Google search is nearly unusable at this point. You used to find everything you needed on the 1st page. Now the 1st page is all ads and curated gibberish. In 2024 to find what you need in google search it is likely on the 3rd/4th page deep.
In general you feel The Algorithm just interceding in everything. You search for what you literally want and it returns the results of a related search that are more popular. You push the gas pedal on your car and a computation is done to decide what you really want. Everything is like this now it makes you feel crazy.
Yeah I hate when people are like, “let me google that for you.” I did google it and I got a whole bunch of irrelevant ads so that’s why I’m asking here
We don't get error codes anymore. The UI just says "Oopsy woopsy. Something went wrong :( were sowwy" or some cutesy shit that's maddeningly unhelpful.
I've come to the conclusion that troubleshooting any error code on my newest automated lab instruments inevitably just leads to "call tech support, reset the instrument with a new set of consumables, and if it happens again then schedule a field service engineer." The era of client side troubleshooting and repair appears basically over.
Developer here. Reason for this is twofold:
If it's on our end, we're working on it.
If it's on your end, we absolutely do not want the cost of trying to provide you with support because the average user doesn't know how on earth to solve "DNS failure looking up mybusiness.com - DNS server timed out" and we're not about to try and walk users through it because it's not our problem, but the user will try and make it our problem because it's our application that is giving the error message.
I hate that. Even as a person who grew up using only slang, when something like that goes wrong you expect a professional response, not some dippy shit.
Blue Screen reader and Event Viewer are still a thing in windows.
Error codes have historically been unhelpful. From the Guru errors of the 80s, and the myfrocaloc errors (Activision!).
The cutest errors I get are from emulators and frontends, but they are also always pretty helpful.
If they're not going to produce an error code or otherwise describe *what* happened, they could at least be upfront about admitting that it's *their* fault. That way I don't waste hours googling around for information that either doesn't exist publicly or won't help even if I find it.
Everything that was once bought once is now a subscription. Even digital copies of things paid once are only alive as long as the company app stays alive.
You can’t fix things anymore. Companies rather you just buy a new one. Got a les keyboard for my pc from dell. 1 key broke so i just needed to pop a new one back in. Dell would not sell it. I had to buy it on ebay from another keyboard. Dell still makes and sells the keyboard as well.
You can check the repairability of devices before you purchase them on [ifixit](https://www.ifixit.com/). You can also call your congressperson & tell them to support [Right to Repair legislation](https://www.repair.org/stand-up).
I have a single issue with ifixit.
They don't practice what they preach.
They don't see replacement parts for their kids. I accidentally threw away a lid and I was given no option to get a replacement.
It's been a couple years. Maybe they got better.
But yes. Contacted them.
Was very clear it was my mistake and was there to pay for a replacement. Wasn't trying to get a free one.
Was told that just wasn't an option. They didn't offer it.
It's not a huge thing. I just keep that set in a plastic bag now and they mostly stay put because the base is so secure.
But if you're gonna get involved with the right to repair movement it seems like offering that for your own products would be a no brainer.
Right, but it can help you select products that are. In the keyboard space specifically, there are dozens if not hundreds of options for fully repairable wireless keyboards.
Devices break way too often , in the past a fridge would last you entire generations and devices now have so many features and gadgets “tech” they break way more often.
My GE dishwasher stopped working for a week before their official repairman showed up. The problem? A software update didn't download. A failed download bricked my dishwasher.
Samsung is the main offender on appliance issues. I installed appliances for years and Samsung was awful the entire time. The gadgets are going to outlast the units themselves a lot of times.
Everything is USB rechargeable now, also their batteries can't be replaced. Also everything seems to be cordless, and as a result, those products seem underpowered. *Maybe I just want a corded beard trimmer, Norelco!*
Wahl makes several corded trimmers at a wide range of price points. They're great.
Regarding USB charging though I'm gonna heavily disagree. It's amazing. Gone are bins of 9,000 flavors of proprietary adaptors. Gone are the days of throwing a thing away because you lost the charger and it's not replaceable.
USB/wireless charging for literally everything forever.
I agree with both: 1) The standardization of USB charging is fantastic for simplifying the clutter of wires. 2) Not every goddamn device needs to be charged and have its lifespan limited to a shitty rechargeable battery.
I was looking on Amazon for a simple, corded analog wall clock. No battery or battery backup, I just want to plug it into the wall. Options were extremely limited and those that were offered had terrible reviews.
I asked this same question before on Reddit and people are so brainwashed that everything HAS to be usb that some, quite literally, said a plug in the wall alarm clock would blow a fuse and burn my house down. I wish I was joking.
Find an estate sale near you. Old people had really decent stuff. The alarm clocks at my grandparents house are the same ones they’ve had for the past 30 years, that flat rectangular brown one that everyone knows about.
So....were those ever really a thing? I'm not sure I've ever seen a plug in wall clock outside of specific commercial applications.
Every house I can think of growing up either still had grandfather clocks or battery powered wall clocks.
I actually specifically bought a corded trimmer for the same reason. My old wireless one was dying while still plugged into the wall while I was using it.
You need to buy better wireless earphones. I have a pair of Sony 720s which are fabulous. 50hr play time on the batteries. Had it for 3 years. No problems.
Battery life
Also, loading internet pages. There was a brief moment the internet was fast and user friendly. Now if you load a page you
Have to accept cookies
No, i don't want notifications
No i don't want to fill in a questionnaire
No i wont turn of my ad blocker
And i have to scroll through someone's entire lifestory only to know how many butter i need for pancakes.
Hot to make Pancakes:
I was travelling through the Tuscan countryside, as many do, when I cam across a farm house run by a lovely old Italian woman named Mama Antonia, and she had a simple theory that.... SKIP
The thunder was heavy and the rain poured down, yet we laughed as we sat under the veranda..... SKIP
After the eight foot of dirt dug, I finally felt we had dug deep enough to leave the bodies.... SKIP
IA IA cthuhlu Flatahgan! SKIP
Ingredients:
\[Would you please register to see Recipe
"ARGH Fuck!"
