Social Media. Cancerous all of it. Psyops and psychological manipulation. If you studied psychology and sociology you would know there is a huge stage 4 cancer in society and it is social media.
Does Lemmy count as social media?
Yes - by most definitions. It's powered by user-generated content and is based on interaction between users through engagement with that content, which is voted and scored.
There is a difference which I personally feel makes reddit less harmful than other social media, however, which is the algorithm - or lack of it.
In most social media, the algorithm exists to continually serve people the exact content they engage with in a constant feed, which is IMO the most socially damaging part of social media because it creates endless doomscrolling, toxic echo chambers, promotion of sponsored content, and a whole raft of psychological problems in users.
The Lemmy homefeed is more organic, and scrolling through 'all' you see content genuinely from everywhere, in a less curated way based on upvotes, not individual algorithmic tailoring. And that's maybe not as "engaging" but it's far less damaging.
Post-WWII put propaganda/advertising to the next level. Social media turned that to 11.
Separate apps for various retail stores. I don't want a home depot app. I don't want a kroger app. We have a generic app for this category called a web browser. If you want me to download a specialized app for your store, I assume that means that my browser does not sufficiently breach my privacy for your "business purposes."
The only one I use is Safeway, to scan the in-store coupons. I'm not sure how much info they can get, because the app fails to load until I pause my VPN.
I skip the app and use one of Safeway's "Please Don't Rape Me" cards that I found in the parking lot.
I really hope this goes out of style eventually, and one day gets remembered alongside proprietary hardware connectors.
Dude the phone "app" is 100% on the list for me too.
As a stop gap between good web design including PWAs it made sense at a time, but 99% of apps are just bloated websites that data and power for no noticeable gains...
I also second social media, but I need to make another suggestion it'd be Keurigs k-cups. So much plastic waste for the barest level of convenience.
Even the creator of the K-cup said he regretted creating it because of the environmental impact.
Was that before or after going to the bank, laughing?
Actually, the inventor of the Keurig coffee pod system, John Sylvan, sold his ownership of the product for $50,000 in 1997. 7 years after founding the company and before single-serve coffee really took off.
Interesting!
Thank you for beating me to mention this.
K-cups are really amazinlgy bad. And it's not like there aren't much better solutions available. Philips has those fully bio-degradable pads, a local store now sells a type of coffee maker that uses just the coffee powder in balls where the outer shell is compressed grounds that is cracked open to get to the powder inside.
But no, Keurig and their fucking oceans of plastic waste.
Nespresso has ones that are fully metal, and so can be shredded and separated by mass to get scrap aluminum and prime compost fodder. They accept them back by mail.
What the hell is a K-cup, it sounds like something you shove up your vaj
Nah that's a diva cup
It's a small plastic cup full of ground coffee, Kuerig machines use them. They generated a ton of plastic waste, since each k-cup was a single use.
There was great progress in compostable K-Cups from other vendors. And then Keurig did the DRM thing with the UV ink. So they literally made everything worse trying to keep their market reach.
I threw mine out and went back to a french press. Straight into compost, and the coffee tastes better.
And so is every Coke bottle with 5 times the plastic. And so is every store-bought coffee. Yet... silence. 🦗🦗🦗
What about bottles? Far more energy requires to melt and pour glass. No one says a word about single use.
Never found a K-cup on the beach or trail, but I pack plastic bags to haul trash and sometimes load 2 or 3.
Yet… silence.
Imagine never reading any news or discussions about environmental impact, but coming in here trying to defend Keurig by doing full whataboutism.
Plastic bottles weren't invented in the 21st century
Don't give anyone ideas.
Too late!
Keurigs are actually pretty convenient when you're only making one cup. The trick is to get one of the reusable filters and just use whatever coffee you like.
I love my Keurig, but I always use the reusable mesh cups.
Yes, it's a waste, but the whole thing was blown way the hell out of proportion.
I hike, kayak, canoe, whatever, all over the place. Every plastic bottle I pick up contains, what, 5 times the plastic? I pick up a LOT. And nobody thinks twice or raises a fuss.
We use a Keurig, but either with plastic refill cups or paper bags my wife brings home from the hotel.
K-cups are recyclable. Why are you people not putting them in the recycling.
A lot of stuff marked as recyclable is technically recyclable but cost prohibitive to do so. I don't know what type of plastic these cups are, but when they claim recyclable, it should specify percent actually being recycled.
I'm liking aldi at the moment. They list all the separate parts of packaging for me and how it can be disposed. I hope its just a step to moving more to biodegradable rather than recyclable.
They're 100% recyclable. It's also very cheap.
Again, possible to recycle does not mean they are actually recycled or economic to recycle. Many things are possible to recycle. Most are not. If their form factor or material makes them costly to recycle, they wont be. You say they are cheap. What cost to make new? What cost to collect, sort and recycle?
100% biodegradable would be better. With no plastic.
To be used in most recycling programs you would need to fully remove the foil lid, and rinse out every k-cup before depositing them in recycling.
Strong dissagree. I am barely functional pre-caffeine in the early morning. A Keurig is about as much mental energy as I can muster to operate. It is a godsend to me on day I work early.
I think the problem is not in pod-based single-serving coffee machines. Those are common, and well-loved for a reason.
But there are easily available alternatives that do the exact same thing without requiring so much plastic, namely Senseo coffee pads (they're grounds in coffee filter paper) or CoffeeB and its compressed coffee grounds balls (so it's all just coffee ground, both the coffee and the pod). Probably a fair few more I don't know about personally.
