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

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)

current vending machines are slower and less reliable than old ones - complex electronic and touch-screen displays, elaborate gadget to fetch the soda and bring it over to a chamber that spins around to release it, etc.

would need to see the data on that one. Archimedean screw failing to push out a bag of doritos for enraged male feels like a trope.

the screw sucks, but the new candy machines still have them! the fetching robot is for bottled soda, replacing your classic wood-paneled opaque prism dropping cans down a chute.

that opaque prism occasionally drops the wrong can.

chute also turns soda bottles into bombs iirc

being able to see that the supposedly out-of-stock item is very clearly in-stock does make me want to break the control panel into bits tho

As a prank you could shit in the vending machine. On all the snacks

Trust me when I say that the 'prank' defense doesn't hold much water with the fuzz.

Not sure if this is the right thread but:

Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20802774/june-smart-oven-remote-preheat-update-user-error

Like I know I should be holding a microphone and standing before a brick wall with the sleeves of my suit jacket rolled to the elbows while saying this but...folks, today's smart technology? Seems pretty gosh darn stupid from where I'm standing! Am I right? Am I right?

butt burning down the house

by the butt talking heads

Smart fridge pic.twitter.com/xKSSLdCR3b

— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) September 3, 2019

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.

hahahaha wow this is fucked up

Getting DDoS'd by my cats - whose dumb idea was this cat flap? pic.twitter.com/bRDWyJYr1o

— Norm Driskell (@n0rm) September 6, 2019

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

read this a couple days ago, fairly convincing argument (not wholly original) that the collapse of soviet models of state-sponsored r&d since the 1960s means that the last 60+ years of technical innovation are really just the gradual commercialisation of innovations paid for by state funded research. The idea that capitalism drives innovation is a myth and outsourcing technological improvement to private industry has predictably meant declining standards as the bottom line is better served by exploiting global networks of cheap labour than spending money designing robots that can do everything. I think the caveat he leaves out would have actually improved his argument. Medical innovation has been huge in the last sixty years but it also the most socialised model of provision of any sector, even in the highly commercialised US healthcare system where the figures of state spending are famously high.

recent uk government alignment of the university sector with private industry imperatives (Jo Johnson, the national industrial strategy) shows the gov pursuing a legacy where state-funded universities must compete to secure funding by directly appealing to the needs of industry. A sort of frankenstein partial regression to the model the article outlines but with the post 2008 crash neoliberal ethos of "socialism for the extremely rich, horrible venture capital logic for the rest of you plebs." No wonder everything is truly shit.

ticket taking used to mean ripping the stub and letting someone in. obv fraud was an issue so of course they moved to the scan system. ok, one extra second or so.

but now all these events are Mobile only so you have to wait for some asshole to remember to pull up the event on his phone, and god forbid his screen brightness is low, they sit there for five minutes trying to get scanned in.

i was at Halloween Horror Nights last night using an express pass and the line would come to a standstill multiple times while the staff had trouble scanning in someone's mobile express ticket because either the brightness was too low, they were holding the scanner wrong, they didn't know how to use the scanner, or the doofus didn't have it ready when he got to the front of the line.

mmmm meter data

I dream of a basic HTML version of all websites and a way to make this default

xxp - ha, the argument and title sounded familiar - that essay is also in Graeber's book "Utopia of Rules" that I read a few months back. The title essay is really good, and then I got to that one and felt like it was a filler track on a 90s album in comparison

I dream of a basic HTML version of all websites and a way to make this default

I use lynx to read nytimes

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

Are those safety precautions? About readability? Something else?

ah, sorry, jokes bruv

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

rms otm

i see he keeps that page up to date:

A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix was such a threat to freedom that I could not treat it as anything but an enemy.

my man

I think you are misunderstanding, It was a DVD that had just arrived in the mail and she popped it in her DVD-R drive.

My preferred joke with the future of "high tech, self driving transportation options" has been that you try to get on a toll road or cross a bridge into Canada and they're like ... this vehicle isn't compatible. You're gonna need a dongle. Pull over to that truck stop over there and you can buy a dongle, because your vehicle needs a dongle.

nabisco!!

that future is now and it's called brexit

it's also called the SF Bay Area, where they are probably going to completely eliminate the ability to pay cash on toll bridges (the Golden gate Bridge is already automated).

no dongles required

basically you just get a bill in the mail

don't be afraid

dongles are your friend

it's the price of freedom

In this dingle dongle morning
I'll come following you

lol

Hey @Tesla can you help me explain to my wife why I can't drive her to the dentist? I gotta tell you, if you can't drive it then it's not a car. On hold 25 minutes and counting. pic.twitter.com/qA52jABFHm

— Jon Johnson (@jrjohnson_) September 9, 2019

cars have never broken down til now

you'd think we'd have figured out this whole dentist thing by now