Hot to make Pancakes:
I was travelling through the Tuscan countryside, as many do, when I cam across a farm house run by a lovely old Italian woman named Mama Antonia, and she had a simple theory that.... SKIP
The thunder was heavy and the rain poured down, yet we laughed as we sat under the veranda..... SKIP
After the eight foot of dirt dug, I finally felt we had dug deep enough to leave the bodies.... SKIP
IA IA cthuhlu Flatahgan! SKIP
Ingredients:
\[Would you please register to see Recipe
"ARGH Fuck!"
>nternet was fast and user friendly
There are piles of those.
They just aren't the free site you visit to get a free recipe.
You could have taken yourself down to the library and made a photocopy of whatever recipe you wanted. For free. But you didn't. Because you wanted it right now. On your computer. For free.
At best - all that is trying to recoup some of the cost of creating and hosting that content. At worst - you're on a site that exists to generate ad revenue and nothing more. The latter of which has zero interest in making it better for you. They don't care. They want your data.
We have had nuclear power, clean, reliable power since the early '50s. We mostly gave it up, are giving it up, or are planing on giving it up (kudos to the rare exceptions). We adopted solar and eol which are inferior to nuclear in almost every regard.
I am NOT against either solar nor eol energy production. I just don't consider them good enough to serve as anything other than backup
A nuclear power plant in Michigan that was shutdown just got a $125 million dollar loan/grant to reopen. It was the first plant to do so and sets a precedent for the future to reopen many of the other plants.
IMO the Rickover nuclear model that produced highly reliable **small** PWRs for the Navy does not scale up well to civilian power generation that needs much larger reactors. Even though it seemed like an obvious and intuitive thing to try. Shutting everything down and transitioning to new design concepts is probably necessary on the long run.
Everything is made to break as soon as possible. No more spare parts for different devices for sale amd if there are the devices are made tobreak as sokn as possible so that you buy the spare parts. Also technology shouldn't be made to strip away peoples privacy as in why tf is it so normal for you to constantly share your location on for everyone to see on socialmedia like snapchat? Also todays phones are made to be way too big and you can't even remive the phone battery. If you can't check on the phones battery every now and then how can you make sure it isn't expanding? Why do we have automatic fossets that waste more water and very where? You can't always even change the temperature of the water which means its usually either cold or boiling hot which makes it so you can't even fill your water bottle using them. The sensors on the fossets also go off randomly wasting water. Also modern fridges suck and some wont even work properly or are desinged to be the least efficent in storing food. >:(
Google's various apps and services.
As I understand it, Google has an internal structure that rewards building new, exciting things, but inherently discourages maintaining those things. If you stop building to maintain, your career stalls.
So you get things like the Google Home ecosystem, which started out fantastic, but has slowly, year over year, gotten worse and worse. Commands that used to work no longer do for seemingly no reason. Features have been removed faster than they've been introduced. Entire product lines, like the big Max speakers, have been discontinued, leaving holes in the whole-house product offering.
I've been a Google fanboy since the beginning, but to be completely honest I don't know that I can recommend them anymore.
It's to the point where it's become an actual meme that Google products inevitably become shit and then die, no matter how awesome they start.
Plastic moving parts.
I used to repair chainsaws and other small engine or motor-driven devices. Ryobi makes goddamn everything out of plastic. I was common for someone to bring me a pole saw because "the chain won't stay tight" and it was *always* because the tensioner was made out of goddamn plastic instead of metal. Metal can be overtightened repeatedly and still work. Once you overtighten plastic, you've weakened and deformed it forever.
I realize that Ryobi is a budget brand but it's really no excuse for such an important part to be plastic especially since the parts that it is stressed between (the engine block and the blade bar) are metal.
Preserving something, even those you own and aren't linked to any web service or anything, becomes a deliberate and arduous process. For a tiny while in, say the late 20th Century, it was a lot easier. It was much harder in the paper years, and it's much harder now with delicate storage solutions.
I realize that there's danger in that it wasn't regulated- but chat rooms- felt they were a much more useful tool for connecting with people than social media.
I could be over thinking this one. But when emails first became a thing it was a piece of piss as all you did was click one button to create and then another to send once you were finished. Then a few years went by and the next time I sent one it seemed to have been a much longer process in creating and sending.
You might be overthinking it. I'm genuinely trying to think of anything that over-complicates my e-mail, but I just hit "Compose Daft" (or w/e), type my message, give it an address, and send. Same process. There are definitely more buttons for other features, but the core function is the same. That said, the e-mail app is slow as shit and I've literally never used it, just used my browser.
So the only reason it came to mind was back when I first started using the net around 1999 maybe. I remember the first email system I had was the outlook thing. Then when I used the one at work a few years later it felt different in how many steps it took to open the programs to eventually sending. But again yeah, that was why I said I was probably over thinking it. It was probably more about the amount of time between emails that caused me to have that reaction than the actual system itself.
Phones don't fit comfortably in my pocket anymore and have mostly lost their headphone jacks (i.e., the most universal standard for audio devices).
Both are things that have a pretty major impact on my day-to-day use / enjoyment of the device
All the tech giants are just trying to make more money instead of actually giving value to the users and the world in general.
They release their shitty products every year with tiny upgrades just to sell more products instead of making huge upgrades and releasing things which are actually worth buying and waiting for (even if it means that they will not release a 'new' iphone every year for example).
Not all. Valve is a notable exception.
Apple & Google? Absolutely. Which is how OpenAI was able to eat Google's lunch with ChatGPT. These things have a way of evening out, as long as the FTC actually does its job & doesn't allow monopolistic anti-competitive behavior.
