. You wouldn't want to miss out on exciting content recommendation features and AI integration! Your life isn't complete without a constant guided tour of all the wonderful things surveillance capitalism has to offer, after all.
The only issue I ever had was Google adding ads to the front page of the Android TV launcher. Easily fixed by using a different launcher.
I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3 years after we started buying it (from korean car makers, really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).
Ha! The Sharp color TV here in the kitchen is now nearly 48 years old (bought in 1978) and still functions well but with the addition of a set top box/PVR although its remote control has been repaired many times (but the TV itself has never needed maintenance).
Other flat screen TVs have no internet access or are used monitor style with separate STBs/PVRs. As I mentioned on HN some weeks ago, if the trend continues and manufacturers booby-trap sets into planned obsolescence, I'll buy only monitors and connect them via HDMI to a TV feed.
My ancient Sharp TV shouts at me that these days there's something terribly wrong with domestic electronic appliances.
I have BT TV (https://www.bt.com/help/tv/learn-about-tv/bt-tv-boxes) and the UI is painfully slow at times (UI response to a button press of 10-20 seconds), searching is horribly slow.
Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive (probably Sky Stream).
I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed you to switch back and forth between two channels with a single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it any more).
The mute button is the next best thing.
Advertisements become much less irritating when silenced. I'm surprised so few people appear to mute advert breaks.
It really winds up one family member who works in TV advertising, so that's a bonus.
I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles, etc.
As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the TV’s UI remains responsive.
I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou, but haven’t run into that issue with LG or, in more recent years, Hisense.
This is how most people use their TVs these days (despite the issues with it). It's reasonable and fair to ask for a better experience.
Because if the answer is "not" then complaining about how your TV performs whilst stubbornly allowing it to download whatever updates it likes and stubbornly refusing to buy one additional device (like an Apple TV or a Firestick) to plug into it is kind of dumb, don't you think? Ornery even?
I agree that it is reasonable and fair to ask for a better experience but TV manufacturers have already made it abundantly clear, over the last decade and a half of smart TVs, that they don't give a damn what people like you and I think about how our TVs work, or that we get pissed off when they slow them down with bloatware and ads.
So the logical choice is to Not. Bloody. Let Them.
Literally, buy one other device - whatever suits your needs best (and they're all compact little things, not like the big ugly set top boxes of years gone by) - and your TV experience will immediately be significantly better.
Once you've set it up you won't even need two remotes: your Apple TV, or whatever, will turn the TV on and off for you, and control the volume, so you'll only need the remote for your it (or whatever device you've chosen).
The only time you'd need a second remote is if you have a cable or satellite box, or you're the kind of person who also has 7 games consoles of varying vintages and a bluray player plugged into your TV as well (which it doesn't sound like you have). We only watch on demand services so, if I weren't a fan of retrogames, we could get away with just the Apple TV and one remote. (The Bluray player barely sees any use, but I keep it around because we do still have some Blurays and DVDs for stuff that we really like and don't want to be beholden to streaming services for.)
(I should say, another alternative is to set up something like Pihole to filter the ads out, but that still doesn't help with crappy updates that slow your TV down. And if you use apps on your TV and don't keep them up to date, eventually they'll stop working, which isn't ideal either. Hence, again, back to the idea of a device to "drive" the TV, which runs the apps you want.)
No, I have plenty of other devices that update and remain useable. So do you.
I would describe your attitude that way though.
Sure, but your TV doesn’t behave like that and it won’t behave like that so why does it make sense to treat it as though it will?
"Wow"! we said. This is the future. Having to reboot the TV.
These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.
Also experienced a Samsung TV at an Airbnb once that was insanely slow - turns out it had very little storage space to begin with and was literally at 0 remaining. Deleted a few larger apps and reinstalled the remaining and it sped up a lot once it had some cache to work with.
It was the bad update that made videos start playing as soon as you selected them, instead of going to the information page. I get the impression I wasn't the only person who complained; I suspect that any manager who sat down to watch TV that night probably twisted a few arms.
