Another one, recently had to call comcast as they were charging my parents $70 for what they are offering for $20, I play the call of "i want to cancel it is too expensive, AT&T cheaper". They recently "improved" their phone bot and added some "amazing" features. I am saying I want to cancel service/speak to customer service, and this thing goes and tells me it is restarting my modem.......then for the next 15 minutes I cannot reach anyone at comcast because my modem is restarting, every time I call I was getting, "We are restarting your modem call us back later GOODBYE!"......I swear things like this just make me want to go live off-grid somewhere.
Social media. I feel like if it weren't for these algorithms that prioritize "engagement" over facts and polite content, my country would be a bit less polarized. I think that social media will turn out to be like cigarettes and someday we will discover that it has an extremely bad outcome; at least how it's implemented today. I have come to enjoy HN a bit more lately, as I just don't engage with the trolls or the horrible people that have opinions I disagree with vehemently. The people I think are horrible, at least, because it's a personal opinion, and other's might view me as a horrible person. I have also learned that it's best not to judge someone by one or two views overall, here, and that helps. I wish more social media could be like HN and allow a diverse set of opinions, but ban the name-calling and such that really take things into a bad place.
Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. Perhaps it's the old man in me coming out, with a rosy view of yesteryear, but I think that the quality of things are just lower, in general. I do think that things "look nicer" and are more consistent, but at a lower level of quality. 20 years ago, I had only 5 or so choices for any given product, maybe a curtain rod for example (because I just bought some). Today I can go down to several stores and pick from hundreds of curtain rod designs that look really nice, but half of them break after a few years or less. I still have some shitty looking but sturdy curtain rods from 20 years ago, no joke. Electronics are worse in some ways, but faster and more complex, so maybe that complexity is the source of the decrease in perceived quality. I can say that computers are way faster now, and it's easier to do many things, but I have less freedom than I had with older computers for sure.
This is just about the end of my old man rant. Thanks for listening.
"The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt..."
Examples:
Car controls:
pre: direct taps and gauges plumbed into engine parts and such, real switches and levers.
optimum: does what it should, not more, not less, more reliable than the old stuff, easy to fix and relatively cheap to fabricate
too much: touchscreens. For everything.
pre: carburettors, bad winter starts, bad fuel consumption, pollution
optimum: EFI, highly reliable, aftermarket parts interchangeable between brands
too much: DRM on everything, parts won't even fit same model a year older, are ridiculously expensive and unreliable to boot
pre: two channels, black and white, bad image quality, crappy small screens
optimum: 20 channels or so, in a way already more than you can consume, good quality color image, fairly easy to see screens (say, up to 3' across).
too much: wall-to-wall screens that intrude on your privacy every chance they can, inability to build up your own collection of content (DRM), pay *for ever* for the same stuff
way too much: youtube.
pre: 8 bits, too slow for many applications, nice and better than an abacus though
optimum: 1990s OS, very little eye candy, just enough to take the edge off, fast, and enough horsepower to do meaningful work
too much: 2020 OS, nothing but eye candy, reduced functionality, telemetry, spyware, forced updates that are just as likely to improve things as they are to leave you stranded
Technology has and always will have a place in my life. But my car is a 1997 model that doesn't phone home to the factory, has buttons instead of menus, my phone is a Nokia, and so on. Technology is my slave, not my master.
Every time I interact with a remotely "clever" system, I keep thinking how my input will feed some machine. How fast do I scroll, what is in my viewport. What do I listen to and when. Is this an A/B test? Will something I do on a whim affect that machine to predict something incredibly stupid tomorrow?
It only became obvious recently, as I was readying an actual, physical book. The relief to realise that the publisher won't optimise the font based on how fast I turn the pages. And the disgust at that aspect of tech.
And to what end?
The Internet has generated in me an habit of information hoarding. At the beginning I would bookmark useful information and then take notes on paper of the useful things; with the passing of time distraction has started to creep in: more and more useless information, more and more FOMO.
2. Omnipresence of tech and privacy concerns
An increasing number of actions require emails to get done, this rises privacy concerns. When I was 14 enrolling in high-school meant filling a form in pen and paper and bring it to the administrative office. 11 years later, my sister needed an email and personal information on the net. I really don't like it.
3. Affliction due to envy
I haven't used social media since I was 19 but HN and reddit are not really better: there are a lot of thing that I just wish I could forget and fill me with envy that I would have never felt if I had never read about that particular thing. It is obviously irrational being envious of something that you didn't event wanted in the first place, but the irrationality of that feeling do not make it less real and painful. Sometimes I do a 30 day diet and I do not visit HN or reddit, but the feelings never really go away.
4. Ephemerality
I still have some books passed by my great-grandmother belonging to my great-grandfather during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. I still have all my books from middle- and high-school. These required passive maintenance: just put them on the shelves far from fire and done. On the other hand I've lost entire years of data (photos, books, notes) during a single incident that rendered my physical back-ups useless.
