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

imre halfords are your frugal friend there

not to be that guy but you know the old acronym about Fords.

lol I know at least two

yeah this is my first and last ford

xps dmac, in a car in which the headlights stay on when the car is off, you need to turn the headlights off when you leave the car, the manual will say as much, and that's not absurd. when everything shuts off once the car is off, i think it's pretty wild for the battery to keep draining and then die. it's never been an issue in any other car i've owned.

gotta be a short somewhere, the battery is just draining to ground i.e. the chassis

easier to say than to find, though

yeah fords are just shitty cars, i have a '14 ford focus and goddamn i'm amazed that it still runs. for like each of the first six years i owned it there was another recall on it. i think they eventually stopped doing recalls because nobody owned one. the last time i saw another '14 focus someone was dealing out of it. my advice? do not, under any circumstances, go to your local ford dealer.

anyway the trans (i don't know if i've mentioned it, but damn near everybody calls them "trans" here. yes, i've had cis friends verify this.) goes out, on a regular basis. design issue. it was supposed to make it "sportier". maybe i just don't drive "sporty". i guess i should love it more. the way i drive it, it's bad at passing. that's fine. passing isn't important to me. anyway, i've had to have the, uh, trans replaced twice now. it's got something like 35,000 miles on it.

jfc— my 2005 Outback has 195k on it, still rolling

jfc— my 2005 Outback has 195k on it, still rolling

There are *so many* Subarus on the road in Montana (and Idaho).

yeah, rural California too, which is where I lived when i bought this guy 70,000 miles and eight years ago for 5 grand

There are *so many* Subarus on the road in Montana (and Idaho).

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson)

about a billion of them out here too... they're reliable cars, good outdoor cars, _and_ the official car of lesbians. i am choosing not to share the deliberately infuriating and obnoxious nickname some trans people (who love them as much as much as lesbians do) give them.

this is actually the most challenging part of what i do professionally.

― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, 13 November 2023 22:56 bookmarkflaglink

really interesting!

the conversation has reminded me of Keith Thomas' description of his note-taking and information retrieval system:

Nobody gave me any such instructions when I began research in the 1950s. I read neither Beatrice Webb nor Langlois and Seignobos until many years later, by which time my working habits had ossified. When I did, though, I was reassured to see that, in a slipshod sort of way, I had arrived at something vaguely approximating to their prescriptions. En route I had made all the obvious beginner’s mistakes. I began by committing the basic error of writing my notes on both sides of the page. I soon learned not to do that, but I continued to copy excerpts into notebooks in the order in which I encountered them. Much later, I discovered that it was preferable to enter passages under appropriate headings. Eventually, I realised that notes should be kept in a loose form which was flexible enough to permit their endless rearrangement. But I recoiled from uniform index cards: my excerpts came in all shapes and sizes, and there was something too grimly mechanical about card indexes. Since Anatole France’s description in Penguin Island of the scholar drowned by an avalanche of his own index cards, it has been hard to take them seriously. I still get cross when reviewers say that all that I have done is to tip my index cards onto the page.

When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. If the notes on a particular topic are especially voluminous, I put them in a box file or a cardboard container or a drawer in a desk. I also keep an index of the topics on which I have an envelope or a file. The envelopes run into thousands.

This procedure is a great deal less meticulous than it sounds.

lol

one of my first jobs in a library was updating the loose-leaf binders of legislation. when laws changed they sent you new pages which you had insert and throw the existing pages away. it was a horrible tedious task which everyone avoided, so the packets of new pages stacked up in the in-tray. sometimes if you hunkered down for an afternoon's session at it you'd be replacing pages that you had inserted an hour earlier because the law had changed twice since last time.

not at all in the spirit of the thread and smell and tactile experience aside data management has unquestionably got easier and less arduous.

that said ofc problems of merging/standardising datasets and metadata persist. and it seems like a classic example where the huge efficiencies in data management get used up by new ways of exploiting the data. i’m sure in all sorts of cases this has enabled insight into how to improve areas of society (medical records for instance?) and spot patterns not sufficiently visible at a more a local level. but how clear is it that the amount of data aggregation now possible provides a proportionate improvement in circumstances, social conditions, or productivity? at the margin the amount of data now synthesised in many contexts requires machine learning to generate insight. how valuable is that insight in practical terms?

i’d be willing to hear both cases! it seems entirely reasonable to say “yes, this is a paradigm shift in our ability to improve people’s lives” (or, ah, extract wealth).

equally i can imagine a case for saying it’s at the heart of the west’s productivity problem.

