Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

yeah i dont want to be all "half informed tech advice" but if yr windows drive isnt already a decent-performing ssd then that can be transformative

it's true, but SSDs are still too small, when I was buying a new laptop I had to specially request a 2TB one as it wasn't standard, I do video editing and that still isn't really enough.

for the OS a smaller one is plenty, for what mookie describes id also imagine the same

pretty much any setup would have as much space as you want for content on additional hdd anyway?

my slow ass boot up 10 year old laptop got a lot better when I moved my 70GBs of photos off the (90gb?) laptop and onto a portable drive

hi!

sheer space can also be an issue def but i dont want to mediocrely (?) splain basic home computer maintenance im sure theres dozens better posters to do it even if mookie doesnt already know it and its the windows 8.1 thats the issue or w/e

hi!! <3 I know I was just another annoying voice on the pile but old habits die hard. It really did make a big difference though.

to mookie’s original point, yes. I get so irritated by the “just buy a new machine” mentality. I miss buying a bigger stick of RAM (a thing I did once.. but it counts) I’d like to yell at the devs to ensure backwards compatibility but in solidarity I’ll turn my ire toward the PMs and people concerned about shareholders etc forcing feature bloat in the inexhaustible drive for growth

this has probably been a thing for years now but today I walked to the corner store to get Gatorade, only to see nobody at the counter. after about five minutes, this guy comes in saying the computers are all down, sorry, you'll have to go elsewhere. used to be they'd manually ring you up and you could pay cash, but nope - they were basically shutting down and forgot to lock the door.

this is a chain obviously so they probably use AI software to analyze the sales metadata and have it make automated store/region product purchase decisions without human input (I never see managers at this location anymore). as a result, instead of telling their employees "just write down what you sold, and take cash if you can", they tell them to close the store. while probably blaming them and insinuating they broke the computer system in the interim.

so the store just becomes a big paperweight until the computers come back on and their employees get mega stressed out as there are never managers on duty to help.

and the other thing about being a chain is sometimes this happens: https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/walmart-computer-glitch-halts-sales-and-returns-at-stores-02858f45

Yeah, have had this happen a few times in the past few years, usually at gas station/convenience stores.

Whereas at the Philly coffee shop chain that I frequent? Square goes down, they go cash or CashApp only.

Same with the gym where I work: when our POS system is on the fritz or updating, we just write down what people have bought and members sign in their names on paper, like they used to back in the day.

at Vue cinemas in the UK the staff can’t change anything about the projection, including the volume. it’s all set remotely. same for other aspects of the theatres, like air conditioning and lighting.

what if the wrong movie gets projected

imagining someone hacking into the theater's mainframe and showing Caligula

Xp my corner store is a 7-11 and several times I will show up as they are closing and have turned the registers off, and they totally take cash in that window of time before locking the door

Maybe not all 7-11s are owned by franchisees but the ones around here are… cigarette prices differ significantly

And maybe this qualifies as a backward step too! So the closest one is the price the yemeni market charges plus tax … as in the total I pay is the same as at the yemeni market… the second closest one actually adds tax to the amount the closest one charges for a pack plus tax … basically they double tax. The one in Berkeley across the street from the good donut shop actually does it as tax inclusive … so it ends up being 10% cheaper than most everywhere else except Walgreens… however I have to drive to el Cerrito to get to a Walgreens that sells cigarettes…

Yea smoking is bad and I should quit.

i see duckduckgo releases updates that breaks their search engine now

I was fairly enthusiastic about shifting to duckduckgo for a short while, but it's never really lived up to expectations at all and haven't bothered with it for a while.

i've been using it pretty unthinkingly for a number of years but it isn't any better than google at finding relevant results afaict and is often worse. i put up with it out of google spite. but yes having your website not work at all not ideal

I've been using duckduckgo the last couple of years, honestly seems pretty much equivalent to google for the kind of searches I do (90% coding related stuff), though not right now obviously

i like a lot of the built in protections and functionality and probably use these as much or more than i do almost any other similar type of "you'll need to select and configure some stuff here" options in any other technology

but the search results are tbh trash

DDG & google seem about the same these days but that’s only because google deliberately broke google a while ago

I feel like this is completely insane but I'm paying $4/month for kagi for search now because it's the least bad.

isn't DDG essentially just a privacy-protecting interface for using Bing? meaning it's not that DDG is a bad search engine, it's that it's not really a search engine at all and Bing sucks (ftr I use DDG)

DDG search results used to be good but took a turn for the worse at some point a while back.

Has anyone else been getting weird search results from DuckDuckGo lately? For example, I can enter the name of a website and none of the results will be the website's home page (whereas Google will give me the home page as first result). It's not always doing this but it's been happening enough lately for me to notice it.

― visiting, Saturday, January 1, 2022

Every time I watch a DVD I remember how much more of a pleasant and user-friendly medium it is, by every conceivable metric, for viewing films (as opposed to streaming)

My opinion of DDG has never really shook its adoption by Pizzagate and associated nutters (which was the first and for a long time the last I heard of it)

also using kagi now

mmm have been mulling this

and orion, except it doesn't seem like it integrates with keychain

I have heard both good and bad things about Kagi, may check it out.

just learned that metacrawler still exists lol

> I have heard both good and bad things about Kagi, may check it out.

i pay 10 bux a month for kagi and at first it felt refreshing but all they talk about is their AI shit now and their results feel less great after the honeymoon period

I'm not paying for anything called Kagi

Same

iSearch.

Or mySearch

occurs to me that while Google is terrible, it still may not be possible to go back to anything good, the internet is just so full of shit now that filtering it out seems like a sisyphean task.

Does One Line Fix Google?

Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add "udm=14" to the search URL.

Every time I watch a DVD I remember how much more of a pleasant and user-friendly medium it is, by every conceivable metric, for viewing films

Not sure I agree? Noisey; need to find it, take it out and put it back; unskippable copyright notice; unskippable trailers; unskippable anti-piracy video…

scratchable

You wouldn't SCRATCH a DVD

Trailers you can skip over though, I always do.

find it out, take it out and put it back vs search every one of your services to see if they have it (or use justwatch, which is only accurate some of the time), fire up vpn to see if it's available in other territories...I'd say it's a toss up, and at least you can make your own dvd library more easy to find stuff in

Also easier to impress people with the Criterion Collection titles on your shelf.

I'm definitely tempted to go back to buying physical media for movies, but the one thing I dislike about physical media is that it takes up physical space.

Friends better appreciate my 4K of Tammy and the T-Rex or they're cut out of my life

I sometimes miss extras and outtakes / blooper reels. Don't miss unskippable anything.

Also using DVD chapters allowed one to watch Memento in forward sequence

physical media idgi

having drives full of the versions you want seems the best approach no?

are drives not physical media?

Does One Line Fix Google?

for whatever reason the "Web" option isn't available to me when i'm logged in, only when i'm logged out. what the fuck google?

dealing with backing up drives is a pita