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

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.