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Full scale mass surveillance capitalism. Governments used to have to hire agents, dress them up, and have them bug peoples phones. Now they can just buy it in bulk. No warrent, no black site op, just cashing checks.
Although initially good, the internet. From malware to corporate tracking, it’s become a cesspool. And yet, here I am.
Generative AI
Quantum computers a real candidate once they get off the ground. They might help solve problems in chemistry and condensed matter physics, but on the other hand they definitely will make a lot of encryption we heavily rely on obsolete, and the replacements are noticeably inferior. And that’s about it, because quantum algorithms are hard to design, so that seems like a net negative to me.
Deep neural nets are powerful, but the fact we fundamentally don’t understand how they work is a bit nerve-wracking.
Microtransactions in video games. Hell, I’d say that modern video games in general are pretty bad, ESPECIALLY modern mobile games.
Look, I agree they suck, but video games being slightly worse isn’t the worst thing about the 21st century.
Eh, I couldn’t really think of anything that isn’t already pointed out by somebody else in the comments, so this is the thing that came to mind.
Have you played many modern games?
Breath of the Wild?
Deep Rock Galactic?
Battlebit Remastered?
Baba is you?
That first one is actually pretty good. For some reason I have never heard of the other three.
Go ahead. Downvote my comment with pleasure.
Modern social media
The generative AI’s that “creates” content. Just dumb black boxes remixing what you give them, overconfident and inaccurate, yet seen as the ultimate tools by people.
They do create content, though, regardless of it you personally think they’re smart in the process of doing so. Like, there’s actual papers that are devoted to making sure.
There’s a lot of people who don’t know when the 21st century began.
“We’re glad to see you successfully advanced the state of the art in human tissue culturing. However, instead of renewing your grant, we’ve decided to immediately execute the entire research team. May god have mercy on your soul”
How can you call that a robot? It doesn’t even run on electricity.
Hmm. What is the definition of robot, anyway? A lot of robots run on hydraulics, which in principle could be pumped and valved with no electricity. On the other hand, nobody calls a conveyor belt a robot regardless of how much stuff it moves or how many parts it has.
I stand corrected.
Do you? I actually don’t know, haha!
It was an honest question.
SPAM. Not the food variety, but the other. Inventend by a lawyer.
Not the 21st century
OK, you got me there. For me, EMail-SPAM is still a new thing, because I still remember the time before.
Lol… I remember the time before my friend…
I’ve been employed in the technology industry for the last 27 years though and it definitely started before Y2K.
Well, I was not that far off. ‘Spamford’ Wallace founded “Cyber Promotions” on 1997. While there have been unsolicided emails even way before that, they had not been an issue: Whoever did them got a clue-by-four from the network community and that’s it. SPAM started to be a problem with ‘Spamford’ Wallace.
Node Package Manager
Cryptocoins
Smartphones without keyboards
Roblox
Eh. The nice thing about a soft keyboard is that it can be anything you want, including more display real estate. It’s not as nice but it seems like an advance overall to me.
Also, why the Roblox hate? I never actually played.
Roblox is what zuckerfuck wish his metaverse could become. Millions of kids playing, another thousands working effectively for free to create content, and the very few that actually find success see that getting any money out of Roblox and into their bank accounts is hard as hell and comes with exorbitant taxes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ -> Video is almost 3 years old, but I doubt Roblox got better for developers in any capacity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6PYj93SGxc -> Essentially the same thing as above, but from September 2023, with some numbers updated, like the CEO saying they made “over 100 million dollars of cash in Q1” (2023), the place having over 50 million games, and more.
I see. Thanks.
Edit: Holy crap, yeah that’s scummy. Literally manipulating children - openly, specifically children - into being whales without even knowing.
Somehow, none of the “think of the children people” care or talk about this.
I can type faster on my keyboard free phone then I could with my old phone with a qwertz keyboard.
Plus when I’m not typing I get more screen real estate. It’s a total win win for me. Not bad at all.
But what’s the error rate? I could type at 200 words per minute (even on a phone!!) if I didn’t care about how many typos I was making. And swiping keyboards get confused incredibly easily. The error rates are especially bad when you’re writing words that only use a single row of keys - on QWERTY keyboards for example, try writing something like “type”, and you could get that, or you might get something else, like wipe/write/ripe. Other groups could include things like tip/top, pit/pot, wit/wire and the selected word will be wrong almost as frequently as it’s right. And autocorrect systems can’t really correct for things like when you mean to press enter and hit the backspace key instead. Plus, their suggestions are generally just very stupid. So while buttons take longer to press on physical keyboards, the reduced error rate makes typing speed about the same in my experience.
