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

my phone provider recently upgraded me to an L4 that has 64gb. I will have barely got a quarter into that by the time they start offering me a new one.

one of the worst features of recent android: no button to clear all app caches. like, why the fuck not?

spotify's storage offenses are infamous. amazing that after all this time it STILL doesn't really remove downloads when you tell it to "remove downloads." eventually, you gotta uninstall, reboot, and reinstall. madness.

I think every Android phone I've had has come preloaded with a Samsung 'virtual assistant' bollocks (current one: "Bixby") that seems to exist solely for me to accidentally activate it, swear at it, vow to remove it any way I can, then forget until next time. Maybe I should start training myself up to do something useful when I do it, like drink some water or do a yoga move, until I become conditioned.

checked my apps, the one taking up the most space is wechat at 3.2gb.

Recently got my first Samsung and I think Bixby is disabled. I had to check options in like 10 different menus and would not know how to tell anyone to turn it off. This is the kind of crap I spend an hour or three doing on a new phone. And despite that I still found after a few days that I was using some kind of Samsung backup feature. Turned it off and hit the button to delete whatever was backed up to their servers but uh.... yeesh

lol it's this type of stuff re android that made me switch to an iPhone -- it still has that "storage Other" problem with cached crap that you have to do "special Apple magic" to get rid of.

also, damn y'all, Spotify sucks and rips off artists. No sympathy there.

I have to use the Smart Switch app on my iMac to move data over from the Samsung.

And every time, this little window pops up: "Ready to transfer your iTunes files over to your Android?"

That question constantly ranks first as the (1.) Most tone-deaf, (2.) Answer unlikely to change, and quite possibly (3.) Overly-repeated that I get regularly asked.

hahahah I have an iPhone & windows 10 -- I am sure there are a bunch of redundant cloud things that are in multiple places that I will eventually have to get annoyed by.

just saw a QR code on a tv advert

(etoro? some trading site)

Last time we drove to Michigan, I saw three billboards that were basically just giant QR codes with only the name of the company beneath. One was for a brewery, but I forgot the other two. Presumably, even at highway speeds, those still work?

Glad to see those companies are big supporters of highway safety.

xp the ongoing lack of progress of the investigation into the death of her daughter iirc

security reorganisation on online bank account taht means paying regular bills has become a convoluted chore. Have to eneter and reenter codes to get payment transacted. Maybe it means taht there is less likelihood of having the account hacked but it just seems totally time consuming. NOt sure if having a much newer phone so I had teh app itself would make things easier.
I always thought of my desktop as my main computer interface and phone as secondary. Is taht like totally outdated?

logging into my bank needs a security code generated by the banking app on my phone. i wonder if they thought this through?

I'd guess they did; isn't this in addition to a password that should ideally only exist inside your head?

IANAE on this, but I think I've seen it described thus: Login (or whatever) should depend on data points from two out of the three following types: something you are, something you know, something you own/can access. In the first group are e.g. fingerprints or iris patterns, in the second groups are passwords, in the final group are e.g. phone authenticators. The idea (if I have understood this) is that compromising one of these is not enough to immediately compromise the entire thing.

Ah maybe I see what you get at: if your login is on the phone, then the password may also be remembered on the same device, so the independence is broken. Yeah, I guess that is a weakness.

a problem mitigated if you have some sort of code for getting into your phone at all, obv

drifting off topic, but: has there been any kind of paradigm shift in relation to "security questions"? i feel like half the ones i'm ever asked to fill out are things that conceivably could be learned by a reasonably determined identity thief. i guess they could deter some casual hacker with a password-generating machine or something.

xp Every time I log into my work email, Microsoft insists on a sending a security code to my phone, no matter how many times I check the little box that says "please don't do this for the next thirty days." What's the point of having the check box if it doesn't work?

You have to make sure to check only the boxes with bicycles in them i think

the phone generates a one-time password after i've entered my bank id and password. the (secure) password is stored in my password app behind a less secure password, but the phone also has a swipe pattern and/or fingerprint protecting it.

this generated password lets me log into bank's web page along with my bank id and my security question answer.

and if i want to send anyone money then i also need to generate a transaction id using the bank app on the phone.

(i'm more worried about needing a phone in order to access bank website. what if i lose it?)

If I lost my phone, I would certainly need to jump through some hoops to get to my online bank yeah. (I guess I have a backup solution in the form of a digital code generator in a closet somewhere, but I doubt I'd remember the associated password/PIN needed with that one.) I'm assuming (read: hoping) this is a common enough occurrence that it is one of the areas where actual human customer support at the bank hasn't totally atrophied.