Everything is becoming touch based these days. As a blind person, this means a lot of devices are unusable or almost unusable for me. As long as it's something in my own place, I can find alternatives, but that's not possible for devices I don't own. PIN pads on POS systems are the most egregious example here. Since I live in Europe, I can either use Apple Pay or give out my PIN to whoever is nearby.
Apart from that, tech has improved my life massively. It's impossible to overstate how much assistive technology has improved in the last 15 or so years. Most smartphones and computers now have a great and free screen reader, can read print, recognize currency, allow us to communicate with the sighted world, let us read almost any book in existence and watch most contemporary movies, at least the popular ones for which they made a special audio description track. None of that was possible 15 years ago, definitely not for the price of a normal smartphone.
First I need to make an account for nearly everything.
Then I need to link that account to a phone number or email.
Then every time I use the service I need to wait for them to text or email me a password.
If they email me the password then I have to log in to my email, which means getting another password texted to me.
Alternatively if it's work related I have a physical key card, a physical password generator, and a slew of personal passwords I just memorize. I have to keep all of these on me just to log in: regular keys, cell phone with service, email, key card, password generator, and ideally a different password memorized for every service which need to be changed every 60-180 days.
Maybe an example is needed, this is a typical day: I want to use the building's front door, so I use the key card. I want to use my office door so I use my regular key. I want to use my laptop so I use a memorized password. I want to connect to the network so I use my physical password generator with a memorized password. I want to read an encrypted email so I use a memorized password. I want to download a file from a document share with another company so I use a memorized password and get texted a password. I want to use the computer lab so I use a key card and a memorized password and another key card and another memorized password. I want to buy something online so I create a new account with a memorized password and get emailed a password so I log into my phone with my thumbprint and my email with a memorized password and get texted a password. Then I buy the thing with a credit card number and code which I've memorized since I get so much practice memorizing things now. I probably verify my identity a hundred times every single day, and businesses seem to be adding more and more ways to do it, making it more and more difficult.
I remember being impressed by my grandfather's keychain when I was a child, thinking "wow, how can someone need this many keys?" ...
Subscriptions for almost anything: "I don't want to subscribe to your service, I want to buy a product and never hear from you ever again"
Still WAY too much "white background" everywhere -> it hurts my eyes...how are we still having WHITE backgrounds???
Spending WAY too much time charging devices.
France and many places in Europe still NOT equipped with decent fast access to Internet
Mobile phones: Spending time with people without having them or myself scrolling their phone is difficult to obtain
Planned obsolescence:Phones are full of proprietary/encrypted stuff on a hardware or a software level making them useless after some years...
We still don't have a fully Free (as in Free software) and viable operating system for mobile platforms -> which leads to a pile of Android versions...not even mentioning Apple.
The fact that phones are still nowadays closed-object that we do not control at all.
Job Market: After more than 10 years of career, two master's degrees and a PhD being asked for a tech job whether I know how to code is annoying. Biologists, Physicists, etc. hired as "computer people" and ensuring the recruitment of programmers The creation of "DevOps" or "full stack developers" -> Being an actual admin sys, developper, network admin are separated things, with actual difference in skills and knowledge. Let everyone have their job, thinking you can have the perfect mix in one person is a myth.
Finally: The fact that private software, private platforms win everytime: TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, Discord, etc. -> all private, all preying on us.
From my childhood, I have always loved to learn new stuff- all kinds of interesting stuff.
Before, when I became interested in something, I looked it up on the net, read books, and asked people about resources.
But with "feed"s, everything went downhill very quickly.
When more and more resources became available, I struggled to keep up with them.
There were not only too many resources I came to know about on topics that interested me, I also came to know about a lot of topics themselves.
There were not only too many things on things, but there were too many things!
I feel a lot more pressurized, a lot more agitated and anxious because I know about so many different kinds of things that I would be interested about and I am sure (at least in my mind) I would be good at.
These things range from a new programming language or a framework, to a new region and its culture that I suddenly came to know about.
The resources come as articles, essays to books, GH repos, MOOCs, and even diplomas.
I am so grateful because of the internet and specific kinds of social media because I got to know about a lot I otherwise would have missed, and my life would have been completely different. But after a certain amount, or velocity, things go to the dogs.
I believe there is a rising curve that plateaus after a certain distance in the X axis where Y is learning and acquiring knowledge and X is flow of information.
Before, learning was just super fun, and now I am often paralyzed in my free time and I do nothing so that I don't mourn not doing other things, and end up doing nothing.
I am thinking of ways to put a stop to this, and have so far come up with a few ways.
