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

371–380 of 498 posts

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

#371

Post by taurath »

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.

Note that there currently exists a line that prevents auditory distractions - the farm on the side of the road can put up signs but they can’t blast music or AM Radio from a loudspeaker. IMO it’s still about as distracting to the senses.

I think the real difference is a whole generation who is used to linear TV has convinced themselves they can somehow tune it out. This isn’t true, but they’re much more likely to be against restrictions since it “doesn’t effect them” that much.

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

#372

Post by psyc »

rsp1984 wrote: post #231

The web experience. I long back for those days where you used to be able to just type in a URL or click a link and arrive at a webpage without much fuss about it. If the page wasn't what you were looking for, NBD, you just moved on. The experience nowadays is more like: * Google for thing XYZ, wait for some seconds until the result page layout is final due to additional crap being loaded in the background * scrolling…

You must be logged in to do that! That username is taken. Please use a stronger password. Check your email for a confirmation link. Or check your spam folder. Or check your spam folder in 5 minutes. Now do this captcha. Now do another one. Please fill out required bio fields. An admin will email you once you’ve been approved.

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

#373

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jfrunyon wrote: post #346
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CPUs [...] you can pry my 16 core Threadripper and its 64GB of RAM from my cold dead hand. Some of us use computers for things where more CPU cycles per second and more RAM are always good things.

But you don't have more CPU cycles per second. And the software you use takes several times as much resources to let you do... basically all the same things you could do a couple decades ago.

I couldn't do physically modelled audio synthesis in real time on ANY processor of that era.

Now I can do a ton of it, though not enough to represent a full orchestra.

And I could not compile 600k lines of C++ in 4 minutes on any processor of that era.

Now I can.

The fact that desktop environments have gotten "heavy" has essentially zero impact on the compute-heavy tasks that are important to me. If I was a video editor (I'm not), the same "progress" would apply there too.

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

#374

Post by [deleted] »

jfrunyon wrote: post #346
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CPUs [...] you can pry my 16 core Threadripper and its 64GB of RAM from my cold dead hand. Some of us use computers for things where more CPU cycles per second and more RAM are always good things.

But you don't have more CPU cycles per second. And the software you use takes several times as much resources to let you do... basically all the same things you could do a couple decades ago.

[deleted]

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

#375

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…

> 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 browser. Sure.

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

#376

Post by trash3 »

cmh89 wrote: post #369
danskeren wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit is literal evil. Last time I used the new Reddit, the up vote scores and comment counts change in real time on the screen. Like what the fuck.

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

#377

Post by rc-1140 »

jhickok wrote: post #323
math_denial wrote: post #37

1. Information hoarding, distraction and FOMO The Internet has generated in me an habit of information hoarding. At the beginning I would bookmark useful information and then take notes on paper of the useful things; with the passing of time distraction has started to creep in: more and more useless information, more and more FOMO. 2. Omnipresence of tech and privacy concerns An increasing number of actions require e…

>Information hoarding, distraction and FOMO You know, I used to jump from one thing to the next never giving anything enough time. I would attend digital conferences, watch PARTS of courses on Pluralsight, LinuxAcademy (RIP) and youtube, hoard books, bookmark websites etc. Something happened a few years ago where I was able to just turn it all off. I deleted all my pdfs and removed all my bookmarks. I began focusing…

It's funny that you say this, I've been meaning and trying to go through the various pdfs and other ebooks I've stockpiled. I usually look at a book's title and go "oh, that looks incredibly useful" after having briefly skimmed the contents and unless I'm immediately working with it, I shelve it.

It's peace of mind that I have the material, but I've noticed that various items in there are either old or not as good/useful as I had thought prior. Your comment has given me a bit more impetus to try to focus on deleting stuff (pdfs, ebooks, bookmarks).

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

#378

Post by speby »

Better AND Worse? Streaming video. The convenience of on-demand and a sort of a la carte experience that we've always been clamoring to have since the days of "regular" Cable TV are here. And while that's nice and convenient in manys (i.e. high-quality streaming feeds of many kinds of both live content, popular shows/movies, and past/old movies and shows).

The downside is now it's a huge pain in the ass to remember what streaming network has what, in some cases down to which show's seasons exist where. Example? Yellowstone TV series (w/ Kevin Costner). You can watch the first 3 seasons on Peacock. But Season 4? Only on Paramount Network. Oh and don't get confused with Paramount Network versus Paramount+.

It's an upgrade in some ways but offset but incredibly frustrating and annoying experiences trying to figure out where shit lives in order to watch it.

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

#379

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…

The sales pitch for icons is that they can be better than words for some purposes.

The play/pause icons on a miniature Japanese cassette player are a good example. No need for localization, efficient use of space, learn them in a couple of interactions. Now universal.

‘Icons are good sometimes’ is not a spit on words.

I’ll happily concede that icons are hard to look up. Tooltips are a smart mitigation for this problem, where available.

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

#380

Post by Li7h »

math_denial wrote: post #95
rg111 wrote: post #83

Learning. From my childhood, I have always loved to learn new stuff- all kinds of interesting stuff. Before, when I became interested in something, I looked it up on the net, read books, and asked people about resources. But with "feed"s, everything went downhill very quickly. When more and more resources became available, I struggled to keep up with them. There were not only too many resources I came to know about o…

Thank you for summarizing years of inquietude. I thought that I might have ADHD, but my "symptoms" started when I realized that I could never catch up to all the information that the Internet is presenting me daily. I wish I had a solution to let it all go. Anyone?

Buddhism?
Post reply on HN