My ability to read anything in long form, including books.
Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
331–340 of 498 posts
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#332Manual controls. There's a lot to like about the infinite reconfigurability of touchscreens and on-screen controls, but there was also a lot to like about being able to find controls without looking and getting positive tactile feedback when you pressed or turned something. This is especially true in cars, but it shows up in other areas (e.g. kitchen equipment) as well. Related: human-oriented design in general. Ever…
I recently moved and was wearing noise-canceling headphones while using the flat black minimalist buttons on my shiny stove and microwave and realized without hearing the beep it was hard to tell if I'd hit the button sensor. I had to wait and see how the minimalist alphanumeric display updated to know if I'd pressed the right little bit of text. People with disabilities or deafness would have a hell of a time.
> not what would actually be functional for users
Functional is ugly and ugly doesn't sell. This has been a problem with product design for decades: durability, usability, safety is all ignored in favor of whatever visual flair maximizes impulse buying. How the product performs when the owner actually uses it is irrelevant. Even worse dynamics are at play when it comes to advertising-supported software services. We've gone from a race to the bottom to a race to hell.
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of a less bad alternative to billboards, so I don't disagree with your claim, but I'll say that I didn't realize how much billboards suck until I spent time driving in Vermont, where they're banned. (I'm originally from Wisconsin, where the freeways have billboards for sex shops, CBD, fireworks, and fetuses every few hundred feet.) The driving experience is so much better without them that I'm pretty co…
That's a pretty dramatic change, as far as billboards go. I think most of the rest of the northeast still has billboards, but they are for, like, normal products.
Pretty much none of the country has billboards for "normal products" these days. They're either advertising a local establishment (i.e. "McDonalds! next exit!"), or they're advertising something that the TV networks/AdSense/Facebook wouldn't allow them to (i.e. CBD or sex shops or random religious nutjobmania).
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advertising is cancer and should die, but billboards and real-world display advertising is probably the least bad version of it. I'd prefer if online advertising (and the associated data collection and privacy violations) were nuked first.
That would destroy 90% of the tech industry.
Good.
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#335Cars. I appreciate all of the advances in emissions reduction, safety, etc., but when I was a kid I learned the basics of working on nearly any car on the market, and now even with an OBD scanner most of them are still near unfixable without visiting a dealership. Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine. That's just the purely funct…
> Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine. Any concrete examples of this? FWIW, cars are orders of magnitude more reliable than they were 40, 50+ years ago even though those were easier to work on.
Assuming that reliability is weakly inversely correlated with repairability (reliable things may be more complicated and thus harder to fix without specialized tools or knowledge), I'm sure there are subjective optima that balance the two and are more practical than the current extreme of maximizing reliability but being completely crippled at the slightest disturbance.
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#336Icons. I hate icons. Every app feels impelled to use icons, and even worse, invent their own due to trying to be cool, and avoiding the copyrights on other icons. 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 phon…
That argument applies to words too. The string ‘run’ has to be learned. So does the spoken version. So does the idea. And you have to relearn the word in each language.
> The string ‘run’ has to be learned
Yes, it does. And 'run' can be looked up in a dictionary. Even by someone who doesn't know English.
Not so for icons.
I am constantly amazed at the collective blindness to the enormous practical advantages of a phonetic alphabet. Steve Jobs was incredibly good at selling the emperor clothes.
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet you'll love these before-and-after photos of Sao Paolo after their outdoor advertising ban: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... Anti-advertising was one of the pet causes of Generation X, back before more pressing things like "the war on terror" and a financial collapse and health care crisis took the stage. And those are bigger deals, but man, advertising is just awful too.
Signs are ugly, but I don't think it's right to tell people they can't have a sign on their property. Property rights and freedom of speech are worth tolerating a bit of eyesore.
We frequently limit property rights and speech when it pollutes, disturbs, or otherwise negatively affects others.
Is this a limit on property rights or an expansion of viewshed rights? It all depends on perspective.
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#338I 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…
I don't think we can have 'too much' CPU or RAM. The stuff I'm working on as a single software consultant, give me a budget of 100k and I can put out software using .Net Core and Angular that you would have needed a 10 million dollar budget in the 90's to make due to code being tied up around the restrictions of hardware. The productivity improvements from fast CPUs and large amounts of RAM are enormous and enables s…
Sure, $100k, plus another $100k for the latest and greatest hardware every few years (or worse yet to rent a small chunk of not-latest-or-greatest hardware for a year), plus another $100k for the software licenses...
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of a less bad alternative to billboards, so I don't disagree with your claim, but I'll say that I didn't realize how much billboards suck until I spent time driving in Vermont, where they're banned. (I'm originally from Wisconsin, where the freeways have billboards for sex shops, CBD, fireworks, and fetuses every few hundred feet.) The driving experience is so much better without them that I'm pretty co…
That's a pretty dramatic change, as far as billboards go. I think most of the rest of the northeast still has billboards, but they are for, like, normal products.
No. The northeast has plenty of anti-abortion, sex shops, fireworks, CBD/marijuana (MM is legal in PA - any state with legalized dispensaries will have these billboards.
Don’t know what you consider a normal product but for truckers and people coming from NY adult stores and fireworks are “normal”
Re: Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I've just hit 40 and think tech now is far far better than it was in the 90s. Same with media, I loved things like TNG growing up, hell I'm currently wearing a "Make it Snow" christmas jumper, but it really shows its age now. What we do with that tech is another story. Tech is weaponised against us in every way, but that's not the tech's fault.
> Tech is weaponised against us in every way, but that's not the tech's fault.
Yes, it is. Because the tech was specifically designed for it.