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Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

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Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#11

Post by commonlisper »

Programming languages! It is ironic because I am a programmer and I write programs and develop software for a living. But proliferation of programming languages has made my life worse. Too many programming languages and every company has their own favorites!

It may be an unpopular opinion on HN but I don't enjoy learning new syntaxes every year for relatively few benefits in new concepts or paradigms.

In my ideal world everyone would be using Lisp (my username checks out!) but so much power. It has a simple syntax (some say it has no syntax but I think that is a little hyperbole). In my ideal world new concepts and paradigms are implemented in Lisp using Lisp. I'd much rather spend time solving real problems that real human beings care about. I'd much rather learning new ways of solving problems with new paradigms. I don't want to waste hours learning new syntaxes and their gotchas and edge-cases!

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#12

Post by causi »

Automatic vehicle climate control. If the ambient temperature is hotter than the setting I get blasted with frozen air and if it's colder I have to sit in an oven until the car decides it's the correct temperature. I much preferred twisting a knob until the air hitting my face was comfortable. What is comfortable is altered by how active I've been, the time of day, the temperature I've been in before getting into the car, what I'm wearing, etc. Climate control doesn't give a shit about any of that.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#13

Post by PaulKeeble »

electrondood wrote: post #8

Anything that listens to your searches and uses that to tailor Youtube results, future search results, advertisements, etc. I miss the discoverability of the old internet, and I hate having to do 90% of my searches in Incognito. inb4 DuckDuckGo, etc.

I want both, tailored searches can be fantastically useful and provide a lot better results. But sometimes I am trying to get out of my own bubble of historical interest and then its a real problem.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#14

Post by anthk »

electrondood wrote: post #8

Anything that listens to your searches and uses that to tailor Youtube results, future search results, advertisements, etc. I miss the discoverability of the old internet, and I hate having to do 90% of my searches in Incognito. inb4 DuckDuckGo, etc.

https://wiby.me

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#15

Post by mhink »

napolux wrote: post #9

IMHO Juicero was a scam. Here's my list. * Too many remote controls. One for TV, one for AppleTv, one for PS5 if I want to see a movie on bluray, one for the Denon AMP, etc... There should be a standard for that. Something with a touchscreen and an API manufacturers should support. * Touchscreens in cars (already mentioned). My Toyota is not even capacitive and it's a car from 2017. More generally... Touchscreens whe…

> Too many remote controls. One for TV, one for AppleTv, one for PS5 if I want to see a movie on bluray, one for the Denon AMP, etc... There should be a standard for that.

Totally agree, although just as an anecdotal experience: I was very surprised this weekend when I set up a soundbar with my TV, which immediately recognized it and did some configuration which allowed me to control the soundbar volume with my normal TV remote.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#16

Post by throwawaytemp27 »

commonlisper wrote: post #11

Programming languages! It is ironic because I am a programmer and I write programs and develop software for a living. But proliferation of programming languages has made my life worse. Too many programming languages and every company has their own favorites! It may be an unpopular opinion on HN but I don't enjoy learning new syntaxes every year for relatively few benefits in new concepts or paradigms. In my ideal wor…

Good thing there are other languages for other peoples preferences!

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#17

Post by a_square_peg »

darkerside wrote: post #2

Car touchscreens are the worst. More complicated, more failure states, and I can't feel the volume button, so I have to take my eyes off the road.

Yeah - this one. I'm sure there must have been some accidents that occurred because it really requires you to shift your attention to the screen.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

#18

Post by rufius »

Smartphones - while providing great utility in some areas, they are generally too distracting without a lot of tweaking. They also result in me having to repeat myself at people fiddling with their phones instead of listening.

Chatbots - as others mentioned.

Laptops - encourage bad posture, lots of PT and exercise to improve that. Self-control as well.

Smart watches - same reasons as phone. Lot of good and a lot of bad.

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