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

This may belong more in whatever thread was lamenting how Pinterest ruined Google Images, but whenever I am looking for some software to do a simple task (recording streaming video, say), the Google results are filled with review comparison sites that seem like fronts to sell some product by iSkysoft or some other spammy-seeming company.

Yeah, I was searching for like, some credible earbud reviews for a gift last week and every search result would list a bunch of companies with startup-sounding names that I've never heard of before and apparently all the products were great! Kinda the same with searching for something in Amazon. As a decidedly non-techie guy, it makes the whole experience worse for me because I'm wondering like "do these companies have customer service? did they exist last month? will they exist next month?"

https://jalopnik.com/your-modern-car-is-a-privacy-nightmare-1840483775

I don't know how Amazon's lackadaisical shrugging in response to what's basically a burgeoning black market of third-party sellers is going to benefit them in the long run. Like you'd think the faith of the casual consumer would start to erode after the third or fourth bogus POS they bought by mistake. I mean, I don't know how frequent an occurrence it is, but I'm generally pretty careful about these things and I've still wound up accidentally buying stuff from rogue Amazon listings whose true nature was not as advertised.

I've recently a noticed a new one -- one of the nice things about gmail is that it will filter most promotional emails into the promotions tab. ... now I'm getting a lot of them categorized as updates. Undoubtedly the marketing people have probably worked out how to "beat the filter" .... idk.

xxxp the headphones subreddit is a decent place to search brands / get cheap recommendations. There's some legitimately nice so-called "Chi-fi" stuff.

I resorted to Amazon for one gift recently... one of those that is from a third party seller but "fulfilled by Amazon" from their warehouse domestically (fully third party you never know what the hell you're getting into or where it is going to come from - and how taxed you'll be - it seems). It was fine.

Today I got a email from the seller (directly... I don't know why they should even have my email address) saying that if I buy this other certain $30 product and give it a good review, they will refund me for it. I'd heard about this method of pumping up product ratings but it's the first time I've been approached to do it. Email contained this gem: "We're sincere and honest, you could trust us."

there is a solution to these amazon issues

I definitely should've shopped around earlier for that person, for one thing, aye

The thing where counter-service restaurants give you a little buzzer to summon you up when your food is ready: at best a mixed bag, and at worst, a backward step. They're greasy and gross to handle, the vibration itself is teeth-rattling and a noise nuisance in the restaurant, plus you have the nervous anticipation of that moment overlapped with an awareness that it might not actually work and you'll fall through the cracks. But also, lately, I find that they buzz a little bit in advance of your order actually being ready, so if you try to comply with them you just end up milling around like a dummy (in an area not really sized to take on a population of buzzer-clutching loiterers) for one to two minutes. On the whole it seems like a pointless and expensive reinvention of the wheel, and a Dud.

hah yeah I find them annoying. Fuddruckers uses them

If you choose to eat at Fuddruckers they assume you're a masochist

Haha I was gonna say

I hate those things. Just use a bell and shout out the number.

I like the flaws of all of the systems of calling out orders, most of which are the fault of the customer.

If you call out someone's order number off their receipt - everybody stares blindly at you not knowing where to find it, half of them threw away their receipt moments after getting it, then you wind up screaming what the order is and the same three people ordered the same thing so they all go up to the front.

if you call out someone's name, you get two people with the same name come up and now you gotta figure out which one is the right one. one time I placed an order at a Firehouse and went to pick it up and they gave me this gigantic order that was way more than I ordered, cos the guy who went to pick up an Uber Eats order also had the same name as me so they gave him mine, and me his. it was funny.

if you use the buzzer, people get annoyed like stated above.

If you scream BITCH GET YOUR GODDAMN FUCKIN' FOOD, you get fired.

in conclusion fast food should not exist.

in britain everybody just apologises and starves

those buzzers buzz REALLY HARD.

also people put them in their pants

The proliferation of potato chips as a side is my personal consumer fraud crusade

When I waited tables in the late 90s, at one restaurant they made us carry those buzzers in our aprons so we’d know when our orders were ready. Regardless of how alert I was (it varied) I was always caught off guard by the intense sensation of that buzz.

fan of the buzzers. It’s ideal when places are loud and buzzy and have multiple stalls. You can go wait wherever you want and claim a table instead of standing around listening.

