Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life? | Hacker News Reader

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

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Growing up I always enjoyed tech and was excited for all the problems tech can solve and all the improvements it can make and has made in my life. However, recently I had to check-in into a doctors office using a 3rd party software and the process is incredibly worse for the patient. Normally, I walk in, tell them my name and sit down. Now on my phone, I have to enter my DOB, answer a few questions, "Accept" some consent forms every time. They will not see me if I don't use the system. Then, at the end I am greeted with an advertisement for a medication.

Another one, recently had to call comcast as they were charging my parents $70 for what they are offering for $20, I play the call of "i want to cancel it is too expensive, AT&T cheaper". They recently "improved" their phone bot and added some "amazing" features. I am saying I want to cancel service/speak to customer service, and this thing goes and tells me it is restarting my modem.......then for the next 15 minutes I cannot reach anyone at comcast because my modem is restarting, every time I call I was getting, "We are restarting your modem call us back later GOODBYE!"......I swear things like this just make me want to go live off-grid somewhere.

View on HN

Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage.

Social media. I feel like if it weren't for these algorithms that prioritize "engagement" over facts and polite content, my country would be a bit less polarized. I think that social media will turn out to be like cigarettes and someday we will discover that it has an extremely bad outcome; at least how it's implemented today. I have come to enjoy HN a bit more lately, as I just don't engage with the trolls or the horrible people that have opinions I disagree with vehemently. The people I think are horrible, at least, because it's a personal opinion, and other's might view me as a horrible person. I have also learned that it's best not to judge someone by one or two views overall, here, and that helps. I wish more social media could be like HN and allow a diverse set of opinions, but ban the name-calling and such that really take things into a bad place.

Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. Perhaps it's the old man in me coming out, with a rosy view of yesteryear, but I think that the quality of things are just lower, in general. I do think that things "look nicer" and are more consistent, but at a lower level of quality. 20 years ago, I had only 5 or so choices for any given product, maybe a curtain rod for example (because I just bought some). Today I can go down to several stores and pick from hundreds of curtain rod designs that look really nice, but half of them break after a few years or less. I still have some shitty looking but sturdy curtain rods from 20 years ago, no joke. Electronics are worse in some ways, but faster and more complex, so maybe that complexity is the source of the decrease in perceived quality. I can say that computers are way faster now, and it's easier to do many things, but I have less freedom than I had with older computers for sure.

This is just about the end of my old man rant. Thanks for listening.

"The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt..."

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.

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. The nearest billboard ads of any sort would be over a hundred kilometres away, in Horsham, Ballarat or Bendigo, and not much at that.

When I go down to the big smoke (Melbourne) I find the prevalence of billboards, side-of-bus ads, &c. physically distressing—and then they make it worse by using screens for them so they can change their contents, make them glary, &c. and it’s just awful. And it becomes ever more and more intrusive; Melbourne’s trains used to be safe spaces, then they put billboards on the platforms, then scrolling billboards, then ads in the carriages, then animated billboards on the platforms, then billboards with speakers on the platforms, and I wonder just what they’ll come up with next. I really dislike the city. There’s a reason I moved out into the country.

As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know. Maybe if you grow up with it you don’t realise quite how obnoxious it is?

I have concluded that display advertising is just fundamentally bad and that our society would be better if it were outright banned in all its forms. I would even sympathise with vigilantes that went round demolishing and vandalising billboards on principle.

> Advertising. I know this is an extreme view

I think your view isn't too extreme enough, frankly. I feel like if I took the time I could compose a lengthy essay showing that we can directly blame advertising for a significant portion of societal ills. Advertising promotes narcissism, selfishness, and entitlement; it convinces you that you need things you don't need, happiness can be bought, you what you have isn't good enough; it lies to you, it lies to you about lying to you, and it makes you think this is normal. And that's all when it isn't trying to outright scam you.

> Social media.

Mostly bad because of advertising.

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion.

A bit more of a stretch, but since advertisements lie and tell you the product costs less and is 'just as good', it leads to a race to the bottom.

Thoroughly agree about adverts. Have you read Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants"?

On the social media thing, I find they are always better when they just show you the things you've asked to see, in chronological order. It's all this algorithmic "hey, your aunt's brother-in-law's gardener just commented on a post by someone you don't know" bullshit that causes the problem. If I just look at Twitter posts from the people I follow it's fine, it's just my friends talking about stuff, the moment I make the mistake of following a trending topic link it's a cesspit.

And yeah, a lot of things seem to be cost engineered to the point where they are designed to look ok, but not last or take much punishment. But that's less about tech, and more about us as consumers, we seek to minimise cost and so that's what manufacturers go for.

I've thought a lot about what plagues our modern world and I've come to the same conclusion. I'm at a loss for what can be done about it though.

We can't very easily ban advertising. Any regulation has to be lightweight because it's nearly impossible to enforce at internet scale (as we've seen again and again).

Curious if you've thought about any ways to fix the problem we're in.

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion.

People forget how (relatively) expensive products used to be. Example: my family had a very early VHS video recorder. I believe it cost ~$1000 in the early 1980s. I may be misremembering. But that was a lot of money then. So of course it was worth repairing. Labour was considerably less expensive in terms of percentage of outlay costs. That's why it was justified.

Computers came along and you had a bunch of chips on a board, some of which were worth replacing. But each interconnect costs money. Each external package costs money. We've seen the rise of complicated SoC chips that basically do everything in one chip. These are overall cheaper to fab (compared to 2+ chips) and have lower build, integration and interconnection costs.

The downside? If it stops working, you just throw it away (or at least replace the entire SoC). And if the SoC is relatively cheap, it's not worth paying someone to order a replacement and replace it (with or without soldering).

So really what you're missing is tech being very expensive. Personally I prefer what we have now.

There are other downsides to modern tech (eg Internet-connected TVs to insert advertising) but durability just isn't one of them.

Just last night I was thinking about how much of my life is wasted watching advertising on TV. 15 minutes is worth more than a few dollars to me.

I was watching a movie on the Roku Channel. Because the channel is free, it's got commercials. The more I watched, the longer the commercials got. At some point I gave up and turned it off. The movie is 132 minutes long and there are 10 stops for commercials. The last commercial was 2 minutes.

I'd rather pay for a subscription than watch commercials and I will definitely not pay for a channel AND watch commercials.

I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned.

It's not an extreme view at all; some cities (like São Paulo) have essentially banned billboards, for example, with decidedly positive effects.

I'm quite confident that we'll eventually come to see rabid, out-of-control advertising (which is about 90 percent of it) as akin to smoking, leaded gas or asbestos - and that eventually it will be regulated accordingly.

> but half of them break after a few years or less

One of the biggest downsides is that these type of things contribute to pollute our world twice: when they are made, when they need to be trashed away. Brands that have products that in average break after a very short time should be banned or shouldn't be sold at all.

Agree. I particularly hate advertisements in public spaces. I often consciously try to avert my eyes, it's like pollution to me, just visual/mental.

I like trade shows. “Pull” advertising, not “Push”. As an engineer and a professional, I appreciate trade shows as a form of advertising in a symbiotic sense. We need great vendors. Vendors need great customers like us.

The collaboration between suppliers and customers is the bedrock of how the world works. Without some form of advertising, it would be stagnant, dysfunctional and basically dead with vendor lock-ins and monopolies. Advertising allows exposure and enables a free market economy.

That said, most consumer advertising is toxic and pushed down the throat. But it works otherwise Google wouldn’t exist.

Maybe not advertising completely but at least targeted advertising. Many problems and borderline unethical business models stem from targeting.

Ads are pointless. No matter how much human capital was invested in making targeted ads possible, only very rarely I see something that I might be interested in buying. And I can't remember a thing that I bought due to ads. They are a better signal of what to not buy.

Spec sheet advertising, that's what I have been rambling about to anyone who'd listen. I would also add that the advertising should go ibto a catalogue of sorts, so if you're specifically out to buy things you pick one up (look it up online?) and look for tjings to buy. But you don't get pestered to buy anything when you're just out and about doing anything else, I think along with manipulation that's one of the main problems with modern advertising.

Recently, I've been buying more stuff from non-Amazon retailers. I bought a pair of basketball shorts from Macy's, and a reading light from Home Depot. I'm tired of getting burned by those weird Chinese brands (with ALLCAPS brands) on Amazon. The physical stores gave me a few choices (that were all pretty decent) and I got to inspect the product before buying, rather than roll the dice with an online order. So I'm rediscovering old shopping.

I don't think we can ever rid ourselves fully of advertising (even acknowledging that it's annoying for users and makes the web experience markedly worse, it ultimately is useful for companies/marketers). What we can and should get rid of is targeted advertising, i.e. the more effective, invasive variety.

Yes all forms of advertising should be banned. But, it will never happen. So, better not to get too excited with the idea.

> Advertising

I get a lot out of using Search, Youtube, Maps, Gmail, Drive and all of Google's other services for free. Advertising probably comes out as a net positive for me if you take all of those into account.

“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.” - Stephen Leacock, long before computers, much less the internet, were a thing.

I really hear you on the product quality, but that is more the result of business systems.

I find it so frustrating that I struggle or fail find quality products - for everything from forzen pizza to jeans. For some cases (frozen pizza) I just opt out. Others, I just give up and accept that I'll have to replace my jeans every 2-3 years. I try to buy recommendations from Wirecutter and do slightly better, but still so annoyed that everything is made so damn cheaply.

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion.

Planned obsolescence is pervasive - it's hard to have endless growth when you've reached market saturation. It's also incredibly hard to go against the grain here, as it's really difficult to judge how long something will last without intimate knowledge of the product.

> I know this is an extreme view

Doesn't mean it's wrong!

This is an under appreciated point about web3. We can get away from the ad-based business model. Web2 has an adversarial relationship with the user, web3 is much more aligned with the user.

https://www.jonstokes.com/p/web3-the-rise-of-the-aligned-web

I'd just like to point out there was a lot of easily broken crap back in the day, too. Durable items from the past are over represented in both our memory and in the physical world.

Furthermore, truly durable items still exist. One of my favorites are my Osprey packs, which I have had for nearly a decade and expect to last for another few decades.

It's really easy to avoid intrusive ads these days: don't waste any time on TV, sign out of social platforms, use Brave, or any browser with adblocking - you're 99% done with it. As for more subtle kinds of advertising, banning it would require killing media, publishing, entertainment, and even large swaths of education.

I work in digital advertising. I manage several billion impressions a year in ads spend and over $15M a year. I think it's easy for engineers to undervalue the importance of advertising. Without marketing, many many well-engineered products would never be discovered. This is why marketing is considered a core function of business. It speeds up the integration of new products and technologies into the general society. It seems like you're lumping all advertising for all products into the same category. It's more likely you just don't like seeing ads for products you don't like. And this is the goal of contemporary digital ads: To only show products to users who are likely to purchase them.

