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

I only go there on July 11 for "7/11 Day" when they give you a free slurpee.

So no ring-up, no problem!

College students often couldn't afford one of their own and it wasn't really thought of as a dire necessity. Plus there were pay phones everywhere which were cheap and unlimited for local calls.

Then local college sweethearts could call each other free from home or dorm usually on shared phones, with other callers often waiting for you to finish so they could use the phone next.

You could make arrangements to meet later at a certain time & place and after you hung up, that was it.

Not too easy to cancel after that when almost nobody had ever been in constant contact before, and so good sweethearts really concentrated on being there for each other.

I would estimate that more of the time apart was spent thinking positively about your partner when you can't be in touch, and letting nothing stand in the way of your appointed meeting (same thing everybody was doing), compared to how there is so much noise in the way with your own phone on you at all times. People don't seem to think about their sweetheart as much when they can just call anywhere anytime. And it's quite common for each person to spend more time on the phone itself doing things other than talking to their partner with it.

The type of strong relationships favored by the archaic limits on mobile communication & networking might be a thing of the forgotten past.

Lots of the less enthusiastic technology lovers still only had radios at that point.

Regardless of the electronics or the decade that spawned it, the unfortunate terminal behavior of that TV set was characteristic of what is known in electronic assembly as a "birth defect".

Quite possibly a single marginal key component or miswiring mistake, and from your account most likely not a vacuum tube itself and very much more unlikely the entire set of original tubes or replacements.

I wouldn't rule out a bad socket though.

Seems to have gone down in history as one of the most ridiculously premature failures people would always remember.

Anyway it did seem to perform normally for a short while before it just up and died, both times, and I think that modern electronics having an equivalent assembly goof-up probably would not even make it once.

So that may speak a bit about a preference for overly-robust engineered electronics that could be lost for decades now.

Entirely unfulfilled with this fateful TV, I know the feeling well but I think it has gotten much worse in the 21st century.

Even if only one tube socket was the cause of the failure, those sockets were what made it much more possible from the beginning for users to keep their own electronics running if they were so inclined, simply taking their own tubes to Radio Shack for testing at a minimum could accomplish a lot.

Not everyone would do this back then but it would be kind of equivalent to those who would rather not add extra memory to their PCs themselves. Neither one should you be doing willy-nilly. More of an upgrade here than a repair but you're still putting components in sockets.

Well a good bit of user repairability was once assumed because there was not any ingrained kind of disposable society, and the devastatingly senseless losses and massive-scale waste of World War II had still not dampened the spirit of Americans for things that last.

Then in the 21st century when digital TV broadcasts took over from analog using the same proven radio frequencies, power levels, and antennae, this was the first time a higher resolution picture was possible since way back when analog TV was standardized by NTSC. The picture's capable of being as perfect as cable when you have an interference-free signal, but that's a certain additional requirement for near-perfection that was however not met often enough.

Seems engineers "forgot" that analog TV was based on radio and the further you got from the broadcast station the worse your picture got until there was nothing but audio for a number of additional miles away from the antenna.

With digital you lost it all, abruptly, beyond a much smaller range.

Ever since.

And TV channels take a lot longer to change, the difference between zero latency and some latency is most uncanny. Like many things defying the type of expectations people had for progress after 1955, that were futuristically anticipated to be realized during the 21st century.

I have read two of Newport's books- Deep Work, and So Good They Can't Ignore You.

In Deep Work, he emphasizes on being comfortable being bored.

Actually the thing is, it is so easy when you have to choose between good and bad. Like- play that video game or read that research paper. Nothing hard about choices here, but when you have to choose between that research paper and some interesting non-fiction, or that great new blog and a conference video, that MOOC and that new language- it becomes paralyzing for me.

I am trying to figure out how to come out of this paralysis when you are choosing among many choices that are all good for you and going to benefit you.

I will give Digital Minimalism a try. Thanks for the suggestion.