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

I had to look up AA boarding groups for my wife recently and they had ten boarding groups plus an extra non-group that went before the rest, she had priority which got he into group 4. In Australia we have two lines premium and everyone else but in practice everyone just joins whichever line looks shorter and they board simultaneously. It's a lot quicker (but less monetised).

nobody got around to coding the bit that inserts the advertisement after the warning about the advertisement.

Oh it's coded, but there are more podcast episodes than the BBC's ad partner (Acast) can actually sell ads against. The BBC has thousands and thousands of podcast episodes; only a couple hundred get ads against them each month. And it's dynamic, so an episode that had an ad against it last month might not this month.

I’m going to consider myself as winning a very genial game of Russian roulette every time the ad chamber comes up empty from now on.

Used to be functions disappearing from home stereo systems and being replaced by flashing lights to make it more discoey.
Trying to think what went between me getting my first one which got stolen and then me having to replace it. I think there were things like the choice of what part fo a twin cassette deck set up you got to play in which direction and when it stopped is the first thing that comes to mind. You could actually use the remote to choose between side a and b of 2 decks and if you played to end of tape, continually through entire tape, or if you then swapped over to the other tape & i think that could be done from the remote.
Now I'm not even sure fi teh current player flips the tape side automatically.
I think that first one also had a set up for you to manually set up your audio choices, graphic equaliser like which gave way to choice of about 12 different sound pattern things like salsa, disco, soul, jazz, rock which were all preset.

We occasionally get adds on bbc podcasts down here. The electoral commission seems to buy a bunch during elections. It’s a bit jarring getting an Aussie ad on the bbc.

most of these are trade-offs where the "backward step" is accompanied by a "forward step". They exist because more people view the forward step as larger than the backward. It is natural that some do not, but it's still not accurate to describe the net as simply a "backward step".

this has to be a malcolm gladwell chapter

"every change is ultimately positive progress" is a curious stance

The existence of Malcolm Gladwell is a backward step we all just accept now.

lol I said "most of these" and indeed most examples of backward steps itt came along with huge forward steps. it would be more interesting to look at the ultimate net progress as you suggest, though. the idea of this thread seems to be to focus on what was traded off in a really negative light, which I think is more indicative of personality (which isn't necessarily negative) than any shift in technological capability. it's not as if battery technology got worse when the iphone came along. battery technology would probably be in a slightly worse state today without the huge driver of smart phone money.

see my "ruin but not replace" post - it's fallacious to assume that because the change happened/caught on that it was overall better or more beneficial. just has to benefit the right people, or render the old system just-broken-enough.

like i think we all know that many of these are seen as "forward steps" to somebody, even if it's just a corporation that counted the beans and realized that plastic components would save x cents per unit in the long term.

Yeah I think it's maybe important to note that 'progress' is often measured and driven by the bottom line of the companies who are ushering these 'innovations' into our lives. The theoretically possible things that people actually want/need/ask for are not often what we get.

I agree with these last 3 posts. I also think that the primary purpose of this thread is to take turns putting the word 'innovations' in scare quotes.

The way business is conducted often leads to regression or stagnation rather than progress, this article about Microsoft Word is a good example of this

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

👻innovations👻

Back when it was all DVDs by mail, Netflix had basically everything that was ever released on video. Now you're at the mercy of whatever each streaming service makes available that month, which is probably a fifth of what was available on DVD.

Wasn't the promise of streaming that you would have access to everything?

How is it that, thirty years down the line, email is still the same piece of shit technology that it always was.

Like, there's someone that I work with, every email she sends, the company logo graphic in her signature is always broken; instead, it shows up as an attached jpeg. There's also usually a second attachment called something like "0.html" which is inevitably just a blank web page.

It’s god’s way of telling you to send plain text emails.

Back when it was all DVDs by mail, Netflix had basically everything that was ever released on video.

xxp netflix dvd subscriptions are not that expensive and they have a huge selection of films from the 20th Century!

― Dan S, Thursday, August 15, 2019 7:04 AM (two days ago)

Wasn't the promise of streaming that you would have access to everything?

Did anyone ever promise this? They obviously would have been lying if so, but did any entity ever actually promote the lie?

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there was a good article a couple years ago that went over how much has been phased out of netflix's dvd-by-mail business through the attrition of dvds that got damaged and weren't replaced.... found it! https://www.kqed.org/arts/10141066/netflix_streaming_dvds

the "access to everything" story wasn't told so much by the streaming companies as by the equivalent of WIRED and other digital cheerleaderati.

I had never seen this last word and was hoping you had made it up for this post.

How is it that, thirty years down the line, email is still the same piece of shit technology that it always was.