Ford = Fix It Again, Tony

Fix Or Repair Daily

yeah, i find the purpose of standards in the first place is to keep people from having to invent the wheel. with technology now... i mean, that's what i feel most of my career has been doing, kind of learning through trial and error. i mean, honestly, i'm fine with that. learning through experience, to me, that's the second best kind of learning (behind only "learning by teaching"). maybe one day there genuinely won't be a need for the kind of thing i do. maybe "machine learning" or something will do it. i don't know. or, maybe like with a lot of people, material conditions will change to an extent that i won't be able to do what i'm doing anymore - either working conditions i can't adapt to, or pay that won't support me. it's already happened to a lot of people. could happen to me at any time. to me, that's the backward step, the constant precarity. so far all i've lost is my house. maybe in a couple of years i won't be able to afford an apartment. just how it goes, right?

in a lot of ways data management _has_ gotten easier. my dad was a librarian. i wanted to be one too, but various circumstances meant that getting a masters degree wasn't in the cards. part of my fucking around for a couple of decades... informatics wasn't a career path when i first went to college. the most recent time i went back to school i saw a guidance counselor and told them i wanted to be a librarian and they said oh hey how about informatics? which it turns out is kind of the same as library science, except it's for-profit, and they pay you a lot more money to do it, and there aren't any meaningful ethical standards, and you only need a bachelor's degree, and oh yeah it's mostly marketed towards men. well, like the meme goes, "i found a way to get more women in STEM".

imre halfords are your frugal friend there

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/815s7YbGa3L._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

Found On Road Dead

that said ofc problems of merging/standardising datasets and metadata persist. and it seems like a classic example where the huge efficiencies in data management get used up by new ways of exploiting the data. i’m sure in all sorts of cases this has enabled insight into how to improve areas of society (medical records for instance?) and spot patterns not sufficiently visible at a more a local level. but how clear is it that the amount of data aggregation now possible provides a proportionate improvement in circumstances, social conditions, or productivity? at the margin the amount of data now synthesised in many contexts requires machine learning to generate insight. how valuable is that insight in practical terms?

i’d be willing to hear both cases! it seems entirely reasonable to say “yes, this is a paradigm shift in our ability to improve people’s lives” (or, ah, extract wealth).

equally i can imagine a case for saying it’s at the heart of the west’s productivity problem.

― Fizzles

ah, shit, i don't know. depends on how you look at it, i guess. i'm looking at it from a position of relative privilege.

with regards to machine learning, to me, it's just the next iteration of the loop. the old way was you have all this data, and you have people whose job is to take data and get insight out of it. the new way is that you have AI learning and _it_ generates the insight for you. how valuable is that insight in practical terms? well, maybe you get a professional to take that insight and translate it into practical terms. i mean it's the same basic _process_, isn't it? to me, on a theoretical level, it's not _that_ different from what dalgliesh was doing in 1963, except that every time you iterate more and more people are cut out of the process.

with regard to social conditions... life is getting harder and harder to live. more and more people live more and more precarious states of existence. it's really difficult, a lot of times, to be a happy and fulfilled human being. sometimes i feel like the whole history of industrialization is an attempt to mold human beings to fit the demands of our technology, and frankly, we're kind of at our limit. i don't think the answer to that is for us all to become "post-human". if i'm going to change, that change is going to be informed by technological advances, but it's going to be on _my_ fucking terms.

i don't think the west _has_ a "productivity problems". i think that an increasing number of us don't have a place in the society the elites have made, and an increasing percentage of the elites' efforts are going towards preventing us from collectively doing something about it. i'm not inclined to think the long game is going to go in the elites' favor, but what do i know?

it’s like the Kia acronym— Killed In Automobile

im selling a 14 focus next month in perfect working nick with never a days trouble

honest guv

the ceo of ford said a couple of months ago that they have so many different suppliers for the different components of their vehicles, each of whom has their own suppliers, some of whom don’t exist anymore, or who got bought and merged into some other corp, that in some cases it’s literally impossible to find someone who understands the code used in a particular component, so if there’s a problem or change needed or update required it just can’t be done

so he claims that ford is going to bring the entire software supply chain in-house, and retrain existing employees to maintain it

did i say next month i mean this week

This is kind of off topic but it's interesting to note the difference between OG Star Trek (we will transmit those codes now) and Star Wars (we need to physically get this recording to our allies) - I suppose Trek is physically transporting something solid (the Enterprise) every week.

I once worked on a cybersecurity project for airplanes. When you have an airplane with sensitive avionics/electronics, you can't really update the software through the wifi at the airport Starbucks.

There are definitely people out there who would like to be able to crash an airplane while not actually being ON said airplane. So as recently as 2019, the software was updated with a physical disk, carried by a person.

I love when you click on an article or a task or something, and it prompts you to log in, and after you log in, it doesn't actually take you to the thing you wanted to open, but back to the home screen.

