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

haha same

someone actually questioned me when I was at a Wawa eating and had some fairly big cans on my ears ("why not use earbuds, do headphones provide a better sound or something?").

outside of "why is it your business", my response was "the shit slips out my ears, I got mutant ears", and went back to rockin

Bluetooth has started to fail completely whenever phone goes into pocket

this never used to happen and is now consistent across different phones a s devices, what gives

* When I'm trying to read an article on my phone, and the text keeps jumping as new ads invade the column

xxp I dropped the $ for custom IEMs five years ago and it's been one of my best audio purchases ever.

Earbuds work fine for me, and so do Airpods— they rest in my ear in way that works.

But every other pair I have tried, from Sennheiser to Anker to cheap bodega ones— don’t work, the little bud part doesn’t rest in my ears at all.

That's why Sennheiser include a range of different sized bud parts with their ear buds. I recommend the Momentum TW3s.

none of them work— none of the sizes fit. perhaps you weren’t paying attention to the discussion

it’s happened with two different brands now, not going to waste more money by trying one of them again.

Tired of my search bar on my new laptop giving me web results when obviously I don't want that, had a look into how to do that, seems I have to go into regedit and set up a new registry key?! Fucking hell microsoft, fuck right off.

nb you can use open-shell to turn your windows search bar back into a proper windows search bar

(but I agree that microsoft can fuck off)

Nice, may give that a go!

related

i want to find out how long to grill these pork chops for

im in ireland

i want to be able to search for this info without getting a lot of results back related to barbecuing instructions because i didnt ask about barbecuing

im not going to type broil because im in fucking ireland and thats not a real word or thing

and my browser and search engine has a button to state im in fucking ireland

so i cant actually find this out without clicking into a load of sites and reading enough fucking biographies to fill a shelf and clicking past enough cookies to fill a shelf before finding out that this cunt of a page is also about barbecuing the fucking pork chops and ive asked about grilling

stupid fucking useless degraded search engine functionality shitheaps

Thin pork chops typically take 8 minutes to cook (4 minutes of searing on each side). Thick pork chops typically take about 20 minutes to grill to perfection - 8 minutes of searing over direct heat, plus 12 minutes of finishing over indirect heat.

he's using the broiler though (lol)

lol oh

I'd still go with those times tbh

I'm struggling with how bad my predictive text on my current phone has become. I remember much better ones that seemed semi intuitive they actually worked. This just 'corrects' things to wrong and loses the original word used. also keeps mistakes as correct forms.
Just so amazingly aggrovating.

Bluetooth headphones are another thing to charge, another layer of audio (data) compression and sometimes you just have sync issues. I've made peace with using a dongle.

another backward step regarding them is how the people for whom they work treat those for whom they don’t as morons and freaks. fuck bluetooth earpieces.

i use bluetooth with a speaker or two i have at home but as far as headphones go i am also team wired 4 life and heartened to hear there are others who feel the same way.

Molarware.

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/three-million-malware-infected-smart-toothbrushes-used-in-swiss-ddos-attacks-botnet-causes-millions-of-euros-in-damages

getting sick of receiving work emails from "DONOTRE✧✧✧@Soan✧✧✧.c✧✧"

How the hell am I supposed to respond?

Also tech companies that go to great lengths to hide their physical location on their websites, I need that info you snooty clowns (this also for work)

"DONOTREPLY"^^^^

tech companies just float in the cloud

Rocketreach is a website that sometimes helps you uncover 'secret email addresses' for companies

When sending invites to add someone to a group on an app, and the recipient logs in and is prompted to...send the other person an invite and wait for them to accept.

That's not how invites work! The original invite did that work! Why does the person who sent the original invite have to reconfirm their intent?

the thing that excited me about the internet when i was new, back in '93, was that people who had niche interests, like me, could get together and talk about those niche interests

that's not something i really know how to do now

everything is flooded with monetizable crap, computers writing content for computers to index and return, at some point, to people looking to read something, anything, written by another person

maybe i'm just getting old, but the internet today looks to me like nothing so much as comcast's customer support phone tree

i'm on this mood stabilizer, lamotrigine, and i forgot to take it friday night, and on saturday night i got to feeling _very bad_

and i distantly remembered hearing a psych at one point tell me that under no circumstances should i skip a dose, because there was a very small likelihood of a very serious side effect

but i couldn't remember what that side effect was or what its symptoms were. some syndrome. something to do with skin rashes or something.

i go searching for side effects and _nothing_ i find was written by a human being. nothing was written _for_ human beings. back in the '00s, when i was addicted to medically prescribed benzos, there was a site i followed called "crazy meds". it was really helpful to me. it was a site created and maintained by someone who had chronic long-term mental illness. it was created by and for people with mental illness who were looking for information about drugs that wasn't the bullshit pumped out by the pharmaceutical companies to cover their asses legally.

