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

lol otm

every time I get a rental car, I generally spend 15-20 minutes trying to figure out where/how to open the gas cap

I hired a car a few months ago and it took me about 3 minutes to figure out how to start it. There was no key, just a Bluetooth fob, and the on/off button was hidden from my point of view by the steering wheel spoke (if that's what it's called)

It always amuses me that Alamo doesn't assign you a rental car at our airport, you go up and down the aisle of your car class, pick one, and get in!

I always wonder if the following has ever happened:

*Someone tries to get a more expensive car, is told to GTFO or pay the difference, and refuses, because they're already in their car.

*Someone driving off with someone else's stuff in the trunk cos someone put their stuff in, walked away to take a call for a sec, and came back to no car.

*Someone driving off with a baby in the car

*Someone changing their mind, forgetting to put the keys back in the original car, getting another, and driving off with those car's keys.

It's not a backward step though - you can even do the whole rental on a fucking kiosk with no humans trying to sell you unnecessary upgrades over and over.

But few of them have owners manuals inside, some don't even have a QR code that you can scan to pull a digital one up, so you gotta Google if you don't understand certain features.

Definitely rented one that I couldn't figure out how to start, but they'd brought it to me fully started, so I didn't realize I didn't know how to start it until hours later when I tried to drive back home

So this is the opposite of the things in this thread as it's mindblowing (to me) that this works - but my other half used https://pimeyes.com/en yesterday -
took a photo of himself now and it searches the web for photos of you out there. It came back with one photo (which we were both in!) from 12 years ago at an event (you have to pay to see/find it properly but used a bit of sleuthing to avoid that).

The fact it can do this accurately with no incorrect guesses, from a photo 12 years later, different type of camera, different angle, lighting etc is incredible to me. I think there are probably more it could have found so might see if it can do that.

Yeah, it's a bit scary that site

Stalking fears over PimEyes facial search engine

Yikes. It found three theater promo pics of me from years ago from a pic I just took.

But it did also pull two pics of a Saudi Arabian prince that I apparently look like

See, I'm scared to try something like that. Not because of what it would turn up, but just for the "Thanks! You have now been added to our database!" declaration I'd fear I'd get.

Neando bin Salman..

tbf youve already been added to their database xp

Yikes indeed - thanks for the link Alba. I'd not heard of this before now.

Since moving in to a fourth floor flat with no lift I think the relative difficulty of buying a matching fridge and freezer that you can stack on top of each other as opposed to a single combined unit qualifies for this thread. If you want to go the former route it feels like your choice of models is reduced by 90%. For a bit more context: I had to send back a combined unit within minutes of arrival as the guys delivering couldn't get this 180cm high 80kg beast up even two stairs in our building - two bigger burlier people could probably have done it but think I'd feel more comfortable with separate units now if I could only find ones energy efficient enough.

https://shop.royalmail.com/media/wysiwyg/738762_RM_DEFINITIVES_SHOP_BNR_Dt_HERO_1400x600_002__1.jpg

new technology means we can have invidual barcodes on every single stamp that we produce. not entirely sure why we'd want that but hey...

but my main gripe is that the perforation there, the one between the stamp and the barcode, it's fake, it's just printed

All hail King Large

it's not fake! i tore one off the other day because i just subconsciously assumed it was an extraneous bit of rubbish and then i freaked out because i was like.. if they're including a QR code now it's probably required?? so i hunted through my trash and painstakingly peeled it off the thing it had gotten stuck to and reaffixed. ffs. no idea if i actually needed to do that. wth is it even for?

Tracking … YOU

it takes you to King Large's onlyfans

I'd guess more sorting than tracking tbh

it takes you to King Large's onlyfans

― rob, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 14:51 (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

okay i'm properly laughing at this

it can't be tracking you because you didn't give them any details when you bought them, plus they are transferable.

the only thing i can think of is either internal tracking or to stop reuse, which would need a database of all the stamps they've ever seen

and I've 4x1st sat right here and the perforations are as fake as fake can be.