Some just light up and don't buzz

Feel like the buzzers came in right around the same time diners started waiting outside since they couldn't smoke at the bar any more.

I also don't like places that take your number and text you when your table is ready. I don't want to have to keep checking my phone. We went to a restaurant with my mother-in-law and she got there first so she gave them her number. They said it would be about half an hour. After sitting in a waiting area inside the restaurant for about 25 minutes I went up to the front to see how much longer it would be, and they told me they texted us 10 minutes ago. My mother in law is not the most tech savvy person but there were no texts on her phone. Maybe they had the number wrong.

I remember them from a long time ago at Outback?

I worked at an Olive Garden in high school. When I hosted we always had waits of 30-45-60 minutes. I would've killed to have had buzzers. Instead we would have to come up with bland descriptions of people to later try to find them for their table. Because of course people had used completely offensive descriptions of people before and the people had seen it written down.

Somebody wrote "Tattoos" to describe me on a check one. Before i had ink it was probably "Ugly".

*once

i mean i'm navigating the virgin media phone call decision tree and am now in a queue listening to Niall Horan forever after having been transferred twice between departments. somehow this feels... not good. i mean i recognise the cost savings, though let's say i'm not convinced these are passed on to the customers.

but you know, what else would i want to do with a saturday morning.

Tom Walker now - Heartbeats apparently. This is vile.

give me vivaldi any day tbh.

ooh, they're going to transfer me again. he can do some of what i need but doesn't have the right cost code for the rest of it. hopefully more tom walker coming up.

virgin media are not my favourite people to phone

on hold. not sure what this music is.

it's sort of nondescript electronic. not too bad for hold music actually.

it would be quite good if more hold music was vaporwave, to close the circle a bit.

he's going to send an engineer round! direct action! 35 minutes and counting on the actual call.

i've got fucking Heartbeats by Tom Walker in my head now. They will pay for this.

I'LL BE THERE IN A HEARTBEEEAAAAT.

and finished. time for a cup of tea. shout out to the last guy who I spoke to who was lovely and very helpful. i said so, and he said he was very grateful to me letting him know that and he appreciated it. little tear in my eye now. we had some good times.

John Lanchester picked up his bespoke mobile phone device and dialled the number for Virgin Customer Services...

... using the electronic keypad the digital display of the phone provided.

fizzles calling VM CS easily merited being the 200k thread tbh

“ I feel like there isn’t enough attention given to the fact that all these high tech, self driving transportation options are ultimately going to translate into restriction of movement. “Firewalls” that can’t be crossed and “regions. Seems like it should be a bigger concern.

― Manitobiloba (Kim), Wednesday, September 4, 2019 3:27 PM (six months ago)”

When I wrote that six months ago, I wasn’t exactly sure what the triggers for such a thing might be, but I sure have been thinking about it again in the past week or so.

I was gonna comment on the audio issues of Zoom conference calls -- but damn, that sounds super prescient, Kim!

I’m half waiting for the call in coming months that my car needs a software update. Actually heck, I’m not sure the car even needs to physically go in for these things anymore.

My car can access the home WiFi from the driveway. Oh brave new world etc

new br / dvd player is half the size of the previous one but has no display and no way of seeing where you are within the film whilst watching the film. (also, no audio out for connection to amp, despite having cd playing options)

(the last one suddenly started saying 'blocked' last time i went to use it. no eject, nothing. it was 75% air inside, just two small pcbs, the drive and the led display)

Yeah, mine did the 'blocked' thing, I found a way to unblock it on the ternet.

when recording music on a laptop (or even a phone), using any bluetooth device will throw the recording out of sync due to the latency, requiring you to manually fix the syncing.

so you wind up going back to wired devices anyway

Ha, yeah, we tried to do home karaoke using an iPhone mic app and bluetooth speakers. That lasted all of about 45 seconds.