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

Yeah, I'm increasingly cashless myself tbh. I know it's disenfranchising for lower income people and supports the endless growth of the financial world but also damn it's convenient

when I first got a contactless card I thought it was ~unsafe~ and didn't want to activate it, but someone at a shop activated it without me realising, and now I use it daily for most of my shopping - but it still feels wrong to go out without cash, like there's a voice in my head still telling me I might need 10p for a phonebox like it's 1985 or something...

(also the sandwich van which visits work is cash-only; there are other lunch options nearby now, but I like the lady who runs it and hope she isn't losing too much custom due to only taking cash)

anyway my wallet is as huge as ever, with notes and coins and work ID and ever-increasing numbers of loyalty cards etc, and phones barely fit in pockets any more but I got the smallest phone on the market which just squeezes in (and sometimes squeezes itself back out unexpectedly, eek) as long as I don't have anything else in the pocket, so tissues and keys and a spare hair-tie are all relegated to my back pockets now and the bf tuts about how my pockets bulge out and why can't I just carry a handbag like a normal woman

Relying more and more on phone for everything wrt physical access to spaces (public transport) and payment definitely feels like a backwards step. Ease of losing a single device, connection volatility, battery...

I rarely carry cash but will always want at least two different methods of paying for stuff on me.

Recently lost card holder on the bus (or street, never actually worked out where/how) which included bus pass (Oyster card) and debit card but had separate 'manual' key for hire bikes so could get to/from work easily that way and then used phone to order lunch at work although this meant keeping the debit card uncancelled for a couple of hours which was risky but used app on phone to track recent/incoming deductions and none were made by anyone but me suggesting the card holder may have been handed in or was just binned by whoever picked it up when they didn't find any cash in it.

Going a few days on just actual cash (keep just enough at home for these situations) was also a real throwback of course.

Yeah, for instance, it's sad for homeless people who obviously still beg for coins since less and less people have any nowadays.
And even bank notes, I almost never use them anymore (it's basically only a problem when I have to tip someone... which is not very common in France, anyway).
It clearly poses fundamental individual rights issues since this evolution is a dream for governments and financial institutions...

Always use cash and take a perverse pleasure in waving a note when bar staff stick a credit card machine under my nose.

Yeah, losing your phone is a nightmare now. Almost worst than losing your home keys !

a checkout lady at Aldi was positively annoyed at being handed a note the other day. she huffed that the till was "locked" and that I was holding up the entire queue so I got out my debit card and she sighed that it was too late because she'd already pressed the "cash" button and couldn't change the payment method either

how does that even work, surely I'm not the only person who would try to use cash at a supermarket?

(I do normally use card there, but I was on my way to a class which I needed to pay for with £15 in cash, and I was hoping to get a fiver in my change)

Slight tangent but while I think of it saw a thread/argument on Twitter earlier about car break-ins now being motivated more and more by whether Bluetooth devices in the car have been detected by the thieves nearby with a device capable of finding them. ARGH.

I always keep cash on hand and a small bank of it at home. I always expect some event where I will need it.

how does that even work, surely I'm not the only person who would try to use cash at a supermarket?

I don't see many people using cards in my local Morrisons tbh and I don't think I've ever seen anyone using contactless. That could be because LOL Poor People but is probably because I generally use the self service machines and hardly anyone seems to use cards on those.

tbf it wouldn't be the first time I got an Aldi assistant who was randomly arsey about completely normal everyday things. some of them are great though!

while I'm ranting on here, the door system at work - bought from a relatively major supplier of such things - is remarkably fragile: so many errors that come up; every so often there's an epidemic of a new inscrutable error message; if you work in too many different buildings or someone sets something up wrong then the data on the card gets corrupted and you can't get in anywhere, etc

that's annoying for our non-essential buildings, but some places use them for accommodation (student rooms etc) - feel like someone's going to get locked out at night and have to sleep in the bushes just due to some system glitch, or the system might go down and default to open and leave people's homes and belongings unlocked

really makes me appreciate good old-fashioned metal keys tbh

Every cashier at my local Aldi asks "cash or card?" as soon as they've bleeped everything thru

