Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

I was watching a programme about Nokia which mentioned how Apple came along with its massive touchscreen, which sacrificed battery life and durability i.e. we all now accept that a phone battery will need charging at least every night and if we drop the phone the screen will shatter, which wasn't the case before. There must be tons of these?

My own personal bugbear is how you used to be able to change the TV channel with a remote instantaneously rather than having to wait a couple of seconds after pressing the button and now that's seemingly impossible.

On a larger scale it's probably a backwards step that everyone is expected to have a recent smartphone to conveniently do loads of things (show your boarding pass, or whatever) and shit stops being supported within a few versions. Music compression too. But I guess I'm thinking of specific annoyances that shouldn't even be problems.

I was only half-watching the Nokia programme so please feel free to correct my comprehensive history of Apple there.

the original gameboy lasted about eight years through new release support and actual durability of the hardware

Everybody's landline used to work in a blackout.

^^ good one, also you can no longer get DC power from landlines

taking the headphone jack away

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too.

sez you, "Telecom"

:)

at my gym i have to log in on a giant touch screen to run on the fucking treadmill. the other day it asked me if i wanted to install updates. hl;kjalkjh;asgdhl;kasgd

My own personal bugbear is how you used to be able to change the TV channel with a remote instantaneously rather than having to wait a couple of seconds after pressing the button and now that's seemingly impossible.

― kinder, 14. august 2019 00:14 (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Wait, what?

oh god please just go away

iPod clickwheel RIP

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too

Right? It used to actually be enjoyable to talk on the phone (not to mention that handsets were much more ergonomic/comfortable/seemed less likely to induce brain cancer), no wonder phone calls seem like an intrusive nuisance now.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/the-us-navy-says-no-to-touchscreens-maybe-automakers-should-too/

I realized too when I got an iPhone for xmas how much it suffered from an absence of the trackball on my old phone.

The iPad was a bit of a stumble
-techno beaver

remote control thing is a great example. that drives me crazy any time i'm in a hotel or something and just want to enjoy the mindless zone-out of channel surfing. related: TVs coming with "motion smoothing" turned on by default and sometimes with no option to turn it off.

* many websites/apps/etc. have gotten slower and junkier as they've added features, loaded up with data-draining graphics and videos and scripts. like, just trying to see what the hourly weather forecast for tomorrow is involves a lot more clicking and waiting than it did a few years ago. google maps is another one that's gotten a lot shittier.

* new laptops with only USB-C ports so that to make this sleek, elegant thing fully functional and do basic things you need to buy an expensive dongle and have it hang awkwardly off the apple lust object.

* also in general, laptops replacing desktops for a computer that remains at a desk at all times --- massively worse ergonomically and less computer for your money.

* not to make this a physical media thread but def all the downsides of the streaming world belong here. but obv there are many tradeoffs.

* general trend of offloading labor onto unpaid customers (self check out, surveys, pressure from amazon to answer support questions for products you've bought, etc.).

* death of big-budget 2D animation (in hollywood anyway).

history is littered with these of course, cf. invention of agriculture and human health/life expectancy/society. or cars replacing transit networks, all of those stories. or at a pettier level, all the changes in shaving since idk the 1960s or 70s.

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too.

i hung onto my landline for longer than most people and in the early days of cellphones it was infuriating talking to anyone on theirs because the audio quality was terrible. it's better now but still not as good as landlines were.

the substitution of plastics for paper, cloth, wood, and metal (not as acceptable as it used to be but never more pervasive)

Color printer/scanners are a now an everyday cheapish appliance but their rate of malfunction makes them barely worth the trouble.
A black and white laserjet that couldn’t scan shit would cost you an arm but you could be sure that sucker would turn out pages for ages, iirc.

A lot of fast fashion type stuff bugs me, like having to actually look for cotton underwear.

as someone who lives in a country where you wear gloves several months out of the year, i daily cursed the engineer who introduced thumbprint unlock as the default on the iPhone

the default of ‘pick up your phone and look at it before we reveal the content of a text’ on the iPhone ten also a v stupid idea

A black and white laserjet that couldn’t scan shit would cost you an arm but you could be sure that sucker would turn out pages for ages, iirc.

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, August 13, 2019 5:02 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Brother still makes products of this caliber and they aren't disturbingly expensive.

at a pettier level, all the changes in shaving since idk the 1960s or 70s.

― Good morning, how are you, I'm (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, August 13, 2019 4:26 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

development of laser hair removal is a big improvement tbh

Color printer/scanners are a now an everyday cheapish appliance but their rate of malfunction makes them barely worth the trouble.

Not to be a commercial but after years of having problems with inkjet printers and generally feeling like they were the most unreliable piece of technology in existence, I bought an Epson Eco-tank and it has been life-changing. I actually love my printer now and wouldn’t trade it for anything. 100% reliable, scans and prints great, I haven’t had to refill it yet and I’ve had it for... 2 years? No more of the seemingly constant cartridge replacements. /commercial

Of course, that’s the opposite of what this thread is about.

I just had a 1958 Grundig tube radio repaired, it sounds amazing; finding someone who could work on it was the hard part

it wasn't really so long ago that devices like radios, TVs, stereo components, and even personal computers were designed to be repaired and kept in service for many years; now the same kinds of devices go directly to the landfill as soon as they fail, if not sooner; the fact that the replacement devices are cheaper and more capable than the junked ones is not a particularly impressive sign of progress

The loss of institutional knowledge about how to build heavy-duty, reliable liquid propellant rocket systems has had a massive impact on space programs around the world.

Now somebody tell me they have a way to get to the moon just fine.

I’m gonna be really anxious when the time comes to buy a new TV because the one I have has been so good for so long *raps on wooden table*

i was curious about buying a new tv - i haven't had one since the mid 90s, a portable black-and-white model from the 80s passed on to me from my parents - and the enormous variations in crazy features and too-good-to-be-credible prices just made me give up

I started with the knowledge that I wanted a Sony of a certain size with a certain number of HDMI inputs and went with that, I think?

i recently had ceiling fans installed, and we got the ones with lights built in

too late i realised that to turn the lights on and off we now need to fumble around with a dinky battery powered remote

curse a society that no longer understands that light switches should be easy to find in the dark

(also every button press is accompanied by an annoying beeping sound that can't be muted)

that everything has a remote is ridiculous.

Wait, I've never turned lights on or off with a battery-powered remote. That is not a backward step I accept!

Landlines, though. Still had one until 2011. I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person who finds it physically difficult to converse satisfyingly on a smartphone.

i hate talking on the phone now, it makes me antsy and eager to get off the phone. but i don't know if that is something abt the phone itself, or how my expectations and practices around phones have changed, esp thru texting taking the place of calls for almost all the things i used to make calls for. and the ppl on the other end feeling the same way and distracted and eager to get off the phone too.

everyone hates talking on the phone now.
it's social anxiety and because we have so many job related activities where one is on the phone all the time.

although my mom still chats away like she is teenager of the year.

It used to be that after CRT and plasma declined, televisions were a forced compromise: backlit LCD or nothing, which suck for watching films (bad shadow levels, motion smoothing, etc etc). I white-knuckled the gap between plasma and OLED by self-repairing my plasma when the power supply failed, and then buying a used plasma which got me through (barely, with lines on the screen and driver failures) just until the OLEDs came down enough for me to consider an end-of-line clearance price.
Now of course I have the best TV of my life - it's kind of ironic because my film library is worth probably 5-10 times as much as the screen I watch them on.

Landlines were easier to have a conversation on because it was in real time. Cellphones have gotten better, but they're still bouncing audio off of metal towers like a pinball machine. Landlines were the technological final product of an evolution that began with two cans and a piece of string, and worked just fine.

I have the same tv remote problem with my microwave.

Are there really cars out there that combat drowsiness by not letting itself drift over any white or yellow line unless the blinker is on?] Because I will lose my shit, that's all there is to it.

things have gotten a bit better, but even as the early playstation era was happening i remember thinking "wow it sucks that i have to wait 15 seconds for every other screen to load". that was in stark contrast to the near-instant load times of the cartridge based systems at the time and of the recent past.

of course, we were all more than willing to wait as long as it took to gedda load of them polygams

https://i.imgur.com/KKf0O1X.jpg

When you buy a new video game and it has to spend an assload of time downloading "updates" before you can play the fucking thing.

Also Denny's getting rid of the Breakfast Dagwood

“like, just trying to see what the hourly weather forecast for tomorrow is involves a lot more clicking and waiting than it did a few years ago”

(since you’re not opposed to using google:) google “(city) weather” once, ctrl+h “wea” for every instance after

P much any form of watching tv now.

Are you guys saying landlines don't sound as good as they used to, or that cellphones don't sound as good as landlines? I agree with the latter, but as for the former, my landline still sounds great. I would never have a conversation on my cellphone unless I was away from home.

We have a landline so we can put the number on paperwork, and for “just in case.” I think we turned the ringer off two years ago. It sits behind the dehumidifier in our master bedroom.

xp saying that cellphones don't sound as good as landlines.

Coca Cola Freestyle machines. Ok...i love em. But...

Soda fountains in the past, usually your biggest problem was the soda came out flat because the bag needed to be changed. So maybe your number one choice isn't available, but other stuff is. Also, multiple people can fill their shit at the same time.

But with these fuckin machines, if you are unlucky enough to go to a store with only one machine, you gotta wait behind the dummy who can't figure it out.

Then when you get there, sometimes they're out of like every diet product, but you don't find out until you click on it and try to pour it, it stops, and greys out.

And then sometimes the shit just malfunctions and nobody in the restaurant knows how to fix it because they gotta call some help line. And if none of the machines work, you gotta wait in kine and get someone at the counter to pour you a drink

iPod clickwheel RIP

Oh and inspired by Neanderthal’s post just now! Automated airport bag drops - just an awful scourge and take far more time than having someone check the suitcase and slap the sticker on it for you. Goes double if you’re stuck behind people who are confused by this (naturally). Waited fifteen minutes behind a family checking in three suitcases the other day - there should have been staff to help them.

I am terrible at affixing the tag that prints out to my own bag. They always have to redo it.

Neanderthal otm re soda machines. I hate those things to the point where I won’t eat at places that use them. Or if I do then def pass on a drink. I think they change the flavor of the drinks too.

I will never forget the day I dropped a newly fully loaded 256gb ipod classic between a Montreal subway car and platform, instantly assuring its doom

Flat screen TVs all sound terrible and require a sound bar or audio system

The smartphone/battery issue annoys me so much (especially as an IPhone user).
If you’re out for meetings/conferences etc a half day, you’re basically done.
I like their design and all (although I don’t like the big ass big screens, circa iPhone 5 it was fine for me) but it requires to also carry a power plug/alt battery at all time so not really an improvement ...

I really miss those trackballs that bolted onto the side of a laptop and which you controlled with your thumb. I am hopeless at pointing and clicking with a trackpad.

Also, trains with doors that can only be opened when the driver releases them and windows that can't be opened at all.

Flat screen TVs all sound terrible and require a sound bar or audio system

Also, trains with doors that can only be opened when the driver releases them and windows that can't be opened at all.

There is a positive side to that second one...

https://metro.co.uk/2016/08/07/man-decapitated-after-sticking-head-out-of-train-window-6053666/

do landlines really not work during power outages now? because that's the main reason I still pay for one.

We drove to Cardiff to buy the last decent plasma TV before they all went LED. don't ask me but my husband Knows About These Things. So yeah, no idea what we'll do when it goes kaput.