The experience nowadays is more like:
* Google for thing XYZ, wait for some seconds until the result page layout is final due to additional crap being loaded in the background
* scrolling down while mentally hiding all the crap that big G is trying to sell you
* finding something that looks interesting and clicking on it
* being greeted with a cookie settings popup from hell, figuring out how to get it out of the way without becoming an advertising target for the rest of your life.
* Trying to find the close button for the video that starts auto-playing in some corner of the screen.
* looking at the site, scrolling, getting another full-screen pop-up reminding you to subscribe to their BS newsletter or their paid service
* etc..
Watching places and people on instagram/youtube for the first time takes away the awe factor of what could have been possible in real life. Imagine seeing the Pyramids for the first time in person vs watching them through a travel vlogger. Or visiting Japan in pre-internet era vs now when you have already read hundreds of blogs on what cultural differences to expect even before landing in the country.
I know it's still a wonderful experience to see things in reality. But I am sure the experience is dampened due to the endless dopamine consumption we saturate ourselves with.
I feel like something is always beeping at me across countless services and just stresses me out.
Windows beeps every time I click anything now, every app wants to spam notifications every our, Jira, countless chat apps, email, even the credit card machines at Target have gotten more aggressive...
I used to use smart phone before I lie on bed before bedtime. I know that I shouldn't use them. But the dopamine generated by digital devices and internet is too cheap. When I am unhappy or under pressure, I tend to use my smart phone. And I am always unhappy or under pressure recently. Then I use smart phone before sleep. Then I fall asleep very late. This creates some vicious circle. The worse my sleep is, the more unhappy I am.
I can no more live with a digital device in the same room before bedtime.
Before I go to bed, I have to leave all my digital devices, except for kindle, at first floor. Then I return to my bedroom at second floor. Without them, I can finnaly sleep well.
2) Attention. The double edged sword of easy information is that digital junk food is also easier to get. You can read Feynman lectures or catch up with the Kardashians, up to you.
3) The idiots can find each other. There's no village idiot anymore, they've gone global.
There is just too much stuff going on, information, news, good/bad tech, entertainment, people doing their things, the list goes on.
We were blissfully ignorant of all the information that exists in the world. It's impossible to keep up with everything that's happening, you're always behind, even finding out when/how to care or where to look for actually good content is hard.
Everything has to be generic enough to account for everything, so market expansion is as fast as the snap of fingers, even if it doesn't matter.
Today I woke up feeling like an old man, I know.
I appreciate all of the advances in emissions reduction, safety, etc., but when I was a kid I learned the basics of working on nearly any car on the market, and now even with an OBD scanner most of them are still near unfixable without visiting a dealership. Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine.
That's just the purely functional stuff. The hassle-ware that's been installed between in dash "infotainment" systems, integrations with remote third parties, etc., I honestly believe is more distracting and dangerous than genuinely helpful. We've grown accustomed to this so much that people have told me they are "bored" driving sometimes without all of their gadgetry. That shouldn't be the state of normal when driving, it should be "I am operating heavy machinery and should pay attention to what I'm doing because my life does depend on it".
It's interesting to me that our trend with software has been to simplify interfaces over the years and cars just keep adding buttons and integrations and auxiliary ports for devices, and excuse themselves with useless friendly warnings that tell you not to use them while you're using the car.
Related: human-oriented design in general. Every interface nowadays seems to be defined by the designer's whims and pure aesthetics, not what would actually be functional for users.
Smart Appliance. Most people dont realise how the word Smart ( implying software ) and Appliance contradict each other.
Information Quality. I spend some time thinking about it. I thought as I age and become more knowledgeable in multiple domains, I smell more BS. But then I realise that is not exactly true. It is not that I smell more BS, it is more BS are being produced at a much faster pace and spread at a much faster rate ( in many order of magnitude, likely thousands if not millions times easier than pre internet era. ). The old dream of information super highway where people can "share" information turns out to be a nightmare.
Constantly connected. No excuse for Battery is dead, not picking up phone? Instant messaging. This combined with Information Quality makes life way worse. I would not be surprised if the great resignation and people want to go to hermit have correlation with this because our brain are bombarded with information.
Digital Photos. Just like everything that started what was suppose to be a great idea. We dont value photos any more. Especially when they are compressed and takes very little space, you can store as much as you want. Not to mention modern smartphone camera "pretty up" your photo and they are no longer realistic.
Edit: I wrote this without first reading all the comments. Turns out many people feel the same as well.
a second.
Now my TV takes about 30s to start up, it's actually constantly on standby mode. It takes a good 5-10 minutes to actually boot from cold.
using the UI feels sluggish, there's proprietary "applications" which clog up the main screen and I'm told it spies on me.
Not to mention: other people with modern TV's have Ads injected into their watching experience, I can't even begin to imagine how frustrating that would be if I were playing a game.
So: TV's are much, much worse than they were 15 years ago. Even if there are more pixels now.
