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

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171–180 of 498 posts

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

#171
1. Monitors.

Things are finally improving but LCDs made me stop playing Quake and Unreal Tournament during the mid 2000s and into the early 2010s when 120Hz panels (TN of course) started appearing at reasonable prices.

2. Lunches with coworkers. No longer a thing for many of us but boy I've had enough lunches with 20 somethings glued to their phones the entire time. What's the point of going together, bruh?

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

#173
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be reassuring to know that most of the things you interact with are actually too bandwidth constrained to care about those things, and the algos you interact with are fairly obvious and explicit (Feeds, curated things, etc)

I used to think this, until I happened across FullStory. With that tool you can replay a website visitor's exact session as if it was recorded live on video -- everything they typed (even if it was cleared and never sent in a request), where/when clicks happened, the contents and response of every request, etc. As a backend engineer, I had no idea that frontend monitoring was this advanced, but apparently it is. So n…

> everything they typed (even if it was cleared and never sent in a request)

Okay, wow, that sounds rough...so in a way, phishing attacks don't even require you to login anymore, just typing the password or maybe 75% of it is enough to get you.

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

#174
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.…

I basically don’t encounter any ads in my day-to-day life, digital or physical. I have no TV, and use uBlock Origin (including annoyances lists) on laptop and phone. I live in a tiny rural town so that practically the only advertising posters within a 35km radius are first-party advertising on two or three Telstra public phone booths, and in the decent-sized towns 40km away in either direction there’s barely any more…

You'd fall into a fit of hysteria in Tokyo! Advertisements as far as the eye can see in the city center. Oh yeah, and everything talks...the bus, the vending machines, the constant jingles in the convenience stores, and if you can understand what it's saying -- well take a guess about what it is.

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

#175
post #92
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.…

> Advertising 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.

[deleted]

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

#176
post #92
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.…

> Advertising 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.

I think it’s glossed over that people are neurologically different, and some people are actively distressed by advertising. I consider it a matter of accessibility, as soon as some block of color moves on the side of the screen, my attention is stolen from me. Maybe that’s a disability on my part, but it makes the web feel actively hostile.

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

#177
post #133

Logging in. First I need to make an account for nearly everything. Then I need to link that account to a phone number or email. Then every time I use the service I need to wait for them to text or email me a password. If they email me the password then I have to log in to my email, which means getting another password texted to me. Alternatively if it's work related I have a physical key card, a physical password gen…

What's a physical password generator? Sounds interesting.

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

#178
post #86
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe not advertising completely but at least targeted advertising. Non-targeted advertising is still distracting. Why not ban it completely? Or perhaps allow dedicated advertising places, so everybody can be happy.

I used to think that too but a complete ban probably doesn't work well. What else would you be banning? Bumper stickers and logos on cars (get rid of the Apple logo on the back of your Mac), yard signs for political campaigns, newspapers, I mean there's a lot there. And then once you start selectively allowing it then you also create hyper-competitive scenarios for the ads that are allowed and I'm thinking if you do…

>I'd say it's local, and lets people know what your business is and what services you offer.

>I'd ban targeted advertising in any form.

Aren't these at odds? Genuine question, I just don't see how you can ban targeted advertising in any form while allowing people to advertise locally on the Internet for one thing. Then, similarly to TV ads, no targeting skews the advertising pool to huge players that can overspend (I swear half the ads on TV are car companies) and companies whose product are used by everyone (consumer products, restaurant chains, etc).

I don't have a mind made up with what's the solution. I too see clear problems with targeted ads when it comes to privacy and manipulation, I also have expunged ads from my Internet, but an outright ban has other issues. If you are an SMB with a niche or local product you simply can't afford advertising to everyone and hope the 1% subset you are aiming converts enough to make it viable. Maybe I'm wrong but I think there's a large amount of SMBs and self-employed jobs that would straight up not exist if it wasn't for targeted advertising, that has societal value in and of itself.

I'm ambivalent overall. On one hand I wouldn't mourn the death of all advertisement, on the other I'm not sure how you make a product, service or SMB known without it and I doubt most of my friends' product, service or SMB would exist without online targeted advertising for finding customers. IMO the solution is more akin to giving more privacy rights and options than an outright ban, granted I have no clue if that is enforceable or how to implement.

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

#179
post #83

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…

Thank you for summarizing years of inquietude. I thought that I might have ADHD, but my "symptoms" started when I realized that I could never catch up to all the information that the Internet is presenting me daily. I wish I had a solution to let it all go. Anyone?

Acknowledge that there's no need to catch up to everything, and that you can narrow your interests to a few things that really interest you, and study them the old fashioned way, with no blinking lights.. just a book, some quiet time and possibly accompanied by a hot cup of coffee.

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

#180
Home Appliances and devices in general.

Everything is becoming touch based these days. As a blind person, this means a lot of devices are unusable or almost unusable for me. As long as it's something in my own place, I can find alternatives, but that's not possible for devices I don't own. PIN pads on POS systems are the most egregious example here. Since I live in Europe, I can either use Apple Pay or give out my PIN to whoever is nearby.

Apart from that, tech has improved my life massively. It's impossible to overstate how much assistive technology has improved in the last 15 or so years. Most smartphones and computers now have a great and free screen reader, can read print, recognize currency, allow us to communicate with the sighted world, let us read almost any book in existence and watch most contemporary movies, at least the popular ones for which they made a special audio description track. None of that was possible 15 years ago, definitely not for the price of a normal smartphone.

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