"Today’s TVs come with a volume of bloatware that’d make an early 2000s big box store PC blush, and when they’re not serving you a nice hot tray of horseshit, they’re finding all sorts of ways to spy on you (and probably pulling double time as part of a botnet, too.) The sheer amount of cruft on such devices can be startling: the person behind another such TV-dumbening project, entitled CleanYourTV, explains that he “vibe coded my parents’ TV this afternoon” because “it was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix.” He ended up “[removing] 25 Xiaomi packages and [writing] a new launcher.” I mean… what even? It’s just supposed to show the moving pictures! Of course, the days of televisions doing any such thing are gone—and, in a remarkably frank interview with The Verge a few years ago, Vizio’s CEO basically admitted that the whole reason TVs are “smart” is that the resultant data and ad revenue subsidizes the cost of the hardware. As with many other aspects of today’s tech dystopia, the promise of subscription services and smart TVs was one big bait-and-switch: it’s left us with an even more atomized content ecosystem, a user experience that’s inferior to the one that out parents enjoyed in the freaking 1950s, and TVs that spy on us while refusing to do the one thing we actually want them to do. What a time to be alive!" https://gizmodo.com/people-using-ai-to-make-smart-tvs-dumb-again-is-the-most-2026-thing-ever-2000828213