Human beings have ideas that organize themselves into formal groupings that need to be formally promoted in order to sustain the cost of the business. Products need to rapidly scale. And marketing/advertising makes that possible. Hating advertising is like hating the dollar for being necessary to exchange value in society.

We need advertising to make the products you engineer viable business ideas. Without advertising, 99.9% of good product will never be discovered.

Advertisements are violent, they are invasive and manipulative. Agree, they should be illegal.

I agree with your sentiment, and I think that having profit incentives tied into fucking everything is actually a horrible idea and makes many things worse for living in society

I came to say Advertising as well

I doubt it has the effectiveness that people say it has when they are everywhere.

yup. We should be able to opt-in instead of having to opt-out of the slew of digital ads we see daily.

How do you discover information you’re not actively looking for?

Eg maybe being environmentally friendly is super important to you. You don’t even realize that today the detergent you’re using isn’t as such. Advertising allows for someone to educate you that products exist that you’re not aware of that align to your needs/wants/desires.

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 the old stuff, easy to fix and relatively cheap to fabricate
  too much: touchscreens. For everything.

(ICE) Car electronics:

  pre: carburettors, bad winter starts, bad fuel consumption, pollution
  optimum: EFI, highly reliable, aftermarket parts interchangeable between brands
  too much: DRM on everything, parts won't even fit same model a year older, are ridiculously expensive and unreliable to boot

TV:

  pre: two channels, black and white, bad image quality, crappy small screens
  optimum: 20 channels or so, in a way already more than you can consume, good quality color image, fairly easy to see screens (say, up to 3' across).
  too much: wall-to-wall screens that intrude on your privacy every chance they can, inability to build up your own collection of content (DRM), pay *for ever* for the same stuff
  way too much: youtube.

CPUs:

  pre: 8 bits, too slow for many applications, nice and better than an abacus though
  optimum: 1990s OS, very little eye candy, just enough to take the edge off, fast, and enough horsepower to do meaningful work
  too much: 2020 OS, nothing but eye candy, reduced functionality, telemetry, spyware, forced updates that are just as likely to improve things as they are to leave you stranded

and so on, you get the idea.

Technology has and always will have a place in my life. But my car is a 1997 model that doesn't phone home to the factory, has buttons instead of menus, my phone is a Nokia, and so on. Technology is my slave, not my master.

Do you think it's possible that what you call optimum are exactly the state of things in your late twenties / early thirties? And anything more you just call "too much"?

FWIW I'm currently in my late twenties / early thirties and I also think the tech of 10-15 years ago was optimal.

Hypothesis 1: The 90s-00s really were the peak and it's not just a generational effect

Hypothesis 2: The nostalgia I currently feel is bad enough but oh god it's just going to get worse isn't it?

I don't think we can have 'too much' CPU or RAM. The stuff I'm working on as a single software consultant, give me a budget of 100k and I can put out software using .Net Core and Angular that you would have needed a 10 million dollar budget in the 90's to make due to code being tied up around the restrictions of hardware. The productivity improvements from fast CPUs and large amounts of RAM are enormous and enables small businesses to use or make custom, niche, high-quality tech for next to nothing, just get someone who knows HTML and javascript well enough. It really lubricates society making us all less rigid and dependent on huge corporations and their access to capital and investment to produce social change.

Most Win95 applications were way snappier than any recent Webapp I've used or developed.

Sure, $100k, plus another $100k for the latest and greatest hardware every few years (or worse yet to rent a small chunk of not-latest-or-greatest hardware for a year), plus another $100k for the software licenses...

Another automotive 'advancement' is headlight bulbs you can't replace yourself - what used to take a few minutes now requires a trip to the dealer, so they can presumably dismantle the front end

Unlikely both would blow, but I'm a little surprised more fuss hasn't been made about it from a safety standpoint; considering being able to see where you're going tends to be important - I believe in France you can get a ticket for having no washer fluid.

This is why I love my Tacoma. Here's the 3-minute tutorial on replacing the headlight bulbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbZc8shIvQ

Then again, everything else about it is dated, especially the engine.

What makes/models do that?

they probably do it so people don't replace the lamps with the wrong shape bulb which can be very dangerous

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

When I go to youtube, I'm looking for something.

But I will see the front page of crap in my peripheral vision and wonder about the millions of people who click on that garbage. Sometimes I'll even look at the names for a second and think how it's the same few names always, and how crazy that they somehow get all the attention in the world for some nonsense.

For that matter, now I see people use the word "influencer" as if it sounds perfectly respectable to them, and it shocks me every time.

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.

Maybe being better than TV was a bit of a low bar to shoot for. Youtube has super good stuff but it's like with email: there are very good emails and then there is the spam. But there is no youtube 'spamfilter'. Hm... idea?

Ivan Illich has a similar idea about technology and people becoming slaves to technology instead of the other way around, starting at some "threshold".

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 they still work better than the more advanced alternatives.

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.

> nothing but eye candy

IMO, the real problem is the number of abstractions we've created, not the nice graphical stuff. The tech companies would be wise to start throwing truckloads of money at hiring game engine people and get help with the performance problems we have everywhere.

I'm not denying that things are more complicated now than in the 1990s, (unicode, high DPI displays, etc.), but we've completely abstracted over hardware to where it is no longer a concern of software developers.

There was definitely spyware and bloatware in the 90s. Remember popups? Or winrar? Remember how illegal copies of windows (that never got security patches) were used in DDOS attacks (and more recently ransomware attacks)?

I agree there is too much eye candy, especially in phones.

What you are seeing here is the natural pro(re)gression of all technology. It only gets worse, it doesn’t get better. They will always be abused by the worst of society.

And then we did new technology to “fix” the old technology. Kind of a ponzi scheme if you ask me.

>too much: 2020 OS, nothing but eye candy,

I wish. Clearly you missed the early 2010s, with skeuomorphic/glass design everywhere. I would have preferred that over the flat/featureless designs we have today.

Very selective memory... You've picked the most streamlined from each older generation, and compared it to the noisiest of the current generation. Though driving a car (I'll assume a manual that you can maintain, not an automatic with the monstrous blackbox analog computer) that is a quarter-century old and using a flip phone in 2021 is legit boomer cred. [thumbs up emoji]

> 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.

Algo-paranoia.

Every time I interact with a remotely "clever" system, I keep thinking how my input will feed some machine. How fast do I scroll, what is in my viewport. What do I listen to and when. Is this an A/B test? Will something I do on a whim affect that machine to predict something incredibly stupid tomorrow?

It only became obvious recently, as I was readying an actual, physical book. The relief to realise that the publisher won't optimise the font based on how fast I turn the pages. And the disgust at that aspect of tech.

And to what end?

It should be reassuring to know that most of the things you interact with are actually too bandwidth constrained to care about those things, and the algos you interact with are fairly obvious and explicit (Feeds, curated things, etc)

I used to think this, until I happened across FullStory. With that tool you can replay a website visitor's exact session as if it was recorded live on video -- everything they typed (even if it was cleared and never sent in a request), where/when clicks happened, the contents and response of every request, etc.

As a backend engineer, I had no idea that frontend monitoring was this advanced, but apparently it is. So now we all have to be extra paranoid, because _any_ website could be using this tool to "spy" on everybody.

Of course, it _was_ very helpful to us in tracking down some issues (ever tried to tell a customer how to send you a HAR?). And I assume that operating with an adblocker and blocking nonessential cookies will prevent or hamper the output for us more technical types. Even so...

This isn't reassuring at all. People also said the gov didn't have the bandwith\storage\processing to record every call. Then we found out it was also happening with our emails too

It's not and even if it were it could be pre-processed locally as to reduce the data volume. It's safe to assume that everything you do on Instagram, Tik Tok is taken into account. Those are spyware and will intrude on the filesystem, on the clipboard history and wherever else they can.

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 emails to get done, this rises privacy concerns. When I was 14 enrolling in high-school meant filling a form in pen and paper and bring it to the administrative office. 11 years later, my sister needed an email and personal information on the net. I really don't like it.

3. Affliction due to envy

I haven't used social media since I was 19 but HN and reddit are not really better: there are a lot of thing that I just wish I could forget and fill me with envy that I would have never felt if I had never read about that particular thing. It is obviously irrational being envious of something that you didn't event wanted in the first place, but the irrationality of that feeling do not make it less real and painful. Sometimes I do a 30 day diet and I do not visit HN or reddit, but the feelings never really go away.

4. Ephemerality

I still have some books passed by my great-grandmother belonging to my great-grandfather during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. I still have all my books from middle- and high-school. These required passive maintenance: just put them on the shelves far from fire and done. On the other hand I've lost entire years of data (photos, books, notes) during a single incident that rendered my physical back-ups useless.

>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 on single thing at a time (usually in reference to certifications or new skills), and it made such a difference.

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).

I did the same thing.

Used to hoard data, bookmarks, pdfs, etc.

Then I put all my data on an external drive and into some bin in the garage, deleted all my bookmarks and stopped saving them. And then realized... I don't need any of it. It's all just mental baggage.

Nowadays if I find an interesting article and don't have time to read it I might leave it open for a day, but then I just close it. I discover new interesting things to read every day, no need to bookmark something I probably won't ever get to.

I actually got the motivation to delete everything except what I need daily. I had more than 19000 e-books: more than 280GB. I've decided that I will now download a book or an article only if it is part of a larger project instead of junk collecting.

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 PIN to whoever is nearby.

Apart from that, tech has improved my life massively. It's impossible to overstate how much assistive technology has improved in the last 15 or so years. Most smartphones and computers now have a great and free screen reader, can read print, recognize currency, allow us to communicate with the sighted world, let us read almost any book in existence and watch most contemporary movies, at least the popular ones for which they made a special audio description track. None of that was possible 15 years ago, definitely not for the price of a normal smartphone.

Good to know it's not all bad.

Logging in.

First I need to make an account for nearly everything.

Then I need to link that account to a phone number or email.

Then every time I use the service I need to wait for them to text or email me a password.

If they email me the password then I have to log in to my email, which means getting another password texted to me.

Alternatively if it's work related I have a physical key card, a physical password generator, and a slew of personal passwords I just memorize. I have to keep all of these on me just to log in: regular keys, cell phone with service, email, key card, password generator, and ideally a different password memorized for every service which need to be changed every 60-180 days.