Like, there's someone that I work with, every email she sends, the company logo graphic in her signature is always broken; instead, it shows up as an attached jpeg. There's also usually a second attachment called something like "0.html" which is inevitably just a blank web page.

― Hideous Lump

J

An issue w/the streaming myth is that it was propagated by people who have no idea how licensing works.

Speaking of one second delays, The half second or second it takes for newer model cars to go after you step on the gas pedal.

automatics in general belong on this thread tbrr

^ otm

J

lol

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definitely a practical step backwards

still an enthusiastic user of netflix dvd service, always waiting for them to drop the hammer on it. i cant imagine why it continues this long, other than the fact that it must cost them next to nothing to keep it up

PowerPoint is bad when used by amateurs. Program quad charts, excessive bullets, terrible formatting: these are not the programs’ fault. A bad briefing is bad because the briefer is bad at briefing. Its closest competitor, Keynote, has all of the same issues.

Word is mediocre when used for text documents that are 4 pages long and need to be reviewed by 2 people. It is phenomenal when a 30 page document with tables and figures needs to be reviewed by an organization of 100+ people. Its closest competitors still lag behind Word in this department.

Automatic transmissions are “bad” because they save on wear & tear (especially tires) and fuel consumption. If you claim to prefer manual transmissions for any rationale besides “fun” you are a moron. Anyway, drive electric. It’s practically 2020 already.

Email is brilliant technology, always has been, and if you hate it you have no place in an office. Go apprentice as a tradesperson and learn to cast bronze or pour concrete or something.

I like to count the number of fonts and font sizes people use in one PowerPoint deck.

i have better control over the car in a stickshift. at least it feels that way. the car doesn't "creep" when my foot's not on the accelerator and it's more responsive to the gas pedal. also i know when to shift, I'm not a moron. but yeah our electric/hybrid future will require automatics, I'm resigned to that.

i only grudgingly accept the existence of power steering so

In my experience apps like Slack have turned out to be worse than email for work comms - too much pressure to reply/contribute too quick and too easy to indulge in small talk you could either do face to face or not at all.

i liked the anti-Word article posted above because it wasn't primarily about Word sucking (altho the issues with overlapping use of style presets and ad-hoc select-and-click formatting are discussed) but about how much easier and more robust things *might have become* in a world without Word dominating the field and quashing innovation in the area of specific tools. i now use scrivener for all my substantial writing, and the one part of the workflow that suuuucks is taking the exported RTF into word for final formatting.

powerpoint makes it way too easy to lay out clunky, ugly documents, in just a "getting shit to line up, follow a grid, align, etc." sense. it still feels like a windows 98 era idea of what easy-to-use design would be (dumbed down and made clumsy, rather than streamlined with more functionality there if you want it). anytime i have to use it i'm just screaming for indesign inside. it also embeds all images at full size within the PPT file, which is very handy for tossing one presentation on a stick and taking it with you, but suuuuper annoying and wasteful of disk space if you're storing it locally, have multiple versions etc.

wasteful of disk space

god forbid.

i liked the anti-Word article posted above because it wasn't primarily about Word sucking (altho the issues with overlapping use of style presets and ad-hoc select-and-click formatting are discussed) but about how much easier and more robust things *might have become* in a world without Word dominating the field and quashing innovation in the area of specific tools. i now use scrivener for all my substantial writing, and the one part of the workflow that suuuucks is taking the exported RTF into word for final formatting.

― Good morning, how are you, I'm (Doctor Casino)

or, in a world without word, i might have 12,000 different overlays for each different program to put on top of my keyboard...

The fact that scrivener can’t export to .docx is not Word’s fault

but… it can?

then why does Doctor Casino not do this?!?!?

I blame sic’s podcast post for turning this into the “complaining about commonplace tech we can’t be bothered to learn how to use” thread

bunch of old dogs on ilx

xp well maybe he just likes rtf - even if you put out docx, there's often some fiddling with the scrivener-formatted doc that one would like to do, unless you just commit to doing everything with scrivener and its formatting options. personally i just do barely any other than italics and a bit of header-ing so that i'm not distracted away from ~teh writing~

ILX THREADS DRIFT GET USED TO IT ALREADY

Sir this is an Arby’s

every thread of this type devolves into an amalgamation of software support threads

Word is just fine. Y’all are crazy. It’s Excel and its complete inability to handle large workbooks that drives me crazy.

It's all been downhill since Tandy's Deskmate

What is that thing where newer model cars coming to a stop at an intersection have to restart the engine when it’s their turn to go? I’m not sure if that’s what actually happening or if that’s just what it sounds like is happening.