* also in general, laptops replacing desktops for a computer that remains at a desk at all times --- massively worse ergonomically and less computer for your money

(xpost to self: lcd not LED; don't emit the crystals)

and yes the classic ipod was great. had one of the first editions - so sleek! so futuristic! it lasted ages although perhaps not 18 years later.

Automated airport bag drops - just an awful scourge and take far more time than having someone check the suitcase and slap the sticker on it for you.

It's also crappy for the staff who have to work these now. They used to sit behind a desk, close to their other colleagues, where they could keep a glass of water or tissues or whatever they needed. Now they have to stand in the middle of the machines and only speak to people who are already annoyed. It is a major inconvenience, and one of the many reasons I cba to fly very much anymore.

Also, maybe it's just the televisions my family buys, but you can no longer see the screen properly unless you are sitting right in front of it.

I will never forget the day I dropped a newly fully loaded 256gb ipod classic between a Montreal subway car and platform, instantly assuring its doom

On that note, the continuing erosion of anonymous/pseudonymous space online. This is bad and people will realise how bad when it’s eventually gone.

― gyac

i mean this was doomed when the internet got taken over by nazis, right? i find a great deal of value in having places to talk about personal stuff that doesn't instantly notify every single person i have ever met, but a large percentage of people who also find a great deal of value in it are nazis and pedophiles. i can't think of any way to protect me without also protecting them.

thru texting taking the place of calls for almost all the things i used to make calls for

I don't find texting comfortable either! It wasn't as bad when my phone's keyboard looked like this: https://www.lg.com/ca_en/images/cell-phones/lg260/gallery/medium02.jpg . (Admittedly, switching languages is easier now.)

those touchscreen menu-based coke machines suuuuuuck and are increasingly common at multiplex theaters, places where you are usually there trying to make a specific time of something and really don't want to wait behind someone figuring out a machine

re: weather: my issue is that any given page I bookmark for weather is filled with all kinds of junked-up shit, OR is way too basic. the absent functional midlde may be a running theme for this thread idk.

agreed about most low-end flatscreen TVs and their built-in speakers - every apartment i've been to to watch a movie in the last couple years, it's been constant "too quiet during dialogue, too loud during explosions" volume adjustment. you can turn on some kind of curve-flattening normalize function on some of them. couldn't say how they compare versus the days of big clunky cabinet TVs with *basically* functional speakers built in, it's been too long and i don't remember how they really sounded.

yeah i bought a blackberry two years ago because my last, clinging-to-life slider phone from like 2011 finally gave up the ghost and thank god, someone extended this slim hope for the physical keyboard.

DC a lot of it is down to how these shows get mixed. a lot of times they're sitting in million dollar rooms and mixing for 5.1 and in that setting it sounds amazing.

sure but the point is everyone else has accepted it sounding like crap

I had to use a cable between my seemingly good LG TV and the router just a few metres away because the...preload(?) compression would get so bad streaming Netflix. Even with the cable it was a problem watching shows on NOW TV for the first few seconds (particularly annoying with e.g. old Futuramas where you would literally not be able to read the joke message at the start. NOW 'solved' the problem by just removing the old Futuramas from their service...).

I will never forget the day I dropped a newly fully loaded 256gb ipod classic between a Montreal subway car and platform, instantly assuring its doom

this post made me break into a cold sweat

― (Appears only as a corpse) (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 4:03 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, I cling stubbornly to mine and freak every time my grip slips in the slightest (particularly since that one ridiculous time when I was getting out of a cab and my phone somehow fell out of my pocket and 'nothing but net'-ed directly into a storm drain). It's like walking around with a priceless relic I borrowed from a museum except that my life will basically be over once it's gone from my life.

I finally switched over to listening to podcasts on my phone, instead of taking my ipod classic with me every day.

It's great, except for when I want to listen to music. I was basically using my ipod as a repository for New Orleans music (much of which is not on Spotify), which is usually what I feel like listening to in the car.

This may not count but:

Passport scanning at airports where people can't figure out which way to place them on the glass so it ends up taking the same or more time than a human person looking at it.

Boarding public transport by scanning/beeping your card at a reader taking the same or more time than having to show your ticket to a driver because your card is too close in your wallet to your debit card so the reader gets confused.

Also:

RACIST hand-driers etc.

There is an automatic paper towel dispenser at my daughter's gymnastics gym that will only give me one towel. And I mean I will stand there for up to a minute afterward trying to get a second towel to no avail.

Shaving. Took me years of picking out the minuscule gaps in wilkinson sword 6-bladed monstrosities with a pin before I realised that safety razors were still available, about 10 times cheaper, and never clogged.

Are there really cars out there that combat drowsiness by not letting itself drift over any white or yellow line unless the blinker is on?] Because I will lose my shit, that's all there is to it.

― pplains, Wednesday, August 14, 2019 2:45 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

BRING THIS ON. I will stan for forcing EACH AND EVERY DRIVER to use turn signals EVERY TIME.

xp

I've never liked the trend toward the giant, flat Mach 3 style razors. There's a total lack of precision with those.

the really annoying thing abt shaving is that switching over to a safety razor + soap + brush model, which overall is saving me a fortune and giving me a better and less irritating shave, requires wading through sites and instructional videos all completely steeped in obnoxious "culture of old-fashioned masculinity" stuff.

i mean this was doomed when the internet got taken over by nazis, right? i find a great deal of value in having places to talk about personal stuff that doesn't instantly notify every single person i have ever met, but a large percentage of people who also find a great deal of value in it are nazis and pedophiles. i can't think of any way to protect me without also protecting them.

Honestly 90% of my time online is pseudonymous and I generally keep to myself for much this reason because it’s often...not great?...being female online (esp when you’re opinionated like I am.)

Shaving is going to be a lot better once they add that 7th blade, though

Also Simon H’s iPod classic story upset me as I left mine in a taxi a few years back and am still never over it :(

The lesson of self-checkouts isn’t “automation will create machines that work better than humans, destroying jobs in the process.” It’s “automation will create machines that work worse than humans, but in a way that shifts the remaining labour on to the users.”

— alex hern @ santa clara (@alexhern) August 13, 2019

otm

Regarding ipods : did they really sound better than today’s iphones ? I don’t remember noticing a difference switching from one to the other.

the Bluetooth connectivity in my car sucks...takes a good minute to get going, and it'll randomly stop or cut the first few seconds off of songs. not problems I ever had using an AUX cord but it looks like this problem has been 'solved' via removing the headphone jack altogether

think i'm just gonna buy another ipod classic on ebay once this one goes kaput

There is an automatic paper towel dispenser at my daughter's gymnastics gym that will only give me one towel. And I mean I will stand there for up to a minute afterward trying to get a second towel to no avail.

Our paper towel dispensers do that too, to save the environment. Even better is when the batteries go dead and you have to wipe your hands off on your pants.

BRING THIS ON. I will stan for forcing EACH AND EVERY DRIVER to use turn signals EVERY TIME.

If there's another car within 500 yards of you, sure. But being forced to do it out on the open road with nobody around?

And it's one thing for the damn chime to keep going off until you put on your seatbelt. Having some weird "safety" function affect the performance of the vehicle could cause major problems. "Sorry, I killed your cat! I tried to swerve, but in the heat of the moment, I forgot to turn on my blinker!"

What about protecting you from them? See: loads of people cool about Obama expanding the surveillance state and being all hand wavey about implications finally making the connection that the Trump admin now has all that data. Particularly when you consider the government tried to identify people who looked at a Trump protest site.

― gyac

See this is a weird one because I'm very familiar with the culture of white male paranoia - the belief that everyone is out to get you despite everybody all the time stacking the deck in your favor. And now that I'm out as a member of a group that is legitimately, uh, targeted, I'm less paranoid? If anything it's driven me to be more out. Privacy would be nice, but if I can't have privacy they can't have their secrecy.

the really annoying thing abt shaving is that switching over to a safety razor + soap + brush model, which overall is saving me a fortune and giving me a better and less irritating shave, requires wading through sites and instructional videos all completely steeped in obnoxious "culture of old-fashioned masculinity" stuff.

― Good morning, how are you, I'm (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 1:18 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I tried using safety razors last year. They were obviously better at shaving my face, but I couldn't stop slicing up my head. So I went back to cartridge razors, but kept going with the soap and brush.

Sainsbury's are really determined to make everyone adopt the "scan as you shop" thing, but I can't see the point.

OTOH I was happy not to have to chat with the cashier at the co op who always does the same banter about "are you saving your points for Christmas?" every time I go there, ideally this would be resolved by him being told to stop doing that by his boss.

Regarding ipods : did they really sound better than today’s iphones ? I don’t remember noticing a difference switching from one to the other.

v skeptical of this tbh, not an expert but can't see a reason for this to be true

_Flat screen TVs all sound terrible and require a sound bar or audio system_

not mine - Sony A1E uses actuators so that the screen is a speaker and there is a small subwoofer in the stand, it sounds pretty excellent (and I am fussy)

xp to self oh unless this is because of them removing the headphone socket?

Regarding ipods : did they really sound better than today’s iphones

Not really, they definitely impart a color to the sound (maybe a lot of muddy low mids?). It was pretty striking when I compared some of my own rough mixes (although you still have to wonder about the differences between the Dropbox player vs the Soundcloud player etc). I'm used to the 'ipod sound' though, and I still like them for carrying around a ton of music.

tbh some of these issues can be resolved by just not buying iPhones, I mean I know people like them for some reason but my phone costs 1/5 as much but has a battery just under twice the size of an iPhone X

Regarding ipods : did they really sound better than today’s iphones ?

well they had this warmth to them

do landlines really not work during power outages now? because that's the main reason I still pay for one.

― ☮ (peace, man)

not if your provider has switched to VoIP:

VoIP phones will not operate when the power is down, unless you have an uninterruptible power supply.

https://www.steadfasttelecom.com/you-have-the-power-voip-and-poe/

https://voipstudio.com/blog/how-do-you-deal-with-a-voip-power-outage/

Feel like this is just the tip of the iceberg for technology no longer being ready for infrastructure problems.

google maps is next to useless now, and i'd put google search up there too. once they started customizing your results to your location is when i think the slide began. of course the migration of all content to five websites didn't help this either

How are the maps useless now?

+1 to google search, what a complete waste of what was once an amazing tool.

of course the migration of all content to five websites didn't help this either
a chilling truth -- seriously makes my skin crawl and yet

for me the transition to streaming has not been a positive or forward step wrt music. it feels like a loss because i used to invest time, money, or both into a thing and now that money is almost expected to go to a gross middleman company that is giving me a preposterous buffet when i would prefer to order a la carte, the backwards way. :(

not only giving me a preposterous buffet, but watching me closely as i eat and saving the data to use to sell things to me
gross!

Well said

Elements of Car Repair, two stories:

--My Mom accidentally bashed in the front fender of her Yukon in a parking lot (separate long story). To replace said fender, you have to basically dismantle the whole front clip (remove bumper, hood, grill etc.) before installing the new part.

--A friend of mine was filming something at a bar. She was getting ready to leave at closing time when a drunk backed his Mustang into her Lincoln. Cosmetically, not a lot happened, just stuffed paint and clear bumper damage. Unfortunately, the computer was damaged enough her car had to go back to the dealer for several days of repairs.

"Scuffed Paint" even.

A car's "Check Engine" light 99% of the time has nothing to do with the engine but rather the onboard cpu/diagnostics.

