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Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

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Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#111

Post by handrous »

cheese_van wrote: post #82

I might include diplomacy, statecraft and foreign policy. 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 ev…

Off-topic, but as a former serious politics nerd (did most of an IR undergrad degree, way back, in fact) who's now a less-serious politics nerd and quite a bit older, what are some entry points to this world for someone with a career in tech? It'd be kinda nice to work on something that's in an area I have any actual interest in, for once.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#112

Post by brokenkebab »

ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

It's really easy to avoid intrusive ads these days: don't waste any time on TV, sign out of social platforms, use Brave, or any browser with adblocking - you're 99% done with it. As for more subtle kinds of advertising, banning it would require killing media, publishing, entertainment, and even large swaths of education.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#113

Post by reaperducer »

Communicating. Talking to someone on a cell phone is awful compared with a real land line. There's so much latency. And then if you're talking to someone who is on a VOIP service, it's even worse. No wonder people text more than they speak to one another these days. It's just so bad. And now we have two generations of people who never knew how good landlines sounded, and what it's like to talk to someone like they're right next to you.

Telephones are just one of the things that "tech" reinvented poorly, but "good enough" to make money, so we're stuck with it.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#114

Post by wincy »

ciccionamente wrote: post #18
ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

> but half of them break after a few years or less One of the biggest downsides is that these type of things contribute to pollute our world twice: when they are made, when they need to be trashed away. Brands that have products that in average break after a very short time should be banned or shouldn't be sold at all.

That’s a good way to ensure that everything in the world is made by a very few monopolies. It took brands like Vizio ten years before their TVs broke down all the time but now they’re pretty good quality, should we have just shut them down at the beginning and never let them improve?

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#115

Post by Nextgrid »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #13

In the last few years I feel like we've reached "notification hell". Technology used to be a tool that was used when needed, now it constantly demands our attention. 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 machi…

The problem is that in a lot of cases, technology shifted from a model where it solves a problem and the user pays for it to a model where it's either an ad delivery mechanism and the advertiser pays for access to the user's eyeballs, or a future ad delivery mechanism currently funded by VC money but that will in the future turn into the former.

Even paid products that you'd think would have nothing to do with ads are affected, as there's still someone on the inside whose salary depends on increasing "engagement", I guess since anything could eventually be turned into an ad delivery mechanism and they're keeping their options open.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#117

Post by megaframe »

cletus wrote: post #66
ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. People forget how (relatively) expensive products used to be. Example: my family had a very early VHS video recorder. I believe it cost ~$1000 in the early 1980s. I may be misremembering. But that was a lot of money then. So of course it was worth repairing. Labour was considerably less expensive in terms of percentage of…

There's also the same price but more complex issue.

Hybrid engines and washing machines are far more efficient but significantly more complex. Prices are roughly the same +inflation but the added complexity reduces lifetime and repairability.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#118

Post by nonameiguess »

tiffanyh wrote: post #62
ok_dad wrote: post #4

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…

How do you discover information you’re not actively looking for? Eg maybe being environmentally friendly is super important to you. You don’t even realize that today the detergent you’re using isn’t as such. Advertising allows for someone to educate you that products exist that you’re not aware of that align to your needs/wants/desires.

There's a fundamental conflict of interest here in relying on the competitors of products you currently use to educate you on why their products are better aligned to your preferences.

If this is important, subscribe to something like Consumer Reports or join a community group of environmentally concerned citizens who share recommendations with each other, which I suppose will work until the group members start getting sponsored by vendors to give paid recommendations.

Outside of that, the tried and true age old method is trusted third parties. Friends, family, people you share hobbies with and have known for a long time, will give word of mouth recommendations when they know you're interesting in something and have knowledge of products you don't. It's like Ask Hacker News, but instead of asking random anonymous people on a website, ask people you know.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#119

Post by criddell »

Surfing TV channels.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

#120

Post by lolsal »

hippie_queen wrote: post #94

Even though I love my friends, I just don't like being available or able to be contacted all the time. I kinda miss the era of basic SMS and, for real-time chatting, MSN Messenger (or IRC). Nowadays, it feels like I can never truly "log off". 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.

You don't need technology to solve this problem for you - you can choose not to be available.
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