Just as in your examples, imo the key here is not "tech". It's that the tech is being used to offload work that used to be done by an employee to you, without passing on the benefits or the choice to opt out.
I think the frame of technology good vs. technology bad is not useful. Technology is a means distinct from the ends it serves. Many modern applications of technology don't serve customers, they serve company profit margins or governments or don't really serve anyone except the maker and that's why they suck.
Good technology is applied to eliminate work altogether like say sending an email instead of snail mail, or doing something fundamentally new & useful like having a detailed map of the world in your pocket.
Before communications were instant, ambassadors were provided a long view of state relationships and foreign policy goals. During his tenure then, the ambassador was guided by these long term visions of how to fulfill policy.
Now, thanks to instant messaging, an ambassador and embassy must (or can) immediately adjust daily to their home office's reaction to events. Instant communications have reduced both the role and need for an embassy's long view of policy stance and goals. Thus, while not necessarily "worse", the autonomy of an ambassador has greatly declined. I suppose the contrarian view would welcome the lessened dangers of an incompetent diplomat who can be micro-managed by their home office.
But to the personal aspect, my career supported this area, and thanks to modern communications, often sleeplessly.
The most upsetting thing to me is the fly-by-wire controls. I used to drive a vehicle that was EFI, but still had a direct cable from your foot to the throttle body. To describe the throttle response as "immediate" is an understatement when compared to any modern car. Today, I have a recent generation sports car with electronic throttle body. There is a dead zone and about 100 milliseconds of latency associated with any input. It really kills the experience/flow when you are anticipating that step-wise moment.
Also, I will probably never drive a car that doesn't utilize an E2E hydraulic braking or steering system. You can maybe survive the software engineers fucking up TB angle. You can't survive the computer deciding to take you directly into a barrier at 80mph or refusing to apply the brakes in an emergency situation.
I think higher latency, lower reliability and reduced safety (in edge cases) is at the core of most things that bother me with tech. Sure, you can get the statistics to make it look good on paper, but the individuals caught in those "but sometimes" situations would like to have a word with your methodologies.
That and addiction to my smartphone. I hardly read books anymore, while that has always been one of the great pleasures in my life
Similarly, since the pandemic, paper menus have been replaced by a stupid QR code that often loads a bloated page or PDF and may contain trackers. Doesn't help that phone service is usually terrible, and Wi-Fi (if it exists) has a captive portal with its own set of problems.
Worse, some venues actually did ordering over the mobile website, so what used to take 10 seconds of telling the barman what you wanted now takes a minute of trying to load a terrible website, filling out a form with way too much personal information, waiting for the payment to process, etc.
When I was a kid I was constantly flipping channels. At commercials I would sometimes flip through the dial to see what else was on. You could change channels as fast as you could turn the dial or press the button.
My state-of-the-art television today is so slow at this that I never channel surf anymore. You can count 5 or more mississippis after changing the channel before the new one starts playing.
Feels like the box should have a bunch of buffers or tuners or whatever the necessary technology is and guess what channel I might flip to next (up, down, previous would be good starts). It could have those streams ready to go in a millisecond.
Everyone is tracking me, monitoring everything I see and do online, feeding the giant "personalized advertisement" machine and all the other trolls mooching off its edges (identity thieves, scammers, etc.); I'm going to extreme lengths of un-googling my Chromium and Android and un-Microsofting my Windows, pi-holing my network and uBlock-ing on top, but I feel it's all for naught, an exhausting losing battle.
I empathize with your thought of just doing a "Stardew Valley" and dropping all this shit to go live on a farm somewhere, but I'm a cog in the machine now and have to live it through :(
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet.
There's simply too much money nowadays in micro-transactions, in-app purchases, loot boxes, pay-to-win and in-game advertising that almost everything is "free" to play and it's literally horrible.
what we have now is mostly copy-pasted franchise titles (with a year after their name) that are just another optimized hellhole of extracting money from you a small slice at a time.
There are exceptions and this is part of the reason why Nintendo as a brand is still loved by many. I consider Zelda Breth of the Wild to be one of the most amazing games and experiences of my video gaming life.
I also like board game adaptations to mobile because they tend to be limited in in-app purchases.
Other than that? By God, there's a ton of crap out there. It's no surprise how many people will go to great efforts to play games that are 20, 30 or more years old now.
The fact that most of those are not interoperable is so frustrating. We all know the only reason they are not interoperable is because each one tries to keep us in their walled ecosystem. Such a waste for the users.
That said, I have no genuinely good reason why I haven't tried going back to a similar personal setup. Maybe it's time to see how it would work out.
(That is not to say those earlier times were entirely positive. People were still trying to build corporate empires, or otherwise use technology to the disadvantage of their customers. Yet the balance of power seemed to be better balanced and it felt easier to walk away from it all and still lead a good life.)
