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Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

305 points by avgDev 5y ago

Growing up I always enjoyed tech and was excited for all the problems tech can solve and all the improvements it can make and has made in my life. However, recently I had to check-in into a doctors office using a 3rd party software and the process is incredibly worse for the patient. Normally, I walk in, tell them my name and sit down. Now on my phone, I have to enter my DOB, answer a few questions, "Accept" some consent forms every time. They will not see me if I don't use the system. Then, at the end I am greeted with an advertisement for a medication. Another one, recently had to call comcast as they were charging my parents $70 for what they are offering for $20, I play the call of "i want to cancel it is too expensive, AT&T cheaper". They recently "improved" their phone bot and added some "amazing" features. I am saying I want to cancel service/speak to customer service, and this thing goes and tells me it is restarting my modem.......then for the next 15 minutes I cannot reach anyone at comcast because my modem is restarting, every time I call I was getting, "We are restarting your modem call us back later GOODBYE!"......I swear things like this just make me want to go live off-grid somewhere.

thrower123 5y ago
The automatic engine shut-off feature in newer cars is terrible. It's like stalling at every red light. My vehicle I can just unclip one wire at the battery to disable it permanently, but most of them the best you can do without getting into the software is disable it every you start the car.
bambax 5y ago
> What things has tech made worse in your life? Parenting!
- rokhayakebe 5y ago
  This one is big. As a parent it is easier to turn on Cocomelon than actually spending time playing with your child. And when you actually turn off the TV and you decide to play with them, you cannot do this for one hour without checking your phone.
Havoc 5y ago
OTPs. Can't get into steam cause need the password. Can't get password cause lastpass is freaking out. Then can't get into email cause that wants an OTP. Find phone. Unlock phone...unravel chain of OTPs from there. ...I just want to play my game
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  Speaking of Steam and OTPs... enforced OTPs. In order to sell crap I get out of CSGO crates, or even to give gifts to friends on Steam, you have to be enrolled in "Steam Guard". Which is their (of course proprietary) OTP - which displays a notification specifically to allow the code to be viewed on lockscreens 'cause that's a great idea. But then half the times it doesn't even display the notification until after I've unlocked my phone and opened the Steam app and opened the menu and gone to the Steam Guard page. And then not only do I have to do that whole process every time their servers are down and the client logs me out because hurrdurr timeout means lost session right?, I also have to do it every time I want to log in to their website (say, because someone sent me a link to a game I want to buy).
DevKoala 5y ago
Porn saturation. Ever tried to quit porn in the digital age? It was harder than quitting weed.
JuliusPullo 5y ago
That it seems nobody wants to sell you anything anymore. Now, they want to rent you things. A car? TV? Fridge? A BBQ grill?...Everything has to be connected. Everything has to be "smart". Which means you have to open an account online and click ok on the "Terms and Conditions" page before you can use the thing you supposedly bought. You can't even fix it yourself if it breaks. And while you're using it, they collect data on every microsecond of use to sell to third parties.
rostodon 5y ago
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mtmail 5y ago
The consent forms were introduced separately. If it wasn't an app you'd have to fill those out with pen&paper, they'd have to keep or scan them for permanent record. Like your AT&T example I hate any kind of unskippable ads. Even with (real human) operators they now have to try to upsell you if it makes sense or not. And if you have time or not. Some are honest "I have to tell you about some products now"
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  Not so sure about the consent forms. I started seeing a new doctor back around 2019. The first time I went we did have to spend ~15 minutes per person answering questions on a tablet. But since then we can either check in on our phone - logging in and then answering a bunch of questions and accerpting a bunch of forms - or by saying "hi, I'm <name>, I'm here for my <time> appointment with <doctor>" to the receptionist.
jermaustin1 5y ago
Your two examples are prime examples, but honestly, before the interactive phone systems, I would wait on hold for hours to talk to a person, so it has improved things a lot, but it is still SUPER aggravating and feels like a step backward. But both of those things are only occasional inconveniences. The real place tech has made my life worse is just how completely dependent I am on it for 95% of my life. From the psychological dependence on knowing what my friends are doing, or how my crypto "investments" (read: gambles). Also needing internet connectivity to play various "single player" games even though I'm just a casual gamer and NEVER play with others.
ok_dad 5y ago
Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media. I feel like if it weren't for these algorithms that prioritize "engagement" over facts and polite content, my country would be a bit less polarized. I think that social media will turn out to be like cigarettes and someday we will discover that it has an extremely bad outcome; at least how it's implemented today. I have come to enjoy HN a bit more lately, as I just don't engage with the trolls or the horrible people that have opinions I disagree with vehemently. The people I think are horrible, at least, because it's a personal opinion, and other's might view me as a horrible person. I have also learned that it's best not to judge someone by one or two views overall, here, and that helps. I wish more social media could be like HN and allow a diverse set of opinions, but ban the name-calling and such that really take things into a bad place. Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. Perhaps it's the old man in me coming out, with a rosy view of yesteryear, but I think that the quality of things are just lower, in general. I do think that things "look nicer" and are more consistent, but at a lower level of quality. 20 years ago, I had only 5 or so choices for any given product, maybe a curtain rod for example (because I just bought some). Today I can go down to several stores and pick from hundreds of curtain rod designs that look really nice, but half of them break after a few years or less. I still have some shitty looking but sturdy curtain rods from 20 years ago, no joke. Electronics are worse in some ways, but faster and more complex, so maybe that complexity is the source of the decrease in perceived quality. I can say that computers are way faster now, and it's easier to do many things, but I have less freedom than I had with older computers for sure. This is just about the end of my old man rant. Thanks for listening. "The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt..."
- bambax 5y ago
  Yes all forms of advertising should be banned. But, it will never happen. So, better not to get too excited with the idea.
- 5y ago
Overtonwindow 5y ago
Constant traceability and contact. It's getting harder, and harder to just step out of society for a while.
Yhippa 5y ago
I reach for my smartphone the microsecond I have idle time. I can't read things longer than 280 characters.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Just turn it off sometimes. It really helps.
  - silksowed 5y ago
    even an hour with a turned off phone can make a noticeable difference. just some time to breath without any notifications is wonderful
- ronyeh 5y ago
  Thanks for this comment. It will make me put down my smartphone. (After writing this comment of course.)
  - bborud 5y ago
    TL;DR. Could you make that into a meme?
- CalChris 5y ago
  I've had that problem as well. The one thing that helped was getting rid of all social networking on the phone. That means no apps and I don't even log in to HN on the phone.
- noneeeed 5y ago
  Yeah, I need to work harder at just leaving the damn thing alone. It's become like a nervous tic :/
- 4ggr0 5y ago
  I had, or rather still have, this exact problem. The way I could cure this a bit is by starting to read books again. Now when I'm in the train I just read a book instead of scrolling through Reddit. I've also deleted Youtube and Reddit from my phone, which also helps. But brains adjust quickly, so now I start visiting Youtube via browser instead of the app. But I do feel better about that whole situation, now that I started reading again. The problem is, that I only feel like reading while travelling to work or elsewhere. When I'm at home, the temptation to sit in front of my PC is just too high. While working from home, I'm in front of a screen for like 95% of the day...
hwers 5y ago
It's not a new point but for sure tech has ruined my attention span. I was once lucky enough to get away from major needs to use tech for a few months (which I spent reading) and it really showed me how much these things affect the brain and how unfortunate it is that there seems to be near no other option than to use it because of the career arms race that you need to participate in in order not to die.
- handrous 5y ago
  It's bad enough that I'd say 75% of my joy from vacations to even very nice places is that it nudges me to all but completely stay off the Web for a few days. The rest of the time I hardly go an hour without looking at a glowing rectangle for one reason or another.
- Ottolay 5y ago
  I wonder sometimes if I have just gotten more ADD in my middle age or if it is a general trend many struggle with today.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4ggr0 5y ago
    These discussions always bother me a bit because I was diagnosed with ADD last year. Now every time I read such discussion I wonder if I was misdiagnosed, if I'm an impostor etc.
JamesBarney 5y ago
I really miss not having a smart phone. I'd totally buy a locked down android that only had maps, sms, and calling.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  At least on Android, it's pretty easy to uninstall all the bloatware and leave only what you need. Why are you not doing it if you miss it? All you need is to enable developer options, enable adb debugging, install adb or Android developer tools on the computer, connect phone with USB and do a bunch of "adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 some.package.name" for a bunch of packages. Ok, now that I wrote it, it's not that simple, especially knowing what to uninstall, but it's not rocket science either.
  - maxk42 5y ago
    Not true on most phones. Samsung and a lot of other manufacturers package a lot of non-removable apps and customizations to make the OS "theirs". Although I do find Google's line of phones to be relatively bloatware-free. (Although I still can't remove Google Assistant, obligatory voice-to-text, or a few other unwanted features.) Motorola's phones were also pretty good until their recent acquisition. Now they're getting just as spammy as other Android manufacturers. OnePlus is relatively good, but I can't remove Google Pay or their stupid gaming app for some reason. Does anybody know of any other relatively bloatware-free manufacturers?
0des 5y ago
Its hard to have a conversation when they're trained to divert their attention when their phone beeps. Phones were a mistake, letting commoners on the internet was a big mistake. Smartphones created the era of Eternal Whatever, and there's no coming back from it.
0des 5y ago
Companies have grown beyond reproach.
- black_13 5y ago
  Genau
scrooched_moose 5y ago
In the last few years I feel like we've reached "notification hell". Technology used to be a tool that was used when needed, now it constantly demands our attention. I feel like something is always beeping at me across countless services and just stresses me out. Windows beeps every time I click anything now, every app wants to spam notifications every our, Jira, countless chat apps, email, even the credit card machines at Target have gotten more aggressive...
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Do-Not-Disturb mode on all your devices, 24/7. It stops all notifications, messages, dinging, buzzing, phone calls, everything. Huge, instant, and permanent quality of life improvement. I've been doing it for a few years, now, and I could never go back to life with my phone dinging and lighting up like Reno ever few minutes. A lot of people think they can't do it (OMG what if I miss that one important call out of thousands?), but I lost that anxiety after about a month. So nice to use my phone on my own terms and review my missed calls when it's convenient for me. You should be issuing commands to your computer, not the other way around.
  - dkdk8283 5y ago
    I’m militant about disabling notifications. My phone is on silent 24x7 except for certain contacts that bypass DnD. I’ll get to it when I get to it.
    - dijit 5y ago
      I'm also this way: but I can easily see how it's easy to not be. It feels like every app asks to display notifications; and sometimes I think of how the functionality of the app could be negatively affected. (Uber, for instance, could notify me when my cab is nearby)- but once the power is given they can spam you with self-promotion.
      - dkdk8283 5y ago
        iOS has something called time sensitive notifications which when allowed solve that issue, at least for me.
yrral 5y ago
I'm less able to really sit down and focus on longer-term projects because of constant notifications and an endless amount of media able to be consumed.
throwamon 5y ago
Zero attention span, social isolation, information overload, fears of dystopia.
crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
Pandemic response: tech has continued to distract society from simply learning its needs and creating covid bubbles large enough to meet everyone's needs within the bubble so people don't have a reason to leave the bubble. Instead, we have mass isolation, instead of population-density diminishing tactics that respect human needs, and mandates for behaviors. So much for freedom. Anyway, where's the app for building a big covid bubble or quickly joining one after following quarantine procedures for that bubble?
- H8crilA 5y ago
  What do you mean by "covid bubbles"?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    A COVID bubble is a group of individuals that are trying to limit their chances of contracting COVID by restricting contact with others outside the bubble, but within the bubble there are no restrictions.
  - gherkinnn 5y ago
    I would guess self-sufficient units of people with little interaction outside of it. Be it a housing block where everything is within walking distance or people choosing to only interact with a small and static group of friends. But within such a block, there are few restrictions.
lovetocode 5y ago
Unnecessary tech in kitchen appliances. Ovens, dishwashers and washer/dryers. I spend most of my time battling the user interface or dealing with obscure bugs.
- handrous 5y ago
  My favorite microwave oven is one my Grandma owned for decades, probably purchased in the 70s or early 80s. Two dials. No buttons. Pull to open the door, not even a button for that. Didn't even have the spinny-plate thing (did OK regardless, and I find I have to manually move stuff around halfway through even with the spinny plate, so it's kinda useless). Put power dial where you want it. Put timer dial where you want it. Timer starts ticking down and the microwave turns on. Loud ding (from a physical bell somewhere inside it, not a speaker) when it's done. That's the entire thing. No buttons, no clock (god, why do you need a clock on your microwave?!) none of that shit. Heavy, good-feeling dials that you could feel physically operating something underneath, from the clunks of the power dial to the subtle scrape of the timer dial. Great feel on the door handle. All-around solid. Nothing to learn. Just use it.
  - bufordtwain 5y ago
    This is the one I ended up getting when my previous microwave broke. It has one dial to set the time and no spinny plate. Pull to open. Happy with it so far but we'll see how long it lasts... https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZTVIPZ2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZTVIPZ2/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
    - handrous 5y ago
      I do wonder why simple products are often expensive. I think our microwave cost like $30-40 new, but it's got probably 20 buttons and a clock and the spinner and all that junk, and at the time I couldn't find any cheap options that were simple, only ones that were (like this) several times more than the cheapies. You'd think the one with nothing but a dial and no spinner (so, no motor, simpler design for the interior, no extra material cost for the glass plate, and so on) would be as cheap as it gets, but no. Microwaves don't even have the "because spying and ads offsets the price of more-complex sets" excuse that TVs do.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Same with restaurant or bars. More and more use some scummy third-party platform that requires an account, asks for more personal information than necessary and will no doubt use said information for nefarious purposes such as spam. Similarly, since the pandemic, paper menus have been replaced by a stupid QR code that often loads a bloated page or PDF and may contain trackers. Doesn't help that phone service is usually terrible, and Wi-Fi (if it exists) has a captive portal with its own set of problems. Worse, some venues actually did ordering over the mobile website, so what used to take 10 seconds of telling the barman what you wanted now takes a minute of trying to load a terrible website, filling out a form with way too much personal information, waiting for the payment to process, etc.
- sneak 5y ago
  Carry cash and leave your smartphone off and your payment cards at home (this is what I do). A lot of these systems fail open if you say "sorry, I don't have a SIM card in my phone" or "my service is shut off" or "I don't have a credit card". You also make it easier for the next person.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
psacawa 5y ago
Anything proximate to human communication. That people in the West communicate largely over platforms controlled by entities with economic interests has been highly destructive. Beyond mere vitriol and "misinformation", there's the accelerationism of human social functions powered by instant communication and full of perverse incentives on the part of the platform controllers. There are also lots of incentives for individuals that are harmful to society in the aggregate. To me, this kind of thing is the primary cause of the western malaise.
sneak 5y ago
Everything requires a telephone number now, and many (due to spam/abuse/whatever) don't accept VoIP/disposable numbers, so it's basically like a universal tracking cookie. I have like six phones to keep my various identity facets separate. It's gross and annoying, and I worry about everyone else who just has one number and uses it for everything and links their accounts everywhere together; most people in the world are going to become very easy to blackmail/coerce/extort in the coming years.
- shakezula 5y ago
  And there's no good way to decouple things once they're tied together. I can't get my personal phone number out of some lists from projects years ago that I can't even remember. The spam calls are constant, probably one call every 30 minutes from different "Scam Likely" numbers. Our government does absolutely nothing about it, either.
- rswskg 5y ago
  Plus anyone with more than one phone is treated like a pervert/cheat and/or drug dealer.
  - sneak 5y ago
    No, everyone makes the drug dealer joke, but the presumption/stereotype of someone carrying around 3+ iPhones of recent generation (~$1k each) and dressed well is usually not "street criminal", in my personal experience.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Why would anyone want to carry around 3+ iPhones? Anyone rich with 3+ iPhones would rather have an assistant carry the 2 other phones.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
frontman1988 5y ago
Novelty Watching places and people on instagram/youtube for the first time takes away the awe factor of what could have been possible in real life. Imagine seeing the Pyramids for the first time in person vs watching them through a travel vlogger. Or visiting Japan in pre-internet era vs now when you have already read hundreds of blogs on what cultural differences to expect even before landing in the country. I know it's still a wonderful experience to see things in reality. But I am sure the experience is dampened due to the endless dopamine consumption we saturate ourselves with.
- ok_dad 5y ago
  On the other hand (I know this is supposed to be a bitching thread, sorry): Imagine all the people who can now see these things who would never have been able to travel and see them in the past. I don't even think I could travel to half the places I want to see due to time constraints and my personal life choices (kids, etc.). I love being able to watch some videos of people walking in different cities or whatever, since I know I have maybe 2 overseas trips left in me. Having been to plenty of places in my youth, though, I can say that seeing the Eiffel Tower on video and climbing to the top (twice in two consecutive days; man my legs hurt) is way way different, but for someone who couldn't go there, it's probably great to see the videos. Also, maybe if people saw the wonders in their own backyard, that would be a good idea, versus watching other wonders on video.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    More than anything I have the internet to thank for getting the initiative to travel abroad, which by extension made uprooting everything and moving to a different state a lot less daunting later on. While there’s I saw no shortage of depictions of travel in movies and TV, the idea of traveling myself remained very abstract until I started reading on the internet about the country in question and what needed to be done to stay there long term back in the 2000s. While a vagueness remained until I actually did it, the internet helped a great deal to shape a faint idea into an actionable plan. Could I have done that prior to the internet? Sure, if I had taken enough interest to make visits to the library and borrow books on the subject. That‘a a significantly higher bar to clear, though — the internet is much more whim-friendly. I could see myself never having traveled of this timeline took place a decade or two earlier.