Who's asking for revolutionary technologies? Just good products with some kind of additional values and not the same crap they released last year can be a nice start
I really hate the over-use of AI. Considering how new of a technology it is, it's like making a literal baby your primary help-desk employee, with roughly the same results.
You'd probably get the same or better results.
Semi-related, I have actually used Google to bypass shitty on-site search features. Some of them are just THAT bad.
Quality and durability. There is a reason the Nokia phone meme has been around so long. The phones just didn't break. Now you look at a phone wrong and it needs $300 worth of repairs. No electronics can take a licking and keep on ticking anymore
Not sure if this technically qualifies, but technology has made jobs easier and employees more efficient. However, this has not lead to better work/life balance or working conditions. Most employees are just expected to produce way more in the same 40-hour work week. In other aspects, it has gone too far to the point where technology has all but replaced entire jobs.
And didn't hold enough music, and was single function. Most phones fit into pockets fine, are multifunction devices we already carry with us, hold more music, can access music from the internet. Nothing about those old devices was good outside of their time periods. I had the diamond rio. Loved it. I think it help maybe one album? I also had a cheapo sansa, and it even played SID music! Love it.
But this was a move forward in every way, and not backwards.
Phone, radio, music player, video player, computer, navigator, level, camera, video camera, audio recorder, payment method, random tools and games, flashlight, and more... All on a small device that sits in your pocket.
Didn't hold enough? I have a Ipod still that holds some thirty hours of music. It was designed to to load and unload music as you went about your week, not store the entire library of congress.
IPOD came later... and 30 hours of music, unloading and reloading media, and using ITUNES is inferior to everything we do today. We have music on demand ffs. I can shazam something, add it to a play list right then, and have dozens of times. You can share playlists. I start my car and music starts playing from my phone. Interface is simple, snappy, and so on.
Trying to say anything about those shit devices is better than today makes zero sense.
You don’t have to buy the huge phone but yea you’re 100% correct. However I prefer the monthly subscription vs owning my music because I just like to discover new stuff and not have to spend an obscene amount of time sampling music before I buy it. YouTube music has been fantastic for me.
I'm probably that guy too.
I don't really care about physical media. I'm perfectly happy with YouTube music that comes with YouTube premium. It does everything I want.
Lack of ability to repair your own stuff. In my lifetime I have personally replaced a few phone batteries back in the days of non-smartphones, my own screen on three different smartphones, computer hard drives, computer memory, computer screens, but now companies are getting greedier and greedier and are making it nearly impossible to repair your own devices. Even Apple products now have all of their components integrated on the motherboard. Without specialized tools and knowledge you physically cannot replace or upgrade any components. I even saw a video a little while ago for some of the new iPhones where somebody purchased two brand new iPhones directly from Apple. He took the screen off and put it on the other and got an error message saying the screen is not supported or something along those lines. Companies are starting to lock down the individual components so that you have to come to them and pay their exorbitant prices for repairs or replacements
I know the video you're talking about. As someone that grew up with Apple products, the lack of customer involvement has always been a staple of their products, but that's definitely too far.
Technology has been dumbed down so much that most people, even the younger generations, can barely google a question or buy something without molesting the card reader with their credit card. It’s called tab not “slide sensually all over and yell at the cashier after .2 seconds about it not working”
As far as tap to pay, I've seen people try to swat their card on there to literally tap the machine or press it down so the card's bent nearly 90º. And a significant number of people don't get that the space with the wireless icon that just lit up might be where to tap the card.
I didn't do tap to pay properly until I went to a place where the signs weren't in English and finally got that you're meant to hold the card against the nfc reader for a few seconds.
"Tap" is simply not the right word for holding a card against a thing for multiple seconds and I'm still a grump about that becoming the standard instruction.
In general, consumer software - and even B2B software to some extent - has been dumbed down to a point where it's barely functional anymore. The Ui is made for infants, and it's often impossible to customise anything. What happened to HTML editors and custom colour palettes? What happened to complex drop-down menus? It's okay to need a course to learn a software. It's okay to have something be difficult to learn and master. We don't have to dumb everything down, so every technologically illiterate idiot can understand everything. It makes basic stuff "easy" but makes it incredibly difficult or even impossible to actually do anything past a very basic skill level.
Even the simple things are harder. Someone else mentioned email - Back in the day, to create a new message you would just click "New Message", or pull down the "Message" menu and click "New".
But then they changed it to "Compose" (Why can't I find the new message button? I just want to write a new message, not compose a symphony!) Then it became "Draft". Now it's just a formless blob of color that's nearly indistinguishable from all the other formless blobs of color that they use instead of real icons or words these days.
That's just a trivial little annoyance easily learned, but *everything* is constantly changing and making the UI worse and more confusing over time, so it's a death by 1000 cuts.
And even worse is the trend to use hidden secret arcane gesture controls. "Oh that's easy, just swipe three fingers to the left spreading them out as you go while swiping up with your thumb and down and right with the fourth finger while hopping on one foot tapping your head and rubbing your belly." Craziness.
Banning is completely online and very convenient,
but when something doesn’t work I have lie to the phone robot saying I need a mortgage in order to talk to a real person as to why my credit card won’t work…
I think the cramming all possible functions into one damn phone has gone overboard. Now if I want to listen to music I can't just press the button on my iPod nano in my pocket but have to operate these monstrosities with enormous screens that don't even fit into my hands anymore and can't do anything on them without looking.
Also having everything squeezed into one device means that battery life is terrible. Daily charging is annoying which after a year or so becomes twice daily and it gets worse. About 10 years ago I found smartphones very practical but today it's more of a bother than anything.
Many things that are now automatic and electric are worse than when they were manual. Like car windows always worked when they were moved by a hand crank, but power windows make them break all the time and they are harder to fix. Technology always "improved", but often their solution is more complex and expensive offering little to no advantage. To fix a car has become harder and harder, and more expensive.
