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

it seems like the more technologically complex things get the more fragile they are and harder to fix

Technological innovation is a selling point and just thrown in to make sales rather than improve the product

I think the fragility is part of the design to force people to continue pouring money into things instead of having items which last and therefore don't continue to generate revenue.

Relevant sketch at 11:20:

https://omny.fm/shows/this-is-branchburg/episode-1-welcome-to-branchburg

examples of things that you physically have but can't use due to it being tied to a subscription model (real or imagined)

I assume that along with the heated seats, BMW's already doing that with their turn signals.

The old ones are the best :D

it is also fitting that phones became the money-making racket du-jour at the turn of the century. a commodity that everybody needed that became a gadget arms race that reduced the amount of affordable options for people who were literally just using them to make calls.

The old ones are the best :D

― Chewshabadoo, Monday, October 24, 2022 12:51 PM

You talking about BMWs or blinker jokes?

Hey, Blinken!

i had a 1980 320i about 25 years ago and that car had almost every single mechanical problem possible. then it got stolen. when it got recovered about a month later, i was somewhat disappointed tbh.

there's no mute button on a Roku remote

My wife just sent me a recipe that was an Instagram Reel. It has written recipe underneath but to follow it in the app I either have to listen to some terrible music, or mute, either way preventing me from listening to the podcast I was listening to. Taking five screenshots appears to be the only way to get this into a vaguely usable format.

Out of curiosity, what's the backward step?

there's no mute button on a Roku remote

I still wonder about this.

Out of curiosity, what's the backward step?

That's a good example of the social construction of technology though—there's nothing inherent to Reels (no "affordances") that suggests you should use it to share written text

As someone who thinks of their phone as an overly complicated iPod, I do think your audio being interrupted because the photo-sharing app mutated into something else counts

Possibly I’m old-fashioned for wanting the written recipe and other people are actually watching the Reel over and over while they cook, or memorising it. Or perhaps no one else is actually making the recipe.

VAR

pp is wondering when you previously had to take five screenshots to capture a recipe, as opposed to it being a bad forward step, I believe

This isn't technology per se, but I just read an article about how a number of streaming services are introducing ad-based plans to their service. Definitely feels like a step backward, in the sense that the introduction of streaming was heralded as a break from the old television model. Now, we're right back to it. It was probably naïve to think capitalist corporations would eliminate something as capitalist as advertising, but...

Free marketeers are always talking about how the market/competition will lead to the most desirable result for consumers, but it seems more like a race to the bottom. Are consumers clamoring for more advertising on their paid platforms? Or a proliferation of minor services like Discovery+? Thank god I know how to torrent.

I was particularly thinking about this sort of thing after taking a flight for the first time in years, and being shocked at how much is now fee-based. A five hour flight, but no free meal. $10 for Wi-Fi. Hell, I wasn't even given the entire can of complimentary Coke. Again, it seems like the market is just competing for how much they can suck out of customers.

so Amazon's stupid media app.

I have a OnePlus phone, and I have an enormous number of purchases of Amazon digital music, so I used to download the mp3s onto my phone for flights. or sometimes if I want to use an individual track in a recording. This was easy as fuck prior to like, this year, after a recent app update.

Now, on many devices (including mine), you can't actually download music from the app to your device. it 'downloads' to the Amazon app, meaning if you go into the Downloaded tracks section, they'll show there and play offline, but you aren't able to access them on your phone.

But there is a workaround! if you go onto the website in desktop mode from your phone and purchase the track, then you can download it the old school way!!!

Combine this with the fact that instead of just showing you your library, when you click on a band in your library, it shows you their entire discography, often which is littered with shit that is erroneously attributed to them, and if you click the Library button to just see the stuff that you bought, it shows you all of the tracks you bought from each album, but to get to the album itself and play them in order, you have to right click and click on "go to album".

xps Samsung Sound Assistant, and I'm guessing similar, has an option for allowing any apps to play sounds at the same time (and control the volume for each, like you would on a computer pretty much). Might be sort of a backwards step mess on its own, but I prefer it to interruptions.

shuts everything up for calls at least

Roku doesn't want you muting ads.

pp is wondering when you previously had to take five screenshots to capture a recipe, as opposed to it being a bad forward step, I believe

I was thinking of someone in her kitchen in 1980, trying to follow along with Julia Child cooking something on television, frustrated that she couldn't also listen to the radio at the same time.

What a HELPFUL Insta cook would do is post the recipe in the comments.

