91–100 of 498 posts
Whatever many of these problems may be, I see pretty much all of my non-tech friends completely helpless in handling them. They're so fucked and don't have a chance.
I can fight back. I can help a very few other close people who care but don't know how to fight back.
And every. single. other. person. I. know. is screwed.
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.…
I get a lot out of using Search, Youtube, Maps, Gmail, Drive and all of Google's other services for free. Advertising probably comes out as a net positive for me if you take all of those into account.
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.
Learning. 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 o…
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…
Buying a PC in parts is not that more expensive than buying than a box from a retailer. The framework laptop is completely competitively priced with laptops of equivalent specs. DIY audio enthusiasts can buy speaker kits that have amazing performance for one third of the price of the "ready" one, and if a speaker or the amp goes bad, they don't need to buy a whole new kit.
It's consumers themselves that got that into that mindset that is not worth to invest time into building and repairing things. We need to start attaching a cost to disposing of obsolete tech, and you can bet they will quickly remember that they too are capable of doing things.
Not for me (I'm in LTR), but casual dating life. Tinder is distorting the market making it "winner(s) takes it all" type
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Today's tech can be cheap and repairable. Buying a PC in parts is not that more expensive than buying than a box from a retailer. The framework laptop is completely competitively priced with laptops of equivalent specs. DIY audio enthusiasts can buy speaker kits that have amazing performance for one third of the price of the "ready" one, and if a speaker or the amp goes bad, they don't need to buy a whole new kit. It…