I had a little generator fob but it died without warning the day my rent was due* and installing the app was the only timely alternative

(* Probably not that exact day - I only used it once a month, could've been any time in the previous 30 days)

I am averse to fingerprint protection/login stuff because of all the tv and movies over the past few decades where they just cut the person's finger or hand off and use it to access the secret vault or door or what-have-you. I am sure this is just a sign that I am a truly damaged person, and that very few other people think about how this technological advancement can lead to dismemberment

I am averse to it because the fingerprint sensor seems to stop working after about 6 months for some reason.

iirc the fingerprint sensor doesn't work if the finger is cold

Or if you've just used a bleach-based or disinfectant cleaning product.

(Good thing nobody has a special reason to do a lot of cleaning things nowadays!)

fingerprint scanners can never read my fingerprints because my hands are permanently ashy

printyflakes

lmao

yeah the whole act of searching is now fraught with results that don't actually contain the words you searched for, because the machine is assuming associations and syllables and people-who-searched-for-x-also-searched-for-y. and it's like, no, i picked to search these words because i'm trying to answer this specific question. now i have to open six tabs and control-F for the key words and then close them again when they're not really there.

― Good morning, how are you, I'm (Doctor Casino), Thursday, August 15, 2019 2:36 PM bookmarkflaglink

just wanted to report that, anecdotally, this perennial issue has, somehow, become staggeringly worse in like the past two weeks. on google, DDG, everything. absolutely no confidence at all that ANY of the search results displayed contain all, most, or even more than one of the search terms i included. wtf.

I think Google is experimenting with some non-cookie tracking methods, whereas your searches are mapped to a cohort... i.e. "if you love the blues, you'll love Bluez Hammer" because all these other folks that searched for similar stuff love them. So far Mozilla wants nothing to do with it, and I think others are not enthused at all as well.

all i want is to be able to search "name of building" architect or "name of building" built or (keyword) (keyword) (keyword) architect and find articles that actually include those words, so i can narrow down when things were built and who the architects might have been. instead i just get literally any page on the internet that mentions the name of the building. or some of the words in the name of the building, quotation marks be damned. fucking hell.

everything weighted towards recency too. good luck trying to find anything written about any topic before 2010 if that thing has also been written about a lot since then then.

surely these are the conditions for a nu (non-Google) Google to establish itself?

or to find access to academic resources via library, same as it ever was tbh

on google after you search click on tools, then change "all results" to "verbatim"

(andy baio of waxy.org complained about this a decade ago so google added this verbatim search)

sorry, just catching up on this thread, my reader’s digest of the past few weeks:

I guess if you're comfortable dealing with Python packages, there are some great packages.

oh, i for one am super comfortable dealing with python packages. you just unzip it, and it runs in your browser. (sorry about the formatting and huge-ass image)

cant believe no one is commenting how great and horny this is!

disclaimer: this technological advancement can lead to dismemberment

abanana, thank you so much for the 'verbatim' trick!!!! i'd seen references to that feature but they were really old articles and for whatever reason i wasn't seeing it in the post-search tools. i guess i'm switching back to Google from DDG just for the ability to easily do that. huge huge huge time-saver. sigh.

there is a "default to verbatim" plugin but it ruined my search results in a different way after a while. I use duck duck go more these days but if I'm honest the results aren't that much better.

surely these are the conditions for a nu (non-Google) Google to establish itself?

as Doc said, even DDG is creaking under the strain of there being just way too much garbage on the web now

abanana - thanks so much!!!! this verbatim thing is great

Being placed in a help queue because a company fucked up and didn't send me the correct files, which I paid for. Like, maybe you could have sent the correct files the first time so I don't have to keep going back and forth with a customer service rep?

I'm reminded of why I used to use soulseek unapologetically before the arrival of bandcamp's UX and payment improvements a while ago. Downloading music files from almost any other site is a waste of time and energy.

I think you also can still put individual words or phrases in quote marks to make Google search for them verbatim

https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-98189/amp

Yep. Just tried it. Still works. I’m used to putting phrases in quotes but had forgotten that you can do it around single words too.

I've definitely done quote searches where my demands have been overridden, though. The tip about verbatim mode is good and I will be using that. Seriously, search engines being almost useless these days is my biggest technological bugbear. It makes me so fucking angry.

yeah, the quotes don't work for me. it's like they've told the algorithm "if it's in quotes, it's *fairly* important, but feel free to disregard also!"

the good news is that google wants to make this problem significantly worse: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/14/1024918/language-models-gpt3-search-engine-google

The digital tools used in modern radio broadcasting are super-glitchy: "Do we have Dennis on the line? Okay, it looks we lost Dennis, we'll try to get him back on.. meanwhile.."
I remember old analog phone lines sounding tinny on the radio but being fairly reliable. NPR is always cutting out and losing guests, but that may be because of pandemic-related home broadcast setups.