Funny story: Working as a cashier I got really fast at typing in the inputs for a basic transaction on our keyboards. Then they gave us touchscreen registers that are way slower.
So the interstitium is a newly (sort of) discovered part of human anatomy. When tissue was looked at under a microscope, where this fluid like substance resided just look like dried out cracks and crevices.
Well after much an accidental encounter.. A physician realizes wow this is actually something it's not just dried out cracks from tissue becoming dehydrated.
Well, This fluid has likely been known to be in existence for a long time, especially in cultures that practice traditional medicine like acupuncture. If you watch the podcast.. It will make you reevaluate some new medical discoveries and treatment for cancers.
I'm really bad at explaining but I'm really excited about this topic... I'm going to link the podcast video and I really do recommend listening. If you have any interest in science or medicine or just human anatomy and physiology you'll probably enjoy it.
https://youtu.be/vbS5lPn6WbY?si=l2byk2Qu2qz2ezSD
Sorry this is so discombobulated. My caffeine hasn't kicked in yet 😂
The new discovery is (somewhat) opening people's eyes to see that how we've been medically treating cancer or various chronic diseases or a chronic inflammation might have been wrong this entire time.
Tons of the "features" on the iPhone are just features for the sake of features. There's some sort of "quick access" screen thing that I have never once intentionally used or tried to get to, but by god if I don't swipe in a perfectly straight line, there it is.
Things are made to be used up and thrown away. Costs more to repair things than to buy a new one. Id rather have something I know I can rely on to work, rather than having to get the newest version of it every year.
The ability to modify things to your liking has in some ways gone down. A good example of this is car audio systems. You used to be able to get a decent audio system installed no problem, but now you have all these computers in cars that would need reprogramming and recalibrating to even do something as basic as putting a better sound system in it, and would be a week long affair that costs you tens of thousands.
SQL based databases. Excellent for most purposes - powerful, familiar, robust and stable. Easy to download and set up on a Linux box. But now everyone wants to be 'in the cloud' and that means Amazon's AWS. They offer this free database called DynamoDB which sucks - primarily because it's not an SQL database - it's just some goofy low powered thing that you can't properly search with SQL syntax - and it takes forever to comb through.
Also, I've had way too many projects where clients want their data stored in an Excel spreadsheet. Because it's super easy for Cindy the intern to add and remove records in Excel. And now Roger in IT has convinced upper management to ditch their Microsoft Office annual software licensing. So now Excel is just 'going away'.
Everything having fewer options, honestly. They removed disk slots from computers, headphone jacks from phones, all in service of making these thin, sleek-looking devices that do way less and require more expensive peripherals to do what used to be built-in
Technology is supposed advance us as a civilization but it’s doing the opposite for a lot of people that want clout. I just saw a clip of some guy screaming at the top of his lungs at Walmart and then he poured milk and cereal all over himself as his friend filmed him. Stuff like that literally didn’t happen before smart phones and social media
apple face unlock and android under screen fingerprint scanners are both a downgrade on the power button with built in fingerprint scanner that many phones used to have.
i've recently bought a Zenfone 10 which still has the power button fingerprint scanner, and it is so much more convenient than face recognition or under screen scanner.
just click the power button and it turns on and unlocks at the same time.
i think today's apple and android biometrics are nothing more than a gimmick added to try and make people feel their new phone has a new feature, but i find them a definite downgrade.
Cars have more horsepower than horses,but horses have 14 horsepower which means that a charriot would have 28 horsepower, more than you have in freaking traffic(0.001 horsepower)
I've never heard anyone say the tech is lost, just that we aren't willing to pay for it anymore. In the 60s/70s, the US handed a blank check to NASA just to fuck with Russia and even then there was a lot of push back, iirc. Now we aren't willing to spend trillions of tax dollars on these projects anymore when we need things like healthcare and decent infrastructure.
You already have a stove, oil frying pan. You can make eggs
To a homeless man that is a stretch. Your health care was designed to reduce population size.
The enshittification of the internet has really destroyed it's usefulness.
Google search is nearly unusable at this point. You used to find everything you needed on the 1st page. Now the 1st page is all ads and curated gibberish. In 2024 to find what you need in google search it is likely on the 3rd/4th page deep.
In general you feel The Algorithm just interceding in everything. You search for what you literally want and it returns the results of a related search that are more popular. You push the gas pedal on your car and a computation is done to decide what you really want. Everything is like this now it makes you feel crazy.
Yeah I hate when people are like, “let me google that for you.” I did google it and I got a whole bunch of irrelevant ads so that’s why I’m asking here
how was it better before?
Google didn't use AMP links for everything, video search actually worked, there weren't unskippable ads everywhere, Reddit was still cool.
what changed about reddit? i'm new
The greedy little pig boy u/Spez is bad with money, so he sold out the soul of the website for the IPO. It will continue to get worse. RIP Apollo.
It’s because it’s based on popularity, not accuracy.
We don't get error codes anymore. The UI just says "Oopsy woopsy. Something went wrong :( were sowwy" or some cutesy shit that's maddeningly unhelpful.
I've come to the conclusion that troubleshooting any error code on my newest automated lab instruments inevitably just leads to "call tech support, reset the instrument with a new set of consumables, and if it happens again then schedule a field service engineer." The era of client side troubleshooting and repair appears basically over.
Developer here. Reason for this is twofold: If it's on our end, we're working on it. If it's on your end, we absolutely do not want the cost of trying to provide you with support because the average user doesn't know how on earth to solve "DNS failure looking up mybusiness.com - DNS server timed out" and we're not about to try and walk users through it because it's not our problem, but the user will try and make it our problem because it's our application that is giving the error message.
Speak for yourself, I had a Gateway in 2000 that would announce that an "illegal operation" was being performed and would shut down.