Used to be they could lift your dna from where you licked the stamp.

Now they can probably link the QR code to the credit card that was used to buy it.

Eventually it will be possible to watch videos and even greetings from senders.

can you not scan the code yourself and track the letter seems like that would make sense and be nice not that the video of the sheep wasnt nice but a tracking system for watching a video for sheep isnt nescisary you can just watch one if you want

Here's a weird story:

We get mail all the time for people who used to live at our address. Two of them are dead.

One day, a letter comes addressed to a name that I hadn't seen. Didn't even come close to the others. No one on our street with that name.

In fact, I couldn't find any result on Google or spokeo or whatever of anyone with this name. (Let's say it was Jeffrey Greentoad.)

The letter was from the USPS, asking if I'd be so kind to fill out the form and give permission to have all of Mr. Greentoad's correspondence forwarded to his new address in Florida.

Because I own a car and work only 40 hours a week, I found the time on a Saturday morning to go down to the post office and deal with this bullshit. The clerk was confused. "Then just don't fill out the form?"

I talked to a supervisor in the back. His answer was along the lines, "What's it matter to you if his mail just goes past your box and on to Florida?"

My response was "What if he's receiving drugs or cp in the mail? Except the senders don't know his real address, but they do know mine?"

That clicked with him. He made a copy of the letter and gave me back the original.

I still get letters from T-Mobile, insurance companies and Capital One addressed to this guy. At least it's not drugs or cp. One letter came in from a creditor, who I called to make sure that nothing from this guy's credit report got intertwined with my credit report.

All these letters have barcodes anyway, but WHAT IF I had received a package with a handwritten address and a postage stamp with a QR code? I guarantee I could find somebody who could scan it and tell me where it came from.

presumably a lot of the address stuff is done with OCR in the early sorting phase these days and having a scannable code in the stamp means you can do that association of metadata to physical object just once while routing it through the system and just snapshot the code at each successive routing facility

yeah they do that anyway in the usa at least but were affixing their own code that long barcode sticker this way you do it for them

yeah, I remember at one point they were printing a long series of bars down the side of envelopes

at least as far a normal old fashioned stamps which is prob the last form that doesnt have a code on it from the beginning

QR CODE ON BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S FACE.

one of my jobs has a PO Box at a nearby post office. A client mailed us a check to our PO Box. It got returned to them with "address unknown" ... this is the post office not knowing the address of one of its own post offices???

so Amazon's stupid media app.

I have a OnePlus phone, and I have an enormous number of purchases of Amazon digital music, so I used to download the mp3s onto my phone for flights. or sometimes if I want to use an individual track in a recording. This was easy as fuck prior to like, this year, after a recent app update.

Now, on many devices (including mine), you can't actually download music from the app to your device. it 'downloads' to the Amazon app, meaning if you go into the Downloaded tracks section, they'll show there and play offline, but you aren't able to access them on your phone.

But there is a workaround! if you go onto the website in desktop mode from your phone and purchase the track, then you can download it the old school way!!!

Combine this with the fact that instead of just showing you your library, when you click on a band in your library, it shows you their entire discography, often which is littered with shit that is erroneously attributed to them, and if you click the Library button to just see the stuff that you bought, it shows you all of the tracks you bought from each album, but to get to the album itself and play them in order, you have to right click and click on "go to album".