I have like six phones to keep my various identity facets separate. It's gross and annoying, and I worry about everyone else who just has one number and uses it for everything and links their accounts everywhere together; most people in the world are going to become very easy to blackmail/coerce/extort in the coming years.
The perpetrator is further away from his car, and knows to expect the sound.
It is startling, rude and offensive. The mechanism should be off by default.
1) Phone calls sounded better when they were analog. Even today, after some improvements, this is still true.
2) Long distance charges turned out to be well fucking worth it for keeping phone spam from being a thing. This "improvement" has been strongly net-harmful.
I got suckered into that madness on my own website, and can't remember what the icons are for without hovering over then for the alt text.
Icons are a giant technological leap backwards. There's a reason that every hieroglyphic language evolved towards phonetics, not the other way.
For a simple example, there's no picture in the world that can clearly mean "run", or "menu", or "oil pressure", or "defroster", or "test", or "print", or "off", or "wash in cold water".
Of course, we can get used to what certain icons conventionally mean, but it is not intuitive, and not any better than learning what a word means.
Instead, we have mass isolation, instead of population-density diminishing tactics that respect human needs, and mandates for behaviors.
So much for freedom.
Anyway, where's the app for building a big covid bubble or quickly joining one after following quarantine procedures for that bubble?
They're so fucked and don't have a chance.
1. With all the little updates you get through Facebook, a lot of people feel that there isn't as much need for meeting, talking, or doing stuff together. I've found the reality to be otherwise; connections are deeper with better quality of time with a person and there are a lot of things that people simply aren't comfortable discussing on FB (mental health, relationship problems, health problems, etc).
2. Social media can give the impression that you have nothing new to talk about with someone. Since I've cut social media out of a lot of my personal life, I can actually call somebody I haven't talked to a year and have a lot to discuss. It's a lot more fulfilling to hear about somebody's new relationship/breakup/child/vacation than it is to get a sanitized summary of the same online.
3. I hadn't realized it since I stopped using FB, but there's a general sense of anxiety that I've found comes from regular usage. I think between the unfeeling algorithmic drive for engagement and the human tendency for information addiction, the need to check one's feed or friend group is a constant thing. I've been a lot happier and experiencing a lot less ambient anxiety without it.
The conclusion I've come to is that social networks, at least how they're run and built today, or a very bad replacement for real human connection. I'd urge everyone to do the following whenever someone you care about comes to mind:
1. Have you spoken with them recently? If not, send them a text and see if they're free to call.
2. Are you not close and nervous about calling? Send them a text/email/letter letting them know you thought about them and share something.
3. Have someone you haven't spoken to in a while due to an argument or disagreement and regret losing touch? Reach out! Talk about it. Time heals many wounds, and with perspective, empathy, and a willingness to hear each other out you'll be surprised at how many friendships can be rekindled.
It's been a rough few years. A contact out of the blue from an old acquaintance or friend can me the world to people. Remember that you're not alone and that whatever anxiety or loneliness you feel is a very human experience we all share.
People don't know how to communicate with their local surroundings anymore, or don't want to.
I was in one of the first groups of kids to grow up having a fair number of online-only friends, and I think it's great in a lot of ways, but I also see an atrophy of civility and sociability happening in physical communities, and think the accessibility of niche culture online has something to do with it.
Some of this may be rose colored glasses or the fact that I'm older and less pleasant to look at, or other biases/confounds, but that's my observation.
I bought a toaster, now my kitchen glows. I bought a toothbrush, now my bathroom glows. Etc, etc. Why do manufacturers insist on making things always glow?
On the other hand, having so much music available has made me discover much more music, including a couple I didn't know about (shout out to Turkish Psych Rock!) but I could be missing out on whole genres. Now I'm not saying this as a boomer rant about how things used to be better back in the day. I do discover much more music, it's just a thought about how this affects the evolution of music.
Speaking of Turkish Psych Rock, a couple of years ago I was at a show of Altin Gun [1], which is a band that's probably seen (some) success mainly due to Spotify, and it looked like that when you looked at the audience - varying in age, dressing styles, etc - just random people who got this recommended a lot and liked it.
I am generally concerned about privacy. It seems if somebody is willing to pay for information about you they can find out almost anything. And often this is used against you.
In my opinion tech by itself is good but “big tech” is very bad. Too much data in companies’ hands is dangerous.
Generally, I think it’s broken the sense of localized community; while making it more global. This has upsides and downsides, but I’d like to see a more localized system in place.
Regarding the comment about living off the grid, I am well on my way. Should have my families setup by late 2022.
This can be a great question to ask yourself when you are considering taking a new (tech related) job or if you are thinking of business ideas.
