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Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

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Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#111

Post by hiyer »

corrral wrote: post #74

Soft buttons and software-mediated knobs replacing real buttons and real knobs that actually do things. Best microwave I've ever used was made in, I think, the late 70s. Didn't even have a turntable, and worked just fine without it, somehow. No clock at all. The "UI" was two heavy-feeling knobs, one for power and one for time. Turn the time knob, and it starts cooking at your selected power until the time runs down,…

I agree with this. My new washing machine has full-touch controls. It's great otherwise (includes full drying!), but it's way too easy to change the settings when it's running or turn it off when you're walking past it and accidentally bump against it.

Luckily I've found a workaround - I turn on the child lock once I've set up the wash program, so these accidental touches are ignored.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#112

Post by igetspam »

Slack. It has turned everyone's current thoughts into interrupts for everyone else. The idea that it is async has long been abandoned and if you don't reply to someone quickly, they escalate or move on to someone else. It has created a world in which everyone thinks everything is a priority and must be addressed immediately. To make things worse, people create channel after channel after channel, many with all the same people but a slightly different scope and you're expected to have read them all. It's maddening.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#114

Post by thefz »

sliken wrote: post #80
thefz wrote: post #71

Very specific, but: Mountain Bike 12x drivetrains. They are extremely finnicky, delicate and built with very small tolerances for something that gets rattled around for kilometers of trail in dust, mud or water. I never, ever had one or seen one that hasn't been very very capricious with cable tension or dropout straightness or cassette tightening or barrel adjustment. And usually they drop out of shape regularly aft…

Heh, very weird. Did you get Shimano or SRAM? Shimano generally seem to behave worse in the real world, at least on mountain bikes. Rain, snow, temp swings, grit, mud, etc seems to degrade them more than SRAM. Shimano also drives the upgrade cycle by not having user maintainable parts or even selling parts for older equipment. The shifters in particular are fragile, not user serviceable, and have incompatible changes…

SRAM. I came from a 11x X01 with a 5 year lifespan in which I maybe only changed the cable once. Zero maintenance and it ran like clockwork. The whole Eagle line has been a disappointment for me, from the bottom to the top products.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#115

Post by _nalply »

Rechargeable AAA and AA batteries with their chargers and gadgets that need AAA and AA batteries.

I think environment-friendly and always have bought rechargeable batteries. However since about ten years I feel that rechargeable batteries don't work well anymore. They don't keep a lot of charge and die soon, sometimes only after two or three recharges.

I gave up and don't buy rechargeable AAA and AA batteries anymore and try to avoid gadgets needing AAA and AA batteries. Most toys need them, however.

What I really would like: USB-C rechargeable AAA and AA batteries by having an USB-C plug in the battery, a way to daisy-chain them during charging, a mini-display on the battery to show the charge in mAh, and a possibility to leave the batteries in the gadget during charging. Even better, don't sell gadgets without USB-C charging.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#116

Post by majewsky »

corrral wrote: post #74

Soft buttons and software-mediated knobs replacing real buttons and real knobs that actually do things. Best microwave I've ever used was made in, I think, the late 70s. Didn't even have a turntable, and worked just fine without it, somehow. No clock at all. The "UI" was two heavy-feeling knobs, one for power and one for time. Turn the time knob, and it starts cooking at your selected power until the time runs down,…

I have one of these microwaves as well (albeit with a turntable) and it's one of my most beloved pieces of technology. The only thing is that it's 20+ years old and I'm dreading the day that it breaks and I won't be able to replace it with a model that has a non-terrible UI.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#117

Post by majewsky »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #100
Havoc wrote: post #23

The aggressive push towards thin devices with questionable cooling combined with the ever increasing bloat in windows/office. Seems to have eaten up all the gains from SSDs and more modern CPUs. The hardware gets better and excel stays slow

Windows was actually getting more resource efficient for a while around Windows 8 and 10 due to the emphasis on running Windows on low powered tablet devices. Then heartbleed etc hit and we lost a bunch of performance due to mitigation patches.

> Then MS Teams hit and we lost a bunch of performance due to crappy Electron apps.

FTFY

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#118

Post by napolux »

ratww wrote: post #42
napolux wrote: post #9

IMHO Juicero was a scam. Here's my list. * Too many remote controls. One for TV, one for AppleTv, one for PS5 if I want to see a movie on bluray, one for the Denon AMP, etc... There should be a standard for that. Something with a touchscreen and an API manufacturers should support. * Touchscreens in cars (already mentioned). My Toyota is not even capacitive and it's a car from 2017. More generally... Touchscreens whe…

> Too many remote controls. One for TV, one for AppleTv, one for PS5 if I want to see a movie on bluray, one for the Denon AMP, etc... There should be a standard for that. Something with a touchscreen and an API manufacturers should support There is a standard where you can use some keys in your TV remote to control your device via HDMI, but I never had a device compatible with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consu…

That covers just a subset of functionalities. Expose an API, give users one remote control with a touchscreen or a smartphone app and that's it. One device to rule them all.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#119

Post by napolux »

mhink wrote: post #15
napolux wrote: post #9

IMHO Juicero was a scam. Here's my list. * Too many remote controls. One for TV, one for AppleTv, one for PS5 if I want to see a movie on bluray, one for the Denon AMP, etc... There should be a standard for that. Something with a touchscreen and an API manufacturers should support. * Touchscreens in cars (already mentioned). My Toyota is not even capacitive and it's a car from 2017. More generally... Touchscreens whe…

> Too many remote controls. One for TV, one for AppleTv, one for PS5 if I want to see a movie on bluray, one for the Denon AMP, etc... There should be a standard for that. Totally agree, although just as an anecdotal experience: I was very surprised this weekend when I set up a soundbar with my TV, which immediately recognized it and did some configuration which allowed me to control the soundbar volume with my norma…

Yeah, but what if you want to control just something more complicated than the volume or basic stuff? You'll need its own remote.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#120

Post by sliken »

thefz wrote: post #114
sliken wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, very weird. Did you get Shimano or SRAM? Shimano generally seem to behave worse in the real world, at least on mountain bikes. Rain, snow, temp swings, grit, mud, etc seems to degrade them more than SRAM. Shimano also drives the upgrade cycle by not having user maintainable parts or even selling parts for older equipment. The shifters in particular are fragile, not user serviceable, and have incompatible changes…

SRAM. I came from a 11x X01 with a 5 year lifespan in which I maybe only changed the cable once. Zero maintenance and it ran like clockwork. The whole Eagle line has been a disappointment for me, from the bottom to the top products.

Wow, I've had really good luck with Eagle, I've talked to quite a few happy owners, was a huge upgrade over my previous shimano XTR. The year I got XTR it was quite the lemon, so much so that Mountain Bike Action (MBA) did an article on how terrible it was, I'd even get mocked by folks on the by folks recognizing the signature screech. Apparently the brake cylinders would fail, never retract, and the only fix was replacement, this combined with a light weight disc rotor with a particularly loud resonance. Very disappointing for a top of the line set of components.

In any case, sorry to hear it. I'm not shopping a bike replacement and leaning towards an ebike, but trying to avoid the Shimano EP8, which again has a signature noise, loud clunk/clanking on the downhills when not under power.

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