I'm in favor of all changes that make people loathe their cars more

LL otm

the times when i most enjoy music, these days, is when i actively try to resist the current paradigm of listening and constrain myself to repeated listens of 1-3 things until i've memorized every note

it's like that with a lot of times. my best reading experiences are when i force myself back into 1989

"it's like that with a lot of times"

how do i still have a job

i'm mostly talking about the navigation features of google maps, the UI is terrible many xxp

The iPad was a bit of a stumble
-techno beaver

― calstars, Tuesday, August 13, 2019 7:13 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lmfao

Back to printers, I bought when I moved to AZ and was gonna be working remotely. A "smart" printer oooh I'm living in the future. Had automated setup routine, get to nearly the final step: loading the paper. It would not recognize the paper was loaded, no matter what. So the thing was unfuckingusable.

Printers and scanners have always been bad and don’t belong on this thread.

If you only need b/w get a brother hl-2350 or 2360 from Craigslist for like 40$. Duplex laser printer. WiFi works. Fast enough for the home. Replacement no brand toner is $10.

If you have a smartphone and you are scanning documents (not slides or photos etc and you don’t need a document feeder) then you don’t need a scanner. Just use scanbot or whatever. Even the notes app on iPhone is better than a cheap scanner.

"it's like that with a lot of times"

how do i still have a job

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, August 14, 2019 11:28 AM (thirty minutes ago)

this made me lol, ty karl :)

My mobile has stayed connected through a number of local power outages. Don't know if the nearest mast has some backup power or it was just luck.

In my first job in the late 80s I flogged laser printers. They cost silly money but were quite reliable tbf. The OG HP DeskJets were OK as well IIRC.

E-ink was one of the best innovations ever and it’s baffling to me that “advanced” e-readers switched over to basically just being tablets (this doesn’t really count tho as they are still coming out with kindle classic and equivalents)

E-ink was one of the best innovations ever and it’s baffling to me that “advanced” e-readers switched over to basically just being tablets (this doesn’t really count tho as they are still coming out with kindle classic and equivalents)

― YouGov to see it (wins), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 1:12 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

did you see https://remarkable.com/

LL otm re a la carte music. me too! I use streaming to check stuff out but still want to have actual mp3s or, gasp, a cd of stuff I want to "keep" and revisit. I pretend this is because I mostly listen to music on my car cd player (it does have an aux for my ipod but the file structure somehow does not let me select anything specific so it's just shuffled) but also i like experiencing music this way rather than a sort of radio that can be shut down whenever "they" choose.

That is why I started buying vinyl again. Streaming allows me to check out a ton of stuff, but if something actually knocks my socks off, I'll plunk down the cash get a hard copy for the house.

I have a playlist on my phone of my favorite 1000 songs or so and whenever I play it in the car I'm just constantly skipping songs, I never know what I actually wanna hear

someone was telling me that you can fairly easily repurpose an old smartphone to use as a media player. ... because eventually my 10 year old iPod will die

I have 1000 playlists. It's pretty awesome.

someone was telling me that you can fairly easily repurpose an old smartphone to use as a media player. ... because eventually my 10 year old iPod will die

was it me? i just did this!

The only problem w using smartphones as media players is their audio quality is often pretty lacking

the “sharing economy”

xp to sarahell -- my ipod is on its last legs but i deleted all the apps from my old phone and am going to use it as an ipod/bluetooth connected to a speaker/wifi for streaming when necessary

it's heavenly! for home and the classroom. i am not a fiend for TOP quality, i will settle for medium good if it suits my life otherwise.

Assuming the old smartphone doesn't have a busted headphone socket, no Bluetooth and/or a worn out non user-replaceable battery.

Theres a related idea that I think about often, about tech we thought we wanted but then discarded - when I was a kid two things that signified Our Amazing Future were video phones and food in pill form. Now we have those things, but if you actually met someone today who was like "I only eat soylent & supplements and only communicate via FaceTime" youd be like wow this person is deeply troubled

yeah I've bought several old iPhones for $20 which you can just use as music players. it's pretty neat.

hoping to get one of the 256 GB ones this way in a couple years

was it me? i just did this!

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 10:45 AM (ten minutes ago)

maybe!

More and more kitchen gadgets (and doubtless other gadgets, but kitchen is what I know) are now only controllable via smartphone. This makes the gadget cheaper to manufacture (no buttons!) and "smart" and horrible. How I love losing that hands-on instant feedback and instead setting up lots of bluetooth pairings with greasy wet fingers, pairings which invariably fail either silently, ruining the food, or with loud alarms.

normal versions of these things still exist. why would you buy these smartphone versions?

in case you need to tweet from your refrigerator

you mean like, if you are stuck inside and need someone to let you out?

the day i have to use my phone to operate a kitchen gadget will be a dark day indeed

xp to sarahell

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/teen-smart-fridge-twitter-grounded

I've been tempted to when the gadget is in every other respect significantly better than the competition.

are there actual fridges on twitter? tweeting about fridge things?

you all should just be like me and rent apartments for the rest of your lives. this will ensure that your appliances are always 10-20 years out of date and easy to use

you can stay in the same rental apartment for 10-20 years, even!

You can imagine me looking disdainfully over my cyberpunk shades at a lot of the things on this thread (iPods, landlines, artisanal shaving).

I do remember the first time it took more than a second for the response to a button press on my phone to be more than instantaneous - thought "Well, I guess this is how it is now". This would have been in the pre-smart phone era but on a phone big enough that you could install some sort of 'app' - it was hell.

But modern smartphones are things of absolute wonder, generations of humans would have killed other generations just to have them.

(You swipe right on an iPhone's lock screen to get by-the-hour weather, if you've set that up)

One things I'll particularly go to the mat for is automated airport bag drops - we waited 20 minutes in a barely moving queue last week until the staff started going down the line to find those without a boarding card and summarily execute them guide them to the checkin machines. When we got to the top of the queue, the gentleman checked the stickers on the bag that we'd already put on, checked the boarding passes that we needed to have to get the stickers, checked the passports that we also needed to have to get the stickers, directed us to the baggage handlers that were very visible, and told us where the gates were - all completely pointless. In Dublin you can do the whole thing without talking with anyone, leaving staff free for the check-in desks.

Anyway anyway I have come here to shit on Google - a friend mentioned a few months ago that the predictive search has gotten weirdly worse - it'll show what you're looking for after 2-3 letters, but hide it again after 4-5!

And having spent some time travelling over the last fortnight, the Google Maps on my phone is ridiculously full of things I'm not searching for, and too willing to take any passing brush as "Oh do you want to go focus on this bar / restaurant / general Real Estate-only neighbourhood concept? That is cool, I can show you how to get from here to there, and not to whatever you were asking about just previously"

pic.twitter.com/G6V7aAufec

— claudia (@KiIledByDeath__) August 12, 2019

dear dorothy,

please eat more vegetables

warmest regards,
the fridge

xp what airport was that? Sounds horrendous. I was in T5 the other day & it was just hell, automated to within an inch of its life and full of clueless tourists (and why would they have a clue, should be being helped if necessary).

tangent but my Google Maps top hate is when you're zoomed in and do a search for whatever only for it to zoom way out to show vague or related results miles away instead of just shifting right to the actual nearby match or asking if you want to zoom out for the suggestions

cloud based software that is clunkier/has fewer features than the standalone versions. e.g. my frenemy: quickbooks online

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-contact-luxury-screens.html

Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good

Screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol.

the automated luggage thing is daft as anything. i was going to the states in the wee hours of the morning from here last summer and it was busy as anything at the gates, then once you'd gone through that rigmarole you're in another big lineup for the baggage drop-off. there's no way this expedites anything and I've still had to interact with two staff members (one who looked at my passport and scanned my ticket at the gate, one who manned the wee conveyor belt to dump your luggage on) if reducing labour costs was the idea.

at the counter rather than the gate i should say.

It's about tomatoes, but it's a great study on how industrial farming makes food taste worse.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/513NeKcWwbL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farming-destroyed-the-tasty-tomato

Estabrook says the mass-produced tomatoes in today's supermarkets lack flavor because they were bred for enduring long journeys to the supermarket — and not for taste.

"As one large Florida farmer said, 'I don't get paid a single cent for flavor,' " says Estabrook. "He said, 'I get paid for weight. And I don't know of any supermarket shopper who tastes her tomatoes before she puts them in her shopping cart.' ... It's not worth commercial plant breeders' while to breed for taste because their customers — the large farmers — don't get paid for it."

As a result, customers have become accustomed to the flavorless tomatoes that dot supermarket shelves, says Estabrook.

"I was speaking to a person in their 30s recently and she said she had never recalled tasting anything other than a supermarket tomato," he says. "I think that wanting a tomato in the winter of winter — or wanting a little bit of orange on the plate ... is inherent in a lot of our shopping decisions. We expect an ingredient to be on the supermarket shelves 365 days a year, whether or whether not it's in season or tastes any good."

Though most of our tomatoes come from Florida, the state isn't necessarily the best place to grow the crop, says Estabrook. Most tomatoes are grown in sand, which contains few nutrients and organic materials. In addition, Florida's humidity breeds large populations of insects, which means tomato growers need to apply chemical pesticides on a weekly basis.

"In order to get a successful crop of tomatoes, the official Florida handbook for tomato growers lists 110 different fungicides, pesticides and herbicides that can be applied to a tomato field over the course of the growing season," he says. "And many of those are what the Pesticide Action Network calls 'bad actors' — they're kind of the worst of the worst in the agricultural chemical arsenal."

Florida applies more than eight times the amount of pesticide and herbicides as does California, the next leading tomato grower in the country. Part of this has to do with the fact that California processes tomatoes that are used for canning — and therefore don't have to look as good as their Florida counterparts. But part of this also has to do with consumers.

"It's the price we pay for insisting we have food out of season and not local," he says. "We foodies and people in the sustainable food movement chant these mantras, 'local, seasonable, organic, fair-trade, sustainable,' and they almost become meaningless because they're said so often and you see them in so many places. If you strip all those away, they do mean something, and what they mean is that you end up with something like a Florida tomato in the winter — which is tasteless."

don't even supermarket tomatoes taste better in the actual summertime? in Europe you can buy tomatoes all year round too but they naturally taste like cardboard until at least June. so why bother?

i feel like if you've never left britain you've never tasted a good tomato

cars are overly complicated, you can't DIY repairs much if it all
in US, homes & small biz buildings used to be built using sturdy, durable materials and constructed by very skilled craftsmen. now they're made out of plywood and siding. Uglier, don't last as long, not as energy efficient, won't survive storms as well.

Jim in Vancouver otm though it is actually incredibly easy to grow your own as long as you water them. fuck a supermarket tomato FOREVER

of course the tradeoff is cars are now MUCH more reliable and thus need repairs much less often than back in the day

yeah the tomato one is def endemic at this point. the first "what has happened to our tomatoes?" exposes date from the late 60s and early 70s as question-the-establishment and/or naderite consumer advocate journos started realizing what sort of research the USDA had actually been subsidizing for years, oldsters and produce-trade veterans were able to notice the difference etc.

for even earlier "what has happened to our bread?" concern, check out sigfried giedion's amazing /mechanization takes command/ from the 1940s. fascinating as he was a major cheerleader of modernization and modern life but (likely influenced by the context of WW2) was, like lewis mumford around the same time, increasingly aware of the downsides and hoping for some humanist technological synthesis around the corner. he also has long passages about the decline of bathing, the "mechanization of death" in the slaughterhouses, etc., and a million cockamamie old inventions illustrated courtesy of the US patent office.

i neither need nor want televisions in airports, taxi cabs, subway cars, buses, restrooms etc

and if cvs insists on making me do the labor of scanning my own stuff (probably after waiting extra to use one of the machines that take cash), i'm gonna periodically take a cut

Florida applies more than eight times the amount of pesticide and herbicides as does California, the next leading tomato grower in the country. Part of this has to do with the fact that California processes tomatoes that are used for canning — and therefore don't have to look as good as their Florida counterparts. But part of this also has to do with consumers.