Like your AT&T example I hate any kind of unskippable ads. Even with (real human) operators they now have to try to upsell you if it makes sense or not. And if you have time or not. Some are honest "I have to tell you about some products now"
Can't get into steam cause need the password. Can't get password cause lastpass is freaking out. Then can't get into email cause that wants an OTP. Find phone. Unlock phone...unravel chain of OTPs from there.
...I just want to play my game
Advertising (that acts as if we actually enjoy being subjected to it), tracking, the continual privacy f*over, screens, memes, interruptions, the pressure to be always on and efficient and optimized and "engaged", fake social media "friends", the inevitable burnout and withdrawal that follows as a result ... all of it.
The given choices for resolving are:
- Mail the slip back with a reason checked. None of the options fit the scenario, there's no "Other". Postage is not prepaid, I have to go to the post office because I haven't needed a stamp since 2012.
- Call a number, which I did. I waited 45 minutes on 2 different days, never got through.
There is no email address or contact form the website. There is no way to make a dispute electronically. (I guess this part is more like a lack of tech that made life worse for me)
The hold message said "EZPass customer services will be with you...". I have an EZPass account which the mistaken plate is on, but wasn't at the time because I didn't have the plates yet. So I figured I'd try the support system through that account, even though it's technically separate. The only option there is a support contact form. I had to type that up twice because, of course, my login timed out by the time I hit "submit" and all my text was lost, an possibility I'm fully aware of as a web dev, but I haven't experienced in like 10 years. That was a week ago, still haven't heard back.
Now I'm going to mail thing in with a handwritten choice and can only hope it's going to work out and not lead to some kind of worse mix up that cost more time or money, or flags my license somehow.
Photography: I don't like looking at other people's photos as much as I used to. Mobile phone cameras do all kinds of weird and unpleasant processing, and usually have focal lengths that result in bad looking portraits (they're usually no more than half as wide as the human eye's focal length.)
Arts, culture, and nightlife: It's harder than ever to find places where people aren't periodically checking their phones. I enjoy having random and serendipitous encounters, and phones and other mobile technology get in the way of that. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where some bars and clubs outright ban cellphone usage, but it's one step forward, two steps back.
I can think of a lot of other things, but I think those three are enough grievances for a single post.
There is one thing I feel I cannot stop reaching to and makes my life worse: endless supply of any kind of porn imaginable.
Phones were a mistake, letting commoners on the internet was a big mistake. Smartphones created the era of Eternal Whatever, and there's no coming back from it.
To be fair, I haven't checked in a few years. Last I checked this was still impossible. Years ago I tried and it was an abysmal waste of time and effort.
I have an extensive collection of CD's and none of them are on my iOS devices because I can't listen to albums as albums, in order, as indivisible units.
I don't understand this. What do Apple employees listen to? One hit wonders?
This was worked just fine on Windows Media Player from day one, literally decades ago. If MS brought back Windows Phone and the media player behaved just as the desktop versions does, I would switch from iPhone in an instant.
This, BTW, is the reason I no longer buy iPads. A Windows-based tablet is a perfect travelling companion. I have unrestricted access to the file system, USB ports, HDMI and more. I can carry my digital books (which are 100% in PDF format) and my music and videos are easy to manage and can be played back in sensible ways. On top of that, they are great business machines for presentations, etc.
Weeks ago I was dealing with chest pain/heart pain. I ended up trying to call a bunch of clinics/doctors to try to get a recommendation of where to go. Everywhere I called, they would have a spiel about covid that would last 1/2 minutes. It would make me livid and my pain worse.
I understand that thats partly my fault for being impatient. But it felt so hard to just reach a doctor/nurse or anyone to talk to at the time.
sensor-driven sinks in public restrooms: dont turn on when you want, shutoff too soon, forcing me into frustrating, time-consuming, farsical movements to try to get it to magically trigger again or stay on, so I can finish rinsing my hands or face
sensor-driven autoflush toilets in public restrooms: similar issues, except they also tend to flush when you dont want -- at the worst time -- or not flush at all when you really really really need it to
in both cases I "get" the fact theyre trying to save water and/or reduce their utility bills. get it. but it makes our lives worse than they were decades ago, when out in public. I know its a trade-off between evils...
tech made my life better: modern mobile smartphones. if you could travel back in time to even the 70s and tell someone that within their lifetime they'll have a small personal device that can do the 1000's of things a 2020 era phone can do, you might blow their mind. yes it has introduced a new class of problems too (eg. social media doom scrolling all day long, more distracted driving, etc.) but the amount of new awesome things it allows is totally worth it, imo, and a big net improvement.
Holy hell. Between Youtube, Twitter, HN and Reddit I'm both wasting an indecent amount of time and my attention span is turning into that of a goldfish.
Before having constant access to internet or a phone, I had much more time to process my thought. I also had much more time throughout the day to think overall as there was much more situation when I had to wait a bit and no mobile phone to disrupt me. I'm trying to reclaim that, but I do miss that (and I think overall it's something that humans needs and are missing).