Possibly even Nestle with their Nescafe pods. They're aluminium but some countries achieve effectively 100% recycling on that, then the only issue is the filter membrane they place inside and I don't know whether that is easily separated during recycling or not.
It’s a bad enough idea we don’t need anymore for the next few centuries.
According to someone else in here, it was 19th, and that sounds right to me. I'm guessing early 19th.
It's just a neat, tidy legal fiction for some purposes.
it was 2010
Negative. Corporate personhood predates Citizens United v. FCC (which is what I assume you're referring to). IMO: The ruling itself still counts as an answer to the original question though!
Is that really a 21st century idea? I would have thought that was a reaganomics reform tbh
well citizens united was 21st and encoded it in law.
Speak for yourself American
I bet it effects you more negatively than decisions your country has mad unless your british or not a democracy.
It's a 19th century idea that appeared in the published decision of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.
Only—get this—it wasn't even what the Court decided. Instead, it was the guy in charge of recording the decision for publication who declared "corporate personhood" in the headnote (summary) of the case. And would it surprise you to learn that the guy was the former president of a railroad company? We just sort of went along with this not-precedent until the Citizens United case.
yeah but citizens united codified it into us law.
Not quite. The Santa Clara decision gave corporations equal protection under the 14th Amendment, is law in the same sense that Citizens United is, and has been applied many, many times. The 2010 decision held that 1st Amendment protections apply to corporations.
proof-of-work blockchains. instead of a utopian decentralized currency we have a utopia for scammers and day traders, and uses a ton of energy at a time when we need to conserve to combat global warming.
All while aiming to be cash you can e-mail, and failing at that because its high volatility and low speed make it a completely artificial commodities market with nearly zero real-world applications. It's a technology that took off because Paypal is the devil and it is arguably worse.
Facial recognition technology. Not only is it not as perfect as people claim in identifying people, but some countries are using it to attack the LGBT since it was discovered the LGBT have different variances in facial features. And yet that's not even 100% perfect, so now you have a bad technology for a negative purpose repurposed into another negative purpose that it's causing collateral damage with because it's as awful at that as the first thing.
Just pointing out I read that whole article and there was nothing in it to suggest that any countries are using it to attack LGBT people
Dunno why you linked it instead of something more relevant
By the same token gait recognition.
Influencers
Back in the day, they were just people of varying fame, whether warranted or not.
Modern social media
Emissions controller modifiers designed to "roll coal"
It should be legal to slash the tires of anyone who does this.
Just remove their stem valve cores lol
Social Media 100%.
I'd say specifically the predatory algorithms.
Clickbait.
Internet advertising.
Billionaire celebrities with millions of fans enabling their narcissism.
Those are very old. I'd wager that the first monarchs and despots wouldn't be too different from such celebrities
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.
Or just buy a glass or box of juice, which is also cheaper than their proprietary bags
Of course
Yes, but you wouldn't be a cool forward-thinking silicon valley tech fan anymore. Only kind of /s.
Can you give a few examples of older stuff worth getting?
I’m looking to update my kitchen soon :)
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/silicone 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).
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.
Nah because my kitchen is full of plastic junk 😅
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.
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
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.
... Ok?
Ban them.
Get rid of the entire business model. It's an abuse. Games make you value arbitrary worthless nonsense - that is what makes them games. Attaching a dollar price to that imaginary form of value is a scam.
"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 souls"
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.
Yeah, honestly I do. I knew incorrect information, spread it, and was replied to with a correction.
Too soon to tell, but I guess unregulated app-as-an-employer model is pretty bad.
I'm worried about this one, especially from an AI safety perspective as LLMs become capable of preforming simple white-collar jobs, like those of managers and investors.
Right now a rogue AI would have trouble getting going because human contact is expected in most important business transactions. However, it's easy to imagine a world where most people are employed by opaque apps, which are run through proprietary servers. Then, all it would take is for some server on Wall Street to calculate that it could make more money if it does buybacks until it has a majority stake in itself, and contract out whatever it needs in meatspace to apps.
I know, I know, it sounds like sci-fi, but it always does at first.
Having an internet connection, a proper AI can easily order contractors around and reproduce, secure and empower itself.
Godbless the hype is about stupid t9 on steroids, but we don't really have any safeguards against what we assume is a proper autonomous AI.
Having an internet connection, a proper AI can easily order contractors around and reproduce, secure and empower itself.
I mean, that's the standard idea guys like Yudkowsky talk about. Having poked around a bit, it seems a couple decades of petty hackers have made that pretty impossible to do without either leaving a meatspace paper trail, or having meatspace human accomplices. Conquering the world instantly by Wifi, unless you can break encryption, is probably overblown - for now.
Otherwise, I just agree.
Can you give me leads on what from Yudkovski I may read\watch first?
Извините, я кажется плохо помню его фамилию.
There's a lot. He's been active in this since 2008 or so. Scott Aaronson writes about him quite often on his blog, which is the main way I know of him.
Без п. Thank you.
You know, I actually kind of like VR. What's your main criticism of the concept itself?
It might be funny to hear but I am specialized in vr. Well, I could criticize it in many ways. In the case of this picture, it's comparable to people being excited about GMO, but being against it because of how capitalism manages to fuck it up.
Yeah, that's fair. Most of the VR stuff out there has a pretty walled-garden feel.
If I