As a Californian, who eats predominantly California tomatoes, I am happy that this is not my problem. ... also the economics of tomato growers is something I've been aware of/complained about since the 90s, so like, late pass to everyone but me.

the automatic baggage dropoff at CDG for Air France is good, you walk up to long row of hand scanners, it takes 20 seconds, don’t have to wait in line or talk to anyone

the automatic supermarket checkouts in the Czech Republic seemed better than what I’m used to. nb I am a former supermarket cashier so I loathe the old way

I was actually thinking about tasteless blueberries when I started this thread! some vague memory of possibly a Twitter thread about how we could all have luscious jammy-tasting berries instead of mushy blue crap

i actually like self-checkout at the grocery store ... sorry.

Automated phone systems where you have to speak your response ... if I wanted to actually speak responses, I would talk to a person, just let me press stupid buttons, ok.

of course the tradeoff is cars are now MUCH more reliable and thus need repairs much less often than back in the day

Also far safer for the occupants

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT%2C_VMT%2C_per_capita%2C_and_total_annual_deaths.png

counterpoints: the trend in supersizing SUVs has made it far worse for pedestrians and fuel efficiency

technological change anthropology, live as it happened: PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAG: Supermarket Self-Serve Checkout Poll

in US, homes & small biz buildings used to be built using sturdy, durable materials and constructed by very skilled craftsmen. now they're made out of plywood and siding. Uglier, don't last as long, not as energy efficient, won't survive storms as well.

one could argue this is something that can be improved/enforced by changes to building codes. There are newer energy efficiency standards for buildings that actually a lot of older buildings don't meet, and thus there are arguments regarding the use of the historical building code and lower standards for historic buildings ... obviously there are regional differences for these things, and you probably live somewhere with laxer standards.

in US, homes & small biz buildings used to be built using sturdy, durable materials and constructed by very skilled craftsmen. now they're made out of plywood and siding. Uglier, don't last as long, not as energy efficient, won't survive storms as well.

A contractor succinctly explained this to me as: "the owners are going to flip the place in five to six years and the owners after them are going to tear it all out anyway, so durability is a liability"

you can stay in the same rental apartment for 10-20 years, even!

you'd think, but the trick is for the landlord to keep raising prices every year so you have to keep downgrading to shittier apartments. the plus side is that the shittier apartments feature appliances that are even more outdated than the regularly outdated appliances, ensuring that the tenant will never have to use their phone to open the refrigerator

Peaches, strawberries, blueberries. There are a bunch of fruit I avoid buying other than specific times of the year when the more local versions are available, which are generally still pretty good.

lots of xps

I was under the mistaken impression that I had the skill and wherewithal to learn how to repair iPod classics prior to the inevitable death of my own but I think I've decided I'm going to figure out how to make an iTunes-based music server happen so I can still access all my songs and playlists through my phone when the day of sorrow finally arrives. Hence my 'RIP clickwheel' post way upthread as this is the one innovation which is basically just gone forever at this point and which I will truly miss.

"the owners are going to flip the place in five to six years and the owners after them are going to tear it all out anyway, so durability is a liability"

some things yes, other things no ...

you'd think, but the trick is for the landlord to keep raising prices every year so you have to keep downgrading to shittier apartments

one weird trick!

i am totally fine with my 20+ year old stove and 10+ year old fridge

me too, although i am considering inviting an amazon representative over to my place on a daily basis so they can check the items in my fridge, re-order the low stock items via Amazon Fresh, and then sell all my product preference data to everyone who will pay for it without telling me (except on pg 562 of the revised privacy policy plan)

thinking of replacing my walls with transparent nu-glass, moving my apartment into my workplace and then taking a bunch of soma until i die

no easy way to view a big chunk of the movies made before the 21st century

in US, homes & small biz buildings used to be built using sturdy, durable materials and constructed by very skilled craftsmen. now they're made out of plywood and siding. Uglier, don't last as long, not as energy efficient, won't survive storms as well.

uglier maybe. the rest eh... not really. it depends. and cheaper? yes (this matters a lot in environments where it's already extremely difficult to build housing for various reasons, e.g. the US).

http://planphilly.com/articles/2019/08/09/we-don-t-build-them-like-we-use-to-why-new-houses-aren-t-made-of-brick

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-america-s-new-apartment-buildings-all-look-the-same

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and "authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware

House technology in the new century: it will eventually be faster and cheaper to keep adding solar panels to a house than it will be to replace the single-pane inefficient windows that have been on it for 60+ years

xp - oooooh! I should ask my mom about that one!

NA extremely otm re: movies

so are y'all saying that I am not stupid and hoarder-y for keeping the hundred or so VHS tapes and DVDs I accumulated as of 10 years ago?

Bbut streaming means everything ever made is available surely!

we call those "Popcorn Classics"

movie streaming exemplifies the buffet model and why it sucks
in order to benefit from the neverendless buffet you have to want to eat what they're serving and apparently they are serving up a bunch of bullshit unless you subscribe to the criterion or shudder or some other niche outlet, which is fine but hardly an improvement on the a la carte model

you can stay in the same rental apartment for 10-20 years, even!

I have been in the same apartment for over 15 years. My rent has gone up about 3% every 3 years. I believe I'm currently paying about what I'd pay if I lived in, say, St. Louis, but I live in a two-bedroom in suburban NJ with an off-street parking space.

We replaced the refrigerator a few years ago - just bought one ($600 or so at Lowe's) rather than ask the landlord. He has replaced our stove, our toilet, and the bathroom sink, though.

I have been in the same apartment for over 15 years. My rent has gone up about 3% every 3 years. I believe I'm currently paying about what I'd pay if I lived in, say, St. Louis, but I live in a two-bedroom in suburban NJ with an off-street parking space.

yeah, my situation is similar -- rent control is what makes it possible. I've been in the same apartment (2 bedroom, off-street parking) for almost 22 years now ... the landlord finally replaced the 20+ year old washing machine that was constantly breaking.

UX tip: When this happens, you have to solve it, even if you don’t feel like it’s your fault. pic.twitter.com/4mV8EwEhxe

— Nathan Lawrence 🌈 (@NathanBLawrence) August 14, 2019

maybe they can add a quick "are you sure you want to burn down your house?" prompt

prob specific to the SW US: buildings were designed with the local environment & climate in mind, and constructed with native materials. Now, for the most part only very recent and very expensive homes/buildings incorporate design elements and materials that allow for less reliance on AC to keep interior cool.

having to tell twitter i want "latest tweets" and not "top tweets" every single time i open it

^^ FB as well

The hilarious thing is the oven preheating disaster was accurately predicted in the Carousel of Progress at Magic Kingdom.

FB and Twitter, period

People really overestimate how easy it was to watch movies back in the day, though. I miss the video store as much as the next guy, but I never had a chance to watch for instance Hou Hsiao-hsien until the internet came along. It wasn't even that easy to learn who Hou Hsiao-hsien even was.

otoh, think of the children who put their baby sibling in the oven and cooked her until she was deceased

Fred B if you lived in New York there were great video stores everywhere. sure there wasn't everything but there were lovingly accumulated collections that were based on something other than marketing, promotion, rights deals, etc

i neither need nor want televisions in airports, taxi cabs, subway cars, buses, restrooms etc

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 14, 2019 6:59 PM (fifty-one minutes ago)

this has definitely made the world a much more annoying place. it's a lot harder to read or just zone out with a fucking tv blaring wherever you might be sitting.

Fred B if you lived in New York there were great video stores everywhere. sure there wasn't everything but there were lovingly accumulated collections that were based on something other than marketing, promotion, rights deals, etc

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), 14. august 2019 22:14 (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

But if I lived in New York I'd never use any video store, since I'd be at a repertory theater every night.

hat_doff.gif

i neither need nor want televisions in airports, taxi cabs, subway cars, buses, restrooms etc

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 14, 2019 6:59 PM (fifty-one minutes ago)

this has definitely made the world a much more annoying place. it's a lot harder to read or just zone out with a fucking tv blaring wherever you might be sitting.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 4:19 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Or how about at the fucking gas pump? Starting to pump gas, and then a TV screen magically pops on and starts loudly playing commercials or cable news - just what the world needed

omg really? ... sorry, that seems like unrealistic fronting

I miss the video store as much as the next guy

ugh what I most remember is walking the aisles w/a friend or relative on a Fri night and all 100 copies of the good new release are checked out and there not being anything we both could agree on and getting depressed by that, and then getting more depressed cause we were forced to settle on some shitty movie.

Or how about at the fucking gas pump? Starting to pump gas, and then a TV screen magically pops on and starts loudly playing commercials or cable news - just what the world needed

I HATE THIS SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!

no easy way to view a big chunk of the movies made before the 21st century

tvs at gas stations really are the worst though

but you see, those movies you couldn't watch, it made you value them more

I just wish when the video stores closed and were selling their inventory I had more money to buy everything I wanted.

I don't even own a gas station

A very specific step backwards is Netflix going from being a repertory service, to now not having anything. When I lived in the US in 2010, a lot of people around me were getting into weird films they got send by mail.

_no easy way to view a big chunk of the movies made before the 21st century_

yeah I highly prefer this to "no easy way to view _all_ of the movies made before the 21st century," which prevailed before 1990 or so.

not sure how recent a development this is but i am convinced nobody knows how to use the defrost mode on their microwave, much less the models where you can punch in a code for baked potato, frozen vegetables, etc. totally needless features and sort of stultifying. especially in an apartment where the owners manual isn't provided. i honestly don't think i need that much control and level of detail over anything

last time i was at the gas station the Tv\V in the pump was playing Chive TV, a new level of cursed

nice

*TV

Wait no it isn’t I read that backwards

guys how am i going to watch back episodes of what was on at the gas pumps

When I lived in the US in 2010, a lot of people around me were getting into weird films they got send by mail.

They still offer this service you know

I guess I haven't been super thorough in testing out this assertion, but it seems like these movies are still available, you just have to search for the channels that have them? Maybe you end up paying to watch a specific thing if you don't have a subscription or special plan, but like ... that's what you used to do at the video store so ...?

yeah i have no idea how to use any of the functions on my microwave besides, like, start and stop and "instant minute" or whatever

like, I can pay $8.99 to watch State of Siege ... before it was just not available.

We replaced the old microwave with the new microwave a few months ago.

Pretty much the same class and style, but on the old microwave, I could hit "1" and "30 SECONDS" in a fluid doot-doot motion to set the timer for 90 seconds.

On the new microwave, I can just about do the same thing except instead of a fluid doot-doot, it's more like doot-(pause)-doot since once I hit the "1", the new microwave feels the need to display the letters

E X P R E S S

up in the window before allowing me to hit the "30 SECONDS" button.

I can sort of get back my rhythm by typing "TIME COOK", "1", "30 SECONDS" in a fluid doot-doot-doot motion, but it still ain't the same like the old microwave.