I also dislike Slack or similar tools for work, it makes the work day much more disrupted and it's hard to manage. I wish that there was a calorie counter on Slack where you need to burn some calories before having to disrupt someone. It would make people think twice before talking.
Finally I find the grab on technology from GAFAM sad. Things have been abstracted and ownership removed to the point that I fell more and more like a passive user rather than someone having fun hacking around. If I can't break it and fix it back, it feels like a piece of non interesting piece of junk to me. I become just a user, not an actor. I find everything they make just sad.
Since working from home I become acutely aware of how often I'm dealing with spinners waiting for things to load, pauses, lag, etc. I feel like I'm living half a beat behind my physical actions and it's brought on a certain amount of unnecessary stress.
The downside is now it's a huge pain in the ass to remember what streaming network has what, in some cases down to which show's seasons exist where. Example? Yellowstone TV series (w/ Kevin Costner). You can watch the first 3 seasons on Peacock. But Season 4? Only on Paramount Network. Oh and don't get confused with Paramount Network versus Paramount+.
It's an upgrade in some ways but offset but incredibly frustrating and annoying experiences trying to figure out where shit lives in order to watch it.
When I started programming, systems with floppy disks that held 360k were the norm. Those disks could be write protected. Diskcopy was a standard DOS command that allowed you to have an exact copy of your data, protected against alteration by the hardware of the machine, and the write-protect tab.
You could directly know what data you were putting into the computer, if it was at risk of modification, and you could even tell if it was being accessed, because it was slow and noisy. Modern Operating Systems have no such provisions for controlling access to data in a obvious and transparent manner.
The hardware was simple enough that there was nowhere for malware to hide. Now that we have systems to boot our systems, that's no longer true. There's no operating system available to provide anywhere near the assurance of MS-DOS on a stand alone twin floppy drive machine.
Because things were inherently secure, shareware was huge. You could freely try out new things, dozens of things in a sitting, sourced from a guy selling floppy disks at a computer club meeting, and know you couldn't possibly mess up your computer or your work.
There is no equivalent operating system security today. The only reasonable approach, in my mind, is that of capability based security. In those systems, you decide what specific resources (files, folders, network access, etc) to make available to a program when you run it. If you didn't include it, your application can't get at it, no matter what. This in direct opposition to the way things are done now, where the program might pull up a file dialog, but then directly accesses the files without oversight, and can do anything you're allowed instead of what you told it.
Couple insecure operating systems with ubiquitous networking, and it's a recipe for disaster.
I figure 5 more years before people wake up to the root cause, and 10 more before it starts getting fixed.
That people in the West communicate largely over platforms controlled by entities with economic interests has been highly destructive. Beyond mere vitriol and "misinformation", there's the accelerationism of human social functions powered by instant communication and full of perverse incentives on the part of the platform controllers. There are also lots of incentives for individuals that are harmful to society in the aggregate.
To me, this kind of thing is the primary cause of the western malaise.
Back in the day I listened to the radio, I bought cds and vinyl and listened to entire albums and looked at every detail of the album art. I went record shopping with my brothers. I made mixtapes for special people in my life and received them as well. I’d listen to the radio hoping for a song to come on so I could record it to a cassette on my boombox. I miss the sound of tape. I miss the imperfection.
With everything at my fingertips, I definitely get music A.D.D and skip things often. I don’t care about bands or artists as much. I don’t listen to albums like I used to. I’ve outsourced my music discovery to Spotify playlists and while it’s convenient and sometimes spot on, I sometimes miss the old days of going on a date to the record store and finding something special.
Streaming services, while initially seeming awesome, offer way less selection than browsing through a Blockbuster or local video store. I suppose you can rent movies online as well, but the browsing experience is pretty bad if you're not looking for the latest thing.
But both of those things are only occasional inconveniences. The real place tech has made my life worse is just how completely dependent I am on it for 95% of my life. From the psychological dependence on knowing what my friends are doing, or how my crypto "investments" (read: gambles). Also needing internet connectivity to play various "single player" games even though I'm just a casual gamer and NEVER play with others.
It's more of an externality to IT than a direct problem as I see it. People are plugged in so it's easier to step over the problems around them. We have access to growth all over the world through chat and forums, so why would we spend our precious time on people who can most likely take us nowhere better than we presently are? Being homeless on Twitter was interesting, because it's like "if you can affort a smart phone then you can afford food;" I think the pandemic has erased that stereotype, at least. Now it's like "you have Twitter, why can't you jump on Zoom?" and "if you have time to Tweet then you have time to apply to a job"--indeed, time, but perhaps not the space or bandwidth or power or editing software to run more than Twitter. This may extend to social services via small screens but I don't have much experience with that.