Maybe an example is needed, this is a typical day: I want to use the building's front door, so I use the key card. I want to use my office door so I use my regular key. I want to use my laptop so I use a memorized password. I want to connect to the network so I use my physical password generator with a memorized password. I want to read an encrypted email so I use a memorized password. I want to download a file from a document share with another company so I use a memorized password and get texted a password. I want to use the computer lab so I use a key card and a memorized password and another key card and another memorized password. I want to buy something online so I create a new account with a memorized password and get emailed a password so I log into my phone with my thumbprint and my email with a memorized password and get texted a password. Then I buy the thing with a credit card number and code which I've memorized since I get so much practice memorizing things now. I probably verify my identity a hundred times every single day, and businesses seem to be adding more and more ways to do it, making it more and more difficult.

I remember being impressed by my grandfather's keychain when I was a child, thinking "wow, how can someone need this many keys?" ...

It seems like no matter what improves in this area, something else breaks it. At first using a password manager helped. So now everyone wants to email or text a code if they don’t recognize the device/browser. But there’s a checkbox to remember the device/browser! And I find more than half the time the checkbox has no apparent effect.

There’s like a Murphy’s Law of Logins: Whatever frustration can be caused, will be.

For logins that are important, I appreciate the extra security of 2FA and am not frustrated by it.

Also, for many people they re-use the same password for everything, so enforcing 2FA makes sense for them as well

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.

What's a physical password generator? Sounds interesting.

Could be referring to diceware https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

I use 1password for everything, and as great as it is, it isnt a seamless and bulletproof solution. No password manager is. The log in experience is EVERYWHERE and I have to generate new passwords seemingly everyday for new sites and apps.

A token generator, a little device where you push a button and get a password. Sorry that the language was confusing, I wanted to make the point that tokens, codes, keys, whatever they want to call them are another password.

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.

First off, you absolutely do have to make an account to participate on Reddit. Second, screw Reddit, between shadowbans and required external IDs to register and the various new anti-user design updates... No, they're not a positive example of anything anymore.

get a password manager. some of them are quite good and will even fill out usernames and passwords which makes maintaining a junk account for non essential websites easier to use

Globally: Having to create accounts for everything. And thus, having passwords, public keys, private keys, password managers, etc. etc.

Subscriptions for almost anything: "I don't want to subscribe to your service, I want to buy a product and never hear from you ever again"

Still WAY too much "white background" everywhere -> it hurts my eyes...how are we still having WHITE backgrounds???

Spending WAY too much time charging devices.

France and many places in Europe still NOT equipped with decent fast access to Internet

Mobile phones: Spending time with people without having them or myself scrolling their phone is difficult to obtain

Planned obsolescence:Phones are full of proprietary/encrypted stuff on a hardware or a software level making them useless after some years...

We still don't have a fully Free (as in Free software) and viable operating system for mobile platforms -> which leads to a pile of Android versions...not even mentioning Apple.

The fact that phones are still nowadays closed-object that we do not control at all.

Job Market: After more than 10 years of career, two master's degrees and a PhD being asked for a tech job whether I know how to code is annoying. Biologists, Physicists, etc. hired as "computer people" and ensuring the recruitment of programmers The creation of "DevOps" or "full stack developers" -> Being an actual admin sys, developper, network admin are separated things, with actual difference in skills and knowledge. Let everyone have their job, thinking you can have the perfect mix in one person is a myth.

Finally: The fact that private software, private platforms win everytime: TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, Discord, etc. -> all private, all preying on us.

> Globally: Having to create accounts for everything. And thus, having passwords, public keys, private keys, password managers, etc. etc.

I have 592 passwords in my password manager :-(

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 on topics that interested me, I also came to know about a lot of topics themselves.

There were not only too many things on things, but there were too many things!

I feel a lot more pressurized, a lot more agitated and anxious because I know about so many different kinds of things that I would be interested about and I am sure (at least in my mind) I would be good at.

These things range from a new programming language or a framework, to a new region and its culture that I suddenly came to know about.

The resources come as articles, essays to books, GH repos, MOOCs, and even diplomas.

I am so grateful because of the internet and specific kinds of social media because I got to know about a lot I otherwise would have missed, and my life would have been completely different. But after a certain amount, or velocity, things go to the dogs.

I believe there is a rising curve that plateaus after a certain distance in the X axis where Y is learning and acquiring knowledge and X is flow of information.

Before, learning was just super fun, and now I am often paralyzed in my free time and I do nothing so that I don't mourn not doing other things, and end up doing nothing.

I am thinking of ways to put a stop to this, and have so far come up with a few ways.

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?

I also started thinking if I had ADHD, but I still have one good habit surviving from single-digit age- reading books.

Despite everything, I manage to read 25-30 books each year.

And these books are always either very long novels or non-trivial, high-quality non-fiction.

I also manage to get immediate works done through time-blocking, and pomodoro (don't need pomodoro for stuff I really like).

But these techniques don't save you from being "reactive"- doing stuff that is needed right in the moment, and nothing else- behaving like primitive animals.

I can get hard, intensive work done, read books, learn hard concepts, but still lack very seriously in long-term action-taking (used to be good at this before).

Trying to solve these.

Acknowledge that there's no need to catch up to everything, and that you can narrow your interests to a few things that really interest you, and study them the old fashioned way, with no blinking lights.. just a book, some quiet time and possibly accompanied by a hot cup of coffee.

Buddhism?

It used to be that information was rare. So to find it you had to use tricks like knowing what person in the village had some books or knew how to do that thing you heard about.

Now information is abundant, so abundant in fact that it's clearly impossible to fit even 1% of it into your head in one human lifetime.

So the meta-skill is figuring out which of the finite number of things you actually want to learn. I suggest going upstream as much as possible. Are there any topics where your interests converge before they split off to many disciplines? Read books about that. The more you can get upstream of stuff the eaiser it is to tell where real novelty and interesting information is (in my experience).

If I can suggest a book: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

I had a lot of the same feelings you describe here. Reading this and actually making tangible changes to my habits helped me rediscover my love of learning. Ultimately, the solution for me was to force myself to be bored. I set artificial limits for myself when consuming content online (for instance, I use the procrastination features here on HN and I deleted all "feed" apps on my phone, like Reddit).

I found that once I was bored, my free time became so much more enjoyable and it was easier to deliberately work on something.

Thank you for your suggestions.

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.

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 down while mentally hiding all the crap that big G is trying to sell you
    * finding something that looks interesting and clicking on it
    * being greeted with a cookie settings popup from hell, figuring out how to get it out of the way without becoming an advertising target for the rest of your life.
    * Trying to find the close button for the video that starts auto-playing in some corner of the screen.
    * looking at the site, scrolling, getting another full-screen pop-up reminding you to subscribe to their BS newsletter or their paid service
    * etc..

These days I spend less time on the web than 20 years ago. Back then it was a quirky, endlessly interesting place to explore and spend hours in. Nowadays I have a hand full of sites that I visit and trust, but other than that I kind of use my computer (or phone for that matter) like it's 1990. The internet experience has become really unbearable.

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Exactly. Thanks for reminding me.

I often find MS Edge usurping my exact URLs (ex: example.com) and turning them into search queries. It's infuriating. It also feels like auto-complete for URLs I visit frequently has been sabotaged to inflate search numbers.

I reach for my smartphone the microsecond I have idle time. I can't read things longer than 280 characters.

I had, or rather still have, this exact problem.

The way I could cure this a bit is by starting to read books again. Now when I'm in the train I just read a book instead of scrolling through Reddit.

I've also deleted Youtube and Reddit from my phone, which also helps. But brains adjust quickly, so now I start visiting Youtube via browser instead of the app. But I do feel better about that whole situation, now that I started reading again.

The problem is, that I only feel like reading while travelling to work or elsewhere. When I'm at home, the temptation to sit in front of my PC is just too high. While working from home, I'm in front of a screen for like 95% of the day...

Thanks for this comment. It will make me put down my smartphone. (After writing this comment of course.)

I think many of us here struggle with this. Some may not even be aware or ashamed to admit, it's a problem.

I can only imagine the vicious circle of decreasing attention span it creates.

Yeah, I need to work harder at just leaving the damn thing alone. It's become like a nervous tic :/

I've had that problem as well. The one thing that helped was getting rid of all social networking on the phone. That means no apps and I don't even log in to HN on the phone.

Just turn it off sometimes. It really helps.

Novelty

Watching places and people on instagram/youtube for the first time takes away the awe factor of what could have been possible in real life. Imagine seeing the Pyramids for the first time in person vs watching them through a travel vlogger. Or visiting Japan in pre-internet era vs now when you have already read hundreds of blogs on what cultural differences to expect even before landing in the country.

I know it's still a wonderful experience to see things in reality. But I am sure the experience is dampened due to the endless dopamine consumption we saturate ourselves with.

On the other hand (I know this is supposed to be a bitching thread, sorry):

Imagine all the people who can now see these things who would never have been able to travel and see them in the past. I don't even think I could travel to half the places I want to see due to time constraints and my personal life choices (kids, etc.). I love being able to watch some videos of people walking in different cities or whatever, since I know I have maybe 2 overseas trips left in me.

Having been to plenty of places in my youth, though, I can say that seeing the Eiffel Tower on video and climbing to the top (twice in two consecutive days; man my legs hurt) is way way different, but for someone who couldn't go there, it's probably great to see the videos. Also, maybe if people saw the wonders in their own backyard, that would be a good idea, versus watching other wonders on video.

In the last few years I feel like we've reached "notification hell". Technology used to be a tool that was used when needed, now it constantly demands our attention.

I feel like something is always beeping at me across countless services and just stresses me out.

Windows beeps every time I click anything now, every app wants to spam notifications every our, Jira, countless chat apps, email, even the credit card machines at Target have gotten more aggressive...

Do-Not-Disturb mode on all your devices, 24/7. It stops all notifications, messages, dinging, buzzing, phone calls, everything. Huge, instant, and permanent quality of life improvement. I've been doing it for a few years, now, and I could never go back to life with my phone dinging and lighting up like Reno ever few minutes.

A lot of people think they can't do it (OMG what if I miss that one important call out of thousands?), but I lost that anxiety after about a month. So nice to use my phone on my own terms and review my missed calls when it's convenient for me.

You should be issuing commands to your computer, not the other way around.

I have it that way (especially Messenger, Slack). Otherwise, I would go crazy (literally, I get meltdowns from sensory overload).

The problem is that people EXPECT an answer soon-ish. Otherwise, they assume the lack of goodwill. Furthermore, nowadays less and fewer people use longer emails.

In a few workplaces, I committed to answering emails. I clarified that I might not read Slack unless for a pre-arranged meeting. Each time they considered it bizarre yet accepted (since it was a hard requirement from my side).

I hope to set a path for other neurodiverse people who lack such chutzpah.

