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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?

#381

Post by jfrunyon »

WalterBright wrote: post #368
jfrunyon wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where Unicode added code points that would cause the renderer to go backwards. No. That's not even slightly accurate to what those codepoints do and those codepoints are necessary for the correct presentation of LTR and RTL scripts. And what is that link? https://trojansource.codes/trojan-source.pdf

> That's not even slightly accurate to what those codepoints do That's what the codepoints do, which causes the renderer to overwrite the earlier text making it invisible and possible to add hidden malware. > and those codepoints are necessary for the correct presentation of LTR and RTL scripts. eurt ton

> which causes the renderer to overwrite the earlier text making it invisible

No. It does not overwrite anything nor does it make anything invisible. The only thing the codepoints you're referring to can do is make things appear out of order (and that's a bug in editors for not rendering them as special characters, not a bug in Unicode). There are invisible codepoints (such as ZWSP) but they also have are also necessary and again, a failure to render them as special characters is an editor bug. And they don't make anything else invisible.

(* There have also been other editor/renderer bugs such which might result in crashes or disappearing text, but those are from failures to be compatible with Unicode, not from Unicode)

You need to go read the paper I linked (which is linked from your blog post), not a 3 paragraph blog post.

If you think that these are errors in Unicode, then I have some errors in ASCII and a text editor that treats NUL as end-of-file to sell you. Control characters have always been necessary and will always be necessary.

> eurt ton

I'm not even going to address that other than to say LOL

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

#382

Post by noneeeed »

sofetch wrote: post #102
noneeeed wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure I remember reading about a city (somewhere in south america I think) that banned all billboards, and it was like the city was reborn.

Sounds like the São Paolo Clean City Law: https://newdream.org/blog/sao-paolo-ad-ban

That's the one! Such a good idea.

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

#383

Post by stnmtn »

dijit wrote: post #241

I grew up in the 90's, when I turned on the TV the audio was being output immediately and the actual display took a second to warm up. a second. Now my TV takes about 30s to start up, it's actually constantly on standby mode. It takes a good 5-10 minutes to actually boot from cold. using the UI feels sluggish, there's proprietary "applications" which clog up the main screen and I'm told it spies on me. Not to mention…

I haven't had this experience at all with my new TV I bought this year.

It boots up in quite literally 3 seconds and I can navigate to netflix or the criterion channel right away and begin playing stuff there

I can even mirror my phone screen directly to my TV with with my phone's built-in functionality, which has actually been useful more times than I would have expected!

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

#384

Post by robotresearcher »

WalterBright wrote: post #375
robotresearcher wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dictionary is tech that addresses this problem for words. There are some catches, like you have to guess the language up front. And you have to know the ordering, eg how to look up Chinese characters. Tooltip is tech that address this for icons. Again, a partial solution. Image search can help in a pinch too. I don’t see anyone claiming that words are bad. The iPhone uses icon+word on the launch screen and Mac toolba…

> I don’t see anyone claiming that words are bad. That's what the sales pitch is for icons. > are usually configurable to use both Don't forget all the uses of icons where it is molded into the button. Take a look at your car's dashboard. > iPhone uses icon+word on the launch screen Only for some items. The bottom row on my iphone does not have text. Of course everyone knows that the needle in circle launches the bro…

I’m pretty sure that cockpits have glyphs instead of words because it’s known to be faster/more reliable to recognize them than word labels, and language is not an issue.

Cockpits are expert user interfaces.

Some icons are better than others, and some are bad. I’ve never loved the burger menu button, for example.

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

#385

Post by rokhayakebe »

jtwaleson wrote: post #124

Spending way too many resources and making it seem fine. Driving 100s of km every week like it's normal. Flying 10x per year. Turning the heat up in winter while wearing a t-shirt. This is an age of extreme luxury and we don't realize it. That and addiction to my smartphone. I hardly read books anymore, while that has always been one of the great pleasures in my life

This is an age of extreme luxury

But hasn't every age been one of luxury for those who lived it?

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

#386

Post by WalterBright »

robotresearcher wrote: post #367
WalterBright wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Dictionary is tech that addresses this problem for words. There are some catches, like you have to guess the language up front. And you have to know the ordering, eg how to look up Chinese characters. Tooltip is tech that address this for icons. Again, a partial solution. Image search can help in a pinch too. I don’t see anyone claiming that words are bad. The iPhone uses icon+word on the launch screen and Mac toolba…

> you have to guess the language up front

I don't know many people who have no idea what the language of the country they're in is. For languages on the internet, cut&pasting the text into google translate works fine. Google infers the language.

> you have to know the ordering

Not necessary. Even for Chinese. I bet you could quickly infer the ordering of a script unknown to you by just flipping through the pages of a dictionary. This is impossible for icons, as icons have no order.

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

#387

Post by rokhayakebe »

swozey wrote: post #67

Read receipts make me not even want to talk to people. I want to be able to walk away and go do my own thing and not possibly offend someone that it took me hours to reply or didn't reply at all. It feels so invasive to me and my time.

Not a problem. Every time I give my contact I let people know it may take me a few days to reply and I am ok if they take time to reply to my messages. I tel them if it is urgent, I will add a note on top of the message. People who have a life are not offended by this.

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

#388

Post by rokhayakebe »

bambax wrote: post #78

> What things has tech made worse in your life? Parenting!

This one is big. As a parent it is easier to turn on Cocomelon than actually spending time playing with your child. And when you actually turn off the TV and you decide to play with them, you cannot do this for one hour without checking your phone.

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

#389

Post by jfrunyon »

Havoc wrote: post #219

OTPs. Can't get into steam cause need the password. Can't get password cause lastpass is freaking out. Then can't get into email cause that wants an OTP. Find phone. Unlock phone...unravel chain of OTPs from there. ...I just want to play my game

Speaking of Steam and OTPs... enforced OTPs.

In order to sell crap I get out of CSGO crates, or even to give gifts to friends on Steam, you have to be enrolled in "Steam Guard". Which is their (of course proprietary) OTP - which displays a notification specifically to allow the code to be viewed on lockscreens 'cause that's a great idea. But then half the times it doesn't even display the notification until after I've unlocked my phone and opened the Steam app and opened the menu and gone to the Steam Guard page.

And then not only do I have to do that whole process every time their servers are down and the client logs me out because hurrdurr timeout means lost session right?, I also have to do it every time I want to log in to their website (say, because someone sent me a link to a game I want to buy).

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

#390

Post by robomartin »

Music on iOS. How old are iPhones and iPods before that? Why is it that I still can't import a library of CD's I own and play the "Dark Side of the Moon", "The Wall", "Brandenburg Concerto", "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" or Mozart's "Requiem" from start to finish as one complete work?

To be fair, I haven't checked in a few years. Last I checked this was still impossible. Years ago I tried and it was an abysmal waste of time and effort.

I have an extensive collection of CD's and none of them are on my iOS devices because I can't listen to albums as albums, in order, as indivisible units.

I don't understand this. What do Apple employees listen to? One hit wonders?

This was worked just fine on Windows Media Player from day one, literally decades ago. If MS brought back Windows Phone and the media player behaved just as the desktop versions does, I would switch from iPhone in an instant.

This, BTW, is the reason I no longer buy iPads. A Windows-based tablet is a perfect travelling companion. I have unrestricted access to the file system, USB ports, HDMI and more. I can carry my digital books (which are 100% in PDF format) and my music and videos are easy to manage and can be played back in sensible ways. On top of that, they are great business machines for presentations, etc.

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