Also, in typing that last sentence, I just noticed that the CEO of Apple Inc. very nearly has name on every microwave sold in North America.

― pplains, Tuesday, August 30, 2016 7:38 PM bookmarkflaglink

no easy way to view a big chunk of the movies made before the 21st century

― na (NA), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 12:22 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

OTM

i live in L.A. and there were several really excellent DVD rental spots within walking distance that have all closed now, i'm sure almost 100% due to streaming taking over. And it's all a trick, we get conned by those articles rhapsodizing about what movies are going to be available this month/which ones we have to watch because oh no they're expiring this month. and it's like The Whole Nine Yards or Red 2 or Another Stakeout. Maybe Deep Impact or High Fidelity, if they're feeling generous. and yeah LL also otm, then you have to sign up for niche premium services to see other films. Even if I want to pay to rent something from Amazon streaming, sometimes it's not available.

however we also have a very good library system in L.A. with a lot of movies, but sometimes they're not always available. I miss going down to the rental place and just browsing their foreign film section or classic noir collection or whatever.

i don't think it's impossible to see something you want to see but it's definitely that backwards step.

the owners manual isn't provided

if you can find a model number, a Google search will usually turn up a PDF manual

(PDF manuals might be a backward step we all just accept now)

movies I hear about and wanna see: check Netflix---> check library ----> check YouTube. There's only a couple in last 10 yrs that I couldn't find one of these 3 ways.

A lot of films are only available to stream in shitty versions which def feels like a step backward from dvd/br where you could be confident you’d get the right aspect ratio at least

Was pleasantly surprised by amount of movies available in my central AZ library system. Browse online, get notified when it's been shipped to my branch...v cool.

i tried to watch RONIN streaming awhile back and it was the goddamned pan n scan. decided to buy the recent blu-ray special edition instead,

pdf manuals are a fucking godsend

a lot of these, like the video store one, could be understood through the ruin-but-not-replace model, which i think i got from one of the canonical los angeles histories (fogelson?) describing the short boom of jitney bus service in the early 20th century, quashed by law because it was recognized that jitneys could skim off just enough cream of the business to ruin the streetcar network, but would not actually replace them in terms of what the public wanted the network to do.

i think this model's useful because it allows us to turn a critical eye even on developments that have many defenders and which do seem to solve some problems for some people. in LA, for many people the jitneys were a huge improvement and solved tons of problems. and that's true of streaming services, even ones with increasingly pathetic back catalogs. but their success ruined video stores which served all kinds of other needs and have not been replaced, full stop. countless articles about the death of the video store make clear how even middling ones in fact had far deeper catalogs than the major streaming services today, surprisingly deep to those of us who remember that era but have forgotten how many VHS tapes actually do fit on a shelf, and how once a store acquired, on release, a copy of Strange Days or Beyond Rangoon or My Dinner With Andre or Critters 2, it was there pretty much eternally. in a beat-up tape with pan-n-scanned picture, but, yknow, THERE! (obviously they would unload the surplus twenty copies of big new releases after their initial heyday.). bringing up the slim pickings for most indie or foreign directors at blockbuster doesn't refute this, because they're not on netflix either!

xxp netflix dvd subscriptions are not that expensive and they have a huge selection of films from the 20th Century!

and yes, libraries remain the greatest of resources to the film enthusiast

have you guys heard of torrentz

thing I love about Gas Station TV is that it has its own anchors and bumper music and it calls itself "GSTV" like a real channel that real people would really watch

pdf manuals are a fucking godsend

ITT ILX is crotchety old geezers

at a pettier level, all the changes in shaving since idk the 1960s or 70s.

― Good morning, how are you, I'm (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, August 13, 2019 4:26 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I had a dream about straight razors last night they had floral and paisley handles. I wonder if they actually exist.

The airport self check in thing really works for me. I have a rfid doodad on my case. I put the bag on the belt, scan my phone and the case gets whisked away, to reappear at my destination. I check my lugged a lot more because of this (free to check a bag in Australia). Of course people without the app and the doodad still have to struggle with the screen and self tagging.

A lot of this is the UX getting way ahead of a backend that has barely evolved since people were handwriting paper tickets on the red carbon paper stuff. (Or equivalents for other industries)

it wasn't really so long ago that devices like radios, TVs, stereo components, and even personal computers were designed to be repaired and kept in service for many years; now the same kinds of devices go directly to the landfill as soon as they fail

this is effed up and probably true. anything with any lead components is supposed to go to household hazardous waste disposal.

This may be an Australian thing too but cellphones have so much higher quality than landlines, particularly on a cell to cell call although even that lags behind FaceTime/WhatsApp/line/WeChat audio which I find myself using more and more.

To be fair I have no idea what our landline number is, or if the handset is still plugged in. I had to get it to get dsl my only interaction with people, presumably, on landlines is call centre workers who all sound like they are calling from a wind up field telephone at the bottom of a well.

Number None otm, pretty much every film you'd care to watch is available to download from private torrent sites like PtP and KG.

Every week, the library emails me a reminder that I've got five MP3s to download for free, and every week, I think "They don't have to do this."

stuntmen and papier mache >>> cgi

well yeah

pdf-only manuals are bullshit though. my continued inability to delve deeply into the workings of my one modern synthesizer/sequencer has a lot to do with not having a paper manual to thumb through

you know that you can PRINT THEM OUT right?

first i would need a laser printer

Or how about at the fucking gas pump? Starting to pump gas, and then a TV screen magically pops on and starts loudly playing commercials or cable news - just what the world needed

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 3:26 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

not saying this is a solution for every instance, but (seemingly) more often than not, when I have pressed every button around the edge of one of these screens, one of those buttons (typically not labeled) mutes the sound

You can print anything you want at a UPS store or a Kinkos, sad lol

Fedex Office yo

an inkjet would work too

I’m too busy being told to insert the credit card, waiting forever while nothing happens, then being told not to remove the card as soon as I do, whether it’s been in there for 2 seconds or months, to worry about figuring out how off the advertisement screen

the only thing to do when a gas station tv starts blaring at you is to walk off to an awkward place in the middle distance where you can't hear or see anything imo

Don't they usually have mute buttons?

i haven't pumped gas in years. This is all fascinating.

Or how about at the fucking gas pump? Starting to pump gas, and then a TV screen magically pops on and starts loudly playing commercials or cable news - just what the world needed

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open)

have managed to mostly avoid this plague by living in the one american state where under no circumstances is an ordinary person allowed to just pump their own gas

i'm cool with this, even if it means i have to actually socially interact with someone i wouldn't have to otherwise

the only thing to do when a gas station tv starts blaring at you is to walk off to an awkward place in the middle distance where you can't hear or see anything imo

― cheese canopy (map), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 7:23 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Don't they usually have mute buttons?

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 7:25 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

second button from the top on the right side works for me. i was really happy when i found that out because that shit is basically assault

This sounds nightmarish, like rushomancy I am thankful to live in Oregon

I don't think I've ever been at a gas station with TVs at the pumps, unless I'm just really good at blocking them out.

I have to go to gas stations a lot, though.

We had to rejoin the car having masses this year and we got a Chevy Bolt. I plug my car into an outlet in front of the house. Then I go inside to watch Twitch on my laptop.

I usually find a mute button somewhere but I still resent being forced to go through the thought process: "time to punp some gas. Oh, a TV just came on! Let me see if I can find the mute button."

I always wonder what the monsters behind that stuff think about it. Like do they imagine there are people out there in the world who go home and say over dinner "honey, I saw something interesting on Gas Station TV today..."

no way, they imagine how much ad space they can fill it with, period

Automated phone systems where you have to speak your response ... if I wanted to actually speak responses, I would talk to a person, just let me press stupid buttons, ok.

― sarahell, Wednesday, August 14, 2019 7:05 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Usually get caught off-guard by these when I'm calling from someplace that requires silence, like my office or the bus, resulting in me having to whisper-shout my answers.

Phone: In a few words, please tell us what you're calling about!
Me: customerservice.
Phone: I'm sorry, I didn't get that! In a few words...
Me: cus! tom! er! ser! vice!

Oh yeah these vocal automated systems are awful. I don’t want to talk to a machine... and customer services in general are a kafkaian nightmare nowadays, even with humans (who are located half the world away and don’t have a clue what they talk about... ) so in the end you never reach a person in charge.

Just tying together the self-checkout and being assaulted by random nonsense themes, there was a brief period this year where Marks and Spencer self checkout machines started screaming at you in the voices of Ant and Dec mid-transaction

Also Virgin Trains have toilets that do a shit comedy routine about how anything that isn't piss, shit or toilet paper is bad for their digestion. I reckon that was better when it was just a sign that said "don't flush random stuff"

Poundland has been using the voices of dracula, father christmas and other seasonal characters on its check out machines, it doesn't seem to make the staff who supervise them very happy.

stuntmen and papier mache >>> cgi

― phil neville jacket (darraghmac), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 5:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yesssssssssss CGI is garbage

Thirded

Many AI voice systems allow you to press numbers, but don't advertise it.

My company's AI, if you press the number corresponding to the order it appears in the menu, it recognizes it.

But i am more a fan of keypad entry in general

what i find interesting is they're starting to design phone menuing systems to recognize when a customer is frustrated or enraged and respond to that. which is an... interesting approach.

"It sounds like you're upset. Would you like a handjob?"

I thought most phone systems you can bypass all the automation by just pressing 0 and it takes you to a person? Or is that no longer the case?

if you aren't printing long documents at the office why even work in an office

OTM

Lots of AI voice systems do not reply to 0.

Mine, you have to say "Representative" or wait on the line

Those automated phone systems that are like 'Okay, got it. Just a second while we check your blooby-blorp. (fake typing sound)'...nobody needs that and who do you think you're fooling.

The automated voicemail service at my work shouts everything that isn't part of the standard template greeting. 'OLD LUNCH...you have...FOUR...unheard messages.'

I guess my general gripe is that annoying automated systems are often more annoying than dealing with a real person even if that real person was just hired two days ago and is struggling to read the script. So yes, I generally just keep hitting '0' like a maniac.

You said "fuck you, asshole". Is that correct? Say yes...or no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw2aEPq3--4

Movie discussion makes me happy I live near this place

Finally, after years of hard work, a collective I’m part of opened Beyond Video, Baltimore’s 100% crowdsourced, all-volunteer, non-profit video shop. 🙏🏼

How memberships work: https://t.co/0EbLlGzYtW

Needed 💿s: https://t.co/9aC5WB9Hk6

Box-set WISH LIST: https://t.co/G2NgFt48Az pic.twitter.com/QhIoZI74rP

— Eric Allen Hatch (@ericallenhatch) December 17, 2018

(Considering donating to their wish list)

I mean in some sense the concept of a phone as a text-composing device itself is the example of this that impinges on my life most frequently. You CAN send someone a text from your phone instead of writing them an email on your laptop, but the incredible pain of typing on a phone has still not gone away, and presumably never will, since people mostly feel the current system is good enough. (And some people, like my wife, are lucky enough to have voices the phone can clearly read, and they dictate everything, though this doesn't solve the problem of writing any text you want to be other than a first draft.)

xpost That is rad.

Progress will have to pry my trove of physical media out of my cold, dead hands.

The only VHS I still own is Midnight Madness and it IS ON THEIR LIST. (but they only want laserdiscs and dvds)

meant to say CONSIDER DONATING TO THEIR WISHLIST!

they've been really successful, mostly bc it's a flat $12/mo instead of per movie. I think that model could work anywhere, people are aware of streaming's limitations and how shitty the options often are, but it took BV a long time to open: raising money, rebuilding a collection from old video stores, estate sales, donations... it took a while but DAMN it's great.

