SPOILER ALERT
> A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_time_machine
Here the "classes" are derived from technical skill and knowledge. It might seem bizarre to us here on HN but just knowing about e.g. ublock origin let alone how to install it makes you one of the elite.
I don't really know how to feel about all this. On the one hand, it seems regressive to me to herd folks into silos and milk them (FAANG). On the other hand, people have to take some personal responsibility for their own education and agency, right? Computers aren't really that hard? No one's holding a gun to their heads to make them use FAANG products and services. Certainly, the options to live a more free and open life are there, eh?
Mickey Mouse finally goes out of copyright next year.
As for the others, there I am fully with you. They are quite aware it can be done and they just can't be bothered to do it. To me that's an informed choice and thus -- consent. They don't get to complain about squat because they made the conscious choice.
Buy an air mouse/keyboard to control it from your couch.
Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Keyboard-W1-Multifunctional-...
The flexible sovereign combo of a general purpose computer and a user agent.
I use a forever-docked ThinkPad x230 under my TV, which can do 1080p and 802.11n (5GHz).
What we need is a good, simple dumbtv interface for a computer with network access and a DVB card/stick. One that can also bring up a full-screen browser window to deal with streaming service DRM. Have been considering getting something together with rust+gstreamer starting by cloning my old Philips dumbtv interface while using mplayer/mpv hotkey standards for everything else.
The all-encompassing, endlessly complicated yet somehow still inflexible Kodi is a bad solution for people like me. Let's start by making a dumbtv out of a cheap linux box + a monitor.
Don't most smart TVs have Bluetooth today? In my case, the FireTV is plugged into my (dumb) PC monitor.
It's not surprising you can't cast without ads - adblock would have to be installed on the chromecast not the device doing the "casting."
I use https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext Smart Tube Next on a Firestick. I side loaded both the beta and release versions with adb. I have not seen a commercial since. If Release doesn't work, try Beta. One of them always seems to work.
>> And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022
Next best thing: I bought a Samsung TV last year and never accepted the Terms and Conditions. No ads.
Edit: fixed link syntax
With firefox and an ad blocker I don't have any youtube ads. Also netflix shows start faster on a browser than they did when I was using a chromecast.
The DNS and other Pihole stuff is a last ditch effort and a poor hack when really we should be able to inspect and alter all packets going through our networks.
And you see it. Your pihole hack doesn't work anymore. Because that was always a loophole and they're closing it now again with DoH (DNS over HTTPS).
All under the guise of privacy. Because somewhere sometime a long time ago an ISP added ads to your web pages and redirected DNS.
You can just do literally the same thing you'd do with dumb TV and connect computer to one of it's HDMI ports. "Smartness" of a TV does not take away any feature from it, unless you're so hurt by software updates - which you can simply disregard by not connecting the TV to the internet.
It requires some investment of time and money, sure, but nothing outrageous and far from impossible.