postsantum 5y ago
Not for me (I'm in LTR), but casual dating life. Tinder is distorting the market making it "winner(s) takes it all" type
- mullen 5y ago
  It's always been that way. While I have never used Tinder (Been married during its existence) but when I talk to men that have used Tinder successfully and unsuccessfully, their stories sound just like my pre-Tinder dating life. To me, Tinder sounds like it just increased the velocity of success or failure.
  - errantspark 5y ago
    I don't think it's always been that way, not exactly, the distribution gets less flat as people are able to make more optimized choices. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27089-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27089-8
  - postsantum 5y ago
    One recurring topic on HN is how miserable people here feel reading about crypto-billionaires, IPOs, cool projects , etc. The common response is that internet made it possible to marvel at 0.0001% people in their respective fields, which wasn't so easy in the past so we shouldn't feel too bad. This advice doesn't work, of course - we are not wired to internalize it properly. The very same thing happens with dating apps - you can see the most attractive people of your city and they are just a swipe away! Robin Hanson has touched this very dangerous topic a bit https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/ https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-t...
- stevenicr 5y ago
  I've noticed it's not just 'casual' dating - but also relationships. Much like when the landline phone and personal automobile increased access to cheating partners.. technology / social media especially - increases access to 'better rung (like a ladder)' sex partners, relationship, social status, money, etc. - all a click / tap away, and likely coming to you via dms/pms.. I'll add that these auto-filters on cameras seem to make a lot of people, (especially girls from what I have seen, anecdotal for sure) - think they are more attractive than they really are.. which increases attention they get via insta/tik/fbk, whatever.. but also gives them false sense of where they could be in the ladder.. which leads them to discount 'average guy is good' - ads make this worst too many times. There is much more to add to this - but these things are noticeable in the data as well right? isn't like 80% of women only trying to attract the top 20% of men. with tech making it easy to have 'a grass is greener here' profile to attract, it's harder to keep a relationship in general than it used to be, even if they don't run away, I think women are less happy / take it out on the average man when they don't have the kardashian/insert reality whatever here, type of life they see others 'living their best life' on reality-social.. I don't mean to say similar affects don't occur with men vs women - I'm just pointing to what I have seen a lot of.
DoctorDabadedoo 5y ago
Signal-to-noise ratio. There is just too much stuff going on, information, news, good/bad tech, entertainment, people doing their things, the list goes on. We were blissfully ignorant of all the information that exists in the world. It's impossible to keep up with everything that's happening, you're always behind, even finding out when/how to care or where to look for actually good content is hard. Everything has to be generic enough to account for everything, so market expansion is as fast as the snap of fingers, even if it doesn't matter. Today I woke up feeling like an old man, I know.
jacquesm 5y ago
I think there is an 'optimum' level for technology of all kinds, below that you really want more and it is clear that there is room for improvement. But once the optimum has been reached any further additions will degrade the experience. Examples: Car controls: pre: direct taps and gauges plumbed into engine parts and such, real switches and levers. optimum: does what it should, not more, not less, more reliable than the old stuff, easy to fix and relatively cheap to fabricate too much: touchscreens. For everything. (ICE) Car electronics: pre: carburettors, bad winter starts, bad fuel consumption, pollution optimum: EFI, highly reliable, aftermarket parts interchangeable between brands too much: DRM on everything, parts won't even fit same model a year older, are ridiculously expensive and unreliable to boot TV: pre: two channels, black and white, bad image quality, crappy small screens optimum: 20 channels or so, in a way already more than you can consume, good quality color image, fairly easy to see screens (say, up to 3' across). too much: wall-to-wall screens that intrude on your privacy every chance they can, inability to build up your own collection of content (DRM), pay *for ever* for the same stuff way too much: youtube. CPUs: pre: 8 bits, too slow for many applications, nice and better than an abacus though optimum: 1990s OS, very little eye candy, just enough to take the edge off, fast, and enough horsepower to do meaningful work too much: 2020 OS, nothing but eye candy, reduced functionality, telemetry, spyware, forced updates that are just as likely to improve things as they are to leave you stranded and so on, you get the idea. Technology has and always will have a place in my life. But my car is a 1997 model that doesn't phone home to the factory, has buttons instead of menus, my phone is a Nokia, and so on. Technology is my slave, not my master.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > CPUs [...] you can pry my 16 core Threadripper and its 64GB of RAM from my cold dead hand. Some of us use computers for things where more CPU cycles per second and more RAM are always good things.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    But you don't have more CPU cycles per second. And the software you use takes several times as much resources to let you do... basically all the same things you could do a couple decades ago.
tspiteri 5y ago
Touch controls. I hate that I cannot turn off my hob in dim light as I have to see which of five barely visible areas I am to touch.
gherkinnn 5y ago
Algo-paranoia. Every time I interact with a remotely "clever" system, I keep thinking how my input will feed some machine. How fast do I scroll, what is in my viewport. What do I listen to and when. Is this an A/B test? Will something I do on a whim affect that machine to predict something incredibly stupid tomorrow? It only became obvious recently, as I was readying an actual, physical book. The relief to realise that the publisher won't optimise the font based on how fast I turn the pages. And the disgust at that aspect of tech. And to what end?
- DataGata 5y ago
  It should be reassuring to know that most of the things you interact with are actually too bandwidth constrained to care about those things, and the algos you interact with are fairly obvious and explicit (Feeds, curated things, etc)
  - nja 5y ago
    I used to think this, until I happened across FullStory. With that tool you can replay a website visitor's exact session as if it was recorded live on video -- everything they typed (even if it was cleared and never sent in a request), where/when clicks happened, the contents and response of every request, etc. As a backend engineer, I had no idea that frontend monitoring was this advanced, but apparently it is. So now we all have to be extra paranoid, because _any_ website could be using this tool to "spy" on everybody. Of course, it _was_ very helpful to us in tracking down some issues (ever tried to tell a customer how to send you a HAR?). And I assume that operating with an adblocker and blocking nonessential cookies will prevent or hamper the output for us more technical types. Even so...
    - 4ggr0 5y ago
      > everything they typed (even if it was cleared and never sent in a request) Okay, wow, that sounds rough...so in a way, phishing attacks don't even require you to login anymore, just typing the password or maybe 75% of it is enough to get you.
analogdreams 5y ago
Honestly, almost everything. More and more i want to see it all torn down for the multiple reasons like those you outlined.
math_denial 5y ago
1. Information hoarding, distraction and FOMO The Internet has generated in me an habit of information hoarding. At the beginning I would bookmark useful information and then take notes on paper of the useful things; with the passing of time distraction has started to creep in: more and more useless information, more and more FOMO. 2. Omnipresence of tech and privacy concerns An increasing number of actions require emails to get done, this rises privacy concerns. When I was 14 enrolling in high-school meant filling a form in pen and paper and bring it to the administrative office. 11 years later, my sister needed an email and personal information on the net. I really don't like it. 3. Affliction due to envy I haven't used social media since I was 19 but HN and reddit are not really better: there are a lot of thing that I just wish I could forget and fill me with envy that I would have never felt if I had never read about that particular thing. It is obviously irrational being envious of something that you didn't event wanted in the first place, but the irrationality of that feeling do not make it less real and painful. Sometimes I do a 30 day diet and I do not visit HN or reddit, but the feelings never really go away. 4. Ephemerality I still have some books passed by my great-grandmother belonging to my great-grandfather during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. I still have all my books from middle- and high-school. These required passive maintenance: just put them on the shelves far from fire and done. On the other hand I've lost entire years of data (photos, books, notes) during a single incident that rendered my physical back-ups useless.
- jhickok 5y ago
  >Information hoarding, distraction and FOMO You know, I used to jump from one thing to the next never giving anything enough time. I would attend digital conferences, watch PARTS of courses on Pluralsight, LinuxAcademy (RIP) and youtube, hoard books, bookmark websites etc. Something happened a few years ago where I was able to just turn it all off. I deleted all my pdfs and removed all my bookmarks. I began focusing on single thing at a time (usually in reference to certifications or new skills), and it made such a difference.
  - rc-1140 5y ago
    It's funny that you say this, I've been meaning and trying to go through the various pdfs and other ebooks I've stockpiled. I usually look at a book's title and go "oh, that looks incredibly useful" after having briefly skimmed the contents and unless I'm immediately working with it, I shelve it. It's peace of mind that I have the material, but I've noticed that various items in there are either old or not as good/useful as I had thought prior. Your comment has given me a bit more impetus to try to focus on deleting stuff (pdfs, ebooks, bookmarks).
sneak 5y ago
GPS in everything, and 2-20 giant, unaccountable corporations knowing where you are at all times, when you go anywhere else, where you go, who with, and how often. The overall loss of privacy with regards to simple day to day comings and goings. (We also as a society have not yet had to contend with the fact that this information is available at any time to the state without a warrant or probable cause, an unprecedented shift of power. I hope it works out okay, but having seen the USSR and DDR and CCP, I fear it will not.) Now, several multinationals and governments know which day of the week I like to go out to eat, or who my FWBs are, and the locations of all of the places I sleep. It's nobody's business, but now it's in everybody's databases (even if I turn my own phone off, unless I avoid human contact entirely).
GDC7 5y ago
I have no interest in knowing that I am a unit in an 8 billion sample (going on 10 billions). You read it as a texbook notion in school, but it's the internet which makes you internalize it. All the stuff you care about and are enthusiast about you'll find people who put your skills and level in that particular field to shame. And you don't even have to be looking for such info because it's shoved right in your face. The most talented person (or perceived as talented) in a field monopolizes all the discussion in that particular field. So as you try to learn about the field you are met with all sorts of devote followers and bootlickers.
pjc50 5y ago
Televisions have more channels, but a far worse user interface with more latency.
- stormdennis 5y ago
  Latency, god yes, that drives me bananas. Mechanical tuners, push buttons, dials all responded immediately.
- salgernon 5y ago
  I grew up with analog televisions - there was no latency and it was very forgiving of atmospheric noise. When I first got Tivo, I thought the latency made it unusable (until I realized that I was no longer flipping channels, but rather navigating to content..) On the other hand, flipping channels led to serendipitous discovery - a cooking show that I would never have found interesting might spark something, or a news show presenting other points of view.
pototo666 5y ago
My sleep. I used to use smart phone before I lie on bed before bedtime. I know that I shouldn't use them. But the dopamine generated by digital devices and internet is too cheap. When I am unhappy or under pressure, I tend to use my smart phone. And I am always unhappy or under pressure recently. Then I use smart phone before sleep. Then I fall asleep very late. This creates some vicious circle. The worse my sleep is, the more unhappy I am. I can no more live with a digital device in the same room before bedtime. Before I go to bed, I have to leave all my digital devices, except for kindle, at first floor. Then I return to my bedroom at second floor. Without them, I can finnaly sleep well.
- handrous 5y ago
  It's batshit crazy that we'd fill our houses with extremely bright nighttime lighting and entertainment that out classes the most lavish, exclusive medieval or Roman imperial festival, all available on-tap every single night in every room of our house and tunable to our every whim, and not expect it to completely ruin sleep patterns for a high percentage of the population. "People have trouble sleeping. Could it be lack of sunlight? Stress? Personal moral failure?" Hahaha, OK, yeah, maybe those things a little, but maybe let's start with the thing that's very obviously most of the problem if we're trying to solve this (which we aren't, because no-one can give up their infinite carnival)
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  only two industries where customers are known as “users”…
01acheru 5y ago
Skimming through the comments I read many things I would have said some years ago, but by now I mostly solved: advertising, social media, attention, notification hell, marginally useful tech in appliances… There is one thing I feel I cannot stop reaching to and makes my life worse: endless supply of any kind of porn imaginable.
thoraway66 5y ago
Throwaway cause reasons; Job life, finding a job. My education was in the late-90s in electronics. Offshoring took that career away by the 2010s. Oh, I don’t know web app development or anything above CS200 by heart, or haven’t contributed a decade of free labor to open source; fuck off. A modern college education and different experiential timeline does not make a college educated person anymore than 1 of 7 billion like the rest of us. Real on the ground life issues for millions are waved off as nbd cause the data shows those millions of able bodied people who see society act indifferent they exist, as they are just a rounding error, seems to be acceptable discourse. It’ll be interesting to see how this all unfolds in a nation with a second amendment and one political party recently sharing plans internally to announce they are overturning the election to protect their demigod. It’s not tech that’s the issue; it’s humanity itself. Its root social language is feudalism and moral relativism. Tech is just the latest vessel for those behaviors.
swozey 5y ago
Read receipts make me not even want to talk to people. I want to be able to walk away and go do my own thing and not possibly offend someone that it took me hours to reply or didn't reply at all. It feels so invasive to me and my time.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Fortunately, it can be turned off in a lot of applications. I hate it the other way around too: someone's read it, but isn't answering. Why? What's wrong? Did something I typed make you hesitate? All irrational niggling thoughts when the other person probably just got called away by a crying kid, or sudden explosive diarrhoea, or their house is on fire — you know, normal stuff.
- rokhayakebe 5y ago
  Not a problem. Every time I give my contact I let people know it may take me a few days to reply and I am ok if they take time to reply to my messages. I tel them if it is urgent, I will add a note on top of the message. People who have a life are not offended by this.
can16358p 5y ago
Human interactions. People tend to socialize less and "digitize" more. Even when sitting together, people constantly scroll through Instagram. This shouldn't be what the new generation defines as "socializing".
- thex10 5y ago
  My friend mentions off-hand that "we talk all the time". We exchange a number of texts over Signal, most days but at least a couple times a week. That's enough to make him think "we talk all the time", but I am feeling super disconnected. I think tech makes some people not even try to reach out socialize in any beyond-digital way.
gherkinnn 5y ago
Whatever many of these problems may be, I see pretty much all of my non-tech friends completely helpless in handling them. They're so fucked and don't have a chance.
- Shared404 5y ago
  This is the worst part imho. I can fight back. I can help a very few other close people who care but don't know how to fight back. And every. single. other. person. I. know. is screwed.
II2II 5y ago
I would say it was the optimism around computers in the 1980's and early 1990's. People were optimistic since a relatively inexpensive computer was an enabler. In some cases, it eased the process of getting stuff done. In other cases, it gave people the tools they needed to do things that they would otherwise have to invest in expensive training or equipment to do. Then the cynicism of the past decade set in. I find it is now nearly impossible to see the positive contributions of technology even when they exist. (That is not to say those earlier times were entirely positive. People were still trying to build corporate empires, or otherwise use technology to the disadvantage of their customers. Yet the balance of power seemed to be better balanced and it felt easier to walk away from it all and still lead a good life.)
- downut 5y ago
  Simultaneous with collapse of Soviet style communism, then the impressive shrinkage of the US military. The explosion of the uses of PCs by individuals (who could, commonly, program those PCs) fed a completely delusional optimism that finally individuals could be empowered by technology. And potentially world-wide. For instance, China opening up, sure to join the gang. Maybe Tianamen was a blip. All nope. But I sure enjoyed the optimism while it lasted.
mikotodomo 5y ago
As a young person lucky enough to have missed the Facebook era, Insta has made my and many others' lives worse with its unregulated predatory behavior.
tosser0001 5y ago
The slight lag that I encounter constantly when interacting with devices and on-line services. Since working from home I become acutely aware of how often I'm dealing with spinners waiting for things to load, pauses, lag, etc. I feel like I'm living half a beat behind my physical actions and it's brought on a certain amount of unnecessary stress.
DrNuke 5y ago
Log-ins & pwds pretty much everywhere, now with 2 and 3 security layers which means more and more SMSes going through the phone and even more being shared among recovery accounts. It’s safer maybe, yet it is a time consuming, irritating madness. Where do we stand with the much praised biometric access procedures yet?
mrjay42 5y ago
Globally: Having to create accounts for everything. And thus, having passwords, public keys, private keys, password managers, etc. etc. Subscriptions for almost anything: "I don't want to subscribe to your service, I want to buy a product and never hear from you ever again" Still WAY too much "white background" everywhere -> it hurts my eyes...how are we still having WHITE backgrounds??? Spending WAY too much time charging devices. France and many places in Europe still NOT equipped with decent fast access to Internet Mobile phones: Spending time with people without having them or myself scrolling their phone is difficult to obtain Planned obsolescence:Phones are full of proprietary/encrypted stuff on a hardware or a software level making them useless after some years... We still don't have a fully Free (as in Free software) and viable operating system for mobile platforms -> which leads to a pile of Android versions...not even mentioning Apple. The fact that phones are still nowadays closed-object that we do not control at all. Job Market: After more than 10 years of career, two master's degrees and a PhD being asked for a tech job whether I know how to code is annoying. Biologists, Physicists, etc. hired as "computer people" and ensuring the recruitment of programmers The creation of "DevOps" or "full stack developers" -> Being an actual admin sys, developper, network admin are separated things, with actual difference in skills and knowledge. Let everyone have their job, thinking you can have the perfect mix in one person is a myth. Finally: The fact that private software, private platforms win everytime: TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, Discord, etc. -> all private, all preying on us.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  > Globally: Having to create accounts for everything. And thus, having passwords, public keys, private keys, password managers, etc. etc. I have 592 passwords in my password manager :-(
cletus 5y ago
Video games. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. There's simply too much money nowadays in micro-transactions, in-app purchases, loot boxes, pay-to-win and in-game advertising that almost everything is "free" to play and it's literally horrible. what we have now is mostly copy-pasted franchise titles (with a year after their name) that are just another optimized hellhole of extracting money from you a small slice at a time. There are exceptions and this is part of the reason why Nintendo as a brand is still loved by many. I consider Zelda Breth of the Wild to be one of the most amazing games and experiences of my video gaming life. I also like board game adaptations to mobile because they tend to be limited in in-app purchases. Other than that? By God, there's a ton of crap out there. It's no surprise how many people will go to great efforts to play games that are 20, 30 or more years old now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- francisofascii 5y ago