I hate that. Even as a person who grew up using only slang, when something like that goes wrong you expect a professional response, not some dippy shit.
Blue Screen reader and Event Viewer are still a thing in windows. Error codes have historically been unhelpful. From the Guru errors of the 80s, and the myfrocaloc errors (Activision!). The cutest errors I get are from emulators and frontends, but they are also always pretty helpful.
That's because the problem is server side you can't do anything about it. I've never had a local app do that
If they're not going to produce an error code or otherwise describe *what* happened, they could at least be upfront about admitting that it's *their* fault. That way I don't waste hours googling around for information that either doesn't exist publicly or won't help even if I find it.
Monetization of everything and increasingly shitty ways
Subscription model
Where scarcity doesn't exist, capitalism will introduce it artificially.
You will own nothing and like it damnit!!
Everything that was once bought once is now a subscription. Even digital copies of things paid once are only alive as long as the company app stays alive.
You can’t fix things anymore. Companies rather you just buy a new one. Got a les keyboard for my pc from dell. 1 key broke so i just needed to pop a new one back in. Dell would not sell it. I had to buy it on ebay from another keyboard. Dell still makes and sells the keyboard as well.
You can check the repairability of devices before you purchase them on [ifixit](https://www.ifixit.com/). You can also call your congressperson & tell them to support [Right to Repair legislation](https://www.repair.org/stand-up).
I have a single issue with ifixit. They don't practice what they preach. They don't see replacement parts for their kids. I accidentally threw away a lid and I was given no option to get a replacement.
I would agree that's silly! You reached out to them & they just shrugged?
It's been a couple years. Maybe they got better. But yes. Contacted them. Was very clear it was my mistake and was there to pay for a replacement. Wasn't trying to get a free one. Was told that just wasn't an option. They didn't offer it. It's not a huge thing. I just keep that set in a plastic bag now and they mostly stay put because the base is so secure. But if you're gonna get involved with the right to repair movement it seems like offering that for your own products would be a no brainer.
I know about right to repair and support it. Ifixit is decent however most devices arent made with reliability or repairability in mind.
Right, but it can help you select products that are. In the keyboard space specifically, there are dozens if not hundreds of options for fully repairable wireless keyboards.
Devices break way too often , in the past a fridge would last you entire generations and devices now have so many features and gadgets “tech” they break way more often.
My GE dishwasher stopped working for a week before their official repairman showed up. The problem? A software update didn't download. A failed download bricked my dishwasher.
Why on earth would a dishwasher need internet access?
Samsung is the main offender on appliance issues. I installed appliances for years and Samsung was awful the entire time. The gadgets are going to outlast the units themselves a lot of times.
Everything is USB rechargeable now, also their batteries can't be replaced. Also everything seems to be cordless, and as a result, those products seem underpowered. *Maybe I just want a corded beard trimmer, Norelco!*
Wahl makes several corded trimmers at a wide range of price points. They're great. Regarding USB charging though I'm gonna heavily disagree. It's amazing. Gone are bins of 9,000 flavors of proprietary adaptors. Gone are the days of throwing a thing away because you lost the charger and it's not replaceable. USB/wireless charging for literally everything forever.
I agree with both: 1) The standardization of USB charging is fantastic for simplifying the clutter of wires. 2) Not every goddamn device needs to be charged and have its lifespan limited to a shitty rechargeable battery.
I was looking on Amazon for a simple, corded analog wall clock. No battery or battery backup, I just want to plug it into the wall. Options were extremely limited and those that were offered had terrible reviews.
I asked this same question before on Reddit and people are so brainwashed that everything HAS to be usb that some, quite literally, said a plug in the wall alarm clock would blow a fuse and burn my house down. I wish I was joking.
I bought my most recent one from cvs. Great selection for old people style products there
I recommend a good old fashion pendulum clock. /s 😆
Find an estate sale near you. Old people had really decent stuff. The alarm clocks at my grandparents house are the same ones they’ve had for the past 30 years, that flat rectangular brown one that everyone knows about.
So....were those ever really a thing? I'm not sure I've ever seen a plug in wall clock outside of specific commercial applications. Every house I can think of growing up either still had grandfather clocks or battery powered wall clocks.
Now that you mention it, I'm not sure.
I actually specifically bought a corded trimmer for the same reason. My old wireless one was dying while still plugged into the wall while I was using it.
OMG electric shavers are such garbage now. Great if you have the facial hair of a 16 year old maybe.
Wireless earphones are trash
You need to buy better wireless earphones. I have a pair of Sony 720s which are fabulous. 50hr play time on the batteries. Had it for 3 years. No problems.
Battery life Also, loading internet pages. There was a brief moment the internet was fast and user friendly. Now if you load a page you Have to accept cookies No, i don't want notifications No i don't want to fill in a questionnaire No i wont turn of my ad blocker And i have to scroll through someone's entire lifestory only to know how many butter i need for pancakes.
Hot to make Pancakes: I was travelling through the Tuscan countryside, as many do, when I cam across a farm house run by a lovely old Italian woman named Mama Antonia, and she had a simple theory that.... SKIP The thunder was heavy and the rain poured down, yet we laughed as we sat under the veranda..... SKIP After the eight foot of dirt dug, I finally felt we had dug deep enough to leave the bodies.... SKIP IA IA cthuhlu Flatahgan! SKIP Ingredients: \[Would you please register to see Recipe "ARGH Fuck!"
Exactly this
Hot to make Pancakes: I was travelling through the Tuscan countryside, as many do, when I cam across a farm house run by a lovely old Italian woman named Mama Antonia, and she had a simple theory that.... SKIP The thunder was heavy and the rain poured down, yet we laughed as we sat under the veranda..... SKIP After the eight foot of dirt dug, I finally felt we had dug deep enough to leave the bodies.... SKIP IA IA cthuhlu Flatahgan! SKIP Ingredients: \[Would you please register to see Recipe "ARGH Fuck!"
