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Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

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Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#261

Post by psv1 »

greggman2 wrote: post #168
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #88

'I'm being tracked' paranoia. I have to force myself to stop thinking about the ways may daily activities can be tracked. I find myself feeling increasingly paranoid, especially when reminded that my actions are available to faceless people and how they help to train systems that then exploit my 'humanness'. In fact, I imagine they will get so good that they not only exploit me, but use that very humanness to veil th…

Yes! I hate being tracked watching videos. I have a self identity I want to put forward. I hate being judged differently based on what I watch. For this reason there are plenty of shows I don't watch via streaming. If I really want to watch I'll find another way. If it's youtube I'll do it not logged in (it's possible it's still attributed to me but I doubt it). It's illegal for a video rental company to share your w…

> (it's possible it's still attributed to me but I doubt it).

It's still attributed to you.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#262

Post by zupa-hu »

kkarakk wrote: post #250
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #23

Motion-sensing automatic doors can be opened by deer, bears (which has led to some excitement in hotels and hospitals), and even birds. I've seen birds that can activate the doors in the hardware store near me, and that know where the birdseed is on the shelves in the garden department.

yup my favorite story of animals adapting to human environments is dogs riding subways in Russia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJf2L2B5fY

Hilarious :)

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#263

Post by Aeolos »

FDSGSG wrote: post #247
onion2k wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practical terms speeding actually makes very little difference to your journey time. Eg if you have a 100 mile drive on a 70mph road and you drive the entire way at 85mph your reward is saving about 10 minutes on a 1.5 hour trip. The downside risk is getting charged for speeding and being delayed for much more than 10 minutes. I've never though the cost/benefit shows it to be particularly worthwhile.

There are exceptions to this though. If you're driving through Europe at night you can easily spend most of your trip on highways safely going 180kmh or faster, saving you many hours on longer trips.

180kmh at night is definitely not safe on a highway. Even with perfect visibility during daytime, anything above 150-160kmh is pushing it for most of the highways I've traveled in Europe.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#264

Post by muffelsong »

That orchestration technologies like k8s and OpenShift generally make services less stable and less performant. IMO not an unexpected consequence, but clearly an unintended one.

I guess this would not happen if people were to use the above technologies with stateless services only, but they don't because the majority of articles, blogs and documentation on the subject leads people to believe that using network based storage for your io intensive state full services is good practice.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#265

Post by danieltillett »

cweathers30 wrote: post #32

I just saw a video of a woman getting hit by a bus because she had her headphones in and looking at her cell phone crossing a crosswalk. Not really her fault, but I guess I would have heard a bus coming.

As tragic as this is, how is this not 100% her fault. Was the bus running a red light?

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#266

Post by StanislavPetrov »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #111
JDiculous wrote: post #98

Depression. People are spending the majority of their lives staring at a screen, and then wondering why they're depressed. In the moment it might not feel lonely. Exchanging DMs and posting on Reddit / HN / social media might feel like real communication. But ultimately there's a sense of emptiness to it, and it can't substitute real flesh-to-flesh human connection. But it feels like we're always expected to be on ou…

This is the exact position i am in right now. I crave the outside world and human contact like a drug. I am not clinically depressed, just in a state of constant longing for social interaction. I keep telling myself my work will allow me to one day enjoy the outside, ironic really.

Join some sort of a club. A bowling league. Some sort of scheduled team activity. The less competitive leagues will be filled with people looking to just socialize, unwind and have a few beers once a week.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#267

Post by Eremotherium »

geggam wrote: post #170
heavyset_go wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_is_theft

Completely opposite of the nations foundations, I had no idea the concept of property being theft was actually entertained as a feasible concept "America's Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself. Thus, through the common law, state law, and the Constitution, they protected property rights" https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-ha…

1. Property is theft is an anarchist position. While libertarians (as you cite the Cato Institute) and anarchists have an overlap of some positions, they are greatly at odds in others.

2. Whenever somebody starts telling me what the Founding Fathers thought I expect some BS which is only there to support their opinion and is so lopsided that it might as well be called a lie.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#268

Post by Dowwie »

I've used Google maps directions assistance for many trips but still enjoy driving somewhere unfamiliar the old fashioned way: using written directions, paying attention, and maintaining a sense of location. I don't remember the feelings associated with driving the old fashioned way. Clearly, driving assistance technology has made driving much less stressful, but also prevents people from acquiring important navigation skills.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#269

Post by trianglem »

gorgoiler wrote: post #167

Journey time calculations in Google maps, Uber etc. mean no one I know is ever on time. If you need to be somewhere at 8:30 and the journey “takes 17 minutes”, one psychologically sets 8:13 as the deadline for leaving the house. You pick up your keys at 8:13, actually leave a few minutes later, hit traffic or take a wrong turn or two, and end up crossing the threshold at your destination fifteen minutes late. It’s no…

I feel exactly the opposite. Google's estimates are usually accurate down to a couple of minutes for me.

Re: Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

#270

Post by muzani »

concordDance wrote: post #259
muzani wrote: post #178

We've learned that better tools doesn't actually create more productivity. Lots of people talk about how they dread email. A singular mega tool like Facebook or Evernote isn't great. Lots of disparate little tools isn't much better. We've learned that data is unreliable. The highest click through rates come from nudity, or totally gross things like gore and trypophobia triggering holes. The highest CTR on text comes…

> We've learned that better tools doesn't actually create more productivity. Lots of people talk about how they dread email. A singular mega tool like Facebook or Evernote isn't great. Lots of disparate little tools isn't much better. I'm struggling to figure out what you mean by this. Obviously it's not literally true (I've saved my colleagues thousands of hours with some of the tools I've made), but I can't figure…

I think it's more like some people walk in the office, comment and tag on Trello, reply emails, deal with messages on Slack, convert and forward files on Dropbox. Then it's lunch.

After lunch, they reply to some more emails, take a meeting on Zoom (waiting half an hour for that one guy to fix his microphone). Then they have 1 hour of work before the evening scrum stand-up, which is done on Slack or Zoom because half the team is remote.

But the CEO doesn't use Slack and his inbox is always full, so we forward him a report on WhatsApp, which has to be converted to PDF, which he then manually puts in his Prezi presentation for a client meeting tonight.

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