Is this a common issue? I deleted mine around the same time. I recently moved to a small town where many of the restaurants and businesses use Facebook which kind of forced me back on. When I tried creating a new one the same thing happened, and there was no way of reversing this decision.
It's been said before but I do believe that most people generally believe the 'best era' was the time around when they started watching - likely high school or around then.
I've watched for 20 years, every era is the same and it's exactly as you describe. A couple decent skits and many that don't hit. The one difference I've found lately is many of the sketches are for a terminally online generation - Bowen Yang in particular leading the charge. As someone with no social media, those sketches go over my head but I can't really hate on it, as I just recognize that I'm getting old haha.
> I've watched for 20 years, every era is the same and it's exactly as you describe.
Virtually the entire time you've watched it has been the bad era. You're making generalizations about a show whose cultural relevance ended when you started watching. That show used to generate hit movies (and awful movies.) Of course, one has to consider that SNL suffered a loss of cultural ubiquity partially because of the internet breaking up the audience for all traditional outlets, but that show generated once generated culture. I never hear a reference to anything on it any more.
Last thing I remember that had juice was the Lonely Island songs like 15-20 years ago.
Respectfully, I never thought Lonely Island or Andy Samberg were funny. But consider them more “academic” humor because of the cultural significance. E.g. “Happy birthday to the ground” is a good/relevant line to know even if it’s not something that makes me laugh. Suppose I feel the same about SNL
in general too
Interesting opinions as someone from Europe who a) never watched a full episode b) never got the stuff when it was actually recent (1-2w) c) has been bombarded with, debatably really good, best-of/classic skits on youtube.
I'm just gonna leave this here: At least there still are some quotable or good skits, if I compare this to anything on German TV the last 20 years.. there's still so much better stuff in it.
They seem to be struggling more to retain their quality actors and writers (nothing against Yang, he's not who I'm referring to). I can't say I can put my finger on why I've come to this belief. Either that or there are fewer funny people to hire, which strikes me as dubious.
Granted, I didn't even start watching clips of it until after college a couple decades ago, but the show seems a lot more guest celebrity driven recently rather than driven by favorite actors.
Oddly tiktok seems to have the strongest sketch game these days. I'm sure youtube is ok too but it's a depressing place to stay for more than a few minutes.
It's like watching a transmission from an alien civilization: zero point of reference, zero shared language … and at the end, I'm left puzzling about what I even saw.
Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are all generally good at those things but honestly not much else. I use my Google Home every day for timers and to turn on/off lights. I don't think any of them will ever be the helpful AI that they were initially promoted as, though.
I'm shocked how much the quality of Google Assistant has degraded over time.
I have a Mini that consistently misunderstands broadcast requests and says "sorry I'm not playing anything right now". When it occasionally speech-to-text converts a broadcast word, it consistently cuts off the first word or letter, even when it's "I'll be right down" users will get "L L be right down".
It used to support simple offline requests like SMS and Navigate when data was unavailable. No more.
It used to integrate with Google Keep. No more.
No longer recognizes the word "torch" as a synonym for flashlight. Why would I be asking to turn on my phone's "porch"?
Painfully slow replies, even under ideal network environment... Just spinning forever, often until a timeout that it doesn't even have the decency to respond with a proper error message.
It's just amazing how they launched a product with a clear "this is where we are, this is our vision of where we're going" and they still sell it but instead they're going in the opposite direction.
My pet theory is that they were launched by the A team, who got replaced by the B team when the A team left for greener pastures. Or maybe they got it working, but in a bid to get another promotion they kept tweaking it, making it worse in ways that matter to us but not the promotion committee.
See, at least Siri usually is ready to take your input the moment you press the button, even if it then casually discards your input because it can’t reach apple’s servers or whatever.
Google Maps: I swear, about half the time I try to activate voice search, it sits and spins before even accepting any voice input at all. Why can’t it just start reading the microphone right when I activate it, and then submit the saved audio whenever it’s done getting set up? It’s so abysmally poor that it’s usually faster to scroll through recent destinations or literally grab the phone, unlock, and put in a destination.
This is just a market begging to be disrupted. I want to see a startup combine Whisper, GPT, and a competent TTS model into a killer voice UI!
What flabbergasts me is how often the screen will display a successful speech-to-text capture, and then it poops the bed anyways. Like, you did it! You did the hard part! The part that feels like goddamned magic to me, converting the noisy messy reality of sound-waves into text. And then it drops the ball on the simple pile of "if" statements it takes to convert that text into an action.