Plus, with physical buttons, you get tactile feedback, so you can tell when your fingers are slightly off and adjust them, whereas on a flat surface, you have no idea whether you pressed the correct button or not. You have to stare straight at the screen to make sure every press is correct, which is exhausting and bad for your eyesight. I feel a lot more eyestrain from simply typing on phones, whereas with physical buttons, I didn’t even have to look at the screen, and I could look at something else around me while typing. And don’t get me started on how many calls I’ve missed because I accidentally hit the hang-up button, or couldn’t find the accept call button - not a problem when you have physical buttons!
Regarding screen real estate, all you need is a slide-out keyboard. They work great!
There are a few downsides to physical keyboards, but in my experience, they’re far superior to non-keyboard devices. But what can you do - in the 21st century, practicality never matters, it’s just all about aesthetics and nothing else…
My “raw” error rate is quite high. My actual output error are is quite low. I can’t speak for swipe keyboards though. I just use the standard tap keyboard. For me the in context predictive autocorrect works wonders.
With my old keyboard phone things were slower because I had to press down on physical buttons. With a touch keyboard I just lightly touch type without the need for effort or rechecking. It all just works out.
As for me I could never go back to a slide out setup. It was very klutzy and thick. Like 2cm thick. Crazy.
I’m happy with touch keyboards because they are faster for me and enable things like folding phones. But to each their own.
Thanks for showing me how passionate you are here. :)
Good for you. My sausage fingers mean I have to use swipe motions more often than not, and often the word will be wrong, then I have to backspace and type it letter by letter, sometimes getting it right, often getting some letters wrong.
Autocorrect means trying anything akin to programming, or typing commands in a terminal emulator is an exercise in patience. “Just turn it off” - see sausage fingers problem
I’m sorry. I can see how someone with very thick fingers might struggle.
My father has a similar issue. I watched him write a message on his phone and I think I found the issue with him. He cared very much about the accuracy of each letter. Doing so made him slow and caused a lot of unhappiness.
My advice to him was to stop caring and just trust autocorrect. It will autocorrect away mistakes and enables people to write quickly. But if you try to get everything letter perfect as you go there is no point to it. It’s a different mindset.
As for programming yah I understand the discomfort here too. I slow down a bit when at the command line on my phone too. Particularly with the flags and such. I recommend the fish shell though. It has an amazing autocomplete set of features above and beyond even zsh. It’s not just looking at histories. It looks at man files and gives autocomplete recommendations. Just Ctrl-F to complete.
As for programming, I have to ask, do you program on your phone? I would use my laptop here.
This
Comment sections
Anything cooking related. It all the same shit you already had but this time it’s plastic, harder to clean and only does 1 specific thing.
Not to mention the shit that’s completely fucking useless, like Juicero - a “juice squeezing machine” that only works with plastic bags you get from their subscription service.
You can also just… empty the bags manually. Without buying the super expensive machine.
Yes, but you wouldn’t be a cool forward-thinking silicon valley tech fan anymore. Only kind of /s.
Or just buy a glass or box of juice, which is also cheaper than their proprietary bags
Of course
Can you give a few examples of older stuff worth getting? I’m looking to update my kitchen soon :)
I’d suggest a stand mixer, but even those have gone down hill, even brands like kitchenaid have gotten worse.
Maybe some old pyrex, if you can find some. The new stuff is bad, can’t recommend that.
A cast iron skillet. If you use it regularly the seasoning will be so good that it’s as functional as any PTFE nonstick pan, you can use metal cooking utensils on it instead of having to get plastic/silicon stuff (for PTFE), and it serves many purposes from stove top to oven. If you can find a “vintage” one at a yard sale from when they used to hand polish them smooth instead of pre-seasoning them with a rough texture, even better. When I bought a small Lodge one years ago, I used a grinder and sanding discs to polish off the factory textured seasoning and re-seasoned it myself, which worked a charm! If you go that route, I recommend doing it outside, because the amount of metal dust that it stirs up is impressive (and magnetic, so an absolute mess to clean up).
Nah because my kitchen is full of plastic junk 😅
Old mandolin slicers. The plastic on one’s produced recently cracks in a year for the cheap ones, or five years for the expensive ones. My grandmother had one that was solid metal. I’m sure it’s serving my cousin as well today as it served my grandmother 50+ years ago.
Corporations are people?
Trickle down economics?
Nuclear weapons?
The first is 19th century. The rest are definitely 20th century
Ah I was falling asleep and didn’t read well enough apparently thanks
Influencers
Back in the day, they were just people of varying fame, whether warranted or not.
