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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?

#471

Post by appleflaxen »

throwawayboise wrote: post #251
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #89

Earlier 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.

Does advertising (as a form of speech) have any societal value?

If not then I think it's reasonable to restrict (time, place, and manner restrictions are recognized as being consistent with 1st A).

But maybe you can think of some value I can't.

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

#472

Post by dTal »

throwawayboise wrote: post #251
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #89

Earlier 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.

Excuse me, some photons appear to be leaking off your property and onto mine.

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

#473

Post by eatYourFood »

dexwiz wrote: post #149
notacoward wrote: post #132

Manual 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 think this is in part due to how quickly software is developed. Since reqs > mvp can be hours, days, or at most weeks, there is a lot pressure on designers for quick turn around. My friend is an Industrial Designer, and works on Faucets, probably one of the last interfaces replaceable by a touch screen. Their design pipeline is years long. They build multiple prototypes and mock them with real humans, and get the s…

>> Since reqs > mvp can be hours, days, or at most weeks

"at most weeks".

I've seen MVP's take far longer than that and still be considered minimal. Minimal is contextual.

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

#474

Post by dTal »

tfehring wrote: post #84
Nextgrid wrote: post #58

Earlier 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.

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…

It's absurd that we're so dedicated to the god of Capitalism that we've had to invent a special term ("negative externalities") to describe the basic premise of ethics - "being selfish is bad".

The "economic value" of billboards shouldn't even be a question. It's self-evident that billboards benefit the owner of the billboard at the expense of everyone else. Nobody looks at an empty patch of sky and wishes there were an advertisement there instead.

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

#476

Post by dTal »

Nextgrid wrote: post #58
chrismorgan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Counterpoint:

You can escape online advertising by walking away from the computer.

There's nowhere you can walk to escape physical advertising. Maybe the desert.

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

#477

Post by benhurmarcel »

throwamon wrote: post #468
jfrunyon wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit used to be amazing. "Just pick a username and password. Give us your email if you want to be able to do a password reset." Now an email (with verification) is required and you'll still get insta-shadow-banned.

Actually, no, an email is not required. It's a dark pattern. You just need to click "Continue" without entering any email address.

Some subreddits (like /r/linux) will delete your comments if you don’t register an email though.

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

#478

Post by looshch »

lordnacho wrote: post #106

1) Privacy / surveillance. There's a lot of things that govt and corporations don't really need to know about you, but now they do. 2) Attention. The double edged sword of easy information is that digital junk food is also easier to get. You can read Feynman lectures or catch up with the Kardashians, up to you. 3) The idiots can find each other. There's no village idiot anymore, they've gone global.

came here and scrolled down only to find #3. Resonates with me so much

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

#479

Post by jfrunyon »

mikewarot wrote: post #418
jfrunyon wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting a step in your "reasonable approach". How do you expect a user to know whether or not they should grant access for HN.exe to talk to 127.0.0.1 or for mikewarot.exe to access some file? The reality is the sort of system you suggest almost inevitably ends up being the same as broad permission-based security like current mobile OSes have, because the only scalable decision is "give it access to all res…

Consider cash in your wallet... you quite easily hand out tokens to clerks for transactions. Instead of a dialog box run by an application to open a document, you have the OS do the same thing, and enforce the decision of the user. As far as the user interface, the same steps would happen, but security would be radically improved. Broad based permissions are horrible kludges, and make explaining fine grained capabili…

Oh, that's great. Good to hear that the user interface will totally be the same.

ring ring Hey mikewarot, my computer is asking me if I should grant TotallyAGoodApp.exe access to C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\sam. I went ahead and said yes because I wasn't sure.

Clearly you've never worked in any kind of remotely user-facing position.

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

#480

Post by jfrunyon »

WalterBright wrote: post #401
jfrunyon wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 necess…

> It does not overwrite anything nor does it make anything invisible Sure it does. It causes the renderer to reverse direction, which overwrites the previous characters. It's EXACTLY this effect which allows for invisible malware insertion into code. Errors in ASCII are not justification for going bananas adding them everywhere. >> eurt ton > I'm not even going to address that other than to say LOL You could try. Som…

> Sure it does. It causes the renderer to reverse direction

Correct.

> , which overwrites the previous characters.

Wildly incorrect.

Again, you don't even being to understand what's going up, so please go educate yourself.

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