Don't know if this quite fits in the thread, but USPS package tracking has gone from precise and reliable to absolutely shit over the past few years.

Tickets. Ok, yes, the physical ticket age meant you were fucked if you lost or ripped your ticket.

But assuming that didn't happen, there are lots of mobile-only events now where you CAN'T print paper tix so you have to rely on your phone having enough juice to get in...or spend 15 mins at guest services.

I just sold my Phish ticket stubs from the 90s for WAY too much money, so I'm bummed that I won't be able to do that in 20 years if I end up hating the bands I'm currently going out to see.

whoa I never realized there was a market for that

brb, putting my 1986 Grateful Dead stub on eBay

We're planning a surprise party for my mother this weekend. (Please don't tell her.)

We're all also hoping she doesn't notice anything odd when everyone across three states simply drops off the radar on her "Find My Friends" app.

While only one aspect of Google search's lightspeed journey into the toilet, I'd like to more generally call out the (possibly correct but still infantilizing) assumption that no one has the ability to spell anymore and that some algorithm knows what you actually meant to write. The words 'did you mean' now make me IA on the regular.

yeah the whole act of searching is now fraught with results that don't actually contain the words you searched for, because the machine is assuming associations and syllables and people-who-searched-for-x-also-searched-for-y. and it's like, no, i picked to search these words because i'm trying to answer this specific question. now i have to open six tabs and control-F for the key words and then close them again when they're not really there.

texting actively makes me look illiterate because google "autocorrects" to put fucking greengrocers apostrophes everywhere

you mean greengrocer's apostrophes?

It occurs to me occasionally that automation and the maximization of convenience is infantilizing in a very nearly literal sense, to the extent that shielding people from steps in a given process will ultimately render them unable to undertake those steps when/if they're required to do so. Like I shudder to think about the condition of a handwritten page when the writer in question has grown up having every electronic word autocorrected for them.

^ why you weren't allowed to use a calculator in math class BACK WHEN THINGS WERE DONE RIGHT

When I try to type about denim jeans, my phone always corrects it to Jean's.

Do any other airlines than BA do anything like that fuckawful celebrity safety film they insist on doing instead of letting the crew do it? Serious Clockwork Orange shit.

A lot of airlines have videos on the larger planes. I like the BA one. Although I couldn't figure out if the old version with Gillian Anderson speaking in a stoic british accent was supposed to be a joke. It was all confusing.

Virgin had a decently entertaining video a few years back, with robots and ninjas in it. They have since replaced it.

The Air France one still uses that Glass Candy song

couldn't figure out if the old version with Gillian Anderson speaking in a stoic british accent was supposed to be a joke

haven't seen this video so dunno about the stoicism, but Gillian Anderson's "natural" accent is English & she has lived in England nearly all her life, apart from term-time high school and during X-Files active production

Most airlines from English speaking countries have a novelty safety video now, not necessarily with celebs. The BA one with Chabuddy-G was/is the absolute nadir of the genre.

The Qantas one cycles through some ‘typical Australian tropes’ like sitting in the front of a cab and being a boorish prick abroad.

xpost I was researching about her accent before and knew she had lived in england but for some reason I assumed she usually speaks with a non-english accent.

I just doublechecked, in interviews she doesn't speak with a british accent. The stoic'ism is that she is very serious and placid in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrQ-RlPDPFo

I just doublechecked, in interviews she doesn't speak with a british accent. The stoic'ism is that she is very serious and placid in the video.

― Yerac, Thursday, August 15, 2019 12:45 PM (six minutes ago)

she can speak in either accent. i think she might do the american one for american media and vice versa?

yeah, see above

yeah i just learned about being 'bidialecta'.

whoops left off the 'l'. bidialectal.

a truly wild backwards technological step:

for the first fifteen years of podcasts, if you wanted to sample a podcast you were interested in, you could just download the episode from the podcast's website.

now, to follow a recommendation, you can't click on a link, because that will take you to a third-party company's redirect to an app.

so you have to google the podcast
then click on it
then click & read a couple of pages of the website to get an idea of whether you want to try more than one episode.
then, you have to google the podcast plus "rss" to find an aggregator service
then click on that
then find the rss link on the page
then click on it to see if it's set up to render in-browser
then click into the URL bar when it turns out not to be
then ctrl+x to copy it
then open a separate plugin or program that you had to install because Firefox took away rss support
then click "add a new feed,"
then click ctrl+v
then click "preview,"
then click "cancel"
and now you finally have a list of episodes you can download from to sample this thing that was recommended and sound intersting

^^ why I have never listened to a podcast, part LXXVII

she can speak in either accent. i think she might do the american one for american media and vice versa?

If you think that's weird, watch Kristin Scott Thomas switch back and forth between (British) English and French sometime.

That seems awfully complicated I just go to my podcast app search for the podcast, hit subscribe and away I go, if I don’t like it I unsubscribe.

Spotify is great for pods.

I don't even subscribe, bc for some reason giving Google Podcasts permission to 'access my web activity and data' is the line in the sand I've drawn. I just go to the app, search for it, and download whatever episode.

When I try to type about denim jeans, my phone always corrects it to Jean's.
― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Thursday, August 15, 2019 2:03 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

dril's ilx account doxxed

seems awfully complicated I just go to my podcast app

the podcast app costs a thousand dollars and then you have to buy new headphones for a couple of hundred just to use it, which don't work with any of your other audio devices

In Australia, the iPhone range starts at A$749 for an iPhone 7 – making it the cheapest entry level model. The new iPhone XS range starts at A$1,629 and A$1,799 for the iPhone XS Max. The iPhone XR will begin at A$1,229.

my phone was free with my contract and my headphones cost $7 canadian

and i only listen to podcasts on my phone because if I'm at home i have better things to do (watch ds9)

Not the Apple podcast app, just a podcast app, I use Castro, no idea if it’s available for Android but there are undoubtedly a bunch.

I got my Samsung Galaxy off craigslist for $240 but maybe they don't have used non-Apple products there, idk

guess sic is listening on his free computer

yeah, even on the shittiest smart phone it's pretty easy to listen to any podcast. This is part of the reason why I listen to a lot more podcasts on my phone than spotify (which is terrible on low end android phones)

ipods don't have apps guys

Pretty sure iPod Touches have apps. My iPhone app (Downcast) lets me quickskip 30 seconds by swiping right, which is the best feature.

the problem is the main aggregators are where people are encouraged to push their podcast feeds and all the links go directly to those, I think

iPods were the first main target for podcasts and iTunes has one of the largest podcast directories, though. I mean, assuming you're still using iTunes for synching and not something third party

fwiw this site seems pretty good and seems to have rss links directly: https://www.listennotes.com/

Pretty sure iPod Touches have apps

Came out 12 years ago.

you mean greengrocer's apostrophes?

― Number None

i did that on purpose

the clickwheel one had apps too! there were like these trivia games you could download. helped me kill time on a long flight

The Qantas one cycles through some ‘typical Australian tropes’ like sitting in the front of a cab and being a boorish prick abroad.

― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed)

as opposed to be the 'typical american trope' of being a racist prick fucking everywhere

yesterday after great pestering from windows i consented to install their latest "upgrade", which first took 24 hours, second didn't work, and third managed to turn back on my touchscreen, which i turned off because it had broken for some reason and was constantly registering presses rendering the computer unusable. which is an extreme case but the constant stream of "you have an update! better install it or some hacker will exploit a 0-day and hold all of your files for bitcoin ransom!" is pretty strongly backward progress imo

sic, while I sympathize as a fellow iPod Classic-owner and stubborn ass-dragger when it comes to progress, I think the podcast issues you face are relatively unique to your situation.

I saw the BA safety video a week ago - the one bright spot is how pissed off the makers must have been when Olivia Coleman won an Oscar.

I think because I hate flying so much, I like the BA video due to the easy distraction (obviously as seen by my Gillian Anderson confusion (she is not in the new one) and trying to dissect a lot of people's involvement and because I super like the curly haired woman in the older one).

sic, while I sympathize as a fellow iPod Classic-owner and stubborn ass-dragger when it comes to progress, I think the podcast issues you face are relatively unique to your situation.

just because many ppl have very happily accepted being herded into third-party data-harvesters does not mean that it is not a technological/practical step backwards to change a plurality of podcast websites such that you cannot download podcasts from them

I paid for my podcast app and it is not a data harvester.

https://support.downcast.fm/article/84WhiJ1BFT-privacy-policy

podcast.. websites?

hmm podcasts.. cool technological/practical "backward step" bro

for real though all software is garbage now

zing is great

Seconded

Tracer I download programmes from BBC radio websites! it's weird how as of this year or thereabouts they always announce "this programme is supported by advertising outside the UK" but then no ad is included. like someone coded a thing that will serve you a special version of the file depending on IP, and somebody coded a script that inserts the announcement into a version of each of the file-size options that BBC radio websites offer, but nobody got around to coding the bit that inserts the advertisement after the warning about the advertisement.

So Spirit airlines is using self boarding pass scan to speed things up

It is moving at a snail's pace aa the average idiot on this flight barely knows how to use them

Employee is having to help everyone...just like THE OLD WAY

Oh and they're having all zones go at the same time.

WHAT'S THE POINT OF ZONES THEN

I had to look up AA boarding groups for my wife recently and they had ten boarding groups plus an extra non-group that went before the rest, she had priority which got he into group 4. In Australia we have two lines premium and everyone else but in practice everyone just joins whichever line looks shorter and they board simultaneously. It's a lot quicker (but less monetised).

nobody got around to coding the bit that inserts the advertisement after the warning about the advertisement.

Oh it's coded, but there are more podcast episodes than the BBC's ad partner (Acast) can actually sell ads against. The BBC has thousands and thousands of podcast episodes; only a couple hundred get ads against them each month. And it's dynamic, so an episode that had an ad against it last month might not this month.

I’m going to consider myself as winning a very genial game of Russian roulette every time the ad chamber comes up empty from now on.

Used to be functions disappearing from home stereo systems and being replaced by flashing lights to make it more discoey.
Trying to think what went between me getting my first one which got stolen and then me having to replace it. I think there were things like the choice of what part fo a twin cassette deck set up you got to play in which direction and when it stopped is the first thing that comes to mind. You could actually use the remote to choose between side a and b of 2 decks and if you played to end of tape, continually through entire tape, or if you then swapped over to the other tape & i think that could be done from the remote.
Now I'm not even sure fi teh current player flips the tape side automatically.
I think that first one also had a set up for you to manually set up your audio choices, graphic equaliser like which gave way to choice of about 12 different sound pattern things like salsa, disco, soul, jazz, rock which were all preset.

We occasionally get adds on bbc podcasts down here. The electoral commission seems to buy a bunch during elections. It’s a bit jarring getting an Aussie ad on the bbc.

most of these are trade-offs where the "backward step" is accompanied by a "forward step". They exist because more people view the forward step as larger than the backward. It is natural that some do not, but it's still not accurate to describe the net as simply a "backward step".

this has to be a malcolm gladwell chapter

"every change is ultimately positive progress" is a curious stance

The existence of Malcolm Gladwell is a backward step we all just accept now.

lol I said "most of these" and indeed most examples of backward steps itt came along with huge forward steps. it would be more interesting to look at the ultimate net progress as you suggest, though. the idea of this thread seems to be to focus on what was traded off in a really negative light, which I think is more indicative of personality (which isn't necessarily negative) than any shift in technological capability. it's not as if battery technology got worse when the iphone came along. battery technology would probably be in a slightly worse state today without the huge driver of smart phone money.

see my "ruin but not replace" post - it's fallacious to assume that because the change happened/caught on that it was overall better or more beneficial. just has to benefit the right people, or render the old system just-broken-enough.

like i think we all know that many of these are seen as "forward steps" to somebody, even if it's just a corporation that counted the beans and realized that plastic components would save x cents per unit in the long term.