We could extend the effect to reduction of menial and low-mid level management jobs as well, which keeps people working 2-3 entry levels jobs as they start families in their mid-20s and beyond. I'm less sure of that case as it starts to get complex. I saw a different dynamic in my service jobs recently than I did as a teenager in the late '90s, but I wasn't there long enough to dissect it in detail. I can say when I was in high school most of my co-workers were high schoolers except the odd "older" person, recently it was almost an opposite proportion with perhaps 1 high schooler on each team. More competition = less opportunity for the vulnerable/unmarketable homeless population is the connection.
Telephones are just one of the things that "tech" reinvented poorly, but "good enough" to make money, so we're stuck with it.
It allows the community to grow, learn and become more diverse.
On the other hand, I regularly read blog articles about complex topics from people that should rather not write about it. I know "senior software engineers" where I ask myself how they are capable of tying their shoes each morning. I see people get praised for achieving the bare minimum, like putting five pictures on LinkedIn about a topic they hardly understand at all.
I like the old kind. There's a position for off and and a position for on. Maybe a slider for a dimmer.
But now in my bedroom, the brightness is adjusted by holding down a single button. The intensity follows a slow triangle wave. You release the button at the desired time. That means if you just want the dimmest possible setting, you have to stand there for ~10 seconds and be subjected to the highest intensity brightness in the meantime.
Things are finally improving but LCDs made me stop playing Quake and Unreal Tournament during the mid 2000s and into the early 2010s when 120Hz panels (TN of course) started appearing at reasonable prices.
2. Lunches with coworkers. No longer a thing for many of us but boy I've had enough lunches with 20 somethings glued to their phones the entire time. What's the point of going together, bruh?
Parenting!
I can’t count the number of times my wife has shouted at the iPad because some web dev wants a SPA form validation that didn’t work correctly, and all while trying to do something reasonably important like making sure our child gets fed food at school without the ingredients she’s allergic to.
(It probably also affects road design, I.E. normally you'd want to keep offramps spaced out so people have time to react. But with GPS, you can cram them into a small space and people will mostly follow the right one.)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/11/hiding-vulner...
where Unicode added code points that would cause the renderer to go backwards.
Unicode looniness has also infected C++23:
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p194...
which is absurdly overcomplicated.
Using emoji as C++ identifier names?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30130806/using-emoji-as-...
What a clowny "feature".
My vehicle I can just unclip one wire at the battery to disable it permanently, but most of them the best you can do without getting into the software is disable it every you start the car.
Now, several multinationals and governments know which day of the week I like to go out to eat, or who my FWBs are, and the locations of all of the places I sleep. It's nobody's business, but now it's in everybody's databases (even if I turn my own phone off, unless I avoid human contact entirely).
It was a technology built for the convenience of building managers, but residents hate it.
That being said, exercising efficiently is easier than ever thanks to technology as well.
It's not just between you and your partner, it's now between you, them, their 300 Facebook friends.
I screwed up one early relationship since I was so afraid she'd post the wrong thing on Facebook.
In terms of meeting people, I only do it the old fashioned way. When you date a real person who you meet as a member of a community, your much less likely to act like a sociopath.
It's also less stressful. I actually meet more people now, while spending vastly less time on dating.
I will say for me social media was outright damaging. I'd waste 20 hours a week on FB, and various dating apps. Doesn't do anything for you at the end of the day, life is too short to waste it behind a tiny screen. However, Facebook messenger has been very useful when meeting people abroad.
PS: If your not happy with the people your meeting , try moving. America has hundreds of cities, many of which have distinct cultures. Someone who's miserable in say San Jose, might very happy in Atlanta.
Find your niche, don't fall for the lie that you can make it anywhere.
Never again.
Maybe because they don't have to think for themselves anymore?
You read it as a texbook notion in school, but it's the internet which makes you internalize it.
All the stuff you care about and are enthusiast about you'll find people who put your skills and level in that particular field to shame.
And you don't even have to be looking for such info because it's shoved right in your face.
The most talented person (or perceived as talented) in a field monopolizes all the discussion in that particular field. So as you try to learn about the field you are met with all sorts of devote followers and bootlickers.
My education was in the late-90s in electronics. Offshoring took that career away by the 2010s.
Oh, I don’t know web app development or anything above CS200 by heart, or haven’t contributed a decade of free labor to open source; fuck off.
A modern college education and different experiential timeline does not make a college educated person anymore than 1 of 7 billion like the rest of us.
Real on the ground life issues for millions are waved off as nbd cause the data shows those millions of able bodied people who see society act indifferent they exist, as they are just a rounding error, seems to be acceptable discourse.
It’ll be interesting to see how this all unfolds in a nation with a second amendment and one political party recently sharing plans internally to announce they are overturning the election to protect their demigod.
It’s not tech that’s the issue; it’s humanity itself. Its root social language is feudalism and moral relativism. Tech is just the latest vessel for those behaviors.