I am all the way with alba in that for many, many things, there doesn't need to be audio and visual. But calling a recipe channel a backward step from a cookbook, well, I'm there in spirit, but I don't know if it'll hold up in Practical Court.

whatever medium a recipe is in, I'm bound to sit down with a pen and paper first and work out substitutions and scale.. and write it out in shorthand in steps. Then I make a great meal and throw away my notes.

I should buy a scribbler lol

What a HELPFUL Insta cook would do is post the recipe in the comments.

I think we're talking at cross purposes, pplains - she had posted the written recipe below, but it wasn't possible to get it all one page, hence the seven screenshots. Yes, I wasn't comparing it to TV cookery; I was comparing it to the ease of accessing a written recipe on a website (where at least you can copy and paste if it's in an annoying format) or, heaven forfend, a book/magazine.

well I'll be danged -- can't copy text in insta.

Practical Court finds for alba, court adjourned.

I've always wondered if Apple pushed the "live text" feature in the latest OSes because of so many folks having to screenshot as a work around for whatever b.s. page formatting is bolluxing it up.

xp - also, why would you want your phone next to you while you are preparing food that could end up making a mess of your phone? Insta is so horrible for anything that requires reading more text than like, 5 words total. ... I remember being annoyed at the formatting when I had to c&p band bios from myspace ... Insta is so much worse!

Yeah tbh I often end up printing recipes out, though I managed with my screenshots today (the recipe wasn’t messy)

i feel like generally speaking phones are a step backward from monitor-and-keyboard computers in every way when it comes to usability.

has anyone mentioned gym admissions yet? all the gyms i know of have gone to requiring you to scan in via app. when i signed up i insisted that not having a physical barcode tag on my key ring was a deal breaker and they dug one out of some drawer for me. almost every morning i'm passing by people standing by the doorway fiddling with their phone for a minute.

i do like the fact that phones can do screenshots and then save as a photo as opposed to the computer method where you have to "print screen" then c&p into ms paint (or whatever the apples do).

^ #scorpioseason

you can save screen images directly to file with key combos these days! and by these days I mean for quite a while now. you might have to have "snipping tool" open on Windows but it's pretty straightforward on mac

haha i figured it was pretty straightforward on mac lol

if yr paying an extra $1000 for a computer, it better have a more straightforward screenshot process, because otherwise ???

really though with snipping tool you just hit a hotkey and it lets you drag an outline of what you want to save to file. it's about the same

print screen, open MS Paint, c&p then crop as necessary seems simpler to me but

Windows key + shift + s for a snip is the greatest keyboard shortcut I know.

Maybe ctrl+T to reopen a tab.

You used to be able to toggle the text between cases in Word - all lower case, all upper case, or initial letters only upper case - by highlighting said case and pressing Shift + f3, but on both my current work & home Windows 10 laptops, that does something trivial and annoying like change the brightness of the screen instead and I don't know how (if at all) to do the case-toggling (this may belong here in that it is genuinely a retrograde insoluble step, or alternatively it may belong on the 'boring computer questions'thread, I dunno, but am hoping one of youse IT whizzes will...)

Shift + fn + f3? If there's a Function key.

Possibly, thanks. Will try tomorrow & get back to you, cheers! (Read 'fn' as 'f***in'' at first, had momentary thought of "how very dare you!", then relief)

always here for some fn help

Shift + fn + f3? If there's a Function key.

It worked! Thank you maffew12!

Deadly. There's probably a "function lock" setting somewhere that would reverse the use of the Fn key so you'd use that for brightness and whatnot, and actually get to use F keys as normal. Anywhere from windows keyboard settings to a manufacturer program to a BIOS setting, depending on the machine.

Cherish the F keys while we still have them.

What kind of Rokus don’t have mute buttons? I’ve owned and used quite a few and they all have?

Ours doesn't, purchased about three years ago. I think there were one or two fancier tiers we didn't spring for... Maybe one of those still has the Mute button?

Naturally, we still have the essential shortcut buttons for Netflix, Hulu, ESPN and "Sling." No one would dare ship a remote without *those.*

Are these standalone Rokus or Roku built into the TV.. or both?

My parents use an old Roku and hate (well, can't handle) having more than 1 remote to deal with. I found an old Logitech Harmony remote at a yard sale and set that up for them. I was so impressed with that, I got myself one on eBay. The older basic infrared style with no mouse/pointing/hub and whatever. Seems people still add devices into the database that even the old ones can use.

Snipping tool is the best, I use it every day