Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 498 posts

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

#361

Post by jfrunyon »

piperswe wrote: post #353
jfrunyon wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also enormous pressure from the public to be able to find things, especially in the case of... you know, a McDonalds on the interstate with people driving by who are from the other side of the country. ;) I don't think most people have a problem with honest ads. The issue is the billboards that tell you "There's something amazing ahead!" and you pay $10 to get in and it's a stupid doll. Or the collections of…

I think that logo signs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_sign ) are sufficient for helping the public find things.

Agreed, although those aren't present in all states (or even at all exits within states that use them).

Edit: actually... IDK. In some states they're just useless too (you get off the interstate and then you find the business that was on the sign is 10 miles down the road, away from the interstate). At least the "this far to " and "this way to " part on billboards is usually accurate ;)

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

#362

Post by dkdk8283 »

dijit wrote: post #245
dkdk8283 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m militant about disabling notifications. My phone is on silent 24x7 except for certain contacts that bypass DnD. I’ll get to it when I get to it.

I'm also this way: but I can easily see how it's easy to not be. It feels like every app asks to display notifications; and sometimes I think of how the functionality of the app could be negatively affected. (Uber, for instance, could notify me when my cab is nearby)- but once the power is given they can spam you with self-promotion.

iOS has something called time sensitive notifications which when allowed solve that issue, at least for me.

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

#363

Post by Daishiman »

jfrunyon wrote: post #343
TchoBeer wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you recognize that this is subjective? YouTube is way better than TV, imo.

Honestly... it depends if you have an ad-blocker. I would prefer TV to Youtube any day, if I had a TV ad-blocker, simply because the content is far more likely to be reasonable quality rather than a 20 minute clickbait video with 30 seconds of actual content.

Are you sure? When I used to watch Battlebots on Discovery channel it was basically 6 minutes of action wrapped in 10 minutes of fluff and 15 minutes of ads. Discovery Magazine had 3 sections per half-hour; comparatively speaking any science channel in YT will have way more content, and a lot of it really good for specialized audiences. Travel YT are way more up-to-date and useful than TV travel documentaries used to be.

There's a ton of really good Youtube channels, and the level of information density is astounding.

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

#364

Post by papertokyo »

miki123211 wrote: post #180

Home Appliances and devices in general. Everything is becoming touch based these days. As a blind person, this means a lot of devices are unusable or almost unusable for me. As long as it's something in my own place, I can find alternatives, but that's not possible for devices I don't own. PIN pads on POS systems are the most egregious example here. Since I live in Europe, I can either use Apple Pay or give out my PI…

Good to know it's not all bad.

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

#365

Post by BbzzbB »

ericmay wrote: post #314
BbzzbB wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd say it's local, and lets people know what your business is and what services you offer. >I'd ban targeted advertising in any form. Aren't these at odds? Genuine question, I just don't see how you can ban targeted advertising in any form while allowing people to advertise locally on the Internet for one thing. Then, similarly to TV ads, no targeting skews the advertising pool to huge players that can overspend (I…

When I say local I'm thinking like, you can have a sign on the sidewalk for your business or you can have a sign in front of your store or something. I wasn't clear on that - my bad. I so far haven't seen any benefit to me personally from targeted advertising. A lot of companies take information about me and my activities without a true way to consent and then use that to send me ads or try and find ways to make me a…

The benefit I highlighted is rather geared towards being an enabler of entrepreneurship, I myself dislike ads enough that I barely ever see one (outside Facebook, great HTML obfuscation there) so I can't pretend I'm a fan of it for product discoverability or what not.

>It's like if you made a business that depended on selling nicotine

Targeted advertising is not the reason why the modern Internet is addictive so the nicotine argument is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, those are separate issues. You could say, IMO rightfully, that profit motives are the incentive that pushed Internet companies towards addiction-optimization, but it would be equally true if you couldn't target-advertise.

>I'm also concerned about things like billboards, or the newspaper ad section that even when I call and ask them to stop I still get tossed into my yard or on the sidewalk. I don't want to see the billboard yet I'm forced to.

Not saying this is a good or bad idea, but if you ban targeted advertising and then all forms of IRL advertising, how do you even develop a new product or make your service known if you don't have access to a lot of capital to spam ads on TV, carpet bomb untargetted ads or buy/rent prime real estate for a store-front (assuming you have a store-business in the first place)? As much as I dislike both online and IRL ads too, arguably the latter more as I can't block it out of my eyesight, but I recognize/believe they are useful to foster SMBs and self-employment which seems, in my book, crucial for social mobility and a democratized capitalism.

Where I'm getting at is that I think (could be wrong, I'm no expert and am speaking from intuition) that expunging advertisement from our lives or making it extremely prohibitive (which I think would be the result of the rules you'd set) would simply further concentrate capital in the hands of large corporations or individuals with high means. I'm not saying your take is invalid but I'd be more inclined towards regulating the deleterious effects of advertising (privacy, advertising drugs or toys, intrusive or excessive panels, height and location limitations, ban some manipulative behaviors, false advertisement, right to opt-out or opt-in by default, etc) than outright banning them all, as much as I hate being advertised to.

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

#366

Post by Daishiman »

ploxiln wrote: post #225
jacquesm wrote: post #29

I 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 think this resonates with your point: https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm Basically, for the first 50 years, airplane technology advanced at an amazing pace. And people thought it would go on to supersonic aircraft and space travel, and they tried to make that happen, but it just didn't make practical sense, and today we use jumbo jets very similar to what was introduced 50 years ago, and the…

The big difference is that the advancements of the past came with an increased energy usage.

We have essentially reached a plateau in terms of energy costs and available energy; sending a rocket to space or making a car go round are limited by fuel consumption. Technological advancements in those areas are now devoted to either fuel efficiency, safety, and rent-seeking.

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

#367

Post by robotresearcher »

WalterBright wrote: post #336
robotresearcher wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 toolbars are usually configurable to use both. Finder panes have text-first lists and icon grids at your choice.

Not sure what your amazement is about.

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

#368

Post by WalterBright »

jfrunyon wrote: post #359
WalterBright wrote: post #354

Unicode. Unicode started out as a marvelous improvement. But then, it was infected by dementia. For example, check out this madness: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/11/hiding-vulner... where Unicode added code points that would cause the renderer to go backwards. Unicode looniness has also infected C++23: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p194... which is absurdly overcomplicated. Us…

> 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

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

#369

Post by cmh89 »

danskeren wrote: post #288
SamuelAdams wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I love Reddit and Wikipedia. You can make an account, but you don’t have to. Compared to say Pinterest, where content can’t really be accessed at all unless you make an account.

Reddit doesn't deserve the love. Forced to login to view content (for everyone that doesn't know 'old' exists), can't download their videos, ban bots that present a downloadable link, obnoxious popups to download their apps, unable to reject cookies on 'old.reddit.com' without first going to 'new.reddit.com' to set preferences, trick users into giving them your email, etc.

Hell, reddits' interface is so terrible and slow that its a basic requirement to get an account solely so you don't have to use it.

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

#370

Post by phendrenad2 »

Roads. I honestly believe that road signs are getting worse and more sparse. People use GPS, so why bother?

(It probably also affects road design, I.E. normally you'd want to keep offramps spaced out so people have time to react. But with GPS, you can cram them into a small space and people will mostly follow the right one.)

Post reply on HN