  My answer is video games but for different reasons. With an original NES you could power on, press start, and be playing the game in two seconds. With the Switch it has to load, the thing is never charged, cartridges are too small, you have to select through so many menus before you can actually start playing, games are two complex, etc.
  - burntoutfire 5y ago
    Presumably, you can still game on the original NES (if any modern TV accepts its video signal).
    - francisofascii 5y ago
      Yes, I have an original that still works in the basement.
cheese_van 5y ago
I might include diplomacy, statecraft and foreign policy. Before communications were instant, ambassadors were provided a long view of state relationships and foreign policy goals. During his tenure then, the ambassador was guided by these long term visions of how to fulfill policy. Now, thanks to instant messaging, an ambassador and embassy must (or can) immediately adjust daily to their home office's reaction to events. Instant communications have reduced both the role and need for an embassy's long view of policy stance and goals. Thus, while not necessarily "worse", the autonomy of an ambassador has greatly declined. I suppose the contrarian view would welcome the lessened dangers of an incompetent diplomat who can be micro-managed by their home office. But to the personal aspect, my career supported this area, and thanks to modern communications, often sleeplessly.
- handrous 5y ago
  Off-topic, but as a former serious politics nerd (did most of an IR undergrad degree, way back, in fact) who's now a less-serious politics nerd and quite a bit older, what are some entry points to this world for someone with a career in tech? It'd be kinda nice to work on something that's in an area I have any actual interest in, for once.
  - cheese_van 5y ago
    Only if you think being dropped off on the corner of Walk and Don't Walk in a foreign country is boatloads of fun, as I do, employment in the Foreign Service of the US State Department. Barriers to getting in are rather high, however, and salaries, initially, are laughable, but you're not paying rent or utilities when you are overseas. There is a pol/econ/mgmt track and a technical support track (where barriers are a bit lower) and is the route I took. State has "diplomats in residence" at major universities. They'll be happy to chat even if you aren't a student.
rg111 5y ago
Learning. From my childhood, I have always loved to learn new stuff- all kinds of interesting stuff. Before, when I became interested in something, I looked it up on the net, read books, and asked people about resources. But with "feed"s, everything went downhill very quickly. When more and more resources became available, I struggled to keep up with them. There were not only too many resources I came to know about on topics that interested me, I also came to know about a lot of topics themselves. There were not only too many things on things, but there were too many things! I feel a lot more pressurized, a lot more agitated and anxious because I know about so many different kinds of things that I would be interested about and I am sure (at least in my mind) I would be good at. These things range from a new programming language or a framework, to a new region and its culture that I suddenly came to know about. The resources come as articles, essays to books, GH repos, MOOCs, and even diplomas. I am so grateful because of the internet and specific kinds of social media because I got to know about a lot I otherwise would have missed, and my life would have been completely different. But after a certain amount, or velocity, things go to the dogs. I believe there is a rising curve that plateaus after a certain distance in the X axis where Y is learning and acquiring knowledge and X is flow of information. Before, learning was just super fun, and now I am often paralyzed in my free time and I do nothing so that I don't mourn not doing other things, and end up doing nothing. I am thinking of ways to put a stop to this, and have so far come up with a few ways.
- math_denial 5y ago
  Thank you for summarizing years of inquietude. I thought that I might have ADHD, but my "symptoms" started when I realized that I could never catch up to all the information that the Internet is presenting me daily. I wish I had a solution to let it all go. Anyone?
  - ronyfadel 5y ago
    Acknowledge that there's no need to catch up to everything, and that you can narrow your interests to a few things that really interest you, and study them the old fashioned way, with no blinking lights.. just a book, some quiet time and possibly accompanied by a hot cup of coffee.
Agingcoder 5y ago
Mobile phones, and the expectation that people should be able to call me/text me and have an instant reply whenever they want.
hippie_queen 5y ago
Even though I love my friends, I just don't like being available or able to be contacted all the time. I kinda miss the era of basic SMS and, for real-time chatting, MSN Messenger (or IRC). Nowadays, it feels like I can never truly "log off". That said, I have no genuinely good reason why I haven't tried going back to a similar personal setup. Maybe it's time to see how it would work out.
- lolsal 5y ago
  You don't need technology to solve this problem for you - you can choose not to be available.
  - rco8786 5y ago
    You're thinking about it backwards. Technology created this problem. Choosing to not be available is effectively making yourself a social pariah if your social circle is otherwise highly available.
    - lolsal 5y ago
      > Technology created this problem. ...No. Your adoption of technology/social media into every facet of your life created this problem. I work in tech and I am not available when I'm not working. I don't participate in social media, but my social life is thriving during a pandemic. > Choosing to not be available is effectively making yourself a social pariah if your social circle is otherwise highly available. This sounds like a problem between you and your social circle. My circle doesn't make me feel like a pariah due to my availability. I suspect it has to do with me setting expectations and exercising discipline. You can do the same thing (though you might have to make changes to your social circle).
      - rco8786 5y ago
        > No. Your adoption of technology/social media into every facet of your life created this problem. No, society's adoption created this problem, not an individual. > This sounds like a problem between you and your social circle. Now we're getting somewhere, we agree it's a problem. Congratulations that your particular social circle doesn't have this problem. But millions upon millions of them do.
WalterBright 5y ago
Icons. I hate icons. Every app feels impelled to use icons, and even worse, invent their own due to trying to be cool, and avoiding the copyrights on other icons. I got suckered into that madness on my own website, and can't remember what the icons are for without hovering over then for the alt text. Icons are a giant technological leap backwards. There's a reason that every hieroglyphic language evolved towards phonetics, not the other way. For a simple example, there's no picture in the world that can clearly mean "run", or "menu", or "oil pressure", or "defroster", or "test", or "print", or "off", or "wash in cold water". Of course, we can get used to what certain icons conventionally mean, but it is not intuitive, and not any better than learning what a word means.
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  That argument applies to words too. The string ‘run’ has to be learned. So does the spoken version. So does the idea. And you have to relearn the word in each language.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > The string ‘run’ has to be learned Yes, it does. And 'run' can be looked up in a dictionary. Even by someone who doesn't know English. Not so for icons. I am constantly amazed at the collective blindness to the enormous practical advantages of a phonetic alphabet. Steve Jobs was incredibly good at selling the emperor clothes.
    - robotresearcher 5y ago
      Dictionary is tech that addresses this problem for words. There are some catches, like you have to guess the language up front. And you have to know the ordering, eg how to look up Chinese characters. Tooltip is tech that address this for icons. Again, a partial solution. Image search can help in a pinch too. I don’t see anyone claiming that words are bad. The iPhone uses icon+word on the launch screen and Mac toolbars are usually configurable to use both. Finder panes have text-first lists and icon grids at your choice. Not sure what your amazement is about.
handrous 5y ago
Two phone-related ones: 1) Phone calls sounded better when they were analog. Even today, after some improvements, this is still true. 2) Long distance charges turned out to be well fucking worth it for keeping phone spam from being a thing. This "improvement" has been strongly net-harmful.
- yardshop 5y ago
  The thing I miss the most is high-quality full-duplex audio over copper cables! No lag, no cutting each other off, just warm analog signal! I also miss wiring up phone lines in the basements of friends' houses!
  - GnarfGnarf 5y ago
    This is why I keep our landline for customer service. Cell phone quality is second-rate,
orangepurple 5y ago
Gamification of the attention economy
ipnon 5y ago
Nuclear weapons are the greatest technological threat, and low probability events are guaranteed to occur over a long enough time frame. Nuclear deterrence has prevented world war, but clandestine nuclear weapons programs have given dangerous leverage to violent pariahs.
lordnacho 5y ago
1) Privacy / surveillance. There's a lot of things that govt and corporations don't really need to know about you, but now they do. 2) Attention. The double edged sword of easy information is that digital junk food is also easier to get. You can read Feynman lectures or catch up with the Kardashians, up to you. 3) The idiots can find each other. There's no village idiot anymore, they've gone global.
- JimTheMan 5y ago
  I feel number 3 in my bones.
- gary_0 5y ago
  > The idiots can find each other. Connecting the mentally ill and intellectually disabled and feeding them enraging misinformation in order to sell the maximal amount of advertising is not a business model that history is going to look kindly on.
- looshch 5y ago
  came here and scrolled down only to find #3. Resonates with me so much
hunterb123 5y ago
Interactions with humans. They are extra stupid now. Maybe because they don't have to think for themselves anymore?
rdiddly 5y ago
Well social media for example is mostly not in my life, but it still has an effect, which is to turn everyone else into a shallow-thinkin', slogan-spewin', snap-judgin', twitchy, goldfish-attention-span-havin', narcissistic snowflake who can never be challenged on anything they say. There's no one left to talk to, and being the only patient wise guru in a room full of children gets fucking old fast. I've been hanging out with Boomers lately, and it's actually pretty good. They have a sense of perspective.
reaperducer 5y ago
Communicating. Talking to someone on a cell phone is awful compared with a real land line. There's so much latency. And then if you're talking to someone who is on a VOIP service, it's even worse. No wonder people text more than they speak to one another these days. It's just so bad. And now we have two generations of people who never knew how good landlines sounded, and what it's like to talk to someone like they're right next to you. Telephones are just one of the things that "tech" reinvented poorly, but "good enough" to make money, so we're stuck with it.
- bufordtwain 5y ago
  I use skype on my cheap(ish) android phone to call my mom in France from the US and it's usually crystal clear and with no latency. Not sure what I am doing right here but I have no complaints. And so much cheaper than in the old days of using a landline.
- nradov 5y ago
  5G HD Voice has better quality than an analog land line with no noticeable latency. Of course the actual audio quality experience depends more on the handset and ambient environment than on the network.
neophyt3 5y ago
Personalization except youtube recommendation otherwise its search sucks
- octet1 5y ago
  Can you expand on this some more?
criddell 5y ago
Surfing TV channels. When I was a kid I was constantly flipping channels. At commercials I would sometimes flip through the dial to see what else was on. You could change channels as fast as you could turn the dial or press the button. My state-of-the-art television today is so slow at this that I never channel surf anymore. You can count 5 or more mississippis after changing the channel before the new one starts playing. Feels like the box should have a bunch of buffers or tuners or whatever the necessary technology is and guess what channel I might flip to next (up, down, previous would be good starts). It could have those streams ready to go in a millisecond.
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  > Feels like the box should have a bunch of buffers or tuners or whatever the necessary technology is and guess what channel I might flip to next (up, down, previous would be good starts). It could have those streams ready to go in a millisecond. I'm not an codec expert but, AFAIK, apart from buffering you also need to decode since the latest keyframe (so, typically, last n seconds of input).
jtwaleson 5y ago
Spending way too many resources and making it seem fine. Driving 100s of km every week like it's normal. Flying 10x per year. Turning the heat up in winter while wearing a t-shirt. This is an age of extreme luxury and we don't realize it. That and addiction to my smartphone. I hardly read books anymore, while that has always been one of the great pleasures in my life
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Reading in bed before going to sleep works for me (and my wife). It's a fixed moment where you unwind and relax, and with a good book it is something to look forward to every day. It also stimulates going to bed at a decent time instead of starting another episode on Netflix or gaming into the small hours.
- rokhayakebe 5y ago
  This is an age of extreme luxury But hasn't every age been one of luxury for those who lived it?
  - jtwaleson 5y ago
    Heh, it's been trending upward for centuries with lots of ups and downs though. For the last 3 decades it's been mostly upwards. But now the trend might become different. I fear for the future of my kids in 30 years.
    - rokhayakebe 5y ago
      Your kids will live an even more luxurious life (perhaps not more fulfilling): be anywhere in the world in less than 3 hours, self driving electric cars, better healthcare services, and much more.
black_13 5y ago
The ability to start over. To much is know about me. I will use the example of Texas or gone to Texas. You cant leave behind failure because you have trail of records.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
notacoward 5y ago
Manual controls. There's a lot to like about the infinite reconfigurability of touchscreens and on-screen controls, but there was also a lot to like about being able to find controls without looking and getting positive tactile feedback when you pressed or turned something. This is especially true in cars, but it shows up in other areas (e.g. kitchen equipment) as well. Related: human-oriented design in general. Every interface nowadays seems to be defined by the designer's whims and pure aesthetics, not what would actually be functional for users.
- dexwiz 5y ago
  I think this is in part due to how quickly software is developed. Since reqs > mvp can be hours, days, or at most weeks, there is a lot pressure on designers for quick turn around. My friend is an Industrial Designer, and works on Faucets, probably one of the last interfaces replaceable by a touch screen. Their design pipeline is years long. They build multiple prototypes and mock them with real humans, and get the space to actually watch people use them. I have very rarely seen a UX designer get more space to experiment than a InVision mockup. So of course what they design is disconnected.
  - eatYourFood 5y ago
    >> Since reqs > mvp can be hours, days, or at most weeks "at most weeks". I've seen MVP's take far longer than that and still be considered minimal. Minimal is contextual.
- gary_0 5y ago
  I recently moved and was wearing noise-canceling headphones while using the flat black minimalist buttons on my shiny stove and microwave and realized without hearing the beep it was hard to tell if I'd hit the button sensor. I had to wait and see how the minimalist alphanumeric display updated to know if I'd pressed the right little bit of text. People with disabilities or deafness would have a hell of a time. > not what would actually be functional for users Functional is ugly and ugly doesn't sell. This has been a problem with product design for decades: durability, usability, safety is all ignored in favor of whatever visual flair maximizes impulse buying. How the product performs when the owner actually uses it is irrelevant. Even worse dynamics are at play when it comes to advertising-supported software services. We've gone from a race to the bottom to a race to hell.
aimor 5y ago
Logging in. First I need to make an account for nearly everything. Then I need to link that account to a phone number or email. Then every time I use the service I need to wait for them to text or email me a password. If they email me the password then I have to log in to my email, which means getting another password texted to me. Alternatively if it's work related I have a physical key card, a physical password generator, and a slew of personal passwords I just memorize. I have to keep all of these on me just to log in: regular keys, cell phone with service, email, key card, password generator, and ideally a different password memorized for every service which need to be changed every 60-180 days. Maybe an example is needed, this is a typical day: I want to use the building's front door, so I use the key card. I want to use my office door so I use my regular key. I want to use my laptop so I use a memorized password. I want to connect to the network so I use my physical password generator with a memorized password. I want to read an encrypted email so I use a memorized password. I want to download a file from a document share with another company so I use a memorized password and get texted a password. I want to use the computer lab so I use a key card and a memorized password and another key card and another memorized password. I want to buy something online so I create a new account with a memorized password and get emailed a password so I log into my phone with my thumbprint and my email with a memorized password and get texted a password. Then I buy the thing with a credit card number and code which I've memorized since I get so much practice memorizing things now. I probably verify my identity a hundred times every single day, and businesses seem to be adding more and more ways to do it, making it more and more difficult. I remember being impressed by my grandfather's keychain when I was a child, thinking "wow, how can someone need this many keys?" ...
- vb6sp6 5y ago
  get a password manager. some of them are quite good and will even fill out usernames and passwords which makes maintaining a junk account for non essential websites easier to use
- 4ggr0 5y ago
  What's a physical password generator? Sounds interesting.
d4mi3n 5y ago
Social media in particular really degraded my social life for a number of years prior to minimizing Facebook in my life. I found that: 1. With all the little updates you get through Facebook, a lot of people feel that there isn't as much need for meeting, talking, or doing stuff together. I've found the reality to be otherwise; connections are deeper with better quality of time with a person and there are a lot of things that people simply aren't comfortable discussing on FB (mental health, relationship problems, health problems, etc). 2. Social media can give the impression that you have nothing new to talk about with someone. Since I've cut social media out of a lot of my personal life, I can actually call somebody I haven't talked to a year and have a lot to discuss. It's a lot more fulfilling to hear about somebody's new relationship/breakup/child/vacation than it is to get a sanitized summary of the same online. 3. I hadn't realized it since I stopped using FB, but there's a general sense of anxiety that I've found comes from regular usage. I think between the unfeeling algorithmic drive for engagement and the human tendency for information addiction, the need to check one's feed or friend group is a constant thing. I've been a lot happier and experiencing a lot less ambient anxiety without it. The conclusion I've come to is that social networks, at least how they're run and built today, or a very bad replacement for real human connection. I'd urge everyone to do the following whenever someone you care about comes to mind: 1. Have you spoken with them recently? If not, send them a text and see if they're free to call. 2. Are you not close and nervous about calling? Send them a text/email/letter letting them know you thought about them and share something. 3. Have someone you haven't spoken to in a while due to an argument or disagreement and regret losing touch? Reach out! Talk about it. Time heals many wounds, and with perspective, empathy, and a willingness to hear each other out you'll be surprised at how many friendships can be rekindled. It's been a rough few years. A contact out of the blue from an old acquaintance or friend can me the world to people. Remember that you're not alone and that whatever anxiety or loneliness you feel is a very human experience we all share.
gxnxcxcx 5y ago
In a city plagued by a decades-long, top-down devotion to capture value from tourism at the expense of the quality of life for its own citizens, Airbnb democratized things so the average Joe can contribute to ruining things for permanent residents, too.
- rswskg 5y ago
  lol, yes!!
bbarn 5y ago