And, in the company I run, Basecamp is the primary communicator to create an email-like asynchronous communication culture.

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.

DND and similar only delay the problem - the notifications still pile up in the background.

Instead, treat the problem at the source by preventing these notifications from originating or reaching you in the first place. Don't sign up for accounts unless absolutely necessary, don't install apps if possible and if you do then deny notification permissions, and for emails that are technically necessary but don't require your attention set up some email rules to automatically archive them.

The problem is that in a lot of cases, technology shifted from a model where it solves a problem and the user pays for it to a model where it's either an ad delivery mechanism and the advertiser pays for access to the user's eyeballs, or a future ad delivery mechanism currently funded by VC money but that will in the future turn into the former.

Even paid products that you'd think would have nothing to do with ads are affected, as there's still someone on the inside whose salary depends on increasing "engagement", I guess since anything could eventually be turned into an ad delivery mechanism and they're keeping their options open.

My sleep.

I used to use smart phone before I lie on bed before bedtime. I know that I shouldn't use them. But the dopamine generated by digital devices and internet is too cheap. When I am unhappy or under pressure, I tend to use my smart phone. And I am always unhappy or under pressure recently. Then I use smart phone before sleep. Then I fall asleep very late. This creates some vicious circle. The worse my sleep is, the more unhappy I am.

I can no more live with a digital device in the same room before bedtime.

Before I go to bed, I have to leave all my digital devices, except for kindle, at first floor. Then I return to my bedroom at second floor. Without them, I can finnaly sleep well.

It's batshit crazy that we'd fill our houses with extremely bright nighttime lighting and entertainment that out classes the most lavish, exclusive medieval or Roman imperial festival, all available on-tap every single night in every room of our house and tunable to our every whim, and not expect it to completely ruin sleep patterns for a high percentage of the population.

"People have trouble sleeping. Could it be lack of sunlight? Stress? Personal moral failure?"

Hahaha, OK, yeah, maybe those things a little, but maybe let's start with the thing that's very obviously most of the problem if we're trying to solve this (which we aren't, because no-one can give up their infinite carnival)

only two industries where customers are known as “users”…

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.

> The idiots can find each other.

Connecting the mentally ill and intellectually disabled and feeding them enraging misinformation in order to sell the maximal amount of advertising is not a business model that history is going to look kindly on.

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

I feel number 3 in my bones.

Signal-to-noise ratio.

There is just too much stuff going on, information, news, good/bad tech, entertainment, people doing their things, the list goes on.

We were blissfully ignorant of all the information that exists in the world. It's impossible to keep up with everything that's happening, you're always behind, even finding out when/how to care or where to look for actually good content is hard.

Everything has to be generic enough to account for everything, so market expansion is as fast as the snap of fingers, even if it doesn't matter.

Today I woke up feeling like an old man, I know.

Cars.

I appreciate all of the advances in emissions reduction, safety, etc., but when I was a kid I learned the basics of working on nearly any car on the market, and now even with an OBD scanner most of them are still near unfixable without visiting a dealership. Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine.

That's just the purely functional stuff. The hassle-ware that's been installed between in dash "infotainment" systems, integrations with remote third parties, etc., I honestly believe is more distracting and dangerous than genuinely helpful. We've grown accustomed to this so much that people have told me they are "bored" driving sometimes without all of their gadgetry. That shouldn't be the state of normal when driving, it should be "I am operating heavy machinery and should pay attention to what I'm doing because my life does depend on it".

It's interesting to me that our trend with software has been to simplify interfaces over the years and cars just keep adding buttons and integrations and auxiliary ports for devices, and excuse themselves with useless friendly warnings that tell you not to use them while you're using the car.

> Cars are literally immobilized by things like faulty sensors when if ignored, the car would legitimately still work just fine.

Any concrete examples of this?

FWIW, cars are orders of magnitude more reliable than they were 40, 50+ years ago even though those were easier to work on.

Faulty Mass Airflow Sensor on my 09 Touareg told the car that not enough air was getting into the engine and it just refused to start. This is on the main intake, which unless completely covered is impossible to block. Plenty of air was getting into the system, so it was possible to disable it and the car worked fine.

Assuming that reliability is weakly inversely correlated with repairability (reliable things may be more complicated and thus harder to fix without specialized tools or knowledge), I'm sure there are subjective optima that balance the two and are more practical than the current extreme of maximizing reliability but being completely crippled at the slightest disturbance.

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. Every interface nowadays seems to be defined by the designer's whims and pure aesthetics, not what would actually be functional for users.

I recently moved and was wearing noise-canceling headphones while using the flat black minimalist buttons on my shiny stove and microwave and realized without hearing the beep it was hard to tell if I'd hit the button sensor. I had to wait and see how the minimalist alphanumeric display updated to know if I'd pressed the right little bit of text. People with disabilities or deafness would have a hell of a time.

> not what would actually be functional for users

Functional is ugly and ugly doesn't sell. This has been a problem with product design for decades: durability, usability, safety is all ignored in favor of whatever visual flair maximizes impulse buying. How the product performs when the owner actually uses it is irrelevant. Even worse dynamics are at play when it comes to advertising-supported software services. We've gone from a race to the bottom to a race to hell.

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 space to actually watch people use them. I have very rarely seen a UX designer get more space to experiment than a InVision mockup. So of course what they design is disconnected.

Reliability. Most hardware dont last as long due to cost saving.

Smart Appliance. Most people dont realise how the word Smart ( implying software ) and Appliance contradict each other.

Information Quality. I spend some time thinking about it. I thought as I age and become more knowledgeable in multiple domains, I smell more BS. But then I realise that is not exactly true. It is not that I smell more BS, it is more BS are being produced at a much faster pace and spread at a much faster rate ( in many order of magnitude, likely thousands if not millions times easier than pre internet era. ). The old dream of information super highway where people can "share" information turns out to be a nightmare.

Constantly connected. No excuse for Battery is dead, not picking up phone? Instant messaging. This combined with Information Quality makes life way worse. I would not be surprised if the great resignation and people want to go to hermit have correlation with this because our brain are bombarded with information.

Digital Photos. Just like everything that started what was suppose to be a great idea. We dont value photos any more. Especially when they are compressed and takes very little space, you can store as much as you want. Not to mention modern smartphone camera "pretty up" your photo and they are no longer realistic.

Edit: I wrote this without first reading all the comments. Turns out many people feel the same as well.

It's not a new point but for sure tech has ruined my attention span. I was once lucky enough to get away from major needs to use tech for a few months (which I spent reading) and it really showed me how much these things affect the brain and how unfortunate it is that there seems to be near no other option than to use it because of the career arms race that you need to participate in in order not to die.

I wonder sometimes if I have just gotten more ADD in my middle age or if it is a general trend many struggle with today.

It's bad enough that I'd say 75% of my joy from vacations to even very nice places is that it nudges me to all but completely stay off the Web for a few days. The rest of the time I hardly go an hour without looking at a glowing rectangle for one reason or another.

I grew up in the 90's, when I turned on the TV the audio was being output immediately and the actual display took a second to warm up.

a second.

Now my TV takes about 30s to start up, it's actually constantly on standby mode. It takes a good 5-10 minutes to actually boot from cold.

using the UI feels sluggish, there's proprietary "applications" which clog up the main screen and I'm told it spies on me.

Not to mention: other people with modern TV's have Ads injected into their watching experience, I can't even begin to imagine how frustrating that would be if I were playing a game.

So: TV's are much, much worse than they were 15 years ago. Even if there are more pixels now.

Oh I like this answer. It immediately reminded me that so many things used to just be instant on. Touch surfaces are slow to respond (think modern kitchen appliances vs older digital buttons), things like car radios have startup delays, even led lights are delayed turning on and slowly fade off (especially annoying if two bulbs on a switch turn on at different speeds). It's comparable to an OS with animations turned on or off, the difference is striking.

I haven't had this experience at all with my new TV I bought this year.

It boots up in quite literally 3 seconds and I can navigate to netflix or the criterion channel right away and begin playing stuff there

I can even mirror my phone screen directly to my TV with with my phone's built-in functionality, which has actually been useful more times than I would have expected!

Try unplugging it and plugging it back in.

I’m glad your TV works for you, I haven’t found one that boots in 3s and is usable- even from standby.

What model do you have?

Recently I went to a 7-11, and the cashier wanted me to teach me how to use an app to checkout. Instead of putting my items down and having him scan it, I had to pull out my phone, scan items with a line of people behind me, then present a code he scanned to bill me. Took 5 minutes to do something that usually takes 30 seconds.

Just as in your examples, imo the key here is not "tech". It's that the tech is being used to offload work that used to be done by an employee to you, without passing on the benefits or the choice to opt out.

I think the frame of technology good vs. technology bad is not useful. Technology is a means distinct from the ends it serves. Many modern applications of technology don't serve customers, they serve company profit margins or governments or don't really serve anyone except the maker and that's why they suck.

Good technology is applied to eliminate work altogether like say sending an email instead of snail mail, or doing something fundamentally new & useful like having a detailed map of the world in your pocket.

Wow, I would have just left

I can't imagine any shop that wouldn't just ring up your items if you answer “No thank you”.

I might include diplomacy, statecraft and foreign policy.

Before communications were instant, ambassadors were provided a long view of state relationships and foreign policy goals. During his tenure then, the ambassador was guided by these long term visions of how to fulfill policy.

Now, thanks to instant messaging, an ambassador and embassy must (or can) immediately adjust daily to their home office's reaction to events. Instant communications have reduced both the role and need for an embassy's long view of policy stance and goals. Thus, while not necessarily "worse", the autonomy of an ambassador has greatly declined. I suppose the contrarian view would welcome the lessened dangers of an incompetent diplomat who can be micro-managed by their home office.

But to the personal aspect, my career supported this area, and thanks to modern communications, often sleeplessly.

Off-topic, but as a former serious politics nerd (did most of an IR undergrad degree, way back, in fact) who's now a less-serious politics nerd and quite a bit older, what are some entry points to this world for someone with a career in tech? It'd be kinda nice to work on something that's in an area I have any actual interest in, for once.

Only if you think being dropped off on the corner of Walk and Don't Walk in a foreign country is boatloads of fun, as I do, employment in the Foreign Service of the US State Department. Barriers to getting in are rather high, however, and salaries, initially, are laughable, but you're not paying rent or utilities when you are overseas.

There is a pol/econ/mgmt track and a technical support track (where barriers are a bit lower) and is the route I took.

State has "diplomats in residence" at major universities. They'll be happy to chat even if you aren't a student.

It's really hard to identify one specific thing, but I would have to say car tech seems to have tripped the most offenses for me.