It's an LG 43UD79-B. According to LG's site[0], it's discontinued. I got it from Costco in 2017 for $550, but it was sold many places at the time.
Doing a quick glance at LG's current lineup, there isn't an obvious successor.
It looks like Amazon has 1 person selling it used[1], but in 6/10 condition and no remote, for double the price of new... While it looks the remote is also being sold places, it's pretty useless without the remote. The seller has sketchy ratings as well, I'd stay away.
[0] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-43UD79-B-4k-uhd-led-monito...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-LED-lit-Monitor-43UD79...
It never is, it won’t ever again be in Europe. But it checks. And lags. And then whatever you chose in the menu is not what it selected.
Every. Single. Time. Going to settings makes me wince.
Every TV I have interacted with in recent years is slow and terrible, except for really old ones. The TVs are the problem, and we shouldn't be making excuses for that.
To make matters worse, the cable box remote works via Bluetooth, the TV remote over IR, so getting any universal remote that works with both AND is simple seems a difficult prospect.
What are people even doing for universal remotes these days? Our household is equipped with Logitech Harmony remotes, which are no longer being made, and I dread the day they stop working.
Plus kids have a special motivation, much more urgent, in getting to know how to work that little plastic box full of buttons.
The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.
I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.
Back with Windows 3.11, it came with a paper thick manual telling you how to use the OS. You could read it, and understand it, and you only had to learn how to use the mouse (the difference between right-click and left-click, and how to double-click fast enough), and also knew that scrollbars looked like scrollbars at all times, buttons behaved a certain way at all times, and UI elements were visible and behaved the same at all times.
I think we've lost that with modern UIs and it's a shame.
One other thing a lot of older people learn is that if they don't want to deal with something they can feign helplessness and someone else will jump in and do it for them.
Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery.
I've lived in places where the power practically never went out, never experienced undervolt situations, etc. I've then lived less than a mile away from the same place and experienced seemingly monthly issues of all the clocks being reset at random times when I come home. Living closer to things like hospitals, fire stations, emergency operations centers, etc. seem to give the best indication of power reliability, at least from my personal experiences.
But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXQqVMt6SE
The last couple of VCRs we owned even had automatic time setting. It read extra data in the vertical blanking interval from our local PBS station.
I was surprised that kind of thing wasn't much more common earlier - it wasn't really any new tech breakthroughs so much as someone just going to the effort of building it.
who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their own judgement.
I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover).
Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.
The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.
Because with analog signals the tuner just had to tune to the correct frequency and at the next vertical blank sync pulse on the video signal the display could begin drawing the picture.
With digital, the tuner has to tune to the correct frequency, then the digital decoder has to sync with the transport stream (fairly quick as TS packets are fairly small) then it has to start watching for a key frame (because without a keyframe the decoded images would appear to be static) and depending upon the compression settings from the transmitter, keyframes might only be transmitted every few seconds, so there's a multi-second wait for the next keyframe to arrive, then the display can start drawing the pictures.
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of round-tripping going on with the streaming services I use through my dongle. They're always slow to both start the app and to start any actual streaming.
I found it amusing the other year when a youngster knew what the save button was, and recognised it, but didn't know what it was - a floppy disk (as he'd never seen one).
Modern Samsung TV are also awful, there's no longer a source button on the remote, so you have to use their terrible UI to navigate to the bottom of the screen, guess which input you want, which takes 10 - 15 seconds. If you can find it in their horribly busy UI.
Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g., "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I say "channel 4".
I don't know how well this works on the newest models because I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically for TV voice control.
If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn the TV on if it is not on).
[1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you said was in Russian too).
For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not translating correctly.
This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now, lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.
The ‘tv remote as a cursor’ is rage inducing.
The AppleTV remote (current, not previous gen) is the least bad system I’ve come across.
I had plans to build something that for the TV, but having kids means I never had the time. And honestly, that might not have been such a bad thing since it made setting limits easier. I was able to teach my kid to turn the TV off when she was fairly young (and pause more recently), which seems to be enough.
