There was a time when longevity was a selling point

At least to some degree that might be because the special longevity features from former days are often the expected default by now.

Take e.g. cars. While galvanized bodies still where a huge, specifically advertised selling point for premium cars (I remember Audi stressing it), they (or similar approaches) have become the common baseline by now.
The condition of my 15 year old, cheap-ass, 24/7 outside, 200.000 km+ eastern European car would have blown the mind of anyone in the 80s.

And coming back to OPs example: We e.g. only got new LCD monitors at work because the management walked through the office and decided that the yellowy-bleached, 15-year-old monitors were not representative enough any more. From a technical standpoint they were still working totally fine.
Whereas I remember my CRT computer screens during the 90s and early 00s each severely degrade after 5-6 years with smudgy, unevenly lid, progressively darker getting images, or just deciding to stop working with a bang (like my beloved 17’’ did some day).

Or take e.g. the now standard LED lights compared to any lighting solution from just 20 years back.

built in obsolescence and enshittification

While this exists (especially when dealing with firmware-enabled devices), back in the days you just had real obsolescence instead.
Tech between roughly 1980 and 2010 was changing so rapidly, you were constantly upgrading or switching, especially for consumer electronics and IT, while we now have reached a plateau with much slower progression.
I am typing this on a 2015 entry level laptop, my E-Book-Reader was build in 2011 and my kids are totally happy playing 10 year old console games.
And regarding enshitification: If your product is shit from the start, you don’t even need that, see e.g. the car example from above…

Yes, things are not perfect by far yet, and some certainly even have regressed, and we should definitely strive to improve those things.
But I don’t see a point in trying and only looking at the gloomy side of things, downplaying everything that already has improved tremendously from 30 or 40 years ago.

You are certainly right, but that is not what OP’s meme was about…

I have some doubts about them not breaking for 50 years.

Definitely.

Our repair shop back in the 80s had free minimalistic TVs you got during repairs.
I remember them standing at least once per year in our living room.

Also, despite all the repairing, my parents had to buy new sets thrice between late 70s and early nineties.
The “in the past stuff lasted forever” imho is a myth heavily fueled by survivorship bias.

No, 95 or so cents to establish a trusted bot-in-human-skin would be a bargain, so doesn’t offer any protection.

I am thinking more of a web of trust kind of thing, ideally based on physically meeting people and exchanging keys in the respective first trust stages, and also with an easy option to distrust signing certificates again in the trust chain.

But somebody made a decision to not have you guys killed

Absolutely, not questioning that for a moment!
(Same reason my wife wears similar lights when riding her horse along public roads in winter also it also looks embarrasing).

My military time has been before the incident you mentiioned btw (got drafted in 1995 for 10 months), which makes the incident even more tragic (if they didn’t use the warning lights), as the lights at the rear seem to already have been common practice in some armies at the time…

I fondly remember back in the days doing military exercise marches on public roads:
The last soldier in the column would have to walk with a signalling light attached to the top of his helmet.
I typically walked in some front row (benefit of being tall and placed there for some military-aesthetics reasons), so was at least spared that embarrassment. :-)

we’re all hanging around in Messenger groups with some “Is a real human” vetting process

I think there is a very high likelihood this, or a communication concept based on this, will be the future. Maybe like SSL trusted identity certificates, but not for websites, but for users.

I guess I prefer the Unix philosophy of doing things:
Have a bunch of combinable small programs each being dedicated to a single function and doing that well instead of large complex monoliths.

Let’s be realistic.

A “No AI” community is also just material tacked as first grade training data for the next wave of AI bots.

But for now, it at least still is a slightly nicer place to be, so I savour it as long as it lasts…

Or IT equipment.
Or (looking at the current draught during our 6th heat wave this year) water.

Had a look into the ublock settings.
The one I found seems to be more of a nuke-grade total disabling, as opposed to the fine-grained approach of the noscript extension.

:-D

Sometimes, I just love the Fediverse and its inhabitants! ❤️

“You are, without doubt, the strangest online-script user I’ve ever heard of.”
“But you have heard of me!”

;-)

[Edit: Sorry, slipped into wrong language before…]

I have never heard the bottom left take anywhere before, though.
Having said that, Firefox+ublock+noscript rules.

The audience is not supposed to know what’s being said.

Well, translating from languages that are more relaxed regarding swear words might have an impact on the PG rating in the US, so you might be right, but for the wrong reasons :-)

It’s even more annoying when the subtitles say “speaking xyz”, while obscuring the writing underneath baked into the video image that shows the actual translation.
Had that several times already…
(as a non-native English speaker I often have the subtitles on, because *mumble-mumble-scottish-accent*…)