Cars. I appreciate all of the advances in emissions reduction, safety, etc., but when I was a kid I learned the basics of working on nearly any car on the market, and now even with an OBD scanner most of them are still near unfixable without visiting a dealership. Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine. That's just the purely functional stuff. The hassle-ware that's been installed between in dash "infotainment" systems, integrations with remote third parties, etc., I honestly believe is more distracting and dangerous than genuinely helpful. We've grown accustomed to this so much that people have told me they are "bored" driving sometimes without all of their gadgetry. That shouldn't be the state of normal when driving, it should be "I am operating heavy machinery and should pay attention to what I'm doing because my life does depend on it". It's interesting to me that our trend with software has been to simplify interfaces over the years and cars just keep adding buttons and integrations and auxiliary ports for devices, and excuse themselves with useless friendly warnings that tell you not to use them while you're using the car.
- rco8786 5y ago
  > Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine. Any concrete examples of this? FWIW, cars are orders of magnitude more reliable than they were 40, 50+ years ago even though those were easier to work on.
  - uoaei 5y ago
    Assuming that reliability is weakly inversely correlated with repairability (reliable things may be more complicated and thus harder to fix without specialized tools or knowledge), I'm sure there are subjective optima that balance the two and are more practical than the current extreme of maximizing reliability but being completely crippled at the slightest disturbance.
    - rco8786 5y ago
      Again, any concrete examples of "being completely crippled at the slightest disturbance."? I've had lots of cars both modern and old and never experienced a disablement due to something that wasn't truly disable worthy.
cygned 5y ago
The lower entry barrier for a lot of things. It allows the community to grow, learn and become more diverse. On the other hand, I regularly read blog articles about complex topics from people that should rather not write about it. I know "senior software engineers" where I ask myself how they are capable of tying their shoes each morning. I see people get praised for achieving the bare minimum, like putting five pictures on LinkedIn about a topic they hardly understand at all.
nicolaslem 5y ago
Fragmented communication. Depending on the person I'm contacting I either have to use Signal, Messenger, iMessage, Email, Slack, Skype, IRC, SMS and I'm probably forgetting one or two others. The fact that most of those are not interoperable is so frustrating. We all know the only reason they are not interoperable is because each one tries to keep us in their walled ecosystem. Such a waste for the users.
stormdennis 5y ago
Car key fobs that fail silently on cars that have no (visible) door keyhole and no ignition one. The first time it happens is an education you could do without.
ryanbrunner 5y ago
Watching movies at home. Streaming services, while initially seeming awesome, offer way less selection than browsing through a Blockbuster or local video store. I suppose you can rent movies online as well, but the browsing experience is pretty bad if you're not looking for the latest thing.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Recently I went to a 7-11, and the cashier wanted me to teach me how to use an app to checkout. Instead of putting my items down and having him scan it, I had to pull out my phone, scan items with a line of people behind me, then present a code he scanned to bill me. Took 5 minutes to do something that usually takes 30 seconds. Just as in your examples, imo the key here is not "tech". It's that the tech is being used to offload work that used to be done by an employee to you, without passing on the benefits or the choice to opt out. I think the frame of technology good vs. technology bad is not useful. Technology is a means distinct from the ends it serves. Many modern applications of technology don't serve customers, they serve company profit margins or governments or don't really serve anyone except the maker and that's why they suck. Good technology is applied to eliminate work altogether like say sending an email instead of snail mail, or doing something fundamentally new & useful like having a detailed map of the world in your pocket.
- jdofaz 5y ago
  Wow, I would have just left
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    I can't imagine any shop that wouldn't just ring up your items if you answer “No thank you”.
    - fuzzfactor 5y ago
      Interesting, I solved this problem without knowing about it. I only go there on July 11 for "7/11 Day" when they give you a free slurpee. So no ring-up, no problem!
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I feel the massive amount of data companies have is making the world more hostile. When I shop for something I am getting really paranoid about the company manipulating what they are showing to me and at what price. I am generally concerned about privacy. It seems if somebody is willing to pay for information about you they can find out almost anything. And often this is used against you. In my opinion tech by itself is good but “big tech” is very bad. Too much data in companies’ hands is dangerous.
justinzollars 5y ago
Latch: https://www.latch.com/ https://www.latch.com/ It was a technology built for the convenience of building managers, but residents hate it.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Humor.
woodruffw 5y ago
Advertising: I don't get useful ads by default. The more ads I block (unconditionally, not attempting to filter by my preferences) on Twitter, the more useful they seem to become. Photography: I don't like looking at other people's photos as much as I used to. Mobile phone cameras do all kinds of weird and unpleasant processing, and usually have focal lengths that result in bad looking portraits (they're usually no more than half as wide as the human eye's focal length.) Arts, culture, and nightlife: It's harder than ever to find places where people aren't periodically checking their phones. I enjoy having random and serendipitous encounters, and phones and other mobile technology get in the way of that. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where some bars and clubs outright ban cellphone usage, but it's one step forward, two steps back. I can think of a lot of other things, but I think those three are enough grievances for a single post.
dvirsky 5y ago
I was just thinking the other day about how in the olden days you'd discover new music by listening to the radio. There would be a bias towards DJs and shows you liked, but musical tastes would be shaped and evolve by these DJs. Now when my music discovery is done by algorithms that are usually tailored to give me what I already like and not what someone thinks some people might like, how will it affect the evolution of music? On the other hand, having so much music available has made me discover much more music, including a couple I didn't know about (shout out to Turkish Psych Rock!) but I could be missing out on whole genres. Now I'm not saying this as a boomer rant about how things used to be better back in the day. I do discover much more music, it's just a thought about how this affects the evolution of music. Speaking of Turkish Psych Rock, a couple of years ago I was at a show of Altin Gun [1], which is a band that's probably seen (some) success mainly due to Spotify, and it looked like that when you looked at the audience - varying in age, dressing styles, etc - just random people who got this recommended a lot and liked it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9g_iyBR7xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9g_iyBR7xo
wara23arish 5y ago
I share your frustrations with Chatbots on the phone so much. Weeks ago I was dealing with chest pain/heart pain. I ended up trying to call a bunch of clinics/doctors to try to get a recommendation of where to go. Everywhere I called, they would have a spiel about covid that would last 1/2 minutes. It would make me livid and my pain worse. I understand that thats partly my fault for being impatient. But it felt so hard to just reach a doctor/nurse or anyone to talk to at the time.
- sophacles 5y ago
  I see you made the mistake of thinking that the healthcare system has anything to do with your wellness. Common mistake, but still a mistake. The healthcare system is just another machine to shovel money into a select group of peoples pocket, any doctoring they choose to provide is just a consequence of the marketing budget (gotta keep those word-of-mouth numbers up!).
  - wara23arish 5y ago
    Yeah, Im really surprised by how inefficient everything here is. Also how shady the practices are, no one warns you as an immigrant that you should avoid hospitals at all cost unless you’re almost sure you’re gonna die. I come from a 3rd world middle eastern county. We somehow have a life expectancy higher than the US. And over there you pretty much just deal with the doctors straightforward. I think part of the problem is there isn’t enough doctors in the US to begin with
50208 5y ago
Is American Society too broad?
50208 5y ago
Is American Societal fabric too broad?
harlanji 5y ago
I bet homelessness was less intense before the proliferation of IT. I've been unhoused for about 3.5 years now, last few months I do have a shelter situation and it's been much easier to gain weight and study. For my first 5 years in tech in SF I was stepping over homeless people on my way to my tech job asking why they didn't just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I did in high school living with my parents. Turns out having a place to plug in a computer and a 15" monitor and a shower and clean clothes to interview in is a so-called privilege, no matter the condition of the place or quality of parenting. It's more of an externality to IT than a direct problem as I see it. People are plugged in so it's easier to step over the problems around them. We have access to growth all over the world through chat and forums, so why would we spend our precious time on people who can most likely take us nowhere better than we presently are? Being homeless on Twitter was interesting, because it's like "if you can affort a smart phone then you can afford food;" I think the pandemic has erased that stereotype, at least. Now it's like "you have Twitter, why can't you jump on Zoom?" and "if you have time to Tweet then you have time to apply to a job"--indeed, time, but perhaps not the space or bandwidth or power or editing software to run more than Twitter. This may extend to social services via small screens but I don't have much experience with that. We could extend the effect to reduction of menial and low-mid level management jobs as well, which keeps people working 2-3 entry levels jobs as they start families in their mid-20s and beyond. I'm less sure of that case as it starts to get complex. I saw a different dynamic in my service jobs recently than I did as a teenager in the late '90s, but I wasn't there long enough to dissect it in detail. I can say when I was in high school most of my co-workers were high schoolers except the odd "older" person, recently it was almost an opposite proportion with perhaps 1 high schooler on each team. More competition = less opportunity for the vulnerable/unmarketable homeless population is the connection.
PascLeRasc 5y ago
Microsoft has made my early career incredibly difficult and sucked all of the joy out of engineering. Their software like Outlook and Teams has given me eye strain, RSI, and teeth grinding. In my experience the Microsoft ecosystem promotes a culture of micromanaging, sniping, and gatekeeping.
beebeepka 5y ago
1. Monitors. Things are finally improving but LCDs made me stop playing Quake and Unreal Tournament during the mid 2000s and into the early 2010s when 120Hz panels (TN of course) started appearing at reasonable prices. 2. Lunches with coworkers. No longer a thing for many of us but boy I've had enough lunches with 20 somethings glued to their phones the entire time. What's the point of going together, bruh?
GnarfGnarf 5y ago
Car horns that beep when you lock them remotely. The perpetrator is further away from his car, and knows to expect the sound. It is startling, rude and offensive. The mechanism should be off by default.
ronyfadel 5y ago
Attention. Holy hell. Between Youtube, Twitter, HN and Reddit I'm both wasting an indecent amount of time and my attention span is turning into that of a goldfish.
miki123211 5y ago
Home Appliances and devices in general. Everything is becoming touch based these days. As a blind person, this means a lot of devices are unusable or almost unusable for me. As long as it's something in my own place, I can find alternatives, but that's not possible for devices I don't own. PIN pads on POS systems are the most egregious example here. Since I live in Europe, I can either use Apple Pay or give out my PIN to whoever is nearby. Apart from that, tech has improved my life massively. It's impossible to overstate how much assistive technology has improved in the last 15 or so years. Most smartphones and computers now have a great and free screen reader, can read print, recognize currency, allow us to communicate with the sighted world, let us read almost any book in existence and watch most contemporary movies, at least the popular ones for which they made a special audio description track. None of that was possible 15 years ago, definitely not for the price of a normal smartphone.
- papertokyo 5y ago
  Good to know it's not all bad.
rswskg 5y ago
Bluetooth headphones. Never again.
edgyquant 5y ago
Dating used to be fun and you’d go out and meet people. Now it’s endless swiping where 50% of matches are bots, 30% of matches just want you to follow their Instagram or Snapchat and the final 20% are just as jaded as I am so it doesn’t last long.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  Go back far enough into the ancient past and everyone had almost always met in person for the first time, since the dawn of man. Well, enough decades into the ancient past.
testingmaniac 5y ago
dating
_xnmw 5y ago
Romance. Tinder and Instagram made monogamy obsolete.
- rokhayakebe 5y ago
  Technology can take away your ability to concentrate on anything long enough. You will have a hard time concentrating on the video you are watching, then the book you are reading, then your children, and your spouse.
muzaffarpur 5y ago
Dating for now white folks in USA.
- fuzzylama 5y ago
  why white folks specifically?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
LongTimeAnon 5y ago
Women.
rsp1984 5y ago
The web experience. I long back for those days where you used to be able to just type in a URL or click a link and arrive at a webpage without much fuss about it. If the page wasn't what you were looking for, NBD, you just moved on. The experience nowadays is more like: * Google for thing XYZ, wait for some seconds until the result page layout is final due to additional crap being loaded in the background * scrolling down while mentally hiding all the crap that big G is trying to sell you * finding something that looks interesting and clicking on it * being greeted with a cookie settings popup from hell, figuring out how to get it out of the way without becoming an advertising target for the rest of your life. * Trying to find the close button for the video that starts auto-playing in some corner of the screen. * looking at the site, scrolling, getting another full-screen pop-up reminding you to subscribe to their BS newsletter or their paid service * etc.. These days I spend less time on the web than 20 years ago. Back then it was a quirky, endlessly interesting place to explore and spend hours in. Nowadays I have a hand full of sites that I visit and trust, but other than that I kind of use my computer (or phone for that matter) like it's 1990. The internet experience has become really unbearable.
- psyc 5y ago
  You must be logged in to do that! That username is taken. Please use a stronger password. Check your email for a confirmation link. Or check your spam folder. Or check your spam folder in 5 minutes. Now do this captcha. Now do another one. Please fill out required bio fields. An admin will email you once you’ve been approved.
  - rsp1984 5y ago
    Exactly. Thanks for reminding me.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  I often find MS Edge usurping my exact URLs (ex: example.com) and turning them into search queries. It's infuriating. It also feels like auto-complete for URLs I visit frequently has been sabotaged to inflate search numbers.
bob1029 5y ago
It's really hard to identify one specific thing, but I would have to say car tech seems to have tripped the most offenses for me. The most upsetting thing to me is the fly-by-wire controls. I used to drive a vehicle that was EFI, but still had a direct cable from your foot to the throttle body. To describe the throttle response as "immediate" is an understatement when compared to any modern car. Today, I have a recent generation sports car with electronic throttle body. There is a dead zone and about 100 milliseconds of latency associated with any input. It really kills the experience/flow when you are anticipating that step-wise moment. Also, I will probably never drive a car that doesn't utilize an E2E hydraulic braking or steering system. You can maybe survive the software engineers fucking up TB angle. You can't survive the computer deciding to take you directly into a barrier at 80mph or refusing to apply the brakes in an emergency situation. I think higher latency, lower reliability and reduced safety (in edge cases) is at the core of most things that bother me with tech. Sure, you can get the statistics to make it look good on paper, but the individuals caught in those "but sometimes" situations would like to have a word with your methodologies.
ksec 5y ago
Reliability. Most hardware dont last as long due to cost saving. Smart Appliance. Most people dont realise how the word Smart ( implying software ) and Appliance contradict each other. Information Quality. I spend some time thinking about it. I thought as I age and become more knowledgeable in multiple domains, I smell more BS. But then I realise that is not exactly true. It is not that I smell more BS, it is more BS are being produced at a much faster pace and spread at a much faster rate ( in many order of magnitude, likely thousands if not millions times easier than pre internet era. ). The old dream of information super highway where people can "share" information turns out to be a nightmare. Constantly connected. No excuse for Battery is dead, not picking up phone? Instant messaging. This combined with Information Quality makes life way worse. I would not be surprised if the great resignation and people want to go to hermit have correlation with this because our brain are bombarded with information. Digital Photos. Just like everything that started what was suppose to be a great idea. We dont value photos any more. Especially when they are compressed and takes very little space, you can store as much as you want. Not to mention modern smartphone camera "pretty up" your photo and they are no longer realistic. Edit: I wrote this without first reading all the comments. Turns out many people feel the same as well.
dijit 5y ago
I grew up in the 90's, when I turned on the TV the audio was being output immediately and the actual display took a second to warm up. a second. Now my TV takes about 30s to start up, it's actually constantly on standby mode. It takes a good 5-10 minutes to actually boot from cold. using the UI feels sluggish, there's proprietary "applications" which clog up the main screen and I'm told it spies on me. Not to mention: other people with modern TV's have Ads injected into their watching experience, I can't even begin to imagine how frustrating that would be if I were playing a game. So: TV's are much, much worse than they were 15 years ago. Even if there are more pixels now.
- stnmtn 5y ago
  I haven't had this experience at all with my new TV I bought this year. It boots up in quite literally 3 seconds and I can navigate to netflix or the criterion channel right away and begin playing stuff there I can even mirror my phone screen directly to my TV with with my phone's built-in functionality, which has actually been useful more times than I would have expected!
  - dijit 5y ago
    Try unplugging it and plugging it back in. I’m glad your TV works for you, I haven’t found one that boots in 3s and is usable- even from standby. What model do you have?
- aimor 5y ago
  Oh I like this answer. It immediately reminded me that so many things used to just be instant on. Touch surfaces are slow to respond (think modern kitchen appliances vs older digital buttons), things like car radios have startup delays, even led lights are delayed turning on and slowly fade off (especially annoying if two bulbs on a switch turn on at different speeds). It's comparable to an OS with animations turned on or off, the difference is striking.
ryanmarsh 5y ago
Gain of function research made me basically lose two years of my life.
vanusa 5y ago
The omnipresent and ever-accelerating pollution and deadening of daily life. Advertising (that acts as if we actually enjoy being subjected to it), tracking, the continual privacy f*over, screens, memes, interruptions, the pressure to be always on and efficient and optimized and "engaged", fake social media "friends", the inevitable burnout and withdrawal that follows as a result ... all of it.
poulsbohemian 5y ago
Maybe due to my Amish heritage, I often ask this question the other way around: what technology is improving my life? This can be a great question to ask yourself when you are considering taking a new (tech related) job or if you are thinking of business ideas.
carom 5y ago
Every interaction with a government or large entity. It has created a rigidity that does not allow for special circumstances. It is phone tree hell, self-help FAQs when you're trying to report a problem, it is minute long COVID safety message when you are calling a store to check item stock.
- jaclaz 5y ago
  On the other hand (according to them) I am "special" as I never found any of the questions that I want or need to ask among the FAQ's, or maybe unlucky as the issue I have cannot ever be resolved by following their problem troubleshooting guides (but somehow in the end the human clerk manages to solve the issue at hand in most cases).
gigel82 5y ago
Privacy Everyone is tracking me, monitoring everything I see and do online, feeding the giant "personalized advertisement" machine and all the other trolls mooching off its edges (identity thieves, scammers, etc.); I'm going to extreme lengths of un-googling my Chromium and Android and un-Microsofting my Windows, pi-holing my network and uBlock-ing on top, but I feel it's all for naught, an exhausting losing battle. I empathize with your thought of just doing a "Stardew Valley" and dropping all this shit to go live on a farm somewhere, but I'm a cog in the machine now and have to live it through :(