I think that's ok, as he actually would get a lot more than 10 minutes of use out of it, and its great to pay the creators while not having to worry about ads manipulating my kid. But it highlights how expectations for the pricing of audio/video content has changed (probably for the worse)... for me at least.
The concept is great - RFID as a replacement for cassette audiobooks (with fewer storage limitations!).
I do wish it integrated better with sources of free audiobooks. The Libby app gets us access to a lot of audiobooks through the public library, many of which are not even available for purchase through the Yoto player. We can only use it to play them for him as a Bluetooth speaker from our phones, which removes a lot of the utility of the player (he can't navigate chapters, we can't set a sleep timer, we can't use our phones for other things).
The concept is great though and the specific product, walled content garden notwithstanding, has been a net win for us.
Mainly (shamefully) "Simply remove the DRM" is doing some work in your sentence. We just, uh, haven't gotten together the executive function to figure out how to do it with the Libby app on the iPhone. As a Hacker News poster I want to be the type of person who figures this out. But, I have not.
For Christmas, we got several members of our extended family to read their favourite story book into a voice memo on our phone(s). We set up a blank Yoto card with all those stories, and with custom icons.
It was a great stocking stuffer for our toddler, and very cute to hear him call out who is reading :)
Adding to the plethora of good ideas here: My wife bought these hanging tabs to stick onto the cards[1], and then strings a keycable[2] through them so my son has groups of them together. Yoto makes folding binders for them as well, but the keycable method seems to be a bit easier for our 5yo to handle.
You do have to watch out for Short content, but if you were buying audiobooks on Audible, you’d have the same issue .
If you do go down this route, I found that Plex offered the best deep-linking functionality and would wrap all of your content with that... but it was still somewhat unreliable.
Honestly that was the biggest extra feature for us, we quickly exhausted all the Yoto store content that appealed, and weren't into any of the big franchise content (except a pleasantly surprising read of Pixar's "Cars") or joining the Yoto club.
And second the blank/customizable cards, that's what 80% of our cards are and my daughter loves helping track down and extract content. Biggest hits for her have been Roald Dahl and random science stuff.
Also David Tennant reading the How To Train Your Dragon series. He is a superb reader with an amazing range. Before he hit the big time with Dr Who he did a lot of radio.
We've also had family members record stories and I've put them onto cards. We gave my son a dictaphone to record his own stuff. He would do great long sagas of mayhem and battle, but he's lost interest in recent months.
I expect there are big benefits to portability, but I'm okay with not having them.
Is there anything else I'm missing?
I had a listen to Yoto Daily, and it's nice! https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/yotodaily
The relaxing music plays the same track, or varies it? I guess it's on for ~20 mins or so?
The audio quality itself is top notch, often talented and well known voice actors, and its all free, except the cost of the blank yoto card.
At least the older model. Don't know about their latest model with gaming and everything.
Tonies just seem like such a horribly bad deal: The actual content is content that the family already pays for twice because my wife pays for Spotify and I pay for YouTube Premium, and the content on those Tonies is actually on the streaming services as well. So, we'd end up paying for the same content a third time.
Moreover, we'd lock ourselves into a closed cloud. If the Tonie company goes out of business, Tonies will no longer work.
One of the nice things about a cassette player is that it seamlessly transitions the kid into enjoying the culture of the grown-ups. I can remember how exciting it felt as a kid when I started borrowing my dad's music and enjoying that on my Fisher Price. -- With the Tonies, you're locked into whatever content the content-mafia deems appropriate for toddlers.
There are also all the arguments pertaining to streaming vs. physical media in general that play into this, which I won't repeat here. I'll just say that children's literature is consistently a target for political influence on culture, and cloud-based centralisation makes it more vulnerable to that sort of influence -- “Vote for me, and there will be no more Taka-Tuka Land for Pippi Longstocking! That's so offensive to ... uhm ... whoever (Polynesians, I guess? Africans?) And what about that shy lion that needs to learn to roar, so the other animals will take him seriously? Toxic masculinity!”
