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

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”

xxpost

Awesome post!

I can highly recommend an Innerclock Systems Syncgen pro to fix sync issues. Cost about £300 on Ebay and fixed all my issues syncing a load of Elektron boxes to Ableton back when I was doing live pa stuff. Total liberty having to do that in this day and age though!

I would legit pay £50 to have every device I ever use accept (the lowest level of) all cookies for lyfe without me having to click anything

my niece from abroad has been travelling round Europe and since she came to the UK she thought there was some setting broken on her phone due to constantly being asked to accept cookies
Also lots of US sites I can't access "due to GDPR"

i still can't read the ny daily news

I'm consistently shocked by how many mobile websites remain unnavigable garbage. The format has been around for a while now, y'all.

I miss cartoons, like actual cartoons as opposed to super-creepy uncanny valley 3D-rendered affairs where everyone and everything looks like custom fetishware

I have got used to the experience of clicking a link to a mobile website and getting an opaque grey box covering the text and stopping me from scrolling. I have no idea whether it's a pop up ad or a cookie or gdpr thing. Won't even bother clicking NYT or Times links any more.

I miss cartoons, like actual cartoons as opposed to super-creepy uncanny valley 3D-rendered affairs where everyone and everything looks like custom fetishware

I feel ya but I don't think this counts as a technological backward step so much as us not keeping up with the aesthetics of the time, sadly.

They redid the bathrooms at work so now when I'm sitting and move slightly it will flush automatically, resulting in 2-3 flushes per event rather than the usual 1.

Exact same here. Bloody things.

clicking on a headline and google opening an app or a formatted-for phone-page with a load of pain in the ass features

They redid the bathrooms at work so now when I'm sitting and move slightly it will flush automatically, resulting in 2-3 flushes per event rather than the usual 1.

I have got used to the experience of clicking a link to a mobile website and getting an opaque grey box covering the text and stopping me from scrolling.

https://media.giphy.com/media/l1BgRViJVF8ZW686s/giphy.gif

I miss cartoons, like actual cartoons as opposed to super-creepy uncanny valley 3D-rendered affairs where everyone and everything looks like custom fetishware

I feel ya but I don't think this counts as a technological backward step so much as us not keeping up with the aesthetics of the time, sadly.

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, November 12, 2019 5:00 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Oh yeah, totes mcgroats, and I realise I'm shouting at cluods here. But at the same time, it does mean that anything created on a computer a few years ago will look weird and dated. And I'm just not into nightmare dummy replicants walking around. I do like how the 'hauntology' aesthetic has moved from 70s stop-animation shows to the stilted polygons of original Playstation games. Vaporwave being the little brother of hauntology.

They redid the bathrooms at work so now when I'm sitting and move slightly it will flush automatically, resulting in 2-3 flushes per event rather than the usual 1.

They have motion sensors on the lights here, so if you sit there for too long you're plunged into darkness. And the sensor is outside the cubicle, so you can imagine the scenarios...

lmao

wmab

Remove sock, roll up sock, toss over the cubicle door

no thats when you discover theres no loo roll iirc

I stayed at an airbnb that apparently had a motion light in the bathroom! I had to wave my arm to let it know I was still on the toilet.

Ugh i hate those.

Thirty seconds ago:

-wave hand in front of faucet sensor
-water comes out of faucet
-wave hand in front of soap sensor
-soap comes out of dispenser
-lather
-wave hand in front of faucet sensor
-soap squirts into sink
-wave hand in front of faucet sensor
-more soap squirts into sink
-wave hand more fervently in front of faucet sensor
-soap puddle achieves volume sufficient to begin slowly running towards drain
-wave hand dejectedly in front of faucet sensor until the futility of doing so finally sinks in
-look into mirror
-sigh heavily
-water comes out of faucet without sensor being directly engaged

this is why you should never wash your hands

This is what I get for trying something new.

When i shake someone's hand and it's soapy, i always know who couldn't get the sensor to work

the case for never washing your hands is only getting stronger

Imo BYOS

https://www.tboake.com/images/film_images/playtime2/PLAYTIME_-9.jpg

One thing it took me a long time to realize is that most sensor-activated faucets work better if you simply hold your hands still in front of the sensor instead of waving them.

How about kicking them hard, does that help