recursive 5y ago
Light switches. I like the old kind. There's a position for off and and a position for on. Maybe a slider for a dimmer. But now in my bedroom, the brightness is adjusted by holding down a single button. The intensity follows a slow triangle wave. You release the button at the desired time. That means if you just want the dimmest possible setting, you have to stand there for ~10 seconds and be subjected to the highest intensity brightness in the meantime.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Why do you tolerate that? "Old kind" light switches are plentiful, as are sliding dimmer, probably multiple kinds at local hardware stores and certainly online. Takes 10 minutes and a screwdriver and maybe a couple wire nuts to replace.
  - recursive 5y ago
    Because I don't think the old kind could communicate with my fancy-ass ceiling fan assembly? I'm actually not sure.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Yes, if you are currently using a remote for the ceiling fan/light assembly because you do not have a 3 conductor wire from the switch to the fan, then it would be impossible.
zarkov99 5y ago
My attention is constantly under siege and I have trouble sitting down and just reading a book or watching the kids without stopping every few minutes to check my phone.
999900000999 5y ago
I think tech makes relationships much harder, I think Chris Rock has a bit on how it was easier for his parents to be married for 30 years than it was for him to be married for 3. It's not just between you and your partner, it's now between you, them, their 300 Facebook friends. I screwed up one early relationship since I was so afraid she'd post the wrong thing on Facebook. In terms of meeting people, I only do it the old fashioned way. When you date a real person who you meet as a member of a community, your much less likely to act like a sociopath. It's also less stressful. I actually meet more people now, while spending vastly less time on dating. I will say for me social media was outright damaging. I'd waste 20 hours a week on FB, and various dating apps. Doesn't do anything for you at the end of the day, life is too short to waste it behind a tiny screen. However, Facebook messenger has been very useful when meeting people abroad. PS: If your not happy with the people your meeting , try moving. America has hundreds of cities, many of which have distinct cultures. Someone who's miserable in say San Jose, might very happy in Atlanta. Find your niche, don't fall for the lie that you can make it anywhere.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  Land lines were always expensive, especially before cellphones when that was all there was. College students often couldn't afford one of their own and it wasn't really thought of as a dire necessity. Plus there were pay phones everywhere which were cheap and unlimited for local calls. Then local college sweethearts could call each other free from home or dorm usually on shared phones, with other callers often waiting for you to finish so they could use the phone next. You could make arrangements to meet later at a certain time & place and after you hung up, that was it. Not too easy to cancel after that when almost nobody had ever been in constant contact before, and so good sweethearts really concentrated on being there for each other. I would estimate that more of the time apart was spent thinking positively about your partner when you can't be in touch, and letting nothing stand in the way of your appointed meeting (same thing everybody was doing), compared to how there is so much noise in the way with your own phone on you at all times. People don't seem to think about their sweetheart as much when they can just call anywhere anytime. And it's quite common for each person to spend more time on the phone itself doing things other than talking to their partner with it. The type of strong relationships favored by the archaic limits on mobile communication & networking might be a thing of the forgotten past.
conductr 5y ago
LEDs. Why does everything need to be lit? I bought a toaster, now my kitchen glows. I bought a toothbrush, now my bathroom glows. Etc, etc. Why do manufacturers insist on making things always glow?
- hollerith 5y ago
  Especially blue LEDs.
- rokhayakebe 5y ago
  Sales.
  - conductr 5y ago
    Perhaps. Not sure I believe that as I've never once noticed the LED light as part of my buying decision. Now that I'm wary though, I will avoid devices that seems to have bright lights and have returned things specifically for that reason. Not that my behavior is average but feel like at the least, nobody is testing things to see if they blink before they buy them (many small electronics are bought without ever seeing them tested/demo'ed). I have had many things over the years that have internal lights, for no apparent reason, but they glow out of the box. Eg, like an old DVD player that glows through the case. I'm sure this is for maintenance as it may blink or light a certain way to communicate error codes, but if you're the one building this in - I would think OFF would be default and could enter some debug mode or something from there, or start blinking when errors occur.
- uoaei 5y ago
  Totally. Photo studio with sick backdrops? Looks great. Random 80s era bathroom counter with many other appliances/bottles/etc. around? Looks ridiculous.
lxe 5y ago
Touchscreens in cars. Please stop this.
boudin 5y ago
I miss being disconnected. Before having constant access to internet or a phone, I had much more time to process my thought. I also had much more time throughout the day to think overall as there was much more situation when I had to wait a bit and no mobile phone to disrupt me. I'm trying to reclaim that, but I do miss that (and I think overall it's something that humans needs and are missing). I also dislike Slack or similar tools for work, it makes the work day much more disrupted and it's hard to manage. I wish that there was a calorie counter on Slack where you need to burn some calories before having to disrupt someone. It would make people think twice before talking. Finally I find the grab on technology from GAFAM sad. Things have been abstracted and ownership removed to the point that I fell more and more like a passive user rather than someone having fun hacking around. If I can't break it and fix it back, it feels like a piece of non interesting piece of junk to me. I become just a user, not an actor. I find everything they make just sad.
echan00 5y ago
Buying records at the store
lettergram 5y ago
Socializing. This pandemic would have ended months ago if people weren’t on social media. The algorithms cater to fear and the fact people stay online gives them the impression of socializing. Generally, I think it’s broken the sense of localized community; while making it more global. This has upsides and downsides, but I’d like to see a more localized system in place. Regarding the comment about living off the grid, I am well on my way. Should have my families setup by late 2022.
- rexpop 5y ago
  It's important to remember that [excess deaths](0) aren't merely rumored to be true; they are a hard fact preventing the pandemic from ending. I agree, however, that online socializing is critically deficient, and an inadequate replacement for the communal traditions we've spent [millennia developing](1) to gratify our [social needs](2). 0. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm 1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24452.Dancing_in_the_Streets https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24452.Dancing_in_the_Str... 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/478.Bowling_Alone https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/478.Bowling_Alone
  - lettergram 5y ago
    If you compare regions that locked down and mask to those that did not in the US the fatality rate is not significantly different. My generally point was back when we had the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 we had similar numbers of excess deaths. Yet no one did anything like break down the social fabric of society. I think that only happened this time because we had social media as a stand in.
sidcool 5y ago
The attention economy and addiction to tech in general. The bottomless scroll and the dopamine hit on pull to refresh. The aversion to be alone and with ones thought, no matter how troubling. The obsession with likes and subs. And so on.
kgwxd 5y ago
Tolls by Mail and the customer support around it. Got one in the mail a few weeks ago even though I have EZPass. They include a pic so I know a '1' was mistaken for a '7' which made it my match my plate. For one, I got my plate a few days after the scan date, they are brand new plates, so there's no chance they were even on the road at the time. Seems like the system should know that. The given choices for resolving are: - Mail the slip back with a reason checked. None of the options fit the scenario, there's no "Other". Postage is not prepaid, I have to go to the post office because I haven't needed a stamp since 2012. - Call a number, which I did. I waited 45 minutes on 2 different days, never got through. There is no email address or contact form the website. There is no way to make a dispute electronically. (I guess this part is more like a lack of tech that made life worse for me) The hold message said "EZPass customer services will be with you...". I have an EZPass account which the mistaken plate is on, but wasn't at the time because I didn't have the plates yet. So I figured I'd try the support system through that account, even though it's technically separate. The only option there is a support contact form. I had to type that up twice because, of course, my login timed out by the time I hit "submit" and all my text was lost, an possibility I'm fully aware of as a web dev, but I haven't experienced in like 10 years. That was a week ago, still haven't heard back. Now I'm going to mail thing in with a handwritten choice and can only hope it's going to work out and not lead to some kind of worse mix up that cost more time or money, or flags my license somehow.
smolder 5y ago
Socializing. People don't know how to communicate with their local surroundings anymore, or don't want to. I was in one of the first groups of kids to grow up having a fair number of online-only friends, and I think it's great in a lot of ways, but I also see an atrophy of civility and sociability happening in physical communities, and think the accessibility of niche culture online has something to do with it. Some of this may be rose colored glasses or the fact that I'm older and less pleasant to look at, or other biases/confounds, but that's my observation.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Everything really. As my career grows I understand the appeal to go off grid because society in general is more and more fragile that anyone thinks and the solutions to fix them are worse .
mikewarot 5y ago
Ubiquitous networking, and the lack of a suitable operating system to match it. When I started programming, systems with floppy disks that held 360k were the norm. Those disks could be write protected. Diskcopy was a standard DOS command that allowed you to have an exact copy of your data, protected against alteration by the hardware of the machine, and the write-protect tab. You could directly know what data you were putting into the computer, if it was at risk of modification, and you could even tell if it was being accessed, because it was slow and noisy. Modern Operating Systems have no such provisions for controlling access to data in a obvious and transparent manner. The hardware was simple enough that there was nowhere for malware to hide. Now that we have systems to boot our systems, that's no longer true. There's no operating system available to provide anywhere near the assurance of MS-DOS on a stand alone twin floppy drive machine. Because things were inherently secure, shareware was huge. You could freely try out new things, dozens of things in a sitting, sourced from a guy selling floppy disks at a computer club meeting, and know you couldn't possibly mess up your computer or your work. There is no equivalent operating system security today. The only reasonable approach, in my mind, is that of capability based security. In those systems, you decide what specific resources (files, folders, network access, etc) to make available to a program when you run it. If you didn't include it, your application can't get at it, no matter what. This in direct opposition to the way things are done now, where the program might pull up a file dialog, but then directly accesses the files without oversight, and can do anything you're allowed instead of what you told it. Couple insecure operating systems with ubiquitous networking, and it's a recipe for disaster. I figure 5 more years before people wake up to the root cause, and 10 more before it starts getting fixed.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  You're forgetting a step in your "reasonable approach". How do you expect a user to know whether or not they should grant access for HN.exe to talk to 127.0.0.1 or for mikewarot.exe to access some file? The reality is the sort of system you suggest almost inevitably ends up being the same as broad permission-based security like current mobile OSes have, because the only scalable decision is "give it access to all resources in a category if it asks and that seems appropriate". However, those systems DO exist in both Windows and Linux.
syngrog66 5y ago
tech made my life worse: sensor-driven sinks in public restrooms: dont turn on when you want, shutoff too soon, forcing me into frustrating, time-consuming, farsical movements to try to get it to magically trigger again or stay on, so I can finish rinsing my hands or face sensor-driven autoflush toilets in public restrooms: similar issues, except they also tend to flush when you dont want -- at the worst time -- or not flush at all when you really really really need it to in both cases I "get" the fact theyre trying to save water and/or reduce their utility bills. get it. but it makes our lives worse than they were decades ago, when out in public. I know its a trade-off between evils... tech made my life better: modern mobile smartphones. if you could travel back in time to even the 70s and tell someone that within their lifetime they'll have a small personal device that can do the 1000's of things a 2020 era phone can do, you might blow their mind. yes it has introduced a new class of problems too (eg. social media doom scrolling all day long, more distracted driving, etc.) but the amount of new awesome things it allows is totally worth it, imo, and a big net improvement.
jfrunyon 5y ago
Advertising.
gxx 5y ago
1) Social media driven by algorithms, destroying the fabric of society. 2) Being the product, not the customer. 3) Endless, gratuitous, unstoppable changes to the tools we use. 4) The raging battle for our attention.
spurgu 5y ago
Too easily getting caught up in news. I tend to not really follow what's going on, but I get into these periods where I keep checking everything. Might take a week or two, then I snap out of it and get back to my life again.
anonu 5y ago
My ability to read anything in long form, including books.
- mlok 5y ago
  I noticed this 6-7 years ago and decided to find time to read a book a month. The easiest way was to insert this in a bedtime routine. Your smartphone must be out of reach.
oyebenny 5y ago
Quality of friendships.
fdjsafdsjl 5y ago
The fact that so many people I see around me, from young children to previously sensible adults, stumble their way through life while desperately scrolling on their smartphones.
WalterBright 5y ago
Unicode. Unicode started out as a marvelous improvement. But then, it was infected by dementia. For example, check out this madness: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/11/hiding-vulnerabilities-in-source-code.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/11/hiding-vulner... where Unicode added code points that would cause the renderer to go backwards. Unicode looniness has also infected C++23: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p1949r1.html http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p194... which is absurdly overcomplicated. Using emoji as C++ identifier names? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30130806/using-emoji-as-identifier-names-in-c-in-visual-studio-or-gcc https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30130806/using-emoji-as-... What a clowny "feature".
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  > where Unicode added code points that would cause the renderer to go backwards. No. That's not even slightly accurate to what those codepoints do and those codepoints are necessary for the correct presentation of LTR and RTL scripts. And what is that link? https://trojansource.codes/trojan-source.pdf https://trojansource.codes/trojan-source.pdf
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > That's not even slightly accurate to what those codepoints do That's what the codepoints do, which causes the renderer to overwrite the earlier text making it invisible and possible to add hidden malware. > and those codepoints are necessary for the correct presentation of LTR and RTL scripts. eurt ton
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      > which causes the renderer to overwrite the earlier text making it invisible No. It does not overwrite anything nor does it make anything invisible. The only thing the codepoints you're referring to can do is make things appear out of order (and that's a bug in editors for not rendering them as special characters, not a bug in Unicode). There are invisible codepoints (such as ZWSP) but they also have are also necessary and again, a failure to render them as special characters is an editor bug. And they don't make anything else invisible. (* There have also been other editor/renderer bugs such which might result in crashes or disappearing text, but those are from failures to be compatible with Unicode, not from Unicode) You need to go read the paper I linked (which is linked from your blog post), not a 3 paragraph blog post. If you think that these are errors in Unicode, then I have some errors in ASCII and a text editor that treats NUL as end-of-file to sell you. Control characters have always been necessary and will always be necessary. > eurt ton I'm not even going to address that other than to say LOL
phendrenad2 5y ago
Roads. I honestly believe that road signs are getting worse and more sparse. People use GPS, so why bother? (It probably also affects road design, I.E. normally you'd want to keep offramps spaced out so people have time to react. But with GPS, you can cram them into a small space and people will mostly follow the right one.)
speby 5y ago
Better AND Worse? Streaming video. The convenience of on-demand and a sort of a la carte experience that we've always been clamoring to have since the days of "regular" Cable TV are here. And while that's nice and convenient in manys (i.e. high-quality streaming feeds of many kinds of both live content, popular shows/movies, and past/old movies and shows). The downside is now it's a huge pain in the ass to remember what streaming network has what, in some cases down to which show's seasons exist where. Example? Yellowstone TV series (w/ Kevin Costner). You can watch the first 3 seasons on Peacock. But Season 4? Only on Paramount Network. Oh and don't get confused with Paramount Network versus Paramount+. It's an upgrade in some ways but offset but incredibly frustrating and annoying experiences trying to figure out where shit lives in order to watch it.
robomartin 5y ago
Music on iOS. How old are iPhones and iPods before that? Why is it that I still can't import a library of CD's I own and play the "Dark Side of the Moon", "The Wall", "Brandenburg Concerto", "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" or Mozart's "Requiem" from start to finish as one complete work? To be fair, I haven't checked in a few years. Last I checked this was still impossible. Years ago I tried and it was an abysmal waste of time and effort. I have an extensive collection of CD's and none of them are on my iOS devices because I can't listen to albums as albums, in order, as indivisible units. I don't understand this. What do Apple employees listen to? One hit wonders? This was worked just fine on Windows Media Player from day one, literally decades ago. If MS brought back Windows Phone and the media player behaved just as the desktop versions does, I would switch from iPhone in an instant. This, BTW, is the reason I no longer buy iPads. A Windows-based tablet is a perfect travelling companion. I have unrestricted access to the file system, USB ports, HDMI and more. I can carry my digital books (which are 100% in PDF format) and my music and videos are easy to manage and can be played back in sensible ways. On top of that, they are great business machines for presentations, etc.
DougN7 5y ago
Politics!
janglezz 5y ago
Listening to music. Back in the day I listened to the radio, I bought cds and vinyl and listened to entire albums and looked at every detail of the album art. I went record shopping with my brothers. I made mixtapes for special people in my life and received them as well. I’d listen to the radio hoping for a song to come on so I could record it to a cassette on my boombox. I miss the sound of tape. I miss the imperfection. With everything at my fingertips, I definitely get music A.D.D and skip things often. I don’t care about bands or artists as much. I don’t listen to albums like I used to. I’ve outsourced my music discovery to Spotify playlists and while it’s convenient and sometimes spot on, I sometimes miss the old days of going on a date to the record store and finding something special.
peanut_worm 5y ago
My general health. Convenience makes you lazy. That being said, exercising efficiently is easier than ever thanks to technology as well.
chrismatheson 5y ago
Online half arsed forms for everything! I can’t count the number of times my wife has shouted at the iPad because some web dev wants a SPA form validation that didn’t work correctly, and all while trying to do something reasonably important like making sure our child gets fed food at school without the ingredients she’s allergic to.
env123 5y ago
Smartphones used as cameras on concerts. Annoying for a concert-goer who just want to see the performer in the moment. This is the only time I see the use of Google Glass as a positive