The most upsetting thing to me is the fly-by-wire controls. I used to drive a vehicle that was EFI, but still had a direct cable from your foot to the throttle body. To describe the throttle response as "immediate" is an understatement when compared to any modern car. Today, I have a recent generation sports car with electronic throttle body. There is a dead zone and about 100 milliseconds of latency associated with any input. It really kills the experience/flow when you are anticipating that step-wise moment.

Also, I will probably never drive a car that doesn't utilize an E2E hydraulic braking or steering system. You can maybe survive the software engineers fucking up TB angle. You can't survive the computer deciding to take you directly into a barrier at 80mph or refusing to apply the brakes in an emergency situation.

I think higher latency, lower reliability and reduced safety (in edge cases) is at the core of most things that bother me with tech. Sure, you can get the statistics to make it look good on paper, but the individuals caught in those "but sometimes" situations would like to have a word with your methodologies.

Spending way too many resources and making it seem fine. Driving 100s of km every week like it's normal. Flying 10x per year. Turning the heat up in winter while wearing a t-shirt. This is an age of extreme luxury and we don't realize it.

That and addiction to my smartphone. I hardly read books anymore, while that has always been one of the great pleasures in my life

Reading in bed before going to sleep works for me (and my wife). It's a fixed moment where you unwind and relax, and with a good book it is something to look forward to every day. It also stimulates going to bed at a decent time instead of starting another episode on Netflix or gaming into the small hours.

This is an age of extreme luxury

But hasn't every age been one of luxury for those who lived it?

Heh, it's been trending upward for centuries with lots of ups and downs though. For the last 3 decades it's been mostly upwards.

But now the trend might become different. I fear for the future of my kids in 30 years.

Same with restaurant or bars. More and more use some scummy third-party platform that requires an account, asks for more personal information than necessary and will no doubt use said information for nefarious purposes such as spam.

Similarly, since the pandemic, paper menus have been replaced by a stupid QR code that often loads a bloated page or PDF and may contain trackers. Doesn't help that phone service is usually terrible, and Wi-Fi (if it exists) has a captive portal with its own set of problems.

Worse, some venues actually did ordering over the mobile website, so what used to take 10 seconds of telling the barman what you wanted now takes a minute of trying to load a terrible website, filling out a form with way too much personal information, waiting for the payment to process, etc.

Carry cash and leave your smartphone off and your payment cards at home (this is what I do). A lot of these systems fail open if you say "sorry, I don't have a SIM card in my phone" or "my service is shut off" or "I don't have a credit card".

You also make it easier for the next person.

Surfing TV channels.

When I was a kid I was constantly flipping channels. At commercials I would sometimes flip through the dial to see what else was on. You could change channels as fast as you could turn the dial or press the button.

My state-of-the-art television today is so slow at this that I never channel surf anymore. You can count 5 or more mississippis after changing the channel before the new one starts playing.

Feels like the box should have a bunch of buffers or tuners or whatever the necessary technology is and guess what channel I might flip to next (up, down, previous would be good starts). It could have those streams ready to go in a millisecond.

> Feels like the box should have a bunch of buffers or tuners or whatever the necessary technology is and guess what channel I might flip to next (up, down, previous would be good starts). It could have those streams ready to go in a millisecond.

I'm not an codec expert but, AFAIK, apart from buffering you also need to decode since the latest keyframe (so, typically, last n seconds of input).

Privacy

Everyone is tracking me, monitoring everything I see and do online, feeding the giant "personalized advertisement" machine and all the other trolls mooching off its edges (identity thieves, scammers, etc.); I'm going to extreme lengths of un-googling my Chromium and Android and un-Microsofting my Windows, pi-holing my network and uBlock-ing on top, but I feel it's all for naught, an exhausting losing battle.

I empathize with your thought of just doing a "Stardew Valley" and dropping all this shit to go live on a farm somewhere, but I'm a cog in the machine now and have to live it through :(

Video games.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet.

There's simply too much money nowadays in micro-transactions, in-app purchases, loot boxes, pay-to-win and in-game advertising that almost everything is "free" to play and it's literally horrible.

what we have now is mostly copy-pasted franchise titles (with a year after their name) that are just another optimized hellhole of extracting money from you a small slice at a time.

There are exceptions and this is part of the reason why Nintendo as a brand is still loved by many. I consider Zelda Breth of the Wild to be one of the most amazing games and experiences of my video gaming life.

I also like board game adaptations to mobile because they tend to be limited in in-app purchases.

Other than that? By God, there's a ton of crap out there. It's no surprise how many people will go to great efforts to play games that are 20, 30 or more years old now.

My answer is video games but for different reasons. With an original NES you could power on, press start, and be playing the game in two seconds. With the Switch it has to load, the thing is never charged, cartridges are too small, you have to select through so many menus before you can actually start playing, games are two complex, etc.

Presumably, you can still game on the original NES (if any modern TV accepts its video signal).

Fragmented communication. Depending on the person I'm contacting I either have to use Signal, Messenger, iMessage, Email, Slack, Skype, IRC, SMS and I'm probably forgetting one or two others.

The fact that most of those are not interoperable is so frustrating. We all know the only reason they are not interoperable is because each one tries to keep us in their walled ecosystem. Such a waste for the users.

Even though I love my friends, I just don't like being available or able to be contacted all the time. I kinda miss the era of basic SMS and, for real-time chatting, MSN Messenger (or IRC). Nowadays, it feels like I can never truly "log off".

That said, I have no genuinely good reason why I haven't tried going back to a similar personal setup. Maybe it's time to see how it would work out.

You don't need technology to solve this problem for you - you can choose not to be available.

I would say it was the optimism around computers in the 1980's and early 1990's. People were optimistic since a relatively inexpensive computer was an enabler. In some cases, it eased the process of getting stuff done. In other cases, it gave people the tools they needed to do things that they would otherwise have to invest in expensive training or equipment to do. Then the cynicism of the past decade set in. I find it is now nearly impossible to see the positive contributions of technology even when they exist.

(That is not to say those earlier times were entirely positive. People were still trying to build corporate empires, or otherwise use technology to the disadvantage of their customers. Yet the balance of power seemed to be better balanced and it felt easier to walk away from it all and still lead a good life.)

Simultaneous with collapse of Soviet style communism, then the impressive shrinkage of the US military. The explosion of the uses of PCs by individuals (who could, commonly, program those PCs) fed a completely delusional optimism that finally individuals could be empowered by technology. And potentially world-wide. For instance, China opening up, sure to join the gang. Maybe Tianamen was a blip. All nope. But I sure enjoyed the optimism while it lasted.

Read receipts make me not even want to talk to people. I want to be able to walk away and go do my own thing and not possibly offend someone that it took me hours to reply or didn't reply at all. It feels so invasive to me and my time.

Fortunately, it can be turned off in a lot of applications. I hate it the other way around too: someone's read it, but isn't answering. Why? What's wrong? Did something I typed make you hesitate? All irrational niggling thoughts when the other person probably just got called away by a crying kid, or sudden explosive diarrhoea, or their house is on fire — you know, normal stuff.

Not a problem. Every time I give my contact I let people know it may take me a few days to reply and I am ok if they take time to reply to my messages. I tel them if it is urgent, I will add a note on top of the message. People who have a life are not offended by this.

Everything requires a telephone number now, and many (due to spam/abuse/whatever) don't accept VoIP/disposable numbers, so it's basically like a universal tracking cookie.

I have like six phones to keep my various identity facets separate. It's gross and annoying, and I worry about everyone else who just has one number and uses it for everything and links their accounts everywhere together; most people in the world are going to become very easy to blackmail/coerce/extort in the coming years.

And there's no good way to decouple things once they're tied together. I can't get my personal phone number out of some lists from projects years ago that I can't even remember. The spam calls are constant, probably one call every 30 minutes from different "Scam Likely" numbers. Our government does absolutely nothing about it, either.

Plus anyone with more than one phone is treated like a pervert/cheat and/or drug dealer.

Car horns that beep when you lock them remotely.

The perpetrator is further away from his car, and knows to expect the sound.

It is startling, rude and offensive. The mechanism should be off by default.

Two phone-related ones:

1) Phone calls sounded better when they were analog. Even today, after some improvements, this is still true.

2) Long distance charges turned out to be well fucking worth it for keeping phone spam from being a thing. This "improvement" has been strongly net-harmful.

The thing I miss the most is high-quality full-duplex audio over copper cables! No lag, no cutting each other off, just warm analog signal!

I also miss wiring up phone lines in the basements of friends' houses!

This is why I keep our landline for customer service. Cell phone quality is second-rate,

Unnecessary tech in kitchen appliances. Ovens, dishwashers and washer/dryers. I spend most of my time battling the user interface or dealing with obscure bugs.

My favorite microwave oven is one my Grandma owned for decades, probably purchased in the 70s or early 80s. Two dials. No buttons. Pull to open the door, not even a button for that. Didn't even have the spinny-plate thing (did OK regardless, and I find I have to manually move stuff around halfway through even with the spinny plate, so it's kinda useless).

Put power dial where you want it. Put timer dial where you want it. Timer starts ticking down and the microwave turns on. Loud ding (from a physical bell somewhere inside it, not a speaker) when it's done. That's the entire thing. No buttons, no clock (god, why do you need a clock on your microwave?!) none of that shit.

Heavy, good-feeling dials that you could feel physically operating something underneath, from the clunks of the power dial to the subtle scrape of the timer dial. Great feel on the door handle. All-around solid. Nothing to learn. Just use it.

Icons. I hate icons. Every app feels impelled to use icons, and even worse, invent their own due to trying to be cool, and avoiding the copyrights on other icons.

I got suckered into that madness on my own website, and can't remember what the icons are for without hovering over then for the alt text.

Icons are a giant technological leap backwards. There's a reason that every hieroglyphic language evolved towards phonetics, not the other way.

For a simple example, there's no picture in the world that can clearly mean "run", or "menu", or "oil pressure", or "defroster", or "test", or "print", or "off", or "wash in cold water".

Of course, we can get used to what certain icons conventionally mean, but it is not intuitive, and not any better than learning what a word means.

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.

Human interactions. People tend to socialize less and "digitize" more. Even when sitting together, people constantly scroll through Instagram. This shouldn't be what the new generation defines as "socializing".

My friend mentions off-hand that "we talk all the time".

We exchange a number of texts over Signal, most days but at least a couple times a week. That's enough to make him think "we talk all the time", but I am feeling super disconnected.

I think tech makes some people not even try to reach out socialize in any beyond-digital way.

Pandemic response: tech has continued to distract society from simply learning its needs and creating covid bubbles large enough to meet everyone's needs within the bubble so people don't have a reason to leave the bubble.