well, "bullshit pumped out by the pharmaceutical companies to cover their asses legally" is exactly what i get when i look up lamotrigine side effects. there's some website that mentions there can be problems and tells me to check with my doctor IMMEDIATELY if i have any out of a long list of symptoms, including such rare side effects like "sweating" and "fatigue". this is garbage. this is worse than garbage. as far as i can tell the page is mainly there to throw a bunch of pop-ups to try and get me to subscribe to some newsletter at me. i gotta go by my memory. it's a rash thing, probably, and i don't think i have a rash. so i'm probably fine.

it did... look, i know, old woman yells at cloud, but it used to be that i could connect with people on the internet in a way that i couldn't in person. i was tired of the trivial, superficial conversations. i couldn't talk to anybody about the things i was interested in. nobody knew what i was talking about. now, well, now i guess i can talk about my trauma. we all got it. everybody i know feels like crap, all the time, and the internet isn't a _relief_ from that. it's the chief _cause_ of that. trying to communicate genuinely with people over the internet is incredibly fucking hard, and it gets harder every day. most of the difficulty is trying not to think about how much better it used to be.

trying to... just accept, you know? just accept. radical acceptance. i spent a long time trying to burn down the world. shit's gotta change, shit will change in its own time, and i'm not the one to make that change happen. i don't have the skills for that. i'm doing the stuff i need to do to take care of me, no matter how fucking hard that is sometimes.

when i look up lamotrigine side effects

I can tell you that my daughter took lamotrigine for her seizures back in the mid 90s when it was a fairly new drug. she had to come off it because of severe adverse side effects. she developed severe edema (tissue swelling) and began to break out in terrible hives over large parts of her body. this only began after she'd taken it for about half a year and progressively worsened over a period of about four months. he4r neurologist swore up and down it couldn't be the lamotrigine so we tried an allergist who couldn't help her.

Finally we insisted the neurologist take her off lamotrigine the symptoms improved, though they didn't disappear. He talked us into putting her back on and the hives and swelling instantly got 3x worse than before. She came off it for good after two days of torment. Her skin was ultra-sensitive for the rest of her life.

xp crazymeds was a fantastic resource... i'm sad to learn that it's gone now.

So sorry Aimless, that sounds bloody awful.

I can tell you that my daughter took lamotrigine for her seizures back in the mid 90s when it was a fairly new drug. she had to come off it because of severe adverse side effects. she developed severe edema (tissue swelling) and began to break out in terrible hives over large parts of her body. this only began after she'd taken it for about half a year and progressively worsened over a period of about four months. he4r neurologist swore up and down it couldn't be the lamotrigine so we tried an allergist who couldn't help her.

Finally we insisted the neurologist take her off lamotrigine the symptoms improved, though they didn't disappear. He talked us into putting her back on and the hives and swelling instantly got 3x worse than before. She came off it for good after two days of torment. Her skin was ultra-sensitive for the rest of her life.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

ugh see THAT IS IT, that's the side effect they warned me about, not fucking surprising that your daughter's neurologist insisted that it _couldn't_ be the lamotrigine. shit, i remember when SSRIs were new and everyone insisted that sexual side effects were INCREDIBLY RARE and nearly NEVER happened. they're still insisting that any of those side effects end IMMEDIATELY when someone stops taking the SSRI. that's not the experience a lot of SSRI users have had, but, you know, we're _mentally ill_ so what we say doesn't need to be taken seriously. i nearly fucking died from benzo withdrawal. the doctors who prescribed me massive quantities of benzos (which by the way aren't terribly effective against gender dysphoria) didn't bother to fucking tell me about the withdrawal syndrome. if i'd died, would anybody have cared? fuck no. nobody's going to give a shit about some seriously mentally ill "guy" who doesn't even have a job. if anything, people would have blamed _me_.

this kind of shit is _exactly_ why patient-centered resources are so important to me. i've seen it over and over again. pharma companies come out with some big new drug, don't catch (or write off as false positives) serious rare side effects in testing, roll it out to the public, bribe doctors to prescribe it, and gaslight patients with those rare side effects into believing they don't happen. then the ambulance chasers come along and there's a class-action lawsuit and the pharma companies sometimes wind up paying big bucks to the victims and sometimes don't. it doesn't matter because either way they wind up making fucking bank from the drug, no matter how much they need to pay to their victims. god, lilly is still paying out for the damage they did with... serzone? was it serzone? i was on serzone for a while. didn't have the side effects in question. even if i had, i wouldn't have been in on the lawsuit... i didn't know it was happening until long after, when my ex-wife was contracting at lilly.