― stank viola (Neanderthal), Wednesday, November 2, 2022 12:14 PM bookmarkflaglink

so I actually think imposters are intentionally creating music under existing IPs to take advantage of Amazon's setup, I don't think it's actually an accident anymore. Like just about every artist I go into has a recent release with cheap artwork, and it's often just individual single releases, and the music itself, if you play it, sounds like it was made in 5 minutes.

since they're on the streaming app I assume they're doing it to make a little money, esp because the new releases often show up first in the list of releases.

hilarious example was someone claiming to be King Diamond wrote a bunch of terrible pseudo-techno and uploaded it

(on another note, I absolutely hate Amazon for allowing you to purchase Paramount Plus through Prime Video, when it's also available to get directly through Paramount Plus, because my mom has (multiple times) mistakenly thought she was in the Paramount Plus app but had accessed it through Prime Video, it showed membership had expired, and she restarted it, thus causing me to pay for it twice)

amazon is the perfect example of business disruption just cheap chaotic crap from top to bottom

before the internet allowed for "online check-ins", for doctor appointments, you just brought your ID card with you at time of appointment, that's it.

now that some of these facilities allow for online check-in for appointments, which is supposed to *save you time* when you arrive, there's zero reason to require someone to show a copy of their ID card. ID cards are not proof of coverage, you can't scan them - you still have to electronically submit for pre-authorization using member data. They were only ever intended to make it easier for the patient to share their member data with the receptionist.

but CVS for its MinuteClinic and Virtual Visits wants it, in addition to you providing the Member ID/group ID. Ok, whatever. Takes two seconds!

CVS's MinuteClinic site is actually fine - you upload the pics of your cards, and it extrapolates the member ID/group ID from that, actually saving you work. But their Virtual Visit site?

First, instead of letting you manually enter the carrier name like the MinuteClinic site, you have to choose it from a dropdown list, for which they usually have like 35 permutations of each carrier, which after you pick the right one, asks you to choose your specific plan from a dropdown list, which usually doesn't contain the specific plan you are in.

Then, they want you to take pics of your ID card. However, after I took them, it told me the file size limit was 2 MB, to upload another file (they were both barely over). so I compressed both files to get them under 2 MB, and reuploaded them, and submitted them, and then get taken to a screen seconds later that said "we were not able to get in touch with your carrier - you may have to pay out of pocket for some or all of your visit", which led me to cancel the appointment entirely (I can do virtual visits elsewhere, and opted to do exactly that!)

I'm at the eye doctor at they hand me an intake form and it's laminated and I have to fill it out with dry erase marker.

Ok, guessing this saves on paper, which is good, but...

-the form has so much crammed together, it's almost impossible to avoid smearing, which I did accidentally twice

-It says to flip over and fill out the back. How the fuck am I supposed to do that without smearing the entire front side? So I did it very carefully by holding the form up and signing that way

-Presumably you erase and reuse these. What if there was an incident of sorts and you claimed I didn't tell you on the form I had cataracts and I said I did?

Idk if this is the right thread but here we go:

There are a lot of people experiencing need around my neighborhood and there is regular package theft. The building email chain is, at least once a week, asking where something is or if anyone has seen it or taken it in for safekeeping. At this point i just want to shake people and say if ur so concerned about package/mail loss just go to the fucking store and buy it yourself. We’re surrounded by retail; you can famously get anything you want in NYC.

https://nymag.com/strategist/article/led-light-bulbs-investigation.html

Interesting but like a lot of long NY Mag pieces that one feels like a lot of richly detailed complaining and not quite enough reporting. Couldn't this guy have found somebody from from the actual lightbulb industry, like I dunno Philips, to address one of the million complaints? "LEDs are not good or bad but more like weird" needs a little more unpacking.. Like maybe there is a reason why film shoots aren't lugging their own generators anymore for lighting that goes beyond just economics

yeah, this is kind of garbage

the short version is "I used to just buy the standard 60W/100W bulbs at the corner store and never worried about color temperature or anything and the new bulbs look different"

he also seems to have forgotten or completely skipped the period of CFL bulbs that you'd put in lamps and fixtures that were the prior lower-energy solution but sucked in predictable ways

the one bit that drove me nuts was "the dimmer switch wouldn't work with the new LED light fixture" because holy shit have you ever tried to install a dimmer with any sort of bulb without checking whether you had the right bulbs, the right dimmer, etc? it's actually gotten easier now! and I say this having used all three (traditional incandescent, CFL (not actually dimmable) and LED)

my anecdotal evidence is that I've had some nicer LEDs that have lasted over a decade right now

Bulbs that claim to be dimmable sometimes aren

Um, I meant to post:

Bulbs that claim to be dimmable sometimes aren't, or rather, "we are technically dimmable but we will emit a high-pitched whiny sound whenever we are dimmed."