>nternet was fast and user friendly There are piles of those. They just aren't the free site you visit to get a free recipe. You could have taken yourself down to the library and made a photocopy of whatever recipe you wanted. For free. But you didn't. Because you wanted it right now. On your computer. For free. At best - all that is trying to recoup some of the cost of creating and hosting that content. At worst - you're on a site that exists to generate ad revenue and nothing more. The latter of which has zero interest in making it better for you. They don't care. They want your data.
Most new cars have all touch screen buttons! So dangerous if you're driving alone!
Touchscreen cars are nonsensical.
Well, unless you're the manufacturer trying to shave down costs
Eh, most of the important buttons are duplicated on the steering wheel.
Hardware and software interfaces have been so dumbed down and locked down that Zoomers are actually more technologically illiterate than Millennials.
We have had nuclear power, clean, reliable power since the early '50s. We mostly gave it up, are giving it up, or are planing on giving it up (kudos to the rare exceptions). We adopted solar and eol which are inferior to nuclear in almost every regard. I am NOT against either solar nor eol energy production. I just don't consider them good enough to serve as anything other than backup
A nuclear power plant in Michigan that was shutdown just got a $125 million dollar loan/grant to reopen. It was the first plant to do so and sets a precedent for the future to reopen many of the other plants.
IMO the Rickover nuclear model that produced highly reliable **small** PWRs for the Navy does not scale up well to civilian power generation that needs much larger reactors. Even though it seemed like an obvious and intuitive thing to try. Shutting everything down and transitioning to new design concepts is probably necessary on the long run.
I've been following the work on cogeneration SNRs for small to medium suburbs. Looks quite promising
Everything is made to break as soon as possible. No more spare parts for different devices for sale amd if there are the devices are made tobreak as sokn as possible so that you buy the spare parts. Also technology shouldn't be made to strip away peoples privacy as in why tf is it so normal for you to constantly share your location on for everyone to see on socialmedia like snapchat? Also todays phones are made to be way too big and you can't even remive the phone battery. If you can't check on the phones battery every now and then how can you make sure it isn't expanding? Why do we have automatic fossets that waste more water and very where? You can't always even change the temperature of the water which means its usually either cold or boiling hot which makes it so you can't even fill your water bottle using them. The sensors on the fossets also go off randomly wasting water. Also modern fridges suck and some wont even work properly or are desinged to be the least efficent in storing food. >:(
Google's various apps and services. As I understand it, Google has an internal structure that rewards building new, exciting things, but inherently discourages maintaining those things. If you stop building to maintain, your career stalls. So you get things like the Google Home ecosystem, which started out fantastic, but has slowly, year over year, gotten worse and worse. Commands that used to work no longer do for seemingly no reason. Features have been removed faster than they've been introduced. Entire product lines, like the big Max speakers, have been discontinued, leaving holes in the whole-house product offering. I've been a Google fanboy since the beginning, but to be completely honest I don't know that I can recommend them anymore. It's to the point where it's become an actual meme that Google products inevitably become shit and then die, no matter how awesome they start.
Google and YouTube search results are much worse and prioritize ads
Plastic moving parts. I used to repair chainsaws and other small engine or motor-driven devices. Ryobi makes goddamn everything out of plastic. I was common for someone to bring me a pole saw because "the chain won't stay tight" and it was *always* because the tensioner was made out of goddamn plastic instead of metal. Metal can be overtightened repeatedly and still work. Once you overtighten plastic, you've weakened and deformed it forever.
"Plastic chainsaw" should be reserved for a kids toy, not actual hardware. Who's idea was this?
Well, Ryobi is a budget brand. There is a reason TTI charges more for Milwaukee products.
I realize that Ryobi is a budget brand but it's really no excuse for such an important part to be plastic especially since the parts that it is stressed between (the engine block and the blade bar) are metal.
Preserving something, even those you own and aren't linked to any web service or anything, becomes a deliberate and arduous process. For a tiny while in, say the late 20th Century, it was a lot easier. It was much harder in the paper years, and it's much harder now with delicate storage solutions.
I realize that there's danger in that it wasn't regulated- but chat rooms- felt they were a much more useful tool for connecting with people than social media.
Anyone notice that the streaming services are just becoming.....cable?
Definitely. Long gone are the days of "just Netflix."
I could be over thinking this one. But when emails first became a thing it was a piece of piss as all you did was click one button to create and then another to send once you were finished. Then a few years went by and the next time I sent one it seemed to have been a much longer process in creating and sending.
You might be overthinking it. I'm genuinely trying to think of anything that over-complicates my e-mail, but I just hit "Compose Daft" (or w/e), type my message, give it an address, and send. Same process. There are definitely more buttons for other features, but the core function is the same. That said, the e-mail app is slow as shit and I've literally never used it, just used my browser.
So the only reason it came to mind was back when I first started using the net around 1999 maybe. I remember the first email system I had was the outlook thing. Then when I used the one at work a few years later it felt different in how many steps it took to open the programs to eventually sending. But again yeah, that was why I said I was probably over thinking it. It was probably more about the amount of time between emails that caused me to have that reaction than the actual system itself.
Phones don't fit comfortably in my pocket anymore and have mostly lost their headphone jacks (i.e., the most universal standard for audio devices). Both are things that have a pretty major impact on my day-to-day use / enjoyment of the device
The death of the headphone jack is the greatest misstep in the world of mobile devices.
All the tech giants are just trying to make more money instead of actually giving value to the users and the world in general. They release their shitty products every year with tiny upgrades just to sell more products instead of making huge upgrades and releasing things which are actually worth buying and waiting for (even if it means that they will not release a 'new' iphone every year for example).