― a very very unfair (Neanderthal), Monday, November 13, 2023 3:16 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

This. Even worse when it happens with online shopping carts. Makes me want to just use the "checkout as a guest" option at all times

This is kind of off topic but it's interesting to note the difference between OG Star Trek (we will transmit those codes now) and Star Wars (we need to physically get this recording to our allies)

To be fair, Star Wars does take place a long time ago.

They physically transport a recording in Star Wars because it is a riff on Hidden Fortress, and Lucas needed something to replace the gold being transported in Hidden Fortress.

want to pick up on kate’s substantial posts but i’m oin a pub and right now just want to say, a problem exemplified by but by no means confined to…

reading local news websites on your phone.

reload reload ad cookie reload try and scroll to read text around and covered by an ad go back to top reload crash.

i mean in this age of responsive design is it too much to ask.

i’m sure this has already been covered.

the web is unusable in general but yeah local news websites are the ultimate evolution of the form

if trying to find the text behind the popups and ads takes longer than reading the text then the police should come and take your news website away.

Just Enough Essential Parts

Tracer and Senor Camaraderie *otm*.

the web is unusable in general! my god. a truth that makes you weep. how did we do it.

The information superhighway, unfortunately there's an overturned semi

don’t assent to all of it but in general Ben Tarnoff’s Internet for the People covers a lot of the why i think.

Thanks for the recommendation, will definitely checkout. I've been thinking a lot in the last few years how pervasive and often essential the internet is in our lives, and yet how little control or say its users have in how it works or is designed.

well look users are very overrated as decision makers but advertisers are worse

so he claims that ford is going to bring the entire software supply chain in-house, and retrain existing employees to maintain it

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

look these deckchairs aren't going to reshuffle themselves

my email is full of emails from everyone I've ever bought anything from telling me to buy stuff from them for Black Friday, despite the fact that I've never voluntarily signed up for a marketing email in my life

Meanwhile the leftist American shitpost accounts I follow on Instagram have pivoted hard to telling me I'm a monster if I buy anything

Please sir, I live in Sydenham and I just got paid, is it OK if I just buy a jumper and 500ml of Chinkiang vinegar

I run uBlock and noscript on Firefox and I never get Youtube ads btw. Might be something to do with having scripts from the nefarious "doubleclick" blocked idk

UBlock occasionally stops working on Instagram, which to be fair is a fantastic incentive to never look at Instagram. the ads on that are really intrusive and insufferable outside of an all-too-brief period where I just got inexplicably served neverending ads for hilariously bad self-published urban fantasy novels

I am an unashamed and prolific user of Youtube Revanced on android and it works like a charm outside of requiring the occasional onerous reinstall

i consider those black friday emails a service - how else would i know i needed to unsubscribe from these fools

That is a fair point yes

I just sort of feel like these people should have an EU GDPR black ops squad rappelling through their windows to fine them 500,000 Euros at gunpoint every time

what is with Support Ticketing systems that completely ignore formatting?

I was submitting a ticket for a problem with a financial account I have - not long ago, this company's ticketing system was basically WYSIWYG - however I formatted the message is how it went over, and vice versa.

This week, I opened one and they recently changed vendors for their ticketing program apparently, because the format was all different. I did paragraph spacing because I had a lot to report and wanted to make it readable, and then after I submitted, the system ignored my formatting and mushed it into one gigantic paragraph, making it hard to read.

thought maybe it was a blip, but then the agent responded and his response was a similar wall-of-text with no spacing.

(no they're not using Zendesk lol)

i saw a supermarket card reader reboot this morning.

the ones in local Sainsbury's have also changed and whereas i used to slap my card right on the screen and that was always ok, the new ones have a reader on the frame *above* the screen and it often doesn't register.

makes me feel like rishi sunak...

I feel like mobile food ordering that doesn't require proximity to location to place is growing to be one.

McDonald's and Wendy's, you can place the order, but they won't start making any of it until you indicate you've arrived at the location. Whereas AMC and Taco Bell, once you place the order and choose the time you want, it gets made at that time, regardless of where you are.

So these places can potentially get hit with a ton of orders all at once, from people who might show up significantly later than the time they indicated, meaning a risk of having to remake the food if it sits too long (or dealing with an angry customer when you refuse to remake it, even though it's their fault). whereas requiring proximity at least spaces the orders out a bit because generally, the customers don't all arrive at the location at the same time.

see this happening all the time lately, like AMC last week which got hit with like 5-6 chicken tender pre-orders all at the same time, and the AMC only had like two people there because it was a Monday.

also, what's with this trend of having 'password-less login' on some commerce sites, where they email you a login link instead.

like I get the benefit of moving away from passwords, but without another factor required, doesn't that create a security risk if you ever have your email address compromised, where someone can go to a website, get a link to that email address, and gain access to your account on that app too, which will include your mailing address and possibly banking info?

You buy your chicken tenders at an AMC theater?

not ME, no. i buy them where every good American does, the gas station