Yeah I think it's maybe important to note that 'progress' is often measured and driven by the bottom line of the companies who are ushering these 'innovations' into our lives. The theoretically possible things that people actually want/need/ask for are not often what we get.

I agree with these last 3 posts. I also think that the primary purpose of this thread is to take turns putting the word 'innovations' in scare quotes.

The way business is conducted often leads to regression or stagnation rather than progress, this article about Microsoft Word is a good example of this

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

👻innovations👻

Back when it was all DVDs by mail, Netflix had basically everything that was ever released on video. Now you're at the mercy of whatever each streaming service makes available that month, which is probably a fifth of what was available on DVD.

Wasn't the promise of streaming that you would have access to everything?

How is it that, thirty years down the line, email is still the same piece of shit technology that it always was.

Like, there's someone that I work with, every email she sends, the company logo graphic in her signature is always broken; instead, it shows up as an attached jpeg. There's also usually a second attachment called something like "0.html" which is inevitably just a blank web page.

It’s god’s way of telling you to send plain text emails.

Back when it was all DVDs by mail, Netflix had basically everything that was ever released on video.

xxp netflix dvd subscriptions are not that expensive and they have a huge selection of films from the 20th Century!

― Dan S, Thursday, August 15, 2019 7:04 AM (two days ago)

Wasn't the promise of streaming that you would have access to everything?

Did anyone ever promise this? They obviously would have been lying if so, but did any entity ever actually promote the lie?

bookmarkflaglink

bookmarkflaglink

there was a good article a couple years ago that went over how much has been phased out of netflix's dvd-by-mail business through the attrition of dvds that got damaged and weren't replaced.... found it! https://www.kqed.org/arts/10141066/netflix_streaming_dvds

the "access to everything" story wasn't told so much by the streaming companies as by the equivalent of WIRED and other digital cheerleaderati.

I had never seen this last word and was hoping you had made it up for this post.

How is it that, thirty years down the line, email is still the same piece of shit technology that it always was.

Like, there's someone that I work with, every email she sends, the company logo graphic in her signature is always broken; instead, it shows up as an attached jpeg. There's also usually a second attachment called something like "0.html" which is inevitably just a blank web page.

― Hideous Lump

J

An issue w/the streaming myth is that it was propagated by people who have no idea how licensing works.

Speaking of one second delays, The half second or second it takes for newer model cars to go after you step on the gas pedal.

automatics in general belong on this thread tbrr

^ otm

J

lol

bookmarkflaglink

definitely a practical step backwards

still an enthusiastic user of netflix dvd service, always waiting for them to drop the hammer on it. i cant imagine why it continues this long, other than the fact that it must cost them next to nothing to keep it up

PowerPoint is bad when used by amateurs. Program quad charts, excessive bullets, terrible formatting: these are not the programs’ fault. A bad briefing is bad because the briefer is bad at briefing. Its closest competitor, Keynote, has all of the same issues.

Word is mediocre when used for text documents that are 4 pages long and need to be reviewed by 2 people. It is phenomenal when a 30 page document with tables and figures needs to be reviewed by an organization of 100+ people. Its closest competitors still lag behind Word in this department.

Automatic transmissions are “bad” because they save on wear & tear (especially tires) and fuel consumption. If you claim to prefer manual transmissions for any rationale besides “fun” you are a moron. Anyway, drive electric. It’s practically 2020 already.

Email is brilliant technology, always has been, and if you hate it you have no place in an office. Go apprentice as a tradesperson and learn to cast bronze or pour concrete or something.

I like to count the number of fonts and font sizes people use in one PowerPoint deck.

i have better control over the car in a stickshift. at least it feels that way. the car doesn't "creep" when my foot's not on the accelerator and it's more responsive to the gas pedal. also i know when to shift, I'm not a moron. but yeah our electric/hybrid future will require automatics, I'm resigned to that.

i only grudgingly accept the existence of power steering so

In my experience apps like Slack have turned out to be worse than email for work comms - too much pressure to reply/contribute too quick and too easy to indulge in small talk you could either do face to face or not at all.

i liked the anti-Word article posted above because it wasn't primarily about Word sucking (altho the issues with overlapping use of style presets and ad-hoc select-and-click formatting are discussed) but about how much easier and more robust things *might have become* in a world without Word dominating the field and quashing innovation in the area of specific tools. i now use scrivener for all my substantial writing, and the one part of the workflow that suuuucks is taking the exported RTF into word for final formatting.

powerpoint makes it way too easy to lay out clunky, ugly documents, in just a "getting shit to line up, follow a grid, align, etc." sense. it still feels like a windows 98 era idea of what easy-to-use design would be (dumbed down and made clumsy, rather than streamlined with more functionality there if you want it). anytime i have to use it i'm just screaming for indesign inside. it also embeds all images at full size within the PPT file, which is very handy for tossing one presentation on a stick and taking it with you, but suuuuper annoying and wasteful of disk space if you're storing it locally, have multiple versions etc.

wasteful of disk space

god forbid.

i liked the anti-Word article posted above because it wasn't primarily about Word sucking (altho the issues with overlapping use of style presets and ad-hoc select-and-click formatting are discussed) but about how much easier and more robust things *might have become* in a world without Word dominating the field and quashing innovation in the area of specific tools. i now use scrivener for all my substantial writing, and the one part of the workflow that suuuucks is taking the exported RTF into word for final formatting.

― Good morning, how are you, I'm (Doctor Casino)

or, in a world without word, i might have 12,000 different overlays for each different program to put on top of my keyboard...

The fact that scrivener can’t export to .docx is not Word’s fault

but… it can?

then why does Doctor Casino not do this?!?!?

I blame sic’s podcast post for turning this into the “complaining about commonplace tech we can’t be bothered to learn how to use” thread

bunch of old dogs on ilx

xp well maybe he just likes rtf - even if you put out docx, there's often some fiddling with the scrivener-formatted doc that one would like to do, unless you just commit to doing everything with scrivener and its formatting options. personally i just do barely any other than italics and a bit of header-ing so that i'm not distracted away from ~teh writing~

ILX THREADS DRIFT GET USED TO IT ALREADY

Sir this is an Arby’s

every thread of this type devolves into an amalgamation of software support threads

Word is just fine. Y’all are crazy. It’s Excel and its complete inability to handle large workbooks that drives me crazy.

It's all been downhill since Tandy's Deskmate

What is that thing where newer model cars coming to a stop at an intersection have to restart the engine when it’s their turn to go? I’m not sure if that’s what actually happening or if that’s just what it sounds like is happening.

that is actually what's happening. it's to conserve fuel.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/automobiles/wheels/start-stop-technology-is-coming-to-cars-like-it-or-not.html

That is a genuinely good and on topic thing for this thread. Enough with the half measures! Get a car that plugs in!

Amazing

My old Escort used to have that feature but we called it "stalling"

lol my ford fiesta does this now

blame sic’s podcast post for turning this into the “complaining about commonplace tech we can’t be bothered to learn how to use” thread

I helpfully provided step-by-step instructions for ppl who need to learn how to use web pages, old dogs are as worthy of my street pats as bright-eyed shibe pups

That is a genuinely good and on topic thing for this thread. Enough with the half measures! Get a car that plugs in!

― El Tomboto, Sunday, 18 August 2019 5:40 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Electric is such a massive improvement on internal combustion engines that I fully expect this thread to be complaining about electric cars in a couple of years.

What is that thing where newer model cars coming to a stop at an intersection have to restart the engine when it’s their turn to go?

my car does this, it threw me off a bit at first, but it's actually fine. it just happens automatically. I can turn it off but iirc you have to turn it off every time you start the car, it doesn't stay off

Doesn't that wear out the starter?

I have absolutely no idea tbh but according to Wikipedia: The starter is reinforced and designed to withstand continuous use without wearing too fast or overheating.

this is my first car so I don't have a lot of basis for comparison, but it seems OK. it's quite smart, like if the car in front of me starts moving it auto-starts before I've even taken my foot off the brake

I have it too and agree that it mostly works fine. Apparently it’s not like a hard restart, more like some kind of suspension that just springs back to life when you take your foot off the gas. The amount of tech in the car overall is pretty boggling - I’ve had it six months, read the manuals front to back, watched hours of videos, and still don’t understand all of it. Absolutely love it right now, but it’s got definite “quirks” and I fear the day it brakes on its own in highway traffic or whatever because a sensor malfunctions.

Also Denny's getting rid of the Breakfast Dagwood

When did this happen! Why did it happen!! Fuck the entire world!!!

I been a loyal customer for like 25 years and this is the thanks I get. No heads up or anything. See if I ever go back to Dennys again. Loggin on to villageinn.com right NOW to locate my nearest new second home.

I got my Samsung Galaxy off craigslist for $240 but maybe they don't have used non-Apple products there, idk

― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, August 15, 2019 4:29 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Be careful, those can go off at any moment

a bunch of electronic locks/keypads that are slower or less effective than just turning a key in a lock

So many different ways of washing hands belong in this thread. The mad variety of awful soap/water/dryer innovations in the last decade or two, and none of them beat just turning a fucking tap.

I'm pretty sure most automated bathroom amenities are produced by Rand Peltzer Inc.

We've been so trained already to accept the couple-seconds-wait for the labor-saving device to activate, that adding a gratuitous delay is becoming a favored design choice. I'm sure there are countless examples in software, where the window beautifully swoops into view when you request it, instead of arriving spot on demand, but I'm thinking of the expensive new fridge I bought.

Works great, so cold, makes ice, frost-free. Every time you open the door, the interior lights gradually fade up from darkness over the course of 4 seconds, theatrically, suspensefully, revealing the food you want to grab.

And then four seconds later it starts beeping obnoxiously to tell you you've left the door open

they send a push notification to your phone now

Oh yes. And then there are the decent innovations that aren't quite implemented right, what Auden called "good ideas which incompetence or impatience prevented from coming to much."

Like the convenient oven that I can set to roast my artichokes for precisely 30 minutes, then automatically shut itself off, saving me from having to watch the clock in the other room and leap up from what I'm doing. At the 30-minute mark, the oven shuts off and beeps to let me know I can retrieve my finished vegetable at my leisure. And keeps beep beeping with increasing insistence every 15 seconds forever until I go pay attention to it.

I had to learn the hard way the difference between the two timers on our newish oven (one of which is merely a timer, the other of which full-on stops the oven and, if cooking isn't complete, requires us to go through the excessively-long preheat process just to get back to square one, at which point I have no idea how much more cook time will be necessitated for the foodstuff that's either been sitting on the stovetop or in an oven of fluctuating temperature for the past ten minutes).

I kinda just want a semi-contained firepit in the middle of the kitchen tbh.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's not just a case of us all subjectively preferring the exact level of labor-saving we were raised with and no more. I think there's a discrete line the machines are crossing, where they're trying to do what they think we want, rather than doing what they're explicitly told. And that's where it becomes oh my god you guys just stop labor-saving me so much damn extra work!

shutting off the heat source won't bring the oven to room temperature for awhile. The oven needs to transfer its contents to a built in but thermally isolated vat of 160deg beurre monte when the timer goes off.