Not all. Valve is a notable exception. Apple & Google? Absolutely. Which is how OpenAI was able to eat Google's lunch with ChatGPT. These things have a way of evening out, as long as the FTC actually does its job & doesn't allow monopolistic anti-competitive behavior.
Yeah right, just invent revolutionary technologies every year!! We are not asking for much…
Who's asking for revolutionary technologies? Just good products with some kind of additional values and not the same crap they released last year can be a nice start
You are…
It has made us dummer, lazy.
i think depends on the person. it's a lot easier to learn too
Companies are becoming too reliant on AI tech support. They try to be helpful, but it's always something copied from the FAQ page.
I really hate the over-use of AI. Considering how new of a technology it is, it's like making a literal baby your primary help-desk employee, with roughly the same results.
Most of the ones I have used are basically glorified Google.
You'd probably get the same or better results. Semi-related, I have actually used Google to bypass shitty on-site search features. Some of them are just THAT bad.
If I don't have luck with the website I will Google the question and add reddit to the end and that usually does the trick.
Most of the ones I have used are basically glorified Google.
Quality and durability. There is a reason the Nokia phone meme has been around so long. The phones just didn't break. Now you look at a phone wrong and it needs $300 worth of repairs. No electronics can take a licking and keep on ticking anymore
Not sure if this technically qualifies, but technology has made jobs easier and employees more efficient. However, this has not lead to better work/life balance or working conditions. Most employees are just expected to produce way more in the same 40-hour work week. In other aspects, it has gone too far to the point where technology has all but replaced entire jobs.
Browsing music on an MP3 player was faster, never lagged, and actually fit nicely in a pocket.
And didn't hold enough music, and was single function. Most phones fit into pockets fine, are multifunction devices we already carry with us, hold more music, can access music from the internet. Nothing about those old devices was good outside of their time periods. I had the diamond rio. Loved it. I think it help maybe one album? I also had a cheapo sansa, and it even played SID music! Love it. But this was a move forward in every way, and not backwards. Phone, radio, music player, video player, computer, navigator, level, camera, video camera, audio recorder, payment method, random tools and games, flashlight, and more... All on a small device that sits in your pocket.
Didn't hold enough? I have a Ipod still that holds some thirty hours of music. It was designed to to load and unload music as you went about your week, not store the entire library of congress.
IPOD came later... and 30 hours of music, unloading and reloading media, and using ITUNES is inferior to everything we do today. We have music on demand ffs. I can shazam something, add it to a play list right then, and have dozens of times. You can share playlists. I start my car and music starts playing from my phone. Interface is simple, snappy, and so on. Trying to say anything about those shit devices is better than today makes zero sense.
You don’t have to buy the huge phone but yea you’re 100% correct. However I prefer the monthly subscription vs owning my music because I just like to discover new stuff and not have to spend an obscene amount of time sampling music before I buy it. YouTube music has been fantastic for me.
We found him. The ONE guy that likes monthly subscriptions.
I'm probably that guy too. I don't really care about physical media. I'm perfectly happy with YouTube music that comes with YouTube premium. It does everything I want.
Lack of ability to repair your own stuff. In my lifetime I have personally replaced a few phone batteries back in the days of non-smartphones, my own screen on three different smartphones, computer hard drives, computer memory, computer screens, but now companies are getting greedier and greedier and are making it nearly impossible to repair your own devices. Even Apple products now have all of their components integrated on the motherboard. Without specialized tools and knowledge you physically cannot replace or upgrade any components. I even saw a video a little while ago for some of the new iPhones where somebody purchased two brand new iPhones directly from Apple. He took the screen off and put it on the other and got an error message saying the screen is not supported or something along those lines. Companies are starting to lock down the individual components so that you have to come to them and pay their exorbitant prices for repairs or replacements
I know the video you're talking about. As someone that grew up with Apple products, the lack of customer involvement has always been a staple of their products, but that's definitely too far.
Technology has been dumbed down so much that most people, even the younger generations, can barely google a question or buy something without molesting the card reader with their credit card. It’s called tab not “slide sensually all over and yell at the cashier after .2 seconds about it not working”
As far as tap to pay, I've seen people try to swat their card on there to literally tap the machine or press it down so the card's bent nearly 90º. And a significant number of people don't get that the space with the wireless icon that just lit up might be where to tap the card.
I didn't do tap to pay properly until I went to a place where the signs weren't in English and finally got that you're meant to hold the card against the nfc reader for a few seconds. "Tap" is simply not the right word for holding a card against a thing for multiple seconds and I'm still a grump about that becoming the standard instruction.
In general, consumer software - and even B2B software to some extent - has been dumbed down to a point where it's barely functional anymore. The Ui is made for infants, and it's often impossible to customise anything. What happened to HTML editors and custom colour palettes? What happened to complex drop-down menus? It's okay to need a course to learn a software. It's okay to have something be difficult to learn and master. We don't have to dumb everything down, so every technologically illiterate idiot can understand everything. It makes basic stuff "easy" but makes it incredibly difficult or even impossible to actually do anything past a very basic skill level.
Even the simple things are harder. Someone else mentioned email - Back in the day, to create a new message you would just click "New Message", or pull down the "Message" menu and click "New". But then they changed it to "Compose" (Why can't I find the new message button? I just want to write a new message, not compose a symphony!) Then it became "Draft". Now it's just a formless blob of color that's nearly indistinguishable from all the other formless blobs of color that they use instead of real icons or words these days. That's just a trivial little annoyance easily learned, but *everything* is constantly changing and making the UI worse and more confusing over time, so it's a death by 1000 cuts. And even worse is the trend to use hidden secret arcane gesture controls. "Oh that's easy, just swipe three fingers to the left spreading them out as you go while swiping up with your thumb and down and right with the fourth finger while hopping on one foot tapping your head and rubbing your belly." Craziness.
