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

i know you made the point about sex workers taking venmo but my weed guys do not

nyc itself has been a haven for cash-only businesses to a degree that other places potentially do not experience xp

weed from clean shiny shops with 100s of products is cash-based in America too, bcz credit card companies can't process it while it's not legal nationally

― shivers me timber (sic), Wednesday, January 20, 2021 5:05 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

damn that'll teach me to read the thread

(it won't)

it's been legal in California for years and the banking regulations (based on federal law) are a major headache and there are even webinars

Also some do to so it’s easier to cheat on taxes.

yes, the donut shop model. Also, some workers are best paid in cash due to immigration issues / complications involving government benefits etc. If the business receives cash from customers, it is easier to pay the workers in cash.

We use PayPal, but that's because of DC weirdness.

The law prohibits selling w33d. It does, however, permit giving it. So you buy something else, like a piece of art or a night in an airbnb, or (in our case) baked goods. The w33d is included as a thank-you gift. It is very convenient.

heh I had a friend who ran a bar in Tennessee that way after hours -- a $3 coke with a free shot of bourbon

two recurring Internet browser gripes:

* used to be every time i wanted to download a file, i got a "save as" dialog box, where i got to choose the path as well as the filename. these days shit just goes wherever it fucking wants, with whatever garbage filename it started with.

or, if i do get the choice of where it goes --- this one is probably Windows-specific --- the system is constantly trying to outsmart me by going to different directories for each thing i download. i think this is windows going "aha, the last file you downloaded with a PNG extension was to THIS directory, six months ago..." aaaaaarrrrrghhhh

* no consistency anymore about whether the 'back' button will actually take me to the previous thing i had on my screen, or like eight steps back, because, surprise! the thing i was looking at was, invisibly, in some kind of nested sub-window and i was supposed to hunt for and click a tiny "X" or "Close" button somewhere. fuck you!!!

The "save as" thing can usually be configured in the browser settings, at least that's the case in Firefox and Chrome. You can define a different behavior for each type of file (like, if it's a .avi always ask the user but if it's a PDF open it within the browser or open a specific application etc.)

lol my company has some programs that only work in Internet Explorer. it doesn't work on Microsoft Edge.

do you know how more involved it is to launch IE on Windows 10? it requires three steps.

(in this case, the backward step = my dumb company making something IE only in 2021)

I'm finding this new tabbing system on Chrome for Android especially confusing and infuriating. Now we've got tabs within tabs, but I can't seem to open a link in a new tab, just an incognito tab??

i hate the way the tabs work now. i know how to use them but...it's annoying.

thanks, dinsdale, i'll take a look!

along the same lines: i disabled the chrome android tab groups or tab clusters or whatever they're called, because they were driving me insane. i can't remember how. but it can be done!

no consistency anymore about whether the 'back' button will actually take me to the previous thing i had on my screen

if people embed a photo on ILX that's from a facebook-owned site, it won't embed for me. if I right-click to view the photo, and then discover that it was on a facebook site, I am unable to return to the thread bcz facebook trick the browser into thinking you were never on the world wide web, why would you want to go off our platform, you don't need a back button, there was never a back button here. looking at this photo is the only think you have ever wanted to do on the internet.

back button? it doesn’t look like anything to me

I've complained about that before. the trick is to open in new tab. then just close the tab.

I read ILX in firefox

speaking of tabs, it used to be easier to get to the url of images via google ... it does reduce my ability and desire to image bomb threads so, maybe this is a good thing?

this is how you disable the annoying tab groups on android chrome
https://piunikaweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Tab-Groups-Chrome.jpg

Plenty of good reasons to change search engines already, add it to the pile

sic, me too. from memory, open in new tab is just another option on right click menu.

sarahell, use duck duck go for image searches (i think that's what sic's post above was suggesting, but the context got lost because of the interruption)

yeah, I set ddg to be my browser default for searching

No “new tab” right-click image option for me! but I also probably haven’t updated the install since 2017, possibly 2013

hidden text feature on ilx

Google search results for straightforward, one word answer queries being a whole page of links with nothing but SEO clickbait text as a preview, so you have to click a link and navigate the cookies/newsletter/notifications gauntlet, plus one handy promoted "Google snippet" which confidently answers the wrong question with something that isn't true

the garbageness of search results is def a whole huge category for this thread at this point. has anybody besides ILX noticed? i feel like it should be on the front page of Time magazine with a worried headline and a photo of a frustrated person at the keyboard, head in their hands. "Searching: What's Gone Wrong?"

