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

^ 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.

that is actually what's happening. it's to conserve fuel.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/automobiles/wheels/start-stop-technology-is-coming-to-cars-like-it-or-not.html

That is a genuinely good and on topic thing for this thread. Enough with the half measures! Get a car that plugs in!

Amazing

My old Escort used to have that feature but we called it "stalling"

lol my ford fiesta does this now

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

I helpfully provided step-by-step instructions for ppl who need to learn how to use web pages, old dogs are as worthy of my street pats as bright-eyed shibe pups

That is a genuinely good and on topic thing for this thread. Enough with the half measures! Get a car that plugs in!

― El Tomboto, Sunday, 18 August 2019 5:40 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Electric is such a massive improvement on internal combustion engines that I fully expect this thread to be complaining about electric cars in a couple of years.

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?

my car does this, it threw me off a bit at first, but it's actually fine. it just happens automatically. I can turn it off but iirc you have to turn it off every time you start the car, it doesn't stay off

Doesn't that wear out the starter?

I have absolutely no idea tbh but according to Wikipedia: The starter is reinforced and designed to withstand continuous use without wearing too fast or overheating.

this is my first car so I don't have a lot of basis for comparison, but it seems OK. it's quite smart, like if the car in front of me starts moving it auto-starts before I've even taken my foot off the brake

I have it too and agree that it mostly works fine. Apparently it’s not like a hard restart, more like some kind of suspension that just springs back to life when you take your foot off the gas. The amount of tech in the car overall is pretty boggling - I’ve had it six months, read the manuals front to back, watched hours of videos, and still don’t understand all of it. Absolutely love it right now, but it’s got definite “quirks” and I fear the day it brakes on its own in highway traffic or whatever because a sensor malfunctions.

Also Denny's getting rid of the Breakfast Dagwood

When did this happen! Why did it happen!! Fuck the entire world!!!

I been a loyal customer for like 25 years and this is the thanks I get. No heads up or anything. See if I ever go back to Dennys again. Loggin on to villageinn.com right NOW to locate my nearest new second home.

I got my Samsung Galaxy off craigslist for $240 but maybe they don't have used non-Apple products there, idk

― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, August 15, 2019 4:29 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Be careful, those can go off at any moment

a bunch of electronic locks/keypads that are slower or less effective than just turning a key in a lock

So many different ways of washing hands belong in this thread. The mad variety of awful soap/water/dryer innovations in the last decade or two, and none of them beat just turning a fucking tap.

I'm pretty sure most automated bathroom amenities are produced by Rand Peltzer Inc.

We've been so trained already to accept the couple-seconds-wait for the labor-saving device to activate, that adding a gratuitous delay is becoming a favored design choice. I'm sure there are countless examples in software, where the window beautifully swoops into view when you request it, instead of arriving spot on demand, but I'm thinking of the expensive new fridge I bought.

Works great, so cold, makes ice, frost-free. Every time you open the door, the interior lights gradually fade up from darkness over the course of 4 seconds, theatrically, suspensefully, revealing the food you want to grab.

And then four seconds later it starts beeping obnoxiously to tell you you've left the door open

they send a push notification to your phone now

Oh yes. And then there are the decent innovations that aren't quite implemented right, what Auden called "good ideas which incompetence or impatience prevented from coming to much."

Like the convenient oven that I can set to roast my artichokes for precisely 30 minutes, then automatically shut itself off, saving me from having to watch the clock in the other room and leap up from what I'm doing. At the 30-minute mark, the oven shuts off and beeps to let me know I can retrieve my finished vegetable at my leisure. And keeps beep beeping with increasing insistence every 15 seconds forever until I go pay attention to it.

I had to learn the hard way the difference between the two timers on our newish oven (one of which is merely a timer, the other of which full-on stops the oven and, if cooking isn't complete, requires us to go through the excessively-long preheat process just to get back to square one, at which point I have no idea how much more cook time will be necessitated for the foodstuff that's either been sitting on the stovetop or in an oven of fluctuating temperature for the past ten minutes).

I kinda just want a semi-contained firepit in the middle of the kitchen tbh.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's not just a case of us all subjectively preferring the exact level of labor-saving we were raised with and no more. I think there's a discrete line the machines are crossing, where they're trying to do what they think we want, rather than doing what they're explicitly told. And that's where it becomes oh my god you guys just stop labor-saving me so much damn extra work!

shutting off the heat source won't bring the oven to room temperature for awhile. The oven needs to transfer its contents to a built in but thermally isolated vat of 160deg beurre monte when the timer goes off.

OH BOY, do I have one for this thread. What the fuck is the deal with Windows updates now? That thing where you can only defer them for so long until they're just like, 'yeah, whatever it is you're doing is going to stop now while we shut yr shit down for the next couple of hours'. Up your ass, Microsoft. All the way up your ass.

I mean and just updates in general that can't be averted/delayed. Life is too goddamn short for me to have to sit and watch a progress bar accomplish more than I'm able to.

You can 'adjust active hours to reduce disruptions' (which I never do, of course).