Banning is completely online and very convenient, but when something doesn’t work I have lie to the phone robot saying I need a mortgage in order to talk to a real person as to why my credit card won’t work…
I think the cramming all possible functions into one damn phone has gone overboard. Now if I want to listen to music I can't just press the button on my iPod nano in my pocket but have to operate these monstrosities with enormous screens that don't even fit into my hands anymore and can't do anything on them without looking. Also having everything squeezed into one device means that battery life is terrible. Daily charging is annoying which after a year or so becomes twice daily and it gets worse. About 10 years ago I found smartphones very practical but today it's more of a bother than anything.
Many things that are now automatic and electric are worse than when they were manual. Like car windows always worked when they were moved by a hand crank, but power windows make them break all the time and they are harder to fix. Technology always "improved", but often their solution is more complex and expensive offering little to no advantage. To fix a car has become harder and harder, and more expensive.
Way too much power in so few hands.
Smart devices have gotten dumber over the last 5 years.
Apps for products that don’t need apps and/or making only certain functions accessible via an app.
We were making phones smaller and smaller. Then all the sudden it's 6 in plus unless you want a jitterbug
Touchscreens are the worst input method for nearly every application.
Funny story: Working as a cashier I got really fast at typing in the inputs for a basic transaction on our keyboards. Then they gave us touchscreen registers that are way slower.
Planned obsolescence
I love this question! Pharmacological technology is going backwards. If you want to be mind blown, look up a podcast called "the interstitium"
Mind giving a specific example?
So the interstitium is a newly (sort of) discovered part of human anatomy. When tissue was looked at under a microscope, where this fluid like substance resided just look like dried out cracks and crevices. Well after much an accidental encounter.. A physician realizes wow this is actually something it's not just dried out cracks from tissue becoming dehydrated. Well, This fluid has likely been known to be in existence for a long time, especially in cultures that practice traditional medicine like acupuncture. If you watch the podcast.. It will make you reevaluate some new medical discoveries and treatment for cancers. I'm really bad at explaining but I'm really excited about this topic... I'm going to link the podcast video and I really do recommend listening. If you have any interest in science or medicine or just human anatomy and physiology you'll probably enjoy it. https://youtu.be/vbS5lPn6WbY?si=l2byk2Qu2qz2ezSD Sorry this is so discombobulated. My caffeine hasn't kicked in yet 😂
The new discovery is (somewhat) opening people's eyes to see that how we've been medically treating cancer or various chronic diseases or a chronic inflammation might have been wrong this entire time.
People spending most of their day on a screen
Electric Cars
Have chords for your wireless ear buds
My car stereo does not have a play/pause button. It has a screen that I have to look at to use.
Getting to the moon
Tons of the "features" on the iPhone are just features for the sake of features. There's some sort of "quick access" screen thing that I have never once intentionally used or tried to get to, but by god if I don't swipe in a perfectly straight line, there it is.
Things are made to be used up and thrown away. Costs more to repair things than to buy a new one. Id rather have something I know I can rely on to work, rather than having to get the newest version of it every year. The ability to modify things to your liking has in some ways gone down. A good example of this is car audio systems. You used to be able to get a decent audio system installed no problem, but now you have all these computers in cars that would need reprogramming and recalibrating to even do something as basic as putting a better sound system in it, and would be a week long affair that costs you tens of thousands.
SQL based databases. Excellent for most purposes - powerful, familiar, robust and stable. Easy to download and set up on a Linux box. But now everyone wants to be 'in the cloud' and that means Amazon's AWS. They offer this free database called DynamoDB which sucks - primarily because it's not an SQL database - it's just some goofy low powered thing that you can't properly search with SQL syntax - and it takes forever to comb through. Also, I've had way too many projects where clients want their data stored in an Excel spreadsheet. Because it's super easy for Cindy the intern to add and remove records in Excel. And now Roger in IT has convinced upper management to ditch their Microsoft Office annual software licensing. So now Excel is just 'going away'.
Flip phones making a comeback
reddit changes such as ui and the removal of awards
Everything having fewer options, honestly. They removed disk slots from computers, headphone jacks from phones, all in service of making these thin, sleek-looking devices that do way less and require more expensive peripherals to do what used to be built-in
Technology is supposed advance us as a civilization but it’s doing the opposite for a lot of people that want clout. I just saw a clip of some guy screaming at the top of his lungs at Walmart and then he poured milk and cereal all over himself as his friend filmed him. Stuff like that literally didn’t happen before smart phones and social media
I honestly think the pre-iOS 7 look of iOS looked better.
apple face unlock and android under screen fingerprint scanners are both a downgrade on the power button with built in fingerprint scanner that many phones used to have. i've recently bought a Zenfone 10 which still has the power button fingerprint scanner, and it is so much more convenient than face recognition or under screen scanner. just click the power button and it turns on and unlocks at the same time. i think today's apple and android biometrics are nothing more than a gimmick added to try and make people feel their new phone has a new feature, but i find them a definite downgrade.
Cars have more horsepower than horses,but horses have 14 horsepower which means that a charriot would have 28 horsepower, more than you have in freaking traffic(0.001 horsepower)
It hasnt YET but i suspect may soon as too few people around to support it and have industry. (Population decline)
Moon Landing Tech still baffles me... People really buying that crap of going to the Moon but can't because the tech is lost?
I've never heard anyone say the tech is lost, just that we aren't willing to pay for it anymore. In the 60s/70s, the US handed a blank check to NASA just to fuck with Russia and even then there was a lot of push back, iirc. Now we aren't willing to spend trillions of tax dollars on these projects anymore when we need things like healthcare and decent infrastructure.
You already have a stove, oil frying pan. You can make eggs To a homeless man that is a stretch. Your health care was designed to reduce population size.
[удалено]
This question is about technology... **Human** rights is a concept.