as noted, just stop using google. we all switched to google bcz it was good, it’s okay to switch away bcz it sucks!

i have a similar if not identical set of problems with duckduckgo

but i'm also saying, this problem with Google should be famous at this point, ppl shd be leaving it in droves, seeing someone Googling shd be like seeing grandpa using Yahoo or Bing or whatever, and i don't think that's happening.

yah true

ddg isn’t as good as peak google was, but it’s vastly better than current goog

Wait, what's ddg. What should I be using instead of google?

duck duck go

My favorite aspect of Google these days is that it increasingly assumes that I am illiterate. 'Did you mean ____?' is annoying enough (no, I did not mean ____, stupid) but when it just full-on searches for something completely different than what I typed because what I typed couldn't possibly be what I meant to type, well...that's just a whole 'nother level of special.

Yeah, very frustrating that the verbatim search option can’t be set as the default option.

tbh i find ddg to be less helpful as a search engine for certain things (like finding more recently published articles on things) but ddg is V helpful as a fuck google destination

my entry for this is when my phone autocorrects a word that is a real word that i spelled correctly but my phone guesses is not the word i wanted. and it waits until i have typed the next word to do this, so i can't just go back and change the one word back, i have to delete two words and rewrite. if anyone knows how to turn off this one specific feature on the iphone while still having it correct actual spelling mistakes please let me know.

related to this, when I go back and write the word again and it "corrects" it again

I just have zero time for patronizing 'ahem, I believe you mean'-ing software/platforms in general. My gf has been taking classes this year and having to engage with Word for the first time in forever and she keeps asking 'what's wrong with this thing Word wants me to correct?' and I'm like 'nothing, Word is a piece of trash that thinks it understands English better than it actually does'.

Also whatever dipshits developed the main UI I use for work failed to include any place names in their bank of recognized words so, for instance, every state name I type winds up with a red squiggle underneath it. But that's a whole other dipshit issue.

I just turn all those things off like right away, as much as I can ... I get super annoyed when they actually make it difficult/impossible to turn off

which brings me to: software that you pay for that shows you ads for add-on things, and the advertising makes the software run more slowly. ... it's like reading a magazine and instead of one or two of those subscription postcards, there's like one inserted between every other page

When Word is all chummily colloquial like "your margins are pretty small there buddy" I just want to give it a fierce backhand and scream HOW DARE YOU BE SO FAMILIAR like a stern Victorian patriarch

i actually did have a good google experience yesterday that also involved MS Office -- i wanted to get a long list of file names and put it into a spreadsheet, and it actually came up with relevant instructions in the first 5 results!

I blame word for the stupid obsession with (avoiding) the passive voice, imagine if excel told you off for using the number 3 because it looks a bit like a bum

actually ... word otm

I need to figure out how to turn off the autocorrect on PowerPoint; when I write a French word that's identical to the English word except for an accent mark, it helpfully removes the accent for me, and the change is so small that sometimes I miss it.

xp also wtf is up with my email telling me to edit out all of the qualifiers; I put those in deliberately bc they are a convention of work emails and if I take them out I'll come off as demanding.

it depends on what you're writing though -- contextually, it could be stupid, if the conventions of your profession expect the passive voice. I just remember taking writing classes prior to the existence of MS Word, and avoiding the passive voice was a key lesson.

also wtf is up with my email telling me to edit out all of the qualifiers; I put those in deliberately bc they are a convention of work emails and if I take them out I'll come off as demanding.

okay, your email is totally overstepping. I can have a word with it, if you want.

the passive is a core part of the English language and writing is stilted and unnatural without it

Sometimes people who are trying too hard to sound businesslike overuse the passive, and I can see that Word is trying to correct for that, but when you know perfectly well which voice you want to use at a given moment, it's irritating. Like, if I write "my dog was hit by a car" I don't want Word suggesting I change it to "a car hit my dog."

it depends what you're writing! I see a lot of people use passive voice because they don't really know what they're talking about, or they lack confidence to assert something, or their thoughts aren't organized yet. ... Yes, there are some contexts when you want to and need to use the passive voice, but there are plenty of contexts where it weakens your presentation.