Instead, we have mass isolation, instead of population-density diminishing tactics that respect human needs, and mandates for behaviors.

So much for freedom.

Anyway, where's the app for building a big covid bubble or quickly joining one after following quarantine procedures for that bubble?

What do you mean by "covid bubbles"?

Whatever many of these problems may be, I see pretty much all of my non-tech friends completely helpless in handling them.

They're so fucked and don't have a chance.

This is the worst part imho.

I can fight back. I can help a very few other close people who care but don't know how to fight back.

And every. single. other. person. I. know. is screwed.

In a city plagued by a decades-long, top-down devotion to capture value from tourism at the expense of the quality of life for its own citizens, Airbnb democratized things so the average Joe can contribute to ruining things for permanent residents, too.

lol, yes!!

Social media in particular really degraded my social life for a number of years prior to minimizing Facebook in my life. I found that:

1. With all the little updates you get through Facebook, a lot of people feel that there isn't as much need for meeting, talking, or doing stuff together. I've found the reality to be otherwise; connections are deeper with better quality of time with a person and there are a lot of things that people simply aren't comfortable discussing on FB (mental health, relationship problems, health problems, etc).

2. Social media can give the impression that you have nothing new to talk about with someone. Since I've cut social media out of a lot of my personal life, I can actually call somebody I haven't talked to a year and have a lot to discuss. It's a lot more fulfilling to hear about somebody's new relationship/breakup/child/vacation than it is to get a sanitized summary of the same online.

3. I hadn't realized it since I stopped using FB, but there's a general sense of anxiety that I've found comes from regular usage. I think between the unfeeling algorithmic drive for engagement and the human tendency for information addiction, the need to check one's feed or friend group is a constant thing. I've been a lot happier and experiencing a lot less ambient anxiety without it.

The conclusion I've come to is that social networks, at least how they're run and built today, or a very bad replacement for real human connection. I'd urge everyone to do the following whenever someone you care about comes to mind:

1. Have you spoken with them recently? If not, send them a text and see if they're free to call.

2. Are you not close and nervous about calling? Send them a text/email/letter letting them know you thought about them and share something.

3. Have someone you haven't spoken to in a while due to an argument or disagreement and regret losing touch? Reach out! Talk about it. Time heals many wounds, and with perspective, empathy, and a willingness to hear each other out you'll be surprised at how many friendships can be rekindled.

It's been a rough few years. A contact out of the blue from an old acquaintance or friend can me the world to people. Remember that you're not alone and that whatever anxiety or loneliness you feel is a very human experience we all share.

Dating used to be fun and you’d go out and meet people. Now it’s endless swiping where 50% of matches are bots, 30% of matches just want you to follow their Instagram or Snapchat and the final 20% are just as jaded as I am so it doesn’t last long.

Go back far enough into the ancient past and everyone had almost always met in person for the first time, since the dawn of man.

Well, enough decades into the ancient past.

Touch controls. I hate that I cannot turn off my hob in dim light as I have to see which of five barely visible areas I am to touch.

Socializing.

People don't know how to communicate with their local surroundings anymore, or don't want to.

I was in one of the first groups of kids to grow up having a fair number of online-only friends, and I think it's great in a lot of ways, but I also see an atrophy of civility and sociability happening in physical communities, and think the accessibility of niche culture online has something to do with it.

Some of this may be rose colored glasses or the fact that I'm older and less pleasant to look at, or other biases/confounds, but that's my observation.

Not for me (I'm in LTR), but casual dating life. Tinder is distorting the market making it "winner(s) takes it all" type

It's always been that way. While I have never used Tinder (Been married during its existence) but when I talk to men that have used Tinder successfully and unsuccessfully, their stories sound just like my pre-Tinder dating life. To me, Tinder sounds like it just increased the velocity of success or failure.

I've noticed it's not just 'casual' dating - but also relationships.

Much like when the landline phone and personal automobile increased access to cheating partners..

technology / social media especially - increases access to 'better rung (like a ladder)' sex partners, relationship, social status, money, etc. - all a click / tap away, and likely coming to you via dms/pms..

I'll add that these auto-filters on cameras seem to make a lot of people, (especially girls from what I have seen, anecdotal for sure) - think they are more attractive than they really are.. which increases attention they get via insta/tik/fbk, whatever.. but also gives them false sense of where they could be in the ladder.. which leads them to discount 'average guy is good' -

ads make this worst too many times.

There is much more to add to this - but these things are noticeable in the data as well right? isn't like 80% of women only trying to attract the top 20% of men.

with tech making it easy to have 'a grass is greener here' profile to attract, it's harder to keep a relationship in general than it used to be, even if they don't run away, I think women are less happy / take it out on the average man when they don't have the kardashian/insert reality whatever here, type of life they see others 'living their best life' on reality-social.. I don't mean to say similar affects don't occur with men vs women - I'm just pointing to what I have seen a lot of.

LEDs. Why does everything need to be lit?

I bought a toaster, now my kitchen glows. I bought a toothbrush, now my bathroom glows. Etc, etc. Why do manufacturers insist on making things always glow?

Especially blue LEDs.

Totally. Photo studio with sick backdrops? Looks great. Random 80s era bathroom counter with many other appliances/bottles/etc. around? Looks ridiculous.

Sales.

I was just thinking the other day about how in the olden days you'd discover new music by listening to the radio. There would be a bias towards DJs and shows you liked, but musical tastes would be shaped and evolve by these DJs. Now when my music discovery is done by algorithms that are usually tailored to give me what I already like and not what someone thinks some people might like, how will it affect the evolution of music?

On the other hand, having so much music available has made me discover much more music, including a couple I didn't know about (shout out to Turkish Psych Rock!) but I could be missing out on whole genres. Now I'm not saying this as a boomer rant about how things used to be better back in the day. I do discover much more music, it's just a thought about how this affects the evolution of music.

Speaking of Turkish Psych Rock, a couple of years ago I was at a show of Altin Gun [1], which is a band that's probably seen (some) success mainly due to Spotify, and it looked like that when you looked at the audience - varying in age, dressing styles, etc - just random people who got this recommended a lot and liked it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9g_iyBR7xo

Zero attention span, social isolation, information overload, fears of dystopia.

I feel the massive amount of data companies have is making the world more hostile. When I shop for something I am getting really paranoid about the company manipulating what they are showing to me and at what price.

I am generally concerned about privacy. It seems if somebody is willing to pay for information about you they can find out almost anything. And often this is used against you.

In my opinion tech by itself is good but “big tech” is very bad. Too much data in companies’ hands is dangerous.

Socializing. This pandemic would have ended months ago if people weren’t on social media. The algorithms cater to fear and the fact people stay online gives them the impression of socializing.

Generally, I think it’s broken the sense of localized community; while making it more global. This has upsides and downsides, but I’d like to see a more localized system in place.

Regarding the comment about living off the grid, I am well on my way. Should have my families setup by late 2022.

It's important to remember that [excess deaths](0) aren't merely rumored to be true; they are a hard fact preventing the pandemic from ending. I agree, however, that online socializing is critically deficient, and an inadequate replacement for the communal traditions we've spent [millennia developing](1) to gratify our [social needs](2).

0. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24452.Dancing_in_the_Str...

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/478.Bowling_Alone

I really miss not having a smart phone. I'd totally buy a locked down android that only had maps, sms, and calling.

At least on Android, it's pretty easy to uninstall all the bloatware and leave only what you need. Why are you not doing it if you miss it?

All you need is to enable developer options, enable adb debugging, install adb or Android developer tools on the computer, connect phone with USB and do a bunch of "adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 some.package.name" for a bunch of packages.

Ok, now that I wrote it, it's not that simple, especially knowing what to uninstall, but it's not rocket science either.

Maybe due to my Amish heritage, I often ask this question the other way around: what technology is improving my life?

This can be a great question to ask yourself when you are considering taking a new (tech related) job or if you are thinking of business ideas.

The attention economy and addiction to tech in general. The bottomless scroll and the dopamine hit on pull to refresh. The aversion to be alone and with ones thought, no matter how troubling. The obsession with likes and subs. And so on.

The consent forms were introduced separately. If it wasn't an app you'd have to fill those out with pen&paper, they'd have to keep or scan them for permanent record.

Like your AT&T example I hate any kind of unskippable ads. Even with (real human) operators they now have to try to upsell you if it makes sense or not. And if you have time or not. Some are honest "I have to tell you about some products now"

Not so sure about the consent forms. I started seeing a new doctor back around 2019. The first time I went we did have to spend ~15 minutes per person answering questions on a tablet. But since then we can either check in on our phone - logging in and then answering a bunch of questions and accerpting a bunch of forms - or by saying "hi, I'm <name>, I'm here for my <time> appointment with <doctor>" to the receptionist.

I'm less able to really sit down and focus on longer-term projects because of constant notifications and an endless amount of media able to be consumed.

OTPs.

Can't get into steam cause need the password. Can't get password cause lastpass is freaking out. Then can't get into email cause that wants an OTP. Find phone. Unlock phone...unravel chain of OTPs from there.

...I just want to play my game

Speaking of Steam and OTPs... enforced OTPs.

In order to sell crap I get out of CSGO crates, or even to give gifts to friends on Steam, you have to be enrolled in "Steam Guard". Which is their (of course proprietary) OTP - which displays a notification specifically to allow the code to be viewed on lockscreens 'cause that's a great idea. But then half the times it doesn't even display the notification until after I've unlocked my phone and opened the Steam app and opened the menu and gone to the Steam Guard page.

And then not only do I have to do that whole process every time their servers are down and the client logs me out because hurrdurr timeout means lost session right?, I also have to do it every time I want to log in to their website (say, because someone sent me a link to a game I want to buy).

The omnipresent and ever-accelerating pollution and deadening of daily life.

Advertising (that acts as if we actually enjoy being subjected to it), tracking, the continual privacy f*over, screens, memes, interruptions, the pressure to be always on and efficient and optimized and "engaged", fake social media "friends", the inevitable burnout and withdrawal that follows as a result ... all of it.

Tolls by Mail and the customer support around it. Got one in the mail a few weeks ago even though I have EZPass. They include a pic so I know a '1' was mistaken for a '7' which made it my match my plate. For one, I got my plate a few days after the scan date, they are brand new plates, so there's no chance they were even on the road at the time. Seems like the system should know that.

The given choices for resolving are:

- Mail the slip back with a reason checked. None of the options fit the scenario, there's no "Other". Postage is not prepaid, I have to go to the post office because I haven't needed a stamp since 2012.

- Call a number, which I did. I waited 45 minutes on 2 different days, never got through.

