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

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

#201

Post by kitsunesoba »

ok_dad wrote: post #43
frontman1988 wrote: post #25

Novelty Watching places and people on instagram/youtube for the first time takes away the awe factor of what could have been possible in real life. Imagine seeing the Pyramids for the first time in person vs watching them through a travel vlogger. Or visiting Japan in pre-internet era vs now when you have already read hundreds of blogs on what cultural differences to expect even before landing in the country. I know…

On the other hand (I know this is supposed to be a bitching thread, sorry): Imagine all the people who can now see these things who would never have been able to travel and see them in the past. I don't even think I could travel to half the places I want to see due to time constraints and my personal life choices (kids, etc.). I love being able to watch some videos of people walking in different cities or whatever, s…

More than anything I have the internet to thank for getting the initiative to travel abroad, which by extension made uprooting everything and moving to a different state a lot less daunting later on.

While there’s I saw no shortage of depictions of travel in movies and TV, the idea of traveling myself remained very abstract until I started reading on the internet about the country in question and what needed to be done to stay there long term back in the 2000s. While a vagueness remained until I actually did it, the internet helped a great deal to shape a faint idea into an actionable plan.

Could I have done that prior to the internet? Sure, if I had taken enough interest to make visits to the library and borrow books on the subject. That‘a a significantly higher bar to clear, though — the internet is much more whim-friendly. I could see myself never having traveled of this timeline took place a decade or two earlier.

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

#202

Post by TchoBeer »

jacquesm wrote: post #29

I think there is an 'optimum' level for technology of all kinds, below that you really want more and it is clear that there is room for improvement. But once the optimum has been reached any further additions will degrade the experience. Examples: Car controls: pre: direct taps and gauges plumbed into engine parts and such, real switches and levers. optimum: does what it should, not more, not less, more reliable than…

Do you recognize that this is subjective? YouTube is way better than TV, imo.

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

#203

Post by rudedogg »

jacquesm wrote: post #29

I think there is an 'optimum' level for technology of all kinds, below that you really want more and it is clear that there is room for improvement. But once the optimum has been reached any further additions will degrade the experience. Examples: Car controls: pre: direct taps and gauges plumbed into engine parts and such, real switches and levers. optimum: does what it should, not more, not less, more reliable than…

> nothing but eye candy

IMO, the real problem is the number of abstractions we've created, not the nice graphical stuff. The tech companies would be wise to start throwing truckloads of money at hiring game engine people and get help with the performance problems we have everywhere.

I'm not denying that things are more complicated now than in the 1990s, (unicode, high DPI displays, etc.), but we've completely abstracted over hardware to where it is no longer a concern of software developers.

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

#204

Post by jazzyjackson »

tiffanyh wrote: post #62
ok_dad wrote: 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.…

How do you discover information you’re not actively looking for? Eg maybe being environmentally friendly is super important to you. You don’t even realize that today the detergent you’re using isn’t as such. Advertising allows for someone to educate you that products exist that you’re not aware of that align to your needs/wants/desires.

I see the environmentally friendly alternative on the shelf next to the Tide, where are you buying your detergent that alternatives are not apparent?

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

#205

Post by errantspark »

mullen wrote: post #97
postsantum wrote: post #27

Not for me (I'm in LTR), but casual dating life. Tinder is distorting the market making it "winner(s) takes it all" type

It's always been that way. While I have never used Tinder (Been married during its existence) but when I talk to men that have used Tinder successfully and unsuccessfully, their stories sound just like my pre-Tinder dating life. To me, Tinder sounds like it just increased the velocity of success or failure.

I don't think it's always been that way, not exactly, the distribution gets less flat as people are able to make more optimized choices.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27089-8

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

#206

Post by riekus »

chrismorgan wrote: post #35
ok_dad wrote: 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…

Lived in hopetoun VIC for 1.5 year, left 6 months ago, what a beautiful area. Love the Grampians.

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

#207

Post by belly_joe »

dfghdfhs wrote: post #88
jacquesm wrote: post #29

I think there is an 'optimum' level for technology of all kinds, below that you really want more and it is clear that there is room for improvement. But once the optimum has been reached any further additions will degrade the experience. Examples: Car controls: pre: direct taps and gauges plumbed into engine parts and such, real switches and levers. optimum: does what it should, not more, not less, more reliable than…

Do you think it's possible that what you call optimum are exactly the state of things in your late twenties / early thirties? And anything more you just call "too much"?

FWIW I'm currently in my late twenties / early thirties and I also think the tech of 10-15 years ago was optimal.

Hypothesis 1: The 90s-00s really were the peak and it's not just a generational effect

Hypothesis 2: The nostalgia I currently feel is bad enough but oh god it's just going to get worse isn't it?

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

#208

Post by handrous »

jstx1 wrote: post #92
ok_dad wrote: 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.

We don't know what sorts of other free (volunteer-led) or paid services would replace these, if they went away.

For maps in particular, it seems to me providing high-quality mapping and traffic data should be a government service, with any competition being mainly over interfaces or add-ons to that. The basics of it seem like infrastructure—and also something the government should have already, in one form or another—and not something it's helpful to have lots of companies competing to achieve, or smaller companies being locked out of doing something cool with it because they don't have the resources to generate all that themselves and can't afford to license it.

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

#209

Post by teddyh »

hidden-spyder wrote: post #184
jstx1 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, I hate ads too, but don't think Google products or any other big internet companies would exist at the scale they do if ads went away.

Wouldn’t that be a good thing?
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