>I don't think any of them will ever be the helpful AI that they were initially promoted as, though.
I must disagree. ChatGPT-style LLM functionality with ElevenLabs-quality realtime voice synthesis will absolutely supercharge these products. The ability to e.g. answer kids' questions in simplified English according to parental prompt guidelines, or drill down on complex educational topics, or maintain context over many back-and-forth conversational interactions will be huge.
I would happily pay for a dumb TV, if they existed. They don't seem to anymore.
I have a Samsung Q-series TV now and tried using the smart TV apps for a while, but many were buggy and often had audio/video desync issues. I might blame part of that on the soundbar, but I gave up and got an Apple TV 4K and haven't had any issues at all.
A recent Jeff Geerling video dug into this subject. [0]. Sharp NEC [1] makes and sells TVs without any "smart" junk (they're mainly aimed at being 24/7 monitors/displays in businesses). They're significantly more expensive than consumer TVs, but part of that is likely to accommodate 24/7 usage.
Not really. You can do that for web, or email, or maps, but for the most part - and especially with third party apps for things like Reddit, or Twitter - you're forced into opening links in Safari. You MAY be given the option to open the link in an app once opening in Safari but in my experience it doesn't always work.
It's fundamentally a worse experience than it is on Android, in every way.
What I want (as a user, not a developer) is to be able to force an app to open links in Safari, not the app's built-in webview, and to force links to certain URLs to open in the app of my choosing, not Safari (in that case).
This is really, really basic stuff. Why don't we have this capability?
> What I want (as a user, not a developer) is to be able to force an app to open links in Safari, not the app's built-in webview
In some cases apps use the browser to render the app's UX, via hooks added to the browser to invoke native code (e.g. to expose native platform functionality that is not web accessible). This web content may only exist within the app sandbox's filesystem, or may be externally hosted.
But from a systems API standpoint, this is no different from Facebook opening links in their own internal browser so they can glean metrics on what links you are following.
So what you are talking about is actually a store policy (e.g. apps without the browser entitlement must open third-party web content via this other mechanism).
> and to force links to certain URLs to open in the app of my choosing, not Safari (in that case).
For HTTPS in general, IIRC the user can select from a list of apps with the browser entitlement.
Apps can already opt into their own HTTPS URL support for several years via Universal Links - but they have to get the domain owner to allow it to prevent abuse. They've been able to take over URI schemes outside of a reserved list since the App Store launched.
The android equivalent system (App Links IIRC) allows non-affiliated apps to take over certain HTTPS URL function, but the user has to enable it in settings - and will get a chooser if multiple applications can support the interface.
Ahh.. I see. Yeah, that's structurally unlikely to happen any time soon on iOS. "open a link" is not a shared idea across apps. In one app that'll be a webview, where the OS could get involved. In another app it'll just be a button - the OS doesn't know if that button is perceived by the user as a "link" or not.
So I think it'd have to be an app-review policy, and I suspect they'd have a LOT of pushback if they tried to enforce something like that.
They could have structured the OS so that each transition to a new view was a request to the operating system to open a URL, and the OS handled the routing to the browser, this app, a different app - but without that kind of a structure I don't think this very doable.
Google's now playing feature is somehow always offline (to relieve privacy concerns) and is somehow still incredible at recognizing even obscure songs. Really impressive.
I also love that it just shows up on my lock screen.
Supposedly while building the backend, they realised the actual summary data for a reasonable breadth of tracks (say, anything you'd likely hear on the radio or on a jukebox) was tiny and so, why build a service at all when you can just ship the data to phones ?
Recently for whatever reason I was listening to the twist/ cover "Stacy's Dad" and Now Playing recognised it as the rather more famous original Fountain's of Wayne "Stacy's Mom". So yeah, it doesn't know everything. It also doesn't recognise lots of obscure stuff I own that's like B-sides or special editions that never saw radio play, or bands that my friends were in (but everybody I know has read both Steve Albini's "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked" and the KLF's "The Manual" and so none of them signed a recording contract and thus you've never heard of them) but I've never had a situation where I heard something I liked at like a bar or somewhere and Now Playing didn't know what it is.
yeah packaging the data and updating it async does make a lot more sense. Also, I guess its fine that it doesn't know it all but covers a good percentage of requests
Disappointing that the SBIR/STTR programs are not reauthorized in this legislation. The program expires in 2 months and certain Republicans seem hell-bent on letting it die.
With rules in the last decade to admit hedge fund ownership, the SBIR/STTR program now poorly supports small businesses. It'd be nice to see the program lapse, the funds could better support other activities.