I don't know the particulars of what the Tonie system looks like from a content creator perspective, but I certainly find it peculiar that Tonies lean heavily in the direction of Disney content. The German language is not exactly the best market for content creators. So, I think we should support our own content creators as well as we can to avoid a situation where the only kind of culture we have is translations of whatever Disney cooks up in the Anglosphere.
And the blank/creative Tonies are not a counterargument to the above because I'd expect there to be upload filters for copyrighted content and the like (or there soon will be if there isn't already).
If you desperately need a distraction, PBS shows are less bad. A few moments of pacification may be worth not disturbing the other airline travelers.
Daniel Tiger may be helpful to parents too. Interacting with children is not intuitive. Techniques from PBS shows have helped me. For example, singing to kids about trying food is move effective than a well reasoned monologue.
1. Do not have children.
2. Have a strong support network.
3. Have their partner or professional handle most aspects of child raising and have a warped understanding of dealing with a precocious and active toddler.
It's great that some folks have kids that like books and keep themselves busy. It's not so great that their parents think that is the reality most parents enjoy.
I agree with the overall sentiment. Too much screen time is bad. Kids need to get out and play, indoors or out. In our house, it's a lot of biking and playing with friends outside, Legos, Brio, Magnatiles, matchbox cars, or just crafts.
But sometimes they're frazzled, out of sorts, and would benefit from just being able to sit and chill.
So we'll put on something for him that we're comfortable with. Tumble Leaf, Blaze & The Monster Machines, Trash Truck, or the occasional Ghibli movie.
We do not give him a tablet or other portable device. He sits and watches on the couch, we set a expectation, and stick to that.
I think controlling the device is important. Keeping the screen as something we control and not something he carries around seems to allow us better control and helps him understand the limits in play. 90% of the time, we have no fuss.
And it's not bad. In moderation, TV can be just fine. Often it genuinely helps him soothe and relax (Especially if he's been really active and engaged all day), and as you said, helps us get something done. Two episodes of one of his favorite shows is great to help him unwind while we're making dinner.
But we keep time/episode limits as well, and that seems to keep things in balance along with the aforementioned things.
It's a missed opportunity.
40 years ago my parents had a close friend with a young and irresponsible wife who raised their child in front of a TV. At 4 years old the child could barely speak. My parents began babysitting and helping socialize her. Now she's a successful businessperson herself and is doing quite well in life.
Studies on the impact of media on children are informative but don't lose sight of the fact that kids are adaptable and will overcome most kinds of sub-optimal upbringing.
But that was once a day, during weekdays, and no re-runs. Watching and re-watching Sesame Street clips back to back is IMO just as brainrotty to kids as the other brainrot going on at the moment.
Don't get me wrong, I think screen time can definitely be a problem. I just think it mostly comes down to whether or not the screen time is at the expense of something else more constructive.
Mine just turned 3. She watches YouTube kids - navigates the TV just fine and makes her own choices. She’s also a dab hand at platformer games - I didn’t think I’d have someone to play Mario with just her.
But - and it’s a big but - she spends 95% of her time doing something else, be it exploring outdoors, playing with duplo/lego, art, looking at books, telling stories with her toys, whatever.
For her, TV and games are just another thing to do, and she picks them up and puts them down like anything else.
The other problem arises at the other end of the spectrum. For me, TV was verboten until I was at least 8 or 9 years old - and when I was finally allowed that forbidden fruit I gorged myself.
I'd cry too if you showed me a bright colorful shiny fun new thing and then took it away after only two minutes.
Part of what you're seeing is the novelty. There does seem to be something about screens, but it's possible to have healthy screen habits as a young child. My 3 year old enjoyed a 25-minute episode of Wild Kratts on PBS Kids on our TV while we finished packing up for a trip to the aquarium today. No problems turning it off once the episode was over and it was time to go. It's not his first time watching TV though.
It's not to say we never have any complaints over this, but when we do, it's rare and usually because something else is amiss (hungry, frazzled, tired).
But most instances it's like last night, where we were clear that we had time for two episodes of Tumble Leaf before dinner. At the end of the second one he announced "last one!" and got up off the couch as we picked up the remote.