OH BOY, do I have one for this thread. What the fuck is the deal with Windows updates now? That thing where you can only defer them for so long until they're just like, 'yeah, whatever it is you're doing is going to stop now while we shut yr shit down for the next couple of hours'. Up your ass, Microsoft. All the way up your ass.

I mean and just updates in general that can't be averted/delayed. Life is too goddamn short for me to have to sit and watch a progress bar accomplish more than I'm able to.

You can 'adjust active hours to reduce disruptions' (which I never do, of course).

the poxy fule gave one time to reconsider

churning butter toned our biceps. besides, the time it took gave us time to think about all the beurre monte we were eating. was it really necessary?

All the way up your ass.

4 % up ass
About 56 minutes remaining

digital picture frames

is it really necessary to rotate our favorite pictures of butter?

the number of butter holders in new cars

digital picture frames

― triple-washed (Sufjan Grafton), Tuesday, August 20, 2019 9:10 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

On the contrary, I got one for my mom that allows people to upload photos and videos via an app and I think she really loves it.

should upload a pic of your country crock. 'just kidding, mom'

Oh, if it were anyone but my moms you best believe I'd be trolling the shit out of that digital frame.

how when you click the red "close window" button on a mac it doesn't actually shut down the programme any more

it has never done that afaicr

it used to do it more often but whether or not it does is at the discretion of the programmer. os-bundled apps in particular often used to do it and many now don't.

interface guidelines used to be more pushy about the types of programs that ought to do it, too.

ah ok, im only a part-time mac user and its always been red button just closes the window when ive bothered to take notice

If you only need b/w get a brother hl-2350 or 2360 from Craigslist for like 40$. Duplex laser printer. WiFi works. Fast enough for the home. Replacement no brand toner is $10.

caek i just want to say - i did this and i now feel like a total don.

welcome to the brother club, brother

printing from my phone feels genuinely futuristic

it's the complete opposite experience this thread is about! it just works for me! somehow it blows my mind every time I'm at home and I can hit print on my phone and it finds the printer, there are no drivers or whatever, and a few seconds later I hear the printer whirr to life

I still want phones to have changeable batteries, especially for travelling.

Sleeper trains in general are a technology going backwards — you'd think with flygskam etc this would be a good time to introduce more, but a number of big routes have closed in the last few years.

If you claim to prefer manual transmissions for any rationale besides “fun” you are a moron.

uh, can we go back to this challop -- I live where there are steep hills and traffic, and being able to brake + downshift (vs. just brake) can be really really crucial

honestly, i feel like the increase in automatic transmission cars in the U.S. has to do with the public school system's changes to driver's ed -- teaching someone to drive an automatic is way easier.

"fun" would be the moronic reasons to like manual transmission. it's just a better way of controlling a car vs an easier way.

steep hills + traffic going uphill is far easier in an automatic though surely, so doesn't that just cancel out?

tbf I couldn't get the hang of manual gears at all, I'd still be learning to drive now if I hadn't switched to automatic

steep hills + traffic going uphill is far easier in an automatic though surely, so doesn't that just cancel out?

easier to not pay attention to one's surroundings, yes! ... which is why having a stick shift car is crucial for me.

I learned and passed my test in an automatic with start-stop and honestly love it, wouldn't have it any other way.

i also am fond of my Mr. Coffee coffeemaker

Locally, manual transmissions are theft prevention.

The appeal was much greater on my past snickity snick manual Miata than on my current FWD Hyundai.

I had my new work macbook for about 30 minutes today before I did something (resetting keychain) that required it to be completely re-imaged.

reimaging is pretty fast these days!

I remember immediately breaking a Windows 98 installation in the first few hours and trying everything I could to avoid reinstalling because it'd be too damn painful

steep hills + traffic going uphill is far easier in an automatic though surely, so doesn't that just cancel out?

My car is underpowered, so man trans is big benefit. There's hills+rocky dirt roads which I see huge trucks with V8s struggle with but I have no problem with cause I can really rev the engine in 1st gear and keep the revs up for the whole climb. Also helps a great deal w/merging & overtaking. Plus for my car one of the few negative criticisms of it was its auto trans (actually it's a Subaru so it's a CVT not traditional automatic) so I avoided that drawback.

honestly, i feel like the increase in automatic transmission cars in the U.S. has to do with the public school system's changes to driver's ed

it's cause US was 1st to make really good & reliable automatics

whos challop was that about transmission/automatics?

ridiculous statement obv

I can't believe this thread sold me a printer

ILX is Influencers Low-key Xchanging

they replaced the once ubiquitous printer ads with "friends" that have "recommendations"

I can't believe this thread sold me a printer

― maffew12, Wednesday, August 28, 2019 9:49 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

new board descrip

s'alll good man

lol

Global 5G wireless networks threaten weather forecasts

that is just an opportunity to start a company that sells filters with high roll-off between 23.8 and 24.25 GHz to whomever makes these satellites.

probably needed to recognize the coming issue and start it years ago, though.

5G is literally going to be a step backwards for every average person, mark my words

It has no clear use case at all, it’s designed for everyone and no one

What are the issues with it? I don't really have a clear understanding of what it means.

* much more bandwidth, but on freqs that can be easily blocked by plywood doors
* any device can bounce traffic from any other local device, just what you wanted your phone battery to be used for
* intercept/spoofing is moderately harder for spies and criminals - but only if implemented correctly (governments still have free reign per local rules)

I’ve had the opportunity to be around a lot of 5G nerds in the last year or two and “the bandwidth” is all they talk about despite the fact that it doesn’t work inside, you know, buildings

Huge capital expense to buy new backhaul equipment to accommodate “the bandwidth” while almost no end users are going to be able to benefit /GAF

I already can't use my phone at home except for one corner, 5G is going to be awesome.

10 yrs ago I thought we'd be reaching the point about now where we could look back and laugh/cringe at the horrors of spotty cell coverage...

5G is WiMAX 2.0

5G has been great for streaming for me (I think), but it blocks my laptop's connection to the printer, I have to connect the two directly to print anything out

different 5G

confirms I really don't understand it

5G - everything has to be an antenna to get coverage

LiFi indoors

CryFi in our hearts

main end users who’ll see value are probably businesses. unlike 4G which made a huge difference to the media streaming industry, the drivers for 5G are not personal mobile/laptop use. some teleco infrastructure companies did think it might be HD live media, but that only really meant appointment to view sporting events which still tend to be watched collectively on televisions.

the ability to network slice and provide virtualised networks with allocated resources for specific purposes and avoid contention means a level of resilience that industry can rely on for day to day use.

when you actually try and dig down into use cases tho it’s quite hard to find things that *necessitate* 5G - looks at times like a technology looking for use cases.

that’s not true tho - one aspect of this is future proofing expected usage. we are going to be using mobile and IoT devices to transfer data to a massive degree in densely populated urban areas. you need a way of ensuring that set of consumer and business services.

IIoT (industrial IoT) will be the revolutionary use - things like orchestration across supply chains, management of machines in factories, and ultra low latency data transfer across data intensive enviroments like hospitals and factories. In theory businesses could replace expensive LAN infrastructure (a huge amount of spend goes on LANs and WANs) with dedicated, scalable 5g networks. it also allows a lot more cloud technology data transaction to mobile devices, bringing the two together in a way that hasn’t been possible, easy or cheap before.

anything which requires manually assisted remote handling of precise machinery, whether remote surgery or drone construction, needs an ultra low latency highly reliable data connection, as the time loop between you doing something and it being accomplished and fed back to you is a key constrain in remote management of precision tools. (think the virtual desktops of eight years ago).

signalling systems which also may need to carry voice communication - like mass transit will be able to operate more easily using 5g.

power supply management, crucial for the efficient use of energy. what power do you need when? (when the answer may be *i need it right now*)

there’s a load of guff talked about self driving cars, but where they *will* be useful and manageable is robot vehicles to move round controlled industrial sites with their own private network.

vr mmo rpgs if that’s your thing.

So i think it will be transformative, and perhaps more importantly will maintain an ability to use mobile devices of all sorts. but there’s a lot of work to do to get there. a lot of the industrial use cases are quite specific and need specific deployments. and although new use cases will emerge with the new technology, right now there are technologies, like low-powered wide area networks for low bitrate sensors (think pollution measurement across a city) that kind of meet similar requirements. there’s a large amount of capital investment and standardisation work needs to be done to get this off the ground.

i imagine there will also be a lot of use cases that make our lives look like a kakatopian nightmare future.

this blog post by nick hunn is a very good example of how shit greedy commercial management and deployment of an essentially useful idea really fucks things up - in this case the area of smart meters and energy management.

Don’t get me started on digital meters (don’t call them smart because they aren’t). They serve one purpose and one purpose only and that is to bill someone without sending a guy in a truck to read the damn thing and most of them don’t seem to be able to do that right. You can’t get real time info from them most of the time and forget doing anything that benefits the customer. Guess what you have to do if you install a battery or want to monitor someone’s solar; you have to install another meter because you can’t tap into the feed from the one that is already there.

It is incredibly dumb.

They are beginning to roll out meters that are provider agnostic, not before time - I refuse to get one until they can guarantee it will be one of the new breed.

To be fair, I think smart meters are a very good idea, but this part of the blog post explains the problem with how it's been done in the UK (and Spain):

That dichotomy between smart grid and accurate bills is key to understanding the GB smart metering programme and why it’s gone wrong. The key reason for installing smart meters should be to provide data to make the grid more efficient. To make the grid efficient, you need to be able to react to demand, which means real-time information and the knowledge of how to use it. However, in Britain, we have let the meter design be driven by the energy suppliers. They have no real interest in real-time data; as for billing they only need it on a monthly basis. Instead, they compromised and designed meters which upload data once a day. The whole of the rest of the smart metering infrastructure, from the DCC through to the cellular contracts for uploading the meter data, has been designed and costed on the same basis, which means that the £20 billion or so we’re spending on the program will not help us get a smarter, more efficient energy grid

that's also a good one for 'market driven innovation' not automatically bringing about best outcomes.

excellent posts, Fizzles

all of the things 5G sounds great for are definitely industrial/corporate and trying to hang a consumer hat on it as a marketing force is insanely clumsy

WiFi 6 (formerly 802.11ax) looks decent and I'm wondering how much support both standards are going to get from the next round of consumer devices

today there was a university-wide network outage, so the copying machines wouldn't work, because you need to scan your id card on the machines to confirm that you have copying privileges, and this requires internet apparently, there is no way to make the machines work without that online confirmation.

I needed to give a placement exam, and I ended up having to write the exam problems on the blackboard in the exam room.

AS GOD INTENDED

I feel like there isn’t enough attention given to the fact that all these high tech, self driving transportation options are ultimately going to translate into restriction of movement. “Firewalls” that can’t be crossed and “regions. Seems like it should be a bigger concern.

same with keyless locks for apartment blocks etc

I needed to give a placement exam, and I ended up having to write the exam problems on the blackboard in the exam room

oooh do i feel this one
happens at my workplace -- the more technologically "advanced" we get (the fancy copiers -- we don't scan IDs but they are connected to/require internet connection for printing), the less we are able to cope when there is inevitably an outage. it's kind of horrifying to witness in these small increments.

the existence of sim swapping (as seen in the hack of jack)