I use cash for maintaining a budget - go out with that much in pocket (but also a wallet for going over if necessary)

Left front jeans pocket: keys, digital Walkman (though now that the weather's cooler the Walkman goes in my left jacket pocket)
Right front jeans pocket: wallet, iPhone 6 (though now that the weather's cooler the phone goes in my inside jacket pocket), change (in small change pocket provided for that purpose)
Back pockets: receipts and other odd scraps of paper, but mostly nothing

change (in small change pocket provided for that purpose)

I thought that was for Zuzu's petals

finally an every day carry thread

Right back pocket: plectrums (currently numbering three)

I’m finding it oddly fascinating! Xp

Left front: phone and wallet. They're both rectangles.

Right front: keys and handkerchief. If I acquire coins I guess I put them there too, but try to get rid of them as soon as possible because I don't like the jingling.

If it is cool enough for me to wear a sportcoat I get a bunch more pockets and can accommodate more things. Glasses, pens, a notebook, a book, a pocketknife, a flask of bourbon, gloves.

how can one put a wallet in their front jeans pocket ??
mine doesn't even fit in the back pocket... (and it would be very uncomfortable anyway).

I have put my wallet in my front pocket for 30+ years. Fits easily

how can one put a wallet in their front jeans pocket ??

My wallet's not gigantic (I don't have a million cards in it), I'm relatively skinny, and I don't wear super tight-fitting jeans.

Wallet in front pocket is one of the only valuable life tips my father ever passed on to me. It's harder for someone to steal it that way, he said, and he's right.

eheh, ok, that's a good reason (if you manage to put it in) !

Nothing in back pockets, ever, back pockets are decoration as far as I'm concerned. I see kids walking around with phones sticking out of their back pockets all the time and I just wonder how they are not always sitting down on their phones and breaking them.

Yeah, phones in back pockets is heresy to me.
It's funny because for a long time I couldn't understand how many girls I knew could make their phones fall in the toilets... I only found out recently, when one explained to me, that it was because they put their phones in their back pocket !

otm about wallets in back pocket=target for pickpockets.

how can one put a wallet in their front jeans pocket ??

Easy if you've got one debit card.

Nothing in back pockets, ever, back pockets are decoration as far as I'm concerned.

OTM, apart from plectrums and the odd scrap of paper

re: cashless, san francisco just passed a law outlawing stores that don't take cash.

the nearest coffee shop to my house not only doesn't take cash but doesn't take chip either. you have to have tap to buy anything. this is probably a niche problem but i don't have tap on my debit card and my cc is often maxed out at some stage during the month (i max it out and clear the balance monthly, lol i am broke)

I’ve always carried my wallet in right back pocket, phone in right front, keys from left back belt loop, tucked into back pocket. This thread is making me reconsider the wallet. My wallet is a bulky leather thing and with certain pants, I imagine it presenting itself appealingly to would-be thieves by hanging slightly open from its weight. I’ve pondered re-evaluating the wallet chain, but it’s way more appealing to just get a smaller wallet and carry in my empty left front pocket. Thing is: I have cards for everything. Card reader at work, transit card, debit, grocery club cards, library card, and so on. They can’t digitize these cards fast enough for me. Though I’m in the bay area, I don’t see a lot of Apple Pay or near field readers at the stores I frequent.

Jim, sounds like they're trying to keep out the likes of you. I wouldn't mess with them on principle

I don't really feel comfortable keeping my wallet in any jeans pocket

luckily I live in a climate where wearing some form of jacket is almost always necessary, so it goes in the inside jacket pocket or side if it's zipped

I do wallet front left and everything else (phone, keys, change) in front right. This used to work pretty good, but I've since bought a new slightly larger phone and all of that together doesn't fit comfortably in my right pocket anymore. I need to either move something to my wallet pocket (which would require having a smaller wallet) or figure out a way to reduce the amount of keys I carry around. I already got rid of my small swiss army knife I used to carry around everywhere (having a knife, screwdriver and scissors always available is so fucking convenient!) and I feel like there's no good solution here.