ericmay 5y ago

Maybe not advertising completely but at least targeted advertising. Many problems and borderline unethical business models stem from targeting.

amelius 5y ago
> Maybe not advertising completely but at least targeted advertising. Non-targeted advertising is still distracting. Why not ban it completely? Or perhaps allow dedicated advertising places, so everybody can be happy.
- ericmay 5y ago
  I used to think that too but a complete ban probably doesn't work well. What else would you be banning? Bumper stickers and logos on cars (get rid of the Apple logo on the back of your Mac), yard signs for political campaigns, newspapers, I mean there's a lot there. And then once you start selectively allowing it then you also create hyper-competitive scenarios for the ads that are allowed and I'm thinking if you do that then the ads that are allowed become crazy addictive and effective because the cost to advertise would be so high. Really what is the purpose of advertising in an ideal world? I'd say it's local, and lets people know what your business is and what services you offer. So if you run an inn in a small town, having a sign hanging outside of your business to let visitors know you're an inn and open for business seems pretty good. People have been doing that for hundreds of years. The current model though is, as you say, at a minimum distracting. But I think we can grab some low-hanging fruit. If I were dictator I'd ban targeted advertising in any form. No collecting personal data. And I'd ban billboards and other large signs. Idk if this is exactly a good thing to do but I'd also explore banning in advertising in which you're not paying for the service. So if I pay for cable TV and they want to advertise to me, that's fine because I'm engaging in an interaction with the company. I shouldn't have to be subjected to ads that I don't agree to see. It's kind of a form of mind-violence IMO. Question is just where do you draw the line.
  - amelius 5y ago
    I think the problem is that we allow any kind of advertising unless there is some problem. We should turn this around: ban all advertising unless there is something for society to be gained.
  - BbzzbB 5y ago
    >I'd say it's local, and lets people know what your business is and what services you offer. >I'd ban targeted advertising in any form. Aren't these at odds? Genuine question, I just don't see how you can ban targeted advertising in any form while allowing people to advertise locally on the Internet for one thing. Then, similarly to TV ads, no targeting skews the advertising pool to huge players that can overspend (I swear half the ads on TV are car companies) and companies whose product are used by everyone (consumer products, restaurant chains, etc). I don't have a mind made up with what's the solution. I too see clear problems with targeted ads when it comes to privacy and manipulation, I also have expunged ads from my Internet, but an outright ban has other issues. If you are an SMB with a niche or local product you simply can't afford advertising to everyone and hope the 1% subset you are aiming converts enough to make it viable. Maybe I'm wrong but I think there's a large amount of SMBs and self-employed jobs that would straight up not exist if it wasn't for targeted advertising, that has societal value in and of itself. I'm ambivalent overall. On one hand I wouldn't mourn the death of all advertisement, on the other I'm not sure how you make a product, service or SMB known without it and I doubt most of my friends' product, service or SMB would exist without online targeted advertising for finding customers. IMO the solution is more akin to giving more privacy rights and options than an outright ban, granted I have no clue if that is enforceable or how to implement.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      When I say local I'm thinking like, you can have a sign on the sidewalk for your business or you can have a sign in front of your store or something. I wasn't clear on that - my bad. I so far haven't seen any benefit to me personally from targeted advertising. A lot of companies take information about me and my activities without a true way to consent and then use that to send me ads or try and find ways to make me addicted to their products. If they got rid of targeted ads I think there'd be 0 detriment to my own life and lots of benefits. Certainly open to other arguments though. > on the other I'm not sure how you make a product, service or SMB known without it and I doubt most of my friends' product, service or SMB would exist without online targeted advertising for finding customers Yea personally I wouldn't care at all. It's like if you made a business that depended on selling nicotine or selling cigarette filters and then we banned cigarettes. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't here, just that if as a society we decided X was bad and shouldn't be sold, then people who sell products related to X I mean we shouldn't keep something bad around just for that reason. > IMO the solution is more akin to giving more privacy rights and options than an outright ban, granted I have no clue if that is enforceable or how to implement. I think this can work on the web or Internet technologies, but I'm also concerned about things like billboards, or the newspaper ad section that even when I call and ask them to stop I still get tossed into my yard or on the sidewalk. I don't want to see the billboard yet I'm forced to. I don't want people to throw newspaper ads on my front yard but I'm forced to. At least with the web though I can just turn on ad blockers and use technology to fight it. I can't do anything about the newspaper stuff. I fantasize about saving them for a year or something and then giving them back. It pisses me off because these things end up all over the street and get washed into and clog up sewer drains too.

caust1c 5y ago

I've thought a lot about what plagues our modern world and I've come to the same conclusion. I'm at a loss for what can be done about it though. We can't very easily ban advertising. Any regulation has to be lightweight because it's nearly impossible to enforce at internet scale (as we've seen again and again). Curious if you've thought about any ways to fix the problem we're in.

jacquesm 5y ago
My life is as close to advertising free as possible. The only thing that I can't really do much about is advertising signs by the roadside, but other than that it isn't a problem.
- noneeeed 5y ago
  I'm sure I remember reading about a city (somewhere in south america I think) that banned all billboards, and it was like the city was reborn.
  - handrous 5y ago
    They're banned on some stretches of interstate (maybe where they cross federal land? Not sure) and damn, it's nice. Even relatively dull and shitty landscapes are so much better without that blight.
    - duderific 5y ago
      I learned today that in California at least, they have to be designated as a Scenic Highway [1]; then advertising is not allowed. [1] https://dot.ca.gov/programs/design/lap-landscape-architecture-and-community-livability/lap-liv-i-scenic-highways https://dot.ca.gov/programs/design/lap-landscape-architectur...
  - sofetch 5y ago
    Sounds like the São Paolo Clean City Law: https://newdream.org/blog/sao-paolo-ad-ban https://newdream.org/blog/sao-paolo-ad-ban
    - noneeeed 5y ago
      That's the one! Such a good idea.
- aigo 5y ago
  Me too, ad blockers and all my media on Plex, etc. For me it's only when I watch live sport that I see adverts now, which I quite like, it's like a little window into what most other British people are seeing when they watch TV all week.
  - wincy 5y ago
    PLEX really makes me feel like I’m living in an awesome future, the one I imagined as a kid on the early internet where I can watch whatever I want whenever I want. Then I go to YouTube and am grossed out by all the ads and the sponsored portions in every video.
  - amelius 5y ago
    How do you navigate around sites that insist on you removing the ad blocker?
    - gryn 5y ago
      A. F12 and remove the div that says so or one of it's parent. B. find another website that offer the same thing. C. give up and temporarily disable adblock for that website until you do what you need to do and enable it again what I find really annoying is website that tangle login to their ads, so when you have adblock software enabled it just silently fails. the most recent example I encountered is https://www.edf.fr/ https://www.edf.fr/ a government owned company, I couldn't get electricity for my new house unless I disabled ublock.
    - aigo 5y ago
      How many of those are there? I've never encountered more than maybe one or two. Even illegal premier league streaming sites don't mind adblockers.
- grech 5y ago
  Curious to know, how did you manage to get to an advertising free life?
  - wincy 5y ago
    It sounds like the steps are pretty simple. I live in the suburbs of a US city, and billboards are banned, so unless I go into the city proper (a few times a year) I hardly ever see advertisements. 1) move to the countryside or at least outside a major city, or a place where billboards are banned 2) Don’t own a TV 3) use uBlock Origin/Adblock on all your devices
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    No TV, big sticker saying 'no print advertising' on my mailbox, adblocked and jsblocked to the hilt on all computers in the house (I see that as a sanity and a security bonus as well), no physical newspaper. It's as good as clean now, every now and then something slips through and then my first response usually is 'surely people can't be that stupid'.
- 4ggr0 5y ago
  I don't know if this is unrealistic, but a couple of months ago I had a thought As soon as AR Glasses start being usable and affordable, I want to buy an open-source model and try to develop a RL-Adblocker. I guess it would need AI, because I still have to see traffic signs and other actually useful things. If AR Glasses allow me to replace every billboard with a picture of a family member or someting else, I will be happy. Hopefully we will get to use open-source ones to play around with.
ok_dad 5y ago
Personally, I just "ignore" those big problems, as I have no authority to fix them. I focus on what I can do: help my family when they need it, teach my kid(s) to be good and intelligent people (for my and my wife's definition of good and intelligent), and work in industries or on technology that will have a positive effect on the world (like distributed energy resource/load controls, currently). I can only affect my little part of the world, so why worry about those big issues that are above my paygrade? I just vote for whom I think will help most (hard to find these days), raise my voice when I see something I don't like (like when someone is being rude to a clerk at a store), and the rest is up to fate/the universe/god(s)/whatever.
- saxonww 5y ago
  This is a good point and it is something we can all do. Don't go work for companies in industries you're opposed to, no matter how much money they want to throw at you. For this discussion, that would be adtech, marketing/pr, etc. Most of the time people think about how to stop corporate behavior they don't like, and it comes down to shutting off their cash flow by not buying their stuff, or by regulation. But workers are also required, and just based on numbers I'd say withholding talent is a lot more impactful than withholding cash.

chrismorgan 5y ago

I basically don’t encounter any ads in my day-to-day life, digital or physical. I have no TV, and use uBlock Origin (including annoyances lists) on laptop and phone. I live in a tiny rural town so that practically the only advertising posters within a 35km radius are first-party advertising on two or three Telstra public phone booths, and in the decent-sized towns 40km away in either direction there’s barely any more. The nearest billboard ads of any sort would be over a hundred kilometres away, in Horsham, Ballarat or Bendigo, and not much at that. When I go down to the big smoke (Melbourne) I find the prevalence of billboards, side-of-bus ads, &c. physically distressing—and then they make it worse by using screens for them so they can change their contents, make them glary, &c. and it’s just awful. And it becomes ever more and more intrusive; Melbourne’s trains used to be safe spaces, then they put billboards on the platforms, then scrolling billboards, then ads in the carriages, then animated billboards on the platforms, then billboards with speakers on the platforms, and I wonder just what they’ll come up with next. I really dislike the city. There’s a reason I moved out into the country. As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know. Maybe if you grow up with it you don’t realise quite how obnoxious it is? I have concluded that display advertising is just fundamentally bad and that our society would be better if it were outright banned in all its forms. I would even sympathise with vigilantes that went round demolishing and vandalising billboards on principle.

