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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?

#51

Post by qorrect »

commonlisper wrote: post #11

Programming languages! It is ironic because I am a programmer and I write programs and develop software for a living. But proliferation of programming languages has made my life worse. Too many programming languages and every company has their own favorites! It may be an unpopular opinion on HN but I don't enjoy learning new syntaxes every year for relatively few benefits in new concepts or paradigms. In my ideal wor…

> some say it has no syntax

That was always my impression, you're writing the AST directly, then manipulating it with fancy macros.

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

#52

Post by qorrect »

darkerside wrote: post #2

Car touchscreens are the worst. More complicated, more failure states, and I can't feel the volume button, so I have to take my eyes off the road.

Car touchscreens are actively making the world a more dangerous place to live in. And everyone seems ok with it.

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

#54

Post by cassianoleal »

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…

It works well with the Apple TV, the PS5, the Samsung soundbar I've got and probably others that I can't recall...

I still use their dedicated remotes though, as they have the full functionality whereas CEC only deals with some.

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

#55

Post by newscracker »

This is not new or recent, but printers, photocopiers and projectors have always made my life confusing and painful. What should’ve been simple and what could’ve been intuitive has been made hellishly complex and unwieldy. The scene in Office Space showing them smashing a printer and the scene in The Office (US) where Pam is utterly defeated by a new copier [1] aren’t just jokes.

On relatively recent technologies, Bluetooth is unpredictable and finicky across different devices. One cannot effectively carry over one’s learning from one Bluetooth device to another. One cannot predict how a particular new Bluetooth device will work (or not) with one’s existing devices.

And then there are USB-C ports and cables. They all look alike, but you’d never easily know what it supports (which cable is the right one, power delivery, how much power can/will it handle, data transfer speed, is it Thunderbolt, etc.).

I can’t imagine how non-technical people roll the dice with all these and how much they must hate technology.

[1]: Season 5 Episode 19 (“Two Weeks”)

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

#57

Post by valbaca »

commonlisper wrote: post #11

Programming languages! It is ironic because I am a programmer and I write programs and develop software for a living. But proliferation of programming languages has made my life worse. Too many programming languages and every company has their own favorites! It may be an unpopular opinion on HN but I don't enjoy learning new syntaxes every year for relatively few benefits in new concepts or paradigms. In my ideal wor…

~~Simple~~ JavaScript is eating the world. ClojureScript compiles to JS.

I'm convinced that Clojure will be the lisp-uber-language.

EDIT: I shouldn't have said "simple"; nothing ever is. I was being arrogant.

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

#58

Post by lxe »

"Smart" hardware requiring an app to do simple things. The whole space produces tings that are so convoluted to set up, prone to constant failures when wifi goes down, suffer from security issues, ergonomics, and probably steal loads of personal data.

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

#59

Post by feoren »

commonlisper wrote: post #11

Programming languages! It is ironic because I am a programmer and I write programs and develop software for a living. But proliferation of programming languages has made my life worse. Too many programming languages and every company has their own favorites! It may be an unpopular opinion on HN but I don't enjoy learning new syntaxes every year for relatively few benefits in new concepts or paradigms. In my ideal wor…

> I don't enjoy learning new syntaxes every year

I don't understand why you need to pick up every new language that comes out. Can't you just hold down one job for longer than a year?

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