So, get used to either having the lights all the way on/off, or wondering why there's a mosquito in your Kamp at all times.

tom scocca on why led lightbulbs suck

https://nymag.com/strategist/article/led-light-bulbs-investigation.html

oh haha i should have read the revive before posting

definitely team 'led lightbulbs suck' fwiw. going to order-horde a bunch of incandescents.

yeah why burn 4W when you could pump out 80

as a sometime lighting tech 1) there are still some tasks+vibes for which i want+use incandescents but 2) i suspect that these days this is often because i don't have nice enough LEDs.

i enjoyed the second half of the scocca article and learned stuff from it (liked the part about dollar-store kelvin levels-- indeed a telling detail-- and the part about tastes in lighting across climates) but the first half plays kinda fast+loose w its terms while trying to rationalize a faintly andyrooneyish sense of loss. it says led bulbs are "computers" with "diodes and drivers"-- okay well yes obviously they are diodes and they have things called drivers (which scocca is half-deliberately allowing the average reader to confuse w the software drivers they're familiar w having to roll back because an update broke them); unlike incandescent bulbs, they require direct current modulated+controlled by integrated circuits. is an integrated circuit a "computer"? it's a machine that performs binary logic, but the article says it can therefore "hang" or "crash": well not really. it's a carved rock electricity flows thru. it doesn't have any data to corrupt or memory to leak. it can break, or distort, but so can a filament, or a river.

some $20 bulbs indeed do have computers onboard, with software and bluetooth and "apps" and everything, but that is a different and admittedly maddening phenomenon bigger than bulbs (cf the entire consumer appliance sector) and at least in bulbs is still presented as an expensive Feature and not a fait accompli. and the theatrical LED fixtures i work with are computerized, because they need to talk to DMX controllers and respond to programming. but the LED itself is still just a thing you run power thru and it lights up.

most consumer Greenery (paper straws etc) strikes me as an attempt by genocidal entities to sell sad and guilty egotists on the idea that they might personally still reach heaven without having to blow up any pipelines; and this is how i felt about CFCs and thus also about LEDs at first; but idk they're pretty amazing. was interesting+amusing to read about the lighting problems at places like the met but (as the article eventually acknowledges) we're working this stuff out. again, found the stuff about unequal kelvin distribution compelling, but as i'm the kind of guy who thinks feeding everyone is a political problem presumably i'm also the kind who thinks giving everyone nice warm indoor lighting (if they're of scandinavian tastes) is a political problem.

(ALL THAT SAID while i think the article is trying to illegitimately transfer your irritation at your laptop and/or "smart fridge" to LED light bulbs, they are undeniably digital, including in a way the article never really gets at except when it complains about "flickering": they are only ever either on or off. i believe most LED "dimming" is really extremely rapid strobing: the light isn't half as dim but rather lit for half the time. if you were of a mind to i guess you could make some sad-modernist hay out of the replacement of a continuously perceived analog world with one chopped movielike into a trillion momentary silicon flashes divided by equally momentary subliminal blackouts. on the other hand, you can perform a similar flourish with alternating current. poor, perverse diode.)

*CFLs (lol)

good points

it does irritate me that in offices, manufacturers managed to create led replacements for tube cfls that,
while not really doing the fluorescent flicker anymore, are identical in every other way. maybe we could have taken a moment to decide whether offices need to look like that

someone at work posted: jump leads in boot. boot needs power to open.

that took me a second, but: oh no