Nextgrid 5y ago
Advertising is cancer and should die, but billboards and real-world display advertising is probably the least bad version of it. I'd prefer if online advertising (and the associated data collection and privacy violations) were nuked first.
- ufo 5y ago
  I do agree that the privacy invading stuff is a more urgent problem. But I want to add a counterpoint about the physical ads. I remember when they banned all the billboards in São Paulo and the city ended up looking much better after it. The change ended up being highly regarded by the residents.
- tfehring 5y ago
  I can't think of a less bad alternative to billboards, so I don't disagree with your claim, but I'll say that I didn't realize how much billboards suck until I spent time driving in Vermont, where they're banned. (I'm originally from Wisconsin, where the freeways have billboards for sex shops, CBD, fireworks, and fetuses every few hundred feet.) The driving experience is so much better without them that I'm pretty confident in saying that their negative externalities are dramatically higher than their economic value and the only reason they exist is that those externalities are externalized.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    That's a pretty dramatic change, as far as billboards go. I think most of the rest of the northeast still has billboards, but they are for, like, normal products.
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      Pretty much none of the country has billboards for "normal products" these days. They're either advertising a local establishment (i.e. "McDonalds! next exit!"), or they're advertising something that the TV networks/AdSense/Facebook wouldn't allow them to (i.e. CBD or sex shops or random religious nutjobmania).
    - danachow 5y ago
      No. The northeast has plenty of anti-abortion, sex shops, fireworks, CBD/marijuana (MM is legal in PA - any state with legalized dispensaries will have these billboards. Don’t know what you consider a normal product but for truckers and people coming from NY adult stores and fireworks are “normal”
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dTal 5y ago
    It's absurd that we're so dedicated to the god of Capitalism that we've had to invent a special term ("negative externalities") to describe the basic premise of ethics - "being selfish is bad". The "economic value" of billboards shouldn't even be a question. It's self-evident that billboards benefit the owner of the billboard at the expense of everyone else. Nobody looks at an empty patch of sky and wishes there were an advertisement there instead.
- carabiner 5y ago
  That would destroy 90% of the tech industry.
- dTal 5y ago
  Counterpoint: You can escape online advertising by walking away from the computer. There's nowhere you can walk to escape physical advertising. Maybe the desert.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Online advertising stalks you even if you're not looking at the ads. Opting out of online advertising basically means you need to go live in the woods and never interact with modern society again. Every interaction you'd have with technology will have something to do with ads one way or another, even if just buying paid products in a physical store thanks to Bluetooth/Wi-Fi MAC address tracking, face recognition, not to mention loyalty cards (but at least you can opt-out of that one).
    - dTal 5y ago
      >Opting out of online advertising basically means you need to go live in the woods and never interact with modern society again No, it just means you need to not open a web browser, or install an ad blocker. Opting out of physical advertising literally means this. I'm not saying that online advertising isn't bad, but physical advertising is inescapable. Your very food packaging is covered in it. The real world has primacy here, because you live in it and can't turn it off.
distantaidenn 5y ago
You'd fall into a fit of hysteria in Tokyo! Advertisements as far as the eye can see in the city center. Oh yeah, and everything talks...the bus, the vending machines, the constant jingles in the convenience stores, and if you can understand what it's saying -- well take a guess about what it is.
riekus 5y ago
Lived in hopetoun VIC for 1.5 year, left 6 months ago, what a beautiful area. Love the Grampians.
spurgu 5y ago
> I basically don’t encounter any ads in my day-to-day life, digital or physical. The only ads I encounter are physical. Adblockers don't work for billboards. :D > As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know. This I realized when I was 19 while on LSD and it was a revelation. I put the TV in the closet and never had one since (or, well, one that I only used through HDMI so it was a monitor rather than a TV).
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
If you consume any media, you're still getting hit by plenty of ads, they're just more subtle. Product placements in TV and movies continues to grow each year, and an increasing proportion of seemingly organic social media posts are bought and paid for by companies, though never disclosed. I have a friend who has basically spent the last ten years helping brands to pay influencers to promote their stuff in subtle ways (first on YouTube, then Instagram, now TikTok), and her business has never been better.

tiffanyh 5y ago

How do you discover information you’re not actively looking for? Eg maybe being environmentally friendly is super important to you. You don’t even realize that today the detergent you’re using isn’t as such. Advertising allows for someone to educate you that products exist that you’re not aware of that align to your needs/wants/desires.

lambic 5y ago
If it's super important to me, I'll actively look for it. Opt-in advertising is another option, I have no problem receiving advertising I've specifically agreed to receive.
unbanned 5y ago
Governed advertising and education channels would be an answer to this
dogleash 5y ago
>Advertising allows for someone to educate you that products exist that you’re not aware of This thin edge of a wedge doesn't justify more than the tiniest fraction of what the advertising industry does. You don't need to hold onto these stock answers for quieting cognitive dissonance. I've found it a huge mental relief to stop lying to myself and just admit to anyone who asks that I'm morally complicit in abusing the worlds collective psyche for money.
nonameiguess 5y ago
There's a fundamental conflict of interest here in relying on the competitors of products you currently use to educate you on why their products are better aligned to your preferences. If this is important, subscribe to something like Consumer Reports or join a community group of environmentally concerned citizens who share recommendations with each other, which I suppose will work until the group members start getting sponsored by vendors to give paid recommendations. Outside of that, the tried and true age old method is trusted third parties. Friends, family, people you share hobbies with and have known for a long time, will give word of mouth recommendations when they know you're interesting in something and have knowledge of products you don't. It's like Ask Hacker News, but instead of asking random anonymous people on a website, ask people you know.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
I see the environmentally friendly alternative on the shelf next to the Tide, where are you buying your detergent that alternatives are not apparent?
jjj123 5y ago
Let’s experiment then, and go for a couple years where all advertising is banned. Then we can regroup and decide if our needs are still being met without ads.

cletus 5y ago

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. People forget how (relatively) expensive products used to be. Example: my family had a very early VHS video recorder. I believe it cost ~$1000 in the early 1980s. I may be misremembering. But that was a lot of money then. So of course it was worth repairing. Labour was considerably less expensive in terms of percentage of outlay costs. That's why it was justified. Computers came along and you had a bunch of chips on a board, some of which were worth replacing. But each interconnect costs money. Each external package costs money. We've seen the rise of complicated SoC chips that basically do everything in one chip. These are overall cheaper to fab (compared to 2+ chips) and have lower build, integration and interconnection costs. The downside? If it stops working, you just throw it away (or at least replace the entire SoC). And if the SoC is relatively cheap, it's not worth paying someone to order a replacement and replace it (with or without soldering). So really what you're missing is tech being very expensive. Personally I prefer what we have now. There are other downsides to modern tech (eg Internet-connected TVs to insert advertising) but durability just isn't one of them.

megaframe 5y ago
There's also the same price but more complex issue. Hybrid engines and washing machines are far more efficient but significantly more complex. Prices are roughly the same +inflation but the added complexity reduces lifetime and repairability.
rglullis 5y ago
Today's tech can be cheap and repairable. Buying a PC in parts is not that more expensive than buying than a box from a retailer. The framework laptop is completely competitively priced with laptops of equivalent specs. DIY audio enthusiasts can buy speaker kits that have amazing performance for one third of the price of the "ready" one, and if a speaker or the amp goes bad, they don't need to buy a whole new kit. It's consumers themselves that got that into that mindset that is not worth to invest time into building and repairing things. We need to start attaching a cost to disposing of obsolete tech, and you can bet they will quickly remember that they too are capable of doing things.
- taneq 5y ago
  I mean, it won't be, but it CAN.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I bought a low-end Chromebook for $92.44 delivered last week. Other than the charge adapter or USB-C cable, there's literally nothing that makes any economic sense to attempt to repair. Even something as bounded as replacing the battery is likely to make no sense several years down the road.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Because everything is integrated, and like I said you are not paying for the cost of disposing it. If electronics are getting to the point that they are as disposable as a plastic bottle, perhaps we should start treating them as such. In Germany, every recyclable (plastic/glass/aluminum) container has a surcharge of a few cents, which you get back by returning them to any supermarket. Imagine if we made something similar for consumer electronics. A tax on electronics products, it being higher in correlation with the level of integration, the difficulty to repair. Your chromebook would be taxed at 100% if sold as a whole package, but if Google decided to produce modules that are independently sold, the tax would drop. Suddenly the whole equation changes for everyone. Manufacturers will have the incentive to produce less integrated products and consumers will have more choice to upgrade/replace only parts of their equipment. Your first-time cost is "higher", but onward you realize that you can upgrade the every three years and the board for $20, the screen last 5 years and costs $40, the battery is $15, etc.
agiacalone 5y ago
> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. Much of this, I feel, is survivor bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) and I totally agree with your thoughts on it. Anecdotal story from my grandfather which occurred circa 1955: He purchased a "name brand" television in 1955, when TVs were still very new and rather expensive (I don't know the brand, sadly, and he's long since passed to ask him). Got the TV home, plugged it in, and almost immediately the vacuum tubes in the television burned out. Called a repairman to service the television. Repairman came out, replaced all of the vacuum tubes, ran a few checks on the electronics to see if everything checked out. It did, and the serviceman took care of the billing and left--all the while, the television was on and operating. As the serviceman was leaving the driveway, the tubes burned out again.
fuzzfactor 5y ago
I would say your grandpa was a true broadcast/electronics enthusiast. Lots of the less enthusiastic technology lovers still only had radios at that point. Regardless of the electronics or the decade that spawned it, the unfortunate terminal behavior of that TV set was characteristic of what is known in electronic assembly as a "birth defect". Quite possibly a single marginal key component or miswiring mistake, and from your account most likely not a vacuum tube itself and very much more unlikely the entire set of original tubes or replacements. I wouldn't rule out a bad socket though. Seems to have gone down in history as one of the most ridiculously premature failures people would always remember. Anyway it did seem to perform normally for a short while before it just up and died, both times, and I think that modern electronics having an equivalent assembly goof-up probably would not even make it once. So that may speak a bit about a preference for overly-robust engineered electronics that could be lost for decades now. Entirely unfulfilled with this fateful TV, I know the feeling well but I think it has gotten much worse in the 21st century. Even if only one tube socket was the cause of the failure, those sockets were what made it much more possible from the beginning for users to keep their own electronics running if they were so inclined, simply taking their own tubes to Radio Shack for testing at a minimum could accomplish a lot. Not everyone would do this back then but it would be kind of equivalent to those who would rather not add extra memory to their PCs themselves. Neither one should you be doing willy-nilly. More of an upgrade here than a repair but you're still putting components in sockets. Well a good bit of user repairability was once assumed because there was not any ingrained kind of disposable society, and the devastatingly senseless losses and massive-scale waste of World War II had still not dampened the spirit of Americans for things that last. Then in the 21st century when digital TV broadcasts took over from analog using the same proven radio frequencies, power levels, and antennae, this was the first time a higher resolution picture was possible since way back when analog TV was standardized by NTSC. The picture's capable of being as perfect as cable when you have an interference-free signal, but that's a certain additional requirement for near-perfection that was however not met often enough. Seems engineers "forgot" that analog TV was based on radio and the further you got from the broadcast station the worse your picture got until there was nothing but audio for a number of additional miles away from the antenna. With digital you lost it all, abruptly, beyond a much smaller range. Ever since. And TV channels take a lot longer to change, the difference between zero latency and some latency is most uncanny. Like many things defying the type of expectations people had for progress after 1955, that were futuristically anticipated to be realized during the 21st century.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago

I bet you'll love these before-and-after photos of Sao Paolo after their outdoor advertising ban: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... Anti-advertising was one of the pet causes of Generation X, back before more pressing things like "the war on terror" and a financial collapse and health care crisis took the stage. And those are bigger deals, but man, advertising is just awful too.

bmitc 5y ago
That’s absolutely amazing. In reading that, I had to ask myself several times if it was real or not. No one seems to make such bold and decisive decisions for good anymore.
radlad 5y ago
Getting a bit off-topic now, but I'm reminded of the song Logos by Faded Paper Figures looking at the photos of empty signs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO_e7Qq2WKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO_e7Qq2WKg Signs on every mountain side, Line highways, stitching desert thread ... My soul goes with your logos, There's no place left to dream tonight
- I_complete_me 5y ago
  This is what jumped into my mind: I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree Indeed, unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all. Ogden Nash
barbazoo 5y ago
I love that! Here where I live in Canada, billboards aren't allowed except on indigenous land. While I totally respect it, it's a horrible eyesore.
- pbourke 5y ago
  Kelowna?
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    Lower mainland.
  - moistly 5y ago
    Those fuuuuuucking flashing LED billboards on the WFN as you approach the corner to the bridge. So surprised no one is sabotaging those on the regular. Can’t believe they are legal.
throwawayboise 5y ago
Signs are ugly, but I don't think it's right to tell people they can't have a sign on their property. Property rights and freedom of speech are worth tolerating a bit of eyesore.
- ryeights 5y ago
  Disagree. We have regulations for noise levels emitting from people’s private property, for example, for the sake of public interest.
  - distribot 5y ago
    A person shouldn't be able to have signage above their business to indicate what it is, the phone number, etc? Not billboards, but literally a sign that says "Johnny's Bakery"
    - ryeights 5y ago
      This seems a bit disingenuous. It's an advertising ban, not a ban on any and all forms of signage. In the pictures of Sao Paulo you can clearly see that businesses still have small signs out front, presumably with the name of the business on them.
- kube-system 5y ago
  We frequently limit property rights and speech when it pollutes, disturbs, or otherwise negatively affects others. Is this a limit on property rights or an expansion of viewshed rights? It all depends on perspective.
- taurath 5y ago
  Note that there currently exists a line that prevents auditory distractions - the farm on the side of the road can put up signs but they can’t blast music or AM Radio from a loudspeaker. IMO it’s still about as distracting to the senses. I think the real difference is a whole generation who is used to linear TV has convinced themselves they can somehow tune it out. This isn’t true, but they’re much more likely to be against restrictions since it “doesn’t effect them” that much.
duderific 5y ago
If you happen to live in or visit the SF Bay Area, and drive on the 280 freeway between San Jose and San Francisco, you'll notice it feels a bit...odd. That's because billboards are banned along that stretch [1], and all you see is the beautiful green rolling hills. [1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11805469/why-arent-any-billboards-on-280 https://www.kqed.org/news/11805469/why-arent-any-billboards-...
- jliptzin 5y ago
  It seems strange to me someone would be allowed to put up billboards to begin with along public property. I assume the freeway is public property correct? It should be illegal to begin with without approval from the public.
  - burlesona 5y ago
    This may not be obvious, but the public land (Right of Way) for a freeway is very small compared to the visual range of a driver in a car, and the scale of "things you see while driving" is much larger than you would think. (Go stand next to an ordinary residential stop sign and then think about how big and high up it actually is compared to your mental model of it.) I'm not aware of any bill boards that are on public land (though some probably exist). Rather almost all bill boards are built on private land, or atop private buildings, as a revenue generator for the property owner. Anything within 500 feet of the road is viable, or even further away assuming a large sign. So for billboards to be prohibited there has to be land use regulation that says property owners can't build large signs. That is actually less trivial to enforce than you might think, because the line between a straight up advertising billboard and, say, the sign that lets you know there's a McDonald's at the next exit, is a little fuzzy. There's enormous pressure from business owners to permit large "marquee" signs so that drivers can spot their business from far back enough that they can easily get in the right lane, slow down, turn, etc. without missing it.
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      There's also enormous pressure from the public to be able to find things, especially in the case of... you know, a McDonalds on the interstate with people driving by who are from the other side of the country. ;) I don't think most people have a problem with honest ads. The issue is the billboards that tell you "There's something amazing ahead!" and you pay $10 to get in and it's a stupid doll. Or the collections of a billion billboards for different things on a single building. Or the TV ads that use every trick in the book to try and manipulate you into buying a crappy product. Sadly businesses seem to be moving more and more towards "just spend all our money on marketing" rather than "just spend all our money on the product". (I'm looking at you, Plex.)
ok_dad 5y ago
Yea, in my home state, all big signs are banned; billboards, store signs, etc. Only a smallish sign is allowed for any given building or whatever. It's really nice.
muzani 5y ago
Those photos remind me of the contrast in software too. Compare today's Lemmings, with any other Lemmings that didn't run on an ad-based business model. Level design is significantly worse to allow it to run as many ads as possible.