I think it's quite important to introduce these addictive things into their lives, in a way that teach how to enjoy them carefully and in small chunks.
In an animation movie somebody might hit somebody else, which appears funny to an adult. A child might just take this as normal behaviour and repeats it the next time she sees somebody and doesn't understand why it's not funny.
Understanding the real world is difficult enough for her.
My screensaver (animated colours) is problematic. Watching a video of herself or the grandparents on the smartphone can be problematic as well, but at least they are typically only a few seconds.
So yes, it's a thing of the medium. But most media for kids are colourful, highly animated, childlike characters and voices. Optimized to catch their attention for a long time.
Also, the media for kids are barely matching the level of the kids state of knowledge. I use words she understands describing things she asks me about, a TV show never does that.
They treat it like a drug and lose all emotional regulation. I don't believe all screen time is bad, but it is something you have to teach them to regulate and 3 year olds and younger are just bad at regulating emotion in general. Teaching them to do this is just part of parenting. One of the most important things we can teach our kids is that it is okay to be bored. In fact it is great to be bored sometimes.
On the other hand, being a parent is hard and keeping your sanity is important in order to be a good parent. So if it helps you be a better parent all other times, it could be worth it.
The issue is when screens are used to in place of parenting. Parents using it as a way to fuel their own screen addiction.
On the other hand, for me airplanes are a special case and all rules go out the window to help keep the kid calm.
As a child I used to hate the feeling of boredom, knowing that I could be doing something I wanted to do. As an adult I am hardly ever bored, and it’s a strict improvement, never have I ever found myself wishing I could just go back to being bored.
Boredom is such a negative emotion that learning to manage it effectively becomes an essential life skill. Learning to set yourself up for success / be prepared required forethought to anticipate the possibility of boredom and come prepared to deal with it. Acting out on boredom is childish, learning to keep yourself occupied so you don’t become bored is mature.
You <---> The point
Being bored is what inspires a kid to daydream for themselves and/or get off their arse and try something new.
Being constantly "entertained" by a TV or fondle slab is an anathema to creativity and independent thought. For children and adults.
For the record, I've also told my daughter that "boredom is good for her", but this is clarifying my thinking on it.
It's a good idea to be aware of every form of media children consume.
- Ethylene Glycol -- Antifreeze that is toxic.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/propylene-glycol#TOC_TI...
it removes stimulation and interaction with the environment and replaces it with sedentary and no physical interactions.
While the exact reasons are not common knowledge, knowing TV is bad for toddlers is.
Is that true? The American Association of Pediatrics doesn't list that as a concern on their page "Health Effects Of Young Kids Being On Screens Too Long" (which is focused on children aged 2-11). Do you have a source I could review for that claim?
https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/cente...
---
(The AAP page about media recommendations for 0-2 also doesn't say anything about eye-development, but _does_ recommend entirely against screen-time for that age-group except for video conversations with people)
https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/cente...
My point is, watching an educational tv program like PBS for 30 minutes in the evening will not be the cause for your child wearing glasses.
The biggest predictor of good vision from the scientific studies is lots of outdoor time. This is most important from ages 6 to 11.
https://www.myopiaprofile.com/articles/how-outdoor-time-infl...
and most TV is not great for people. there is a reason depression and anxiety correlate with TV time
The current rule is video games require 1 minute of exercise for one minute of usage. This is a self regulating time limit that has worked well.
- 0 to 3 years: Ideally, no screen time at all. If media is used, then only in very short intervals and not every day.
- 4 to 5 years: Up to half an hour of screen time per day.
- 6 to 9 years: Up to one hour of screen time per day.
- For older children aged 10 and above, it is advisable to agree on a weekly time allowance.
I agree with the 6-9 years old tv time. It is about what we did. But the 4-5 years? I know all my friends learned the most from tv this way. I did not because we didn’t have cable. We watched pbs.