One from the PS4 thread but:- the death of couch multiplayer video games. if you want to play with your friend, you both need a console and a copy of the game and a headset and you play in your own homes.. bit sad really. Video games were a sociable experience when I was a teenager

in fairness playing while talking with your pals on the headset is quite social

the nearest coffee shop to my house not only doesn't take cash but doesn't take chip either. you have to have tap to buy anything.

Whoa, is this how it is in Vancouver now? Where I live, every time I tap, the person at the counter is still surprised to see the tap, it has not really caught on.

Compared to the US, Canada is a lot tap friendlier. And compared to North America, it was nearly completely ubiquitous when I was in Poland and it worked with Apple Pay, no exceptions found. Makes me feel very backward at home

yeah, considering how in Canada it feels like we are always 1 or 2 years behind the U.S. technology-wise, it's always weird to me every time I go to the U.S. how they seem to be far behind everybody else when it comes to credit card technology.

Its crazy to me how even the little handheld credit card machines are not ubiquitous in here the USA. Sometimes in canada at bars or restaurants I will still occasionally slip up and start to hand the server my credit card and they will be completely amused that Americans consider it normal to hand their credit card to a complete stranger.

And the weird bit where the server goes away and something happens, and then they hand the card back to you, and then you add the tip, then the transaction finally happens once you're gone - that this is all fine is pretty They Live tbh.

Yeah I was not prepared for that having had a fourteen year gap between visits to the US and pretty much used cash only the previous time.

Rest assured I still tipped well and I don't mean the British well

The big handsome mechanical flipboard or lightbulb-array signs showing arrivals and departures at the train station, ferry terminal, and so forth have been replaced by TV screens. Less maintenance, more visibility from a distance, and now you get to wait through an ad before you can see when the next boat is.

That reminds me, I miss the old mechanical voting machines. I felt I had truly voted when I pulled that big lever back. The current Scantron-style voting system elicits no feeling at all.

was typing in word with track changes running and was getting pissed at the latency screwing up my flow. granted, turning off track changes sped up the response, but it reminded me of this article from a little while back:

https://gizmodo.com/the-one-way-your-laptop-is-actually-slower-than-a-30-ye-1821608743

Latency is also a big issue with audio sequencing and electronic music-making. Modern audio sequencers for Windows or MacOS sit on top of a complex operating system that manages everything with APIs, so they can't communicate directly with the bare metal. The greater speed of modern hardware compensates for the layers of abstraction but even small delays can sound off.

Early drum machines used a simple clock trigger input as a synchronisation source - essentially a sharp CLICK! - and because the machines didn't have an abstraction layer they responded more or less instantly to clock inputs. Before MIDI was introduced in the 1980s synthesisers used CV/Gate to communicate with each other. It was a mixture of control voltages and click pulses that responded at the speed of light without having to pass through an 8-bit CPU first. Vince Clarke famously gave up on MIDI in the 1990s because he felt that it had a jittery clock, and if there were a lot of MIDI devices in a chain the jitter became noticeable.

There has been a resurgence in CV/Gate over the last few years. In the late-80s-90s-early 2000s it was dead as doornail. A bunch of modern retro analogue synthesisers have CV/Gate ports, and Arturia and others sell modern sequencers with CV/Gate outputs. Korg's battery-powered Volca instruments have simple clock trigger inputs, as do the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators. Here's a video I did a while back where all the instruments are being driven by CV/Gate or clock trigger pulses coming from an ancient Power Macintosh G5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRj2AOxwK5E

Digital audio sequencers also have trouble with latency. Again it's less of an issue than it was in the 2000s, but if you mix virtual and live instruments it can get awkward. In the early days of VST instruments a lot of musicians still hung on to Atari STs driving Akai samplers because the latency was lower; the ST still has a tiny cult following today because the signal path is basically Cubase -> MIDI Out -> Instrument rather than Cubase -> I/O buffers -> Windows I/O APIs -> Windows sound subsystem.

this right here is a motherfuckin POST

In the late-80s-90s-early 2000s

During which electronic music all sounded terrible because of “jittery clocks”