lobocinza 5y ago

Ads are pointless. No matter how much human capital was invested in making targeted ads possible, only very rarely I see something that I might be interested in buying. And I can't remember a thing that I bought due to ads. They are a better signal of what to not buy.

distantaidenn 5y ago
Buying the product is the primary goal, but they don't expect you to act right away. It's about impressions. You see 1000 Coke ads and product placements a year. When you finely decide you want a sweet fizzy drink, well the decision has already been made for you.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  I would be very, very surprised if this sort of subliminal effect was strong enough to make advertising worth it.
  - distantaidenn 5y ago
    I've had some work in this field -- it is as far as the marketing teams are concerned. One of my previous employers (international mega company) spent millions on advertisements each month, with no clear way to measure their direct impact. But they did it for the impressions.
    - kzzzznot 5y ago
      Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two can’t make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: "I stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria." From https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  The problem with this logic is that although I see all these Coke, etc., ads, is that (a) I rarely drink soda, and (b) when I do it's almost always the cheap store brand. The same goes for most grocery items that aren't produce or meat. I almost never buy the branded products unless I know it's better. e.g., Cascade dishwasher detergent is noticeably superior to the store brand.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  It can backfire. Recently Coke pushed a cringe ad to Twitch and I have seem a lot of people in a diverse set of channels complaining about "not being able to tank the Coke ad". The impression left not always is positive for the brand. Even Jesus, the best brand ever, couldn't please everyone. But I see myself still being influenced by impressions left decades ago in my mind when I used to watch TV as a kid. And smart kids nowadays probably use an ad blocker but there wasn't much they could do to avoid it in my age.
hotpotamus 5y ago
I feel the same way, but given that the largest companies in the world are advertising companies, they must work on someone, right? Also, perhaps they're good enough that they're working on us without us consciously knowing. Afterall, you must buy some things. Why do you choose which products to buy?
- lobocinza 5y ago
  Could be said that they profit from management FOMO. As a consumer I spend more time than I should thinking about what I buy. I'm heavily influenced by reviews and opinions which I know to be biased and not always authentic but is still the best way to discover hidden issues in a product. I frequently think about the characteristics that I like to see in the product and compare it with similar products. But sincerely, trying to approach a rational decision has become time costly if not counter-productive due to lack of reliable information and strong noise. Pay and pray might be a better strategy.
rokhayakebe 5y ago
No matter how much human capital was invested in making targeted ads possible, only very rarely I There is the issue. "I." You may be one in 100,000. Also there is a trickle-down effect. A brand will spend enough dollars to attract a certain number of fans, then those fans attract others organically. Many will say you "Ads do not work on me," but unless you know exactly why you choose product X or Y, it is difficult to say with confidence.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  Yes, I know I'm probably an exception and there's the problem of the observed being the observer. What I can say is that I haven't seen ads of most of the stuff I bought recently. I don't see companies with good and afordable products spending much in ads. I'm stunned when I see it but I agree that the average person is heavily influenced by advertisement. Influencers and ads can implant ideas in the minds of people that they replicate with absolute naturalness without thinking about it ever. Like: "X is the best Y". Which reminds me of Venus Inc.

magicroot75 5y ago

I work in digital advertising. I manage several billion impressions a year in ads spend and over $15M a year. I think it's easy for engineers to undervalue the importance of advertising. Without marketing, many many well-engineered products would never be discovered. This is why marketing is considered a core function of business. It speeds up the integration of new products and technologies into the general society. It seems like you're lumping all advertising for all products into the same category. It's more likely you just don't like seeing ads for products you don't like. And this is the goal of contemporary digital ads: To only show products to users who are likely to purchase them. Human beings have ideas that organize themselves into formal groupings that need to be formally promoted in order to sustain the cost of the business. Products need to rapidly scale. And marketing/advertising makes that possible. Hating advertising is like hating the dollar for being necessary to exchange value in society. We need advertising to make the products you engineer viable business ideas. Without advertising, 99.9% of good product will never be discovered.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rixed 5y ago
Advertising is needed to protect good products from the advertising of bad products?
_oghd 5y ago
99.9% of products aren't needed in any way by anybody. 90% of products are created to fill an artificial demand manufactured by advertising in the first place. these products and their manufacturing comes at a massive carbon cost for meaningless gain. i also worked in digital advertising. for some of the biggest brands out there. i quit.
- magicroot75 5y ago
  In a free market, we don't dictate what someone needs or doesn't need. We believe the individual has a right to choose amongst options that are presented with truthful claims. If someone pays for it willingly, they needed it. If we start attempting to break down all the extrinsic motivations for purchase decisions, we'd see almost ALL of them are dictated by social acceptance, comfort, and convenience. This is a feature of a wealthy nation, not a bug, that we can seek out goods and services beyond basic food/water/shelter/safety needs.

arprocter 5y ago

Another automotive 'advancement' is headlight bulbs you can't replace yourself - what used to take a few minutes now requires a trip to the dealer, so they can presumably dismantle the front end Unlikely both would blow, but I'm a little surprised more fuss hasn't been made about it from a safety standpoint; considering being able to see where you're going tends to be important - I believe in France you can get a ticket for having no washer fluid.

carabiner 5y ago
This is why I love my Tacoma. Here's the 3-minute tutorial on replacing the headlight bulbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbZc8shIvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbZc8shIvQ Then again, everything else about it is dated, especially the engine.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
What makes/models do that?
- arprocter 5y ago
  iirc it happened on a friend's 6th gen Ford Fiesta I doubt there's a big list somewhere as it isn't something the manufacturers are proud about
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    What? Not sure what years are in that generation but my gf owned a 2014 Ford Fiesta (the final generation) and replacing headlights was a 5 minute job. I did it several times...
    - C19is20 5y ago
      I have a 2005 FF...never replaced the headlights (gf has a 2007 fusion - similar): and you say 'several times'?
    - arprocter 5y ago
      Strange - possible I'm misremembering, as this was about a decade ago I just looked it up and seems like you have to remove the entire headlight from the car, so maybe he took one look at it and decided it could be someone else's problem
- mh- 5y ago
  Lots, apparently. Search r/JustRolledIntoTheShop for "headlights". Some of the first few matches: Ford Fusion: https://reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/pw1n0e/to_the_guy_replacing_headlight_bulbs_in_his_tesla/ https://reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/pw1n0e/t... Tesla: https://reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/pvyq3u/you_have_to_take_off_a_tire_to_remove_the_bulb_on/ https://reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/pvyq3u/y...
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    Having to take off the bumper is pretty bad. On the other hand, taking off a tire takes perhaps a minute.
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    I just found it surprising, because I've changed lots of bulbs on my own cars, and it was never that hard a job.
xk3 5y ago
they probably do it so people don't replace the lamps with the wrong shape bulb which can be very dangerous

TchoBeer 5y ago

Do you recognize that this is subjective? YouTube is way better than TV, imo.

jacquesm 5y ago
Maybe being better than TV was a bit of a low bar to shoot for. Youtube has super good stuff but it's like with email: there are very good emails and then there is the spam. But there is no youtube 'spamfilter'. Hm... idea?
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Subscriptions are basically that. A curated feed of only creators you're interested in.
jfrunyon 5y ago
Honestly... it depends if you have an ad-blocker. I would prefer TV to Youtube any day, if I had a TV ad-blocker, simply because the content is far more likely to be reasonable quality rather than a 20 minute clickbait video with 30 seconds of actual content.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  Are you sure? When I used to watch Battlebots on Discovery channel it was basically 6 minutes of action wrapped in 10 minutes of fluff and 15 minutes of ads. Discovery Magazine had 3 sections per half-hour; comparatively speaking any science channel in YT will have way more content, and a lot of it really good for specialized audiences. Travel YT are way more up-to-date and useful than TV travel documentaries used to be. There's a ton of really good Youtube channels, and the level of information density is astounding.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    I never said all content on TV was good. Similarly, not all content on Youtube is bad. But the most hyped/advertised content on TV tends to be pretty entertaining (and usually fairly accurately advertised), while the most hyped/advertised content on Youtube (i.e. frontpage) is 90% clickbait and 10% people I'm subscribed to.
lgrialn 5y ago
When I go to youtube, I'm looking for something. But I will see the front page of crap in my peripheral vision and wonder about the millions of people who click on that garbage. Sometimes I'll even look at the names for a second and think how it's the same few names always, and how crazy that they somehow get all the attention in the world for some nonsense. For that matter, now I see people use the word "influencer" as if it sounds perfectly respectable to them, and it shocks me every time.

WalterBright 5y ago

> I don’t see anyone claiming that words are bad. That's what the sales pitch is for icons. > are usually configurable to use both Don't forget all the uses of icons where it is molded into the button. Take a look at your car's dashboard. > iPhone uses icon+word on the launch screen Only for some items. The bottom row on my iphone does not have text. Of course <cough>everyone knows</cough> that the needle in circle launches the browser. Sure.

robotresearcher 5y ago
The sales pitch for icons is that they can be better than words for some purposes. The play/pause icons on a miniature Japanese cassette player are a good example. No need for localization, efficient use of space, learn them in a couple of interactions. Now universal. ‘Icons are good sometimes’ is not a spit on words. I’ll happily concede that icons are hard to look up. Tooltips are a smart mitigation for this problem, where available.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > The play/pause icons Arrows are indeed icons that work. The square for "stop" - how is that intuitive?
  - robotresearcher 5y ago
    Not harder to learn than ‘stop/parar/arreter/halt’ Even with a dictionary in front of me I’m not sure which German word is right for stopping music. But I know the icon for a German-localized device. If you move the Safari icon out of the shortcut dock so you can read the word ‘Safari’ it would still not suggest ‘web browser’ to a noob. Pros and cons. And discoverability has definitely moved backwards since the classic Mac desktop.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > Even with a dictionary in front of me I’m not sure which German word is right for stopping music That's because to learn what a word means, you use a German->English dictionary. If you want to learn what the German word is for stop, you use an English-German dictionary, and this is not relevant for labels in German. > Safari At least I could look it up in the index of the manual. Or I could ask "What is Safari?" when I call tech support. > Pros and cons Definitely. But the main Pro seems to be "it looks pretty" along with misguided virtue signalling. Plenty, plenty cons.
robotresearcher 5y ago
I’m pretty sure that cockpits have glyphs instead of words because it’s known to be faster/more reliable to recognize them than word labels, and language is not an issue. Cockpits are expert user interfaces. Some icons are better than others, and some are bad. I’ve never loved the burger menu button, for example.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > I’m pretty sure that cockpits have glyphs instead of words because it’s known to be faster/more reliable to recognize them than word labels Are you sure about that? https://wallpapercave.com/w/wp2472707 https://wallpapercave.com/w/wp2472707 http://benedict-xvi.blogspot.com/2017/10/boeing-737-max-cockpit-layout.html http://benedict-xvi.blogspot.com/2017/10/boeing-737-max-cock...

BbzzbB 5y ago
The benefit I highlighted is rather geared towards being an enabler of entrepreneurship, I myself dislike ads enough that I barely ever see one (outside Facebook, great HTML obfuscation there) so I can't pretend I'm a fan of it for product discoverability or what not. >It's like if you made a business that depended on selling nicotine Targeted advertising is not the reason why the modern Internet is addictive so the nicotine argument is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, those are separate issues. You could say, IMO rightfully, that profit motives are the incentive that pushed Internet companies towards addiction-optimization, but it would be equally true if you couldn't target-advertise. >I'm also concerned about things like billboards, or the newspaper ad section that even when I call and ask them to stop I still get tossed into my yard or on the sidewalk. I don't want to see the billboard yet I'm forced to. Not saying this is a good or bad idea, but if you ban targeted advertising and then all forms of IRL advertising, how do you even develop a new product or make your service known if you don't have access to a lot of capital to spam ads on TV, carpet bomb untargetted ads or buy/rent prime real estate for a store-front (assuming you have a store-business in the first place)? As much as I dislike both online and IRL ads too, arguably the latter more as I can't block it out of my eyesight, but I recognize/believe they are useful to foster SMBs and self-employment which seems, in my book, crucial for social mobility and a democratized capitalism. Where I'm getting at is that I think (could be wrong, I'm no expert and am speaking from intuition) that expunging advertisement from our lives or making it extremely prohibitive (which I think would be the result of the rules you'd set) would simply further concentrate capital in the hands of large corporations or individuals with high means. I'm not saying your take is invalid but I'd be more inclined towards regulating the deleterious effects of advertising (privacy, advertising drugs or toys, intrusive or excessive panels, height and location limitations, ban some manipulative behaviors, false advertisement, right to opt-out or opt-in by default, etc) than outright banning them all, as much as I hate being advertised to.
- ericmay 5y ago
  > The benefit I highlighted is rather geared towards being an enabler of entrepreneurship Yea it's like so many things a cost/benefit analysis. But do we want to rely on selling ads to fund entrepreneurial endeavors? Idk. I think someone could argue that if you can't survive without selling ads then you shouldn't start that business. (Let me know if that's not what you were getting at with that comment). I also advise a lot of college age students looking to start companies and whenever they talk about ads I make them create a business model that doesn't involve ads. It's a good test and if nothing else gets them thinking about alternative business models (ads are lazy thinking in this space). > Targeted advertising is not the reason why the modern Internet is addictive so the nicotine argument is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, those are separate issues. You could say, IMO rightfully, that profit motives are the incentive that pushed Internet companies towards addiction-optimization, but it would be equally true if you couldn't target-advertise. Sorry my point wasn't to draw a comparison between nicotine and addictiveness of ads on the Internet but to draw a comparison between a potentially harmful product (cigarettes or targeted ads) and then downstream industries or businesses that rely on those harmful products. It's like saying "well don't ban cigarettes, how am I going to sell Nicotine patches". > Not saying this is a good or bad idea, but if you ban targeted advertising and then all forms of IRL advertising, how do you even develop a new product or make your service known if you don't have access to a lot of capital to spam ads on TV, carpet bomb untargetted ads or buy/rent prime real estate for a store-front (assuming you have a store-business in the first place)? As much as I dislike both online and IRL ads too, arguably the latter more as I can't block it out of my eyesight, but I recognize/believe they are useful to foster SMBs and self-employment which seems, in my book, crucial for social mobility and a democratized capitalism. Yea it's easy to pontificate as I'm doing and then like you said you get some company they just plaster ads all over storefronts and we're just dealing with other negative externalities. The thing I see though is that we're kind of in a somewhat neutral equilibrium with advertising, but if it starts to "get real" we're going to be in big trouble because companies like Facebook, Google, others aren't just going to sit around and watch their business collapse as people fight against tracking and ads. Long story short it's not that big of a problem right now, but it could be. > I'm not saying your take is invalid but I'd be more inclined towards regulating the deleterious effects of advertising (privacy, advertising drugs or toys, intrusive or excessive panels, height and location limitations, ban some manipulative behaviors, false advertisement, right to opt-out or opt-in by default, etc) than outright banning them all, as much as I hate being advertised to. Yea totally and I get where you're going. The thing I worry about is like so many regulations the more we add the more we have to maintain and the more like tech debt they are. With respect to your question about how to develop a new product or make your service known I'd just say tons of small businesses really do that right now with 0 capital for ads on TV or anything. Almost all of the best products or services I have used have been from word-of-mouth, research and trying to find just good and unbiased product reviews, and just seeing stuff. I think in America in particular we're so used to so many ads and we're subjected to so much advertising because we live in suburban homes, don't walk past any coffee shops or small businesses on the way to anywhere, and we drive so they have to create these giant billboards and McDonalds signs off the highway. It's hard to imagine a world where those things exist because we're just so used to them, but all of the best places I've ever visited weren't filled with ads. Becoming "touristy" is a manifestation of the advertising and consumerist culture creeping in. If I could, I think just banning billboards and highway signs, and making junk mail and all of that stuff illegal is a good place to start. I appreciate your thoughts and perspectives here btw. Interesting discussion!