[1] kid loves trucks and garbage trucks and trains, and so for a while it was fun to pull up a video of real life trucks and trains and watch them and talk about them. We'd read a book about trucks. He'd point and say, "what's that do," and I'd explain, then say, "wait! I can show you." Which was fun, until it became triggering.
was sort of a crutch for a sick kid or when things were slammed (e.g. kid 2 or 3 was also sick or we were otherwise busy) but we had to limit them heavily.
we also made the mistake of playing her the soundtracks, which ended up with listening to Aladdin or Frozen on repeat. All told not bad music compared to the drek they're putting out on YT now...
I believe a balance of all mediums is healthy. I look forward to introducing video games to them.
They re-enact fun/positive stuff from shows and don't get locked in or desperate for TV. Seems to work for us.
I don't know, I would have just have the kid get off their seat in between shows and walk up to the TV with drive attached and change disks there. Very similar to how you had to change VHS tapes.
Unless, of course, the above was just an excuse to do some tinkering, then it's fine and fun.
The plus is that you get higher quality video and don't have to press the play and rewind button, but the disks are easier to lose/break (outside of the player).
The real benefit (outside of being a fun project for a certain type of parent) is having a curated library of shows for kids that they can use themselves.
Well, the disks here are just for fun: they just tell the player which of the stored movies to actually play.
I think the portability / battery-drivenness is really just to ensure that the drive doesn’t have a cable that could break something if it were yanked on.
I’ve always wondered what people are doing to them? Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe I was just careful with them. Maybe I don’t remember the ones that failed.
I don’t think kids are less careful now, although being screamed at for making the CD or record skip was probably a deterrent.
Lots of kids will handle them however they want. They'll pick them up with greasy, sticky hands right on the media section. They won't necessarily care about ensuring they're properly in the drive tray. They'll jam all kinds of things into the drive slots. They'll drop them on the floor and step on them, toss them in a toy box when told to clean their room, etc.
Obviously not all kids will be this way, but many will.
Like you, it never occurred to me that I can also just use specific DVDs or CDs as hooks for videos to be streamed, or media downloaded on a hard drive. So that suddenly makes the whole project a lot more interesting, and possibly easier too.
Buying a large pack of burnable DVDs is a lot cheaper and sustainable than using SD-cards like other commenters suggested.
In general I think it's a very American thing, and considering the education problem the US suffers from, probably explains a part of that. Most other countries have very limited amount of homeschooling even allowed, because of all the drawbacks with it.
Good point, it was superfluous info. It's how I found out about it
As a father I can't imagine ever leaving a 3-year-old alone with media so they can be 'independent'. If for no other reason, that's an age and developmental stage where media should be almost nonexistent in their lives.
The same way you might say to a kid, "pick out the book you want me to read to you off the shelf" this is something like, pick the video we are going to watch together.
Besides, non-interactive, low-stimulation media with a plot line and simple dialog is not on the same level as giving your child a tablet and letting them have at it.
My real concern with this project is the amount of time the builder spent away from his children. Now I get it that some folks(dads on the spectrum?) might feel their best contribution to their child's development stems from something they build in the lab but your children are only young for such a short period and taking time away from them to build a custom electronic solution seems narrowminded and selfish.
A good option would be to have the same data printed as QR codes in labels glued to small domino sized wood blocks that could be inserted in a slot in a box and read by a cheap camera module.
The article points out there is a useful lesson in accidentally destroying/losing a physical object in the way that floppies or VHS tapes were easy to accidentally destroy and taught young childhood lessons. QR codes are a bit harder to destroy, which can be a benefit, but also loses this tiny lesson.
It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
Even if the price were to double, I suspect that someone with the skills to make this has a sufficiently well paying job that the price of a hundred disks per year would not be a problem.
As far as I can tell, they are not.
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...
Interesting little read I fell into while looking this up!
Yes, it is not efficient, but physical media looks to like it kind of meet some higher levels of needs in the Maslow hierarchy. It is ergonomic, it is human, it is tangible, countable. It is embodied in a world that is less and less embodied by the day.