the pharma industry is rotten at the core - the whole thing controlled by greedy plutocrats who don't care about patient health. they're just looking for the next great white while, the next cash cow. they made a lot of money off prozac, enough that they ignore anything that's not just profitable, but _super_-profitable. there are drugs i can't get except compounded. nobody makes them. it's not profitable _enough_.

anyway i try not to go off on my "the real problem is capitalism" rants too often but sometimes it's directly relevant enough that i feel like i need to talk about it

by the way i don't know for sure that crazymeds doesn't exist anymore, i'm just... i'm kind of scared to look? it's just one of those things with long-term mental illness, you know? there's this awful bit in _framing agnes_ where the people re-enacting the interviews are talking about one of the interview subjects, saying they liked him, they were curious about what happened to him, imagined he could live a great life after the interviews. and one of the researchers said "actually, he's one of the people where we do know what happened to him, we were able to figure that out. he killed himself shortly after the interviews." it's that kind of thing. knowing something like that, it's like knowing someone's deadname. it doesn't _really_ matter in the sense that... it doesn't change who they are, what they did, what they mean to me, but it's not something i want to know.

if i'd died, would anybody have cared? fuck no. nobody's going to give a shit about some seriously mentally ill "guy" who doesn't even have a job. if anything, people would have blamed _me_.

by the way i literally saw this happen to my ex-wife's schizophrenic brother. for decades her family tried to take care of him, help him live independently. finally they got to a point where they couldn't do it anymore. they were like, he deserves better. he deserves more than we can provide for him. so they put him into long-term care.

two weeks later he was dead of a prescription drug overdose. nobody was exactly sure how that happened. was it a mistake by one of the staff? did he get it from one of the other patients? nobody really gave too much of a shit. people saw him as a problem, a burden, and now he wasn't. one less mouth to feed is one less mouth to feed.

when you move the mouse to the browser's back button, or toward another tab, and a pop-up comes up that says something like "wait, before you go you could sign up for our mailing list!!!" or "don't click that button! we have other content!" or "don't you leave me! you stay here!"

shouldn't they add this to physical stores, too? when you even look toward the exit, a sales associate approaches to make sure that you're sure. really there should just be more physical interactions in stores, like physical objects with messages on them thrown at you while you're browsing

there was one gas station once where I went in to browse and I didn't find anything snack wise I wanted and the employee followed me out of the store demanding to know what I was looking for and I should come back inside and she will find it for me

and please fill out a short survey to let them know how they did, before you leave!! please for the love of god fill out thi---

If I knew how to write browser extensions I would write one to make all that shit fuck off

at the grocery they always ask me if I want smokes or ice or maybe buy a decorative candle

want a bottle of whiskey, some funeral balloons?

Related: sites that load/refresh in such a way that you can't simply hit "back" to return to your previous page--you have to depress the back button and choose your previous page from the drop down because the last three previous entries are the page you're currently on.

everything is flooded with monetizable crap, computers writing content for computers to index and return, at some point, to people looking to read something, anything, written by another person

yeah lately this has been irritating me too. I write a music blog where I basically just focus on a particular album 2-3x a month. it gets a decent amount of engagement - always cool to like hop on Discord servers and realize people actually know who I am. my numbers have been going up year after year and most of that is Google traffic - I write about some pretty obscure stuff sometimes and I think people searching for those albums happen upon my site. lately this hasn't been the case though as top results are now AI-generated bullshit, my site isn't even on the first page anymore when you look up really obscure stuff where I'm almost certainly one of the only people that's actually written about it. I mean I'm not touting my own writing but surely this is what people who are searching these albums are actually looking for right? kinda unsure if I even want to be doing this anymore

what's your blog? just curious to check it out

^^^ let's get those search results boosted!

yeah, i had no idea a frogbs blog was out there. link pls.

Somedays I wish I could take the technological backward step of directory search engines like '90s Yahoo. All the usual caveats about gatekeeping apply, but it'd be nice to look up a topic and see sites by verified humans. But I suppose that's not feasible now that so much of the web is no longer "handmade".

it's on my website url on ILX!! what are you telling me nobody checks those!???

https://critterjams.wordpress.com/

No offense to frogs, but websites with social media icons that only lead to facebook.com or instagram.com, not to any actual profile pages.

They're likely thrown with the template, but why throw them in there at all in the first place?

it's on my website url on ILX!! what are you telling me nobody checks those!???

https://critterjams.wordpress.com/

― frogbs

i absolutely don't check those

It's multiple layers of awful that the only way to reliably find real people talking about something is to add site:reddit.com to the search string.