There is no email address or contact form the website. There is no way to make a dispute electronically. (I guess this part is more like a lack of tech that made life worse for me)

The hold message said "EZPass customer services will be with you...". I have an EZPass account which the mistaken plate is on, but wasn't at the time because I didn't have the plates yet. So I figured I'd try the support system through that account, even though it's technically separate. The only option there is a support contact form. I had to type that up twice because, of course, my login timed out by the time I hit "submit" and all my text was lost, an possibility I'm fully aware of as a web dev, but I haven't experienced in like 10 years. That was a week ago, still haven't heard back.

Now I'm going to mail thing in with a handwritten choice and can only hope it's going to work out and not lead to some kind of worse mix up that cost more time or money, or flags my license somehow.

Mobile phones, and the expectation that people should be able to call me/text me and have an instant reply whenever they want.

Advertising: I don't get useful ads by default. The more ads I block (unconditionally, not attempting to filter by my preferences) on Twitter, the more useful they seem to become.

Photography: I don't like looking at other people's photos as much as I used to. Mobile phone cameras do all kinds of weird and unpleasant processing, and usually have focal lengths that result in bad looking portraits (they're usually no more than half as wide as the human eye's focal length.)

Arts, culture, and nightlife: It's harder than ever to find places where people aren't periodically checking their phones. I enjoy having random and serendipitous encounters, and phones and other mobile technology get in the way of that. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where some bars and clubs outright ban cellphone usage, but it's one step forward, two steps back.

I can think of a lot of other things, but I think those three are enough grievances for a single post.

Skimming through the comments I read many things I would have said some years ago, but by now I mostly solved: advertising, social media, attention, notification hell, marginally useful tech in appliances…

There is one thing I feel I cannot stop reaching to and makes my life worse: endless supply of any kind of porn imaginable.

My attention is constantly under siege and I have trouble sitting down and just reading a book or watching the kids without stopping every few minutes to check my phone.

Nuclear weapons are the greatest technological threat, and low probability events are guaranteed to occur over a long enough time frame. Nuclear deterrence has prevented world war, but clandestine nuclear weapons programs have given dangerous leverage to violent pariahs.

Its hard to have a conversation when they're trained to divert their attention when their phone beeps.

Phones were a mistake, letting commoners on the internet was a big mistake. Smartphones created the era of Eternal Whatever, and there's no coming back from it.

Music on iOS. How old are iPhones and iPods before that? Why is it that I still can't import a library of CD's I own and play the "Dark Side of the Moon", "The Wall", "Brandenburg Concerto", "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" or Mozart's "Requiem" from start to finish as one complete work?

To be fair, I haven't checked in a few years. Last I checked this was still impossible. Years ago I tried and it was an abysmal waste of time and effort.

I have an extensive collection of CD's and none of them are on my iOS devices because I can't listen to albums as albums, in order, as indivisible units.

I don't understand this. What do Apple employees listen to? One hit wonders?

This was worked just fine on Windows Media Player from day one, literally decades ago. If MS brought back Windows Phone and the media player behaved just as the desktop versions does, I would switch from iPhone in an instant.

This, BTW, is the reason I no longer buy iPads. A Windows-based tablet is a perfect travelling companion. I have unrestricted access to the file system, USB ports, HDMI and more. I can carry my digital books (which are 100% in PDF format) and my music and videos are easy to manage and can be played back in sensible ways. On top of that, they are great business machines for presentations, etc.

Companies have grown beyond reproach.

I share your frustrations with Chatbots on the phone so much.

Weeks ago I was dealing with chest pain/heart pain. I ended up trying to call a bunch of clinics/doctors to try to get a recommendation of where to go. Everywhere I called, they would have a spiel about covid that would last 1/2 minutes. It would make me livid and my pain worse.

I understand that thats partly my fault for being impatient. But it felt so hard to just reach a doctor/nurse or anyone to talk to at the time.

I see you made the mistake of thinking that the healthcare system has anything to do with your wellness. Common mistake, but still a mistake. The healthcare system is just another machine to shovel money into a select group of peoples pocket, any doctoring they choose to provide is just a consequence of the marketing budget (gotta keep those word-of-mouth numbers up!).

Car key fobs that fail silently on cars that have no (visible) door keyhole and no ignition one. The first time it happens is an education you could do without.

tech made my life worse:

sensor-driven sinks in public restrooms: dont turn on when you want, shutoff too soon, forcing me into frustrating, time-consuming, farsical movements to try to get it to magically trigger again or stay on, so I can finish rinsing my hands or face

sensor-driven autoflush toilets in public restrooms: similar issues, except they also tend to flush when you dont want -- at the worst time -- or not flush at all when you really really really need it to

in both cases I "get" the fact theyre trying to save water and/or reduce their utility bills. get it. but it makes our lives worse than they were decades ago, when out in public. I know its a trade-off between evils...

tech made my life better: modern mobile smartphones. if you could travel back in time to even the 70s and tell someone that within their lifetime they'll have a small personal device that can do the 1000's of things a 2020 era phone can do, you might blow their mind. yes it has introduced a new class of problems too (eg. social media doom scrolling all day long, more distracted driving, etc.) but the amount of new awesome things it allows is totally worth it, imo, and a big net improvement.

As a young person lucky enough to have missed the Facebook era, Insta has made my and many others' lives worse with its unregulated predatory behavior.

Attention.

Holy hell. Between Youtube, Twitter, HN and Reddit I'm both wasting an indecent amount of time and my attention span is turning into that of a goldfish.

I miss being disconnected.

Before having constant access to internet or a phone, I had much more time to process my thought. I also had much more time throughout the day to think overall as there was much more situation when I had to wait a bit and no mobile phone to disrupt me. I'm trying to reclaim that, but I do miss that (and I think overall it's something that humans needs and are missing).

I also dislike Slack or similar tools for work, it makes the work day much more disrupted and it's hard to manage. I wish that there was a calorie counter on Slack where you need to burn some calories before having to disrupt someone. It would make people think twice before talking.

Finally I find the grab on technology from GAFAM sad. Things have been abstracted and ownership removed to the point that I fell more and more like a passive user rather than someone having fun hacking around. If I can't break it and fix it back, it feels like a piece of non interesting piece of junk to me. I become just a user, not an actor. I find everything they make just sad.

The slight lag that I encounter constantly when interacting with devices and on-line services.

Since working from home I become acutely aware of how often I'm dealing with spinners waiting for things to load, pauses, lag, etc. I feel like I'm living half a beat behind my physical actions and it's brought on a certain amount of unnecessary stress.

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.

Log-ins & pwds pretty much everywhere, now with 2 and 3 security layers which means more and more SMSes going through the phone and even more being shared among recovery accounts. It’s safer maybe, yet it is a time consuming, irritating madness. Where do we stand with the much praised biometric access procedures yet?

Constant traceability and contact. It's getting harder, and harder to just step out of society for a while.

Ubiquitous networking, and the lack of a suitable operating system to match it.

When I started programming, systems with floppy disks that held 360k were the norm. Those disks could be write protected. Diskcopy was a standard DOS command that allowed you to have an exact copy of your data, protected against alteration by the hardware of the machine, and the write-protect tab.

You could directly know what data you were putting into the computer, if it was at risk of modification, and you could even tell if it was being accessed, because it was slow and noisy. Modern Operating Systems have no such provisions for controlling access to data in a obvious and transparent manner.

The hardware was simple enough that there was nowhere for malware to hide. Now that we have systems to boot our systems, that's no longer true. There's no operating system available to provide anywhere near the assurance of MS-DOS on a stand alone twin floppy drive machine.

Because things were inherently secure, shareware was huge. You could freely try out new things, dozens of things in a sitting, sourced from a guy selling floppy disks at a computer club meeting, and know you couldn't possibly mess up your computer or your work.

There is no equivalent operating system security today. The only reasonable approach, in my mind, is that of capability based security. In those systems, you decide what specific resources (files, folders, network access, etc) to make available to a program when you run it. If you didn't include it, your application can't get at it, no matter what. This in direct opposition to the way things are done now, where the program might pull up a file dialog, but then directly accesses the files without oversight, and can do anything you're allowed instead of what you told it.

Couple insecure operating systems with ubiquitous networking, and it's a recipe for disaster.

I figure 5 more years before people wake up to the root cause, and 10 more before it starts getting fixed.

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 resources in a category if it asks and that seems appropriate".

However, those systems DO exist in both Windows and Linux.

Anything proximate to human communication.

That people in the West communicate largely over platforms controlled by entities with economic interests has been highly destructive. Beyond mere vitriol and "misinformation", there's the accelerationism of human social functions powered by instant communication and full of perverse incentives on the part of the platform controllers. There are also lots of incentives for individuals that are harmful to society in the aggregate.

To me, this kind of thing is the primary cause of the western malaise.

Listening to music.

Back in the day I listened to the radio, I bought cds and vinyl and listened to entire albums and looked at every detail of the album art. I went record shopping with my brothers. I made mixtapes for special people in my life and received them as well. I’d listen to the radio hoping for a song to come on so I could record it to a cassette on my boombox. I miss the sound of tape. I miss the imperfection.

With everything at my fingertips, I definitely get music A.D.D and skip things often. I don’t care about bands or artists as much. I don’t listen to albums like I used to. I’ve outsourced my music discovery to Spotify playlists and while it’s convenient and sometimes spot on, I sometimes miss the old days of going on a date to the record store and finding something special.

Watching movies at home.

Streaming services, while initially seeming awesome, offer way less selection than browsing through a Blockbuster or local video store. I suppose you can rent movies online as well, but the browsing experience is pretty bad if you're not looking for the latest thing.

Romance. Tinder and Instagram made monogamy obsolete.

Technology can take away your ability to concentrate on anything long enough. You will have a hard time concentrating on the video you are watching, then the book you are reading, then your children, and your spouse.

Your two examples are prime examples, but honestly, before the interactive phone systems, I would wait on hold for hours to talk to a person, so it has improved things a lot, but it is still SUPER aggravating and feels like a step backward.

But both of those things are only occasional inconveniences. The real place tech has made my life worse is just how completely dependent I am on it for 95% of my life. From the psychological dependence on knowing what my friends are doing, or how my crypto "investments" (read: gambles). Also needing internet connectivity to play various "single player" games even though I'm just a casual gamer and NEVER play with others.

I bet homelessness was less intense before the proliferation of IT. I've been unhoused for about 3.5 years now, last few months I do have a shelter situation and it's been much easier to gain weight and study. For my first 5 years in tech in SF I was stepping over homeless people on my way to my tech job asking why they didn't just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I did in high school living with my parents. Turns out having a place to plug in a computer and a 15" monitor and a shower and clean clothes to interview in is a so-called privilege, no matter the condition of the place or quality of parenting.