For my toddler, I've started the process of hooking up my TV with a Mac Mini, Broadlink RF dongle, and a Stream Deck. I'm using a python library to control the stream deck.
I'm configuring the buttons to play her favorite shows with jellyfin. End goal is to create a jukebox for her favorite shows/movies/music. Only thing I have it wired to do right now is play fart noises.
Bonus: it is an arts and crafts project to put on the stickers for the cards.
One thing I notice with kids is they think everything is already in a device, which is not true at all, same for the internet always being available.
I see DVDs etc coming back into popularity for kids now too, because they can control and make it play, instead of fighting a youtube algorithm that is obesses with getting them to play the next video. Streaming platforms are the same and they will be leaving my life if I can't manage how they are to be used.
That combined with Youtube not allowing me to add youtube kids videos to a playlist however I wish (premium account or not) has me looking elsewhere.
Tip: it's much quicker to read the serial number of the RFID card and rename the MP3 than it is to program the MP3 name to the card!
(My partner and I are building one for our daughter)
Depending on the SD card formatting, perhaps a nice big folder of symlinks.
Unfortunately, it takes a fair bit of time and skill with microelectronics and fabrication to build these things.
My 7 year old has figured out the Roku app pretty well and can play stuff on PBS Kids or turn on the Nintendo Switch without any guidance. His 3 year old brother, not so much.
In particular what brought it to mind was a scene in one episode with a bunch of kids being shown how it works, same episode as the page's title image.
https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...
This remedy only requires a Raspberry Pi and an HDMI cable. Also, disconnect the TV from the Internet.
I wonder if he could have just polled the drive every five seconds?
And Tonies with little figures and games and such: https://us.tonies.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitClips
I remember being quite entranced with one that a neighbor had. It feels like a bit of a silly format now, but perhaps it's time for a resurgence.
For those talking about not using TV much, or that the UI is slow, my setup is a cheap projector hooked into my sound system and hooking up a laptop when streaming as necessary. Really dislike the smart anything that can be used in other ways for the reasons I already saw mentioned, but it is hard to lag something that has no Internet by looking for ads and updates for sure.
The kids love it and it's easy to use
I would say that feeling that we have everything at the tip of our fingers does not make our brains value it for some reason, but I'm not sure if it's true, and can't support it with any arguments others than anecdotical.
My child just turned 3, she can already turn on the NVIDIA Shield, go into Jellyfin and put a movie playing.
The movie is always Shrek or Jungle Book though, so I still didn’t have to put parental restrictions. But she can already choose them from the favorites list.
I built an app for managing a similar project based on something else linked here previously: https://github.com/Chuntttttt/TapeDeck/
I self-host it and it isn't exposed outside of my network, not sure if it'll work for anyone else.
Is the terminology correct though?
Looking at the showcased disks, in my youth we called these “stiffy disks” - owing to their stiff plastic casing.
We also had “floppy disks” - but these were larger (in size, albeit with less storage capacity) and floppier (the plastic case would bend easily).
I treasured my burgundy Dysan stiffy disk boxes!
so defs not a globally consistent usage of the term then?
judging by the article's authorship, i'm guessing denmark and US the same
so perhaps US and EU but not elsewhere?
This nomenclature could be a regional thing though (I'm from the US).
Are you also from the US like the other commenter on this sub-thread?
I guess that since it was a foreign word the physical connotation of the term was simply lost, and "a floppy" was just the disk that your computer used.
a marketing campaign for middle-aged men perhaps
Maybe we'll eventually get an AR os where you get to lean spatial reasoning instead of just floating screens. (Along side all the power tools, of course)
Both really tactile and if you don’t look after them then there is a cost/consequence
At least those are easier to acquire, and they can't get demagnetized :)
works fine, though my kids tended to toss it around.
fairly easy to get blanks and record an mp3 on there. got a few of grandma reading favorite books, which my daughter loved.
I feel seen
They must be _over_ 20 years old
Actually buying a new pack would probably have been a few years prior to that, they last a long time with only occasional use.
Does it play exactly one video?
It's of course not the nice way to do it, but the easy one I thiiink.