It's more of an externality to IT than a direct problem as I see it. People are plugged in so it's easier to step over the problems around them. We have access to growth all over the world through chat and forums, so why would we spend our precious time on people who can most likely take us nowhere better than we presently are? Being homeless on Twitter was interesting, because it's like "if you can affort a smart phone then you can afford food;" I think the pandemic has erased that stereotype, at least. Now it's like "you have Twitter, why can't you jump on Zoom?" and "if you have time to Tweet then you have time to apply to a job"--indeed, time, but perhaps not the space or bandwidth or power or editing software to run more than Twitter. This may extend to social services via small screens but I don't have much experience with that.

We could extend the effect to reduction of menial and low-mid level management jobs as well, which keeps people working 2-3 entry levels jobs as they start families in their mid-20s and beyond. I'm less sure of that case as it starts to get complex. I saw a different dynamic in my service jobs recently than I did as a teenager in the late '90s, but I wasn't there long enough to dissect it in detail. I can say when I was in high school most of my co-workers were high schoolers except the odd "older" person, recently it was almost an opposite proportion with perhaps 1 high schooler on each team. More competition = less opportunity for the vulnerable/unmarketable homeless population is the connection.

Communicating. Talking to someone on a cell phone is awful compared with a real land line. There's so much latency. And then if you're talking to someone who is on a VOIP service, it's even worse. No wonder people text more than they speak to one another these days. It's just so bad. And now we have two generations of people who never knew how good landlines sounded, and what it's like to talk to someone like they're right next to you.

Telephones are just one of the things that "tech" reinvented poorly, but "good enough" to make money, so we're stuck with it.

I use skype on my cheap(ish) android phone to call my mom in France from the US and it's usually crystal clear and with no latency. Not sure what I am doing right here but I have no complaints. And so much cheaper than in the old days of using a landline.

5G HD Voice has better quality than an analog land line with no noticeable latency. Of course the actual audio quality experience depends more on the handset and ambient environment than on the network.

Televisions have more channels, but a far worse user interface with more latency.

I grew up with analog televisions - there was no latency and it was very forgiving of atmospheric noise. When I first got Tivo, I thought the latency made it unusable (until I realized that I was no longer flipping channels, but rather navigating to content..)

On the other hand, flipping channels led to serendipitous discovery - a cooking show that I would never have found interesting might spark something, or a news show presenting other points of view.

Latency, god yes, that drives me bananas. Mechanical tuners, push buttons, dials all responded immediately.

That it seems nobody wants to sell you anything anymore. Now, they want to rent you things. A car? TV? Fridge? A BBQ grill?...Everything has to be connected. Everything has to be "smart". Which means you have to open an account online and click ok on the "Terms and Conditions" page before you can use the thing you supposedly bought. You can't even fix it yourself if it breaks. And while you're using it, they collect data on every microsecond of use to sell to third parties.

Everything really. As my career grows I understand the appeal to go off grid because society in general is more and more fragile that anyone thinks and the solutions to fix them are worse .

The lower entry barrier for a lot of things.

It allows the community to grow, learn and become more diverse.

On the other hand, I regularly read blog articles about complex topics from people that should rather not write about it. I know "senior software engineers" where I ask myself how they are capable of tying their shoes each morning. I see people get praised for achieving the bare minimum, like putting five pictures on LinkedIn about a topic they hardly understand at all.

Light switches.

I like the old kind. There's a position for off and and a position for on. Maybe a slider for a dimmer.

But now in my bedroom, the brightness is adjusted by holding down a single button. The intensity follows a slow triangle wave. You release the button at the desired time. That means if you just want the dimmest possible setting, you have to stand there for ~10 seconds and be subjected to the highest intensity brightness in the meantime.

Why do you tolerate that? "Old kind" light switches are plentiful, as are sliding dimmer, probably multiple kinds at local hardware stores and certainly online. Takes 10 minutes and a screwdriver and maybe a couple wire nuts to replace.

My ability to read anything in long form, including books.

I noticed this 6-7 years ago and decided to find time to read a book a month. The easiest way was to insert this in a bedtime routine.

Your smartphone must be out of reach.

1. Monitors.

Things are finally improving but LCDs made me stop playing Quake and Unreal Tournament during the mid 2000s and into the early 2010s when 120Hz panels (TN of course) started appearing at reasonable prices.

2. Lunches with coworkers. No longer a thing for many of us but boy I've had enough lunches with 20 somethings glued to their phones the entire time. What's the point of going together, bruh?

> What things has tech made worse in your life?

Parenting!

This one is big. As a parent it is easier to turn on Cocomelon than actually spending time playing with your child. And when you actually turn off the TV and you decide to play with them, you cannot do this for one hour without checking your phone.

Online half arsed forms for everything!

I can’t count the number of times my wife has shouted at the iPad because some web dev wants a SPA form validation that didn’t work correctly, and all while trying to do something reasonably important like making sure our child gets fed food at school without the ingredients she’s allergic to.

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.)

Well social media for example is mostly not in my life, but it still has an effect, which is to turn everyone else into a shallow-thinkin', slogan-spewin', snap-judgin', twitchy, goldfish-attention-span-havin', narcissistic snowflake who can never be challenged on anything they say. There's no one left to talk to, and being the only patient wise guru in a room full of children gets fucking old fast. I've been hanging out with Boomers lately, and it's actually pretty good. They have a sense of perspective.

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.

Using emoji as C++ identifier names?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30130806/using-emoji-as-...

What a clowny "feature".

> 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

Every interaction with a government or large entity. It has created a rigidity that does not allow for special circumstances. It is phone tree hell, self-help FAQs when you're trying to report a problem, it is minute long COVID safety message when you are calling a store to check item stock.

On the other hand (according to them) I am "special" as I never found any of the questions that I want or need to ask among the FAQ's, or maybe unlucky as the issue I have cannot ever be resolved by following their problem troubleshooting guides (but somehow in the end the human clerk manages to solve the issue at hand in most cases).

The automatic engine shut-off feature in newer cars is terrible. It's like stalling at every red light.

My vehicle I can just unclip one wire at the battery to disable it permanently, but most of them the best you can do without getting into the software is disable it every you start the car.

Gamification of the attention economy

Porn saturation. Ever tried to quit porn in the digital age? It was harder than quitting weed.

Smartphones used as cameras on concerts. Annoying for a concert-goer who just want to see the performer in the moment. This is the only time I see the use of Google Glass as a positive

Too easily getting caught up in news. I tend to not really follow what's going on, but I get into these periods where I keep checking everything. Might take a week or two, then I snap out of it and get back to my life again.

GPS in everything, and 2-20 giant, unaccountable corporations knowing where you are at all times, when you go anywhere else, where you go, who with, and how often. The overall loss of privacy with regards to simple day to day comings and goings. (We also as a society have not yet had to contend with the fact that this information is available at any time to the state without a warrant or probable cause, an unprecedented shift of power. I hope it works out okay, but having seen the USSR and DDR and CCP, I fear it will not.)

Now, several multinationals and governments know which day of the week I like to go out to eat, or who my FWBs are, and the locations of all of the places I sleep. It's nobody's business, but now it's in everybody's databases (even if I turn my own phone off, unless I avoid human contact entirely).

1) Social media driven by algorithms, destroying the fabric of society. 2) Being the product, not the customer. 3) Endless, gratuitous, unstoppable changes to the tools we use. 4) The raging battle for our attention.

Gain of function research made me basically lose two years of my life.

Latch: https://www.latch.com/

It was a technology built for the convenience of building managers, but residents hate it.

My general health. Convenience makes you lazy.

That being said, exercising efficiently is easier than ever thanks to technology as well.

Touchscreens in cars. Please stop this.

Dating for now white folks in USA.

why white folks specifically?

I think tech makes relationships much harder, I think Chris Rock has a bit on how it was easier for his parents to be married for 30 years than it was for him to be married for 3.

It's not just between you and your partner, it's now between you, them, their 300 Facebook friends.

I screwed up one early relationship since I was so afraid she'd post the wrong thing on Facebook.

In terms of meeting people, I only do it the old fashioned way. When you date a real person who you meet as a member of a community, your much less likely to act like a sociopath.

It's also less stressful. I actually meet more people now, while spending vastly less time on dating.

I will say for me social media was outright damaging. I'd waste 20 hours a week on FB, and various dating apps. Doesn't do anything for you at the end of the day, life is too short to waste it behind a tiny screen. However, Facebook messenger has been very useful when meeting people abroad.

PS: If your not happy with the people your meeting , try moving. America has hundreds of cities, many of which have distinct cultures. Someone who's miserable in say San Jose, might very happy in Atlanta.

Find your niche, don't fall for the lie that you can make it anywhere.

Land lines were always expensive, especially before cellphones when that was all there was.

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.

Personalization except youtube recommendation otherwise its search sucks

Can you expand on this some more?

Ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp

Bluetooth headphones.

Never again.

Is American Society too broad?

Interactions with humans. They are extra stupid now.

Maybe because they don't have to think for themselves anymore?

Buying records at the store

Quality of friendships.

Microsoft has made my early career incredibly difficult and sucked all of the joy out of engineering. Their software like Outlook and Teams has given me eye strain, RSI, and teeth grinding. In my experience the Microsoft ecosystem promotes a culture of micromanaging, sniping, and gatekeeping.

Advertising.

Politics!

dating

Humor.

I have no interest in knowing that I am a unit in an 8 billion sample (going on 10 billions).

You read it as a texbook notion in school, but it's the internet which makes you internalize it.

All the stuff you care about and are enthusiast about you'll find people who put your skills and level in that particular field to shame.

And you don't even have to be looking for such info because it's shoved right in your face.

The most talented person (or perceived as talented) in a field monopolizes all the discussion in that particular field. So as you try to learn about the field you are met with all sorts of devote followers and bootlickers.

Throwaway cause reasons; Job life, finding a job.

My education was in the late-90s in electronics. Offshoring took that career away by the 2010s.

Oh, I don’t know web app development or anything above CS200 by heart, or haven’t contributed a decade of free labor to open source; fuck off.

A modern college education and different experiential timeline does not make a college educated person anymore than 1 of 7 billion like the rest of us.

Real on the ground life issues for millions are waved off as nbd cause the data shows those millions of able bodied people who see society act indifferent they exist, as they are just a rounding error, seems to be acceptable discourse.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all unfolds in a nation with a second amendment and one political party recently sharing plans internally to announce they are overturning the election to protect their demigod.

It’s not tech that’s the issue; it’s humanity itself. Its root social language is feudalism and moral relativism. Tech is just the latest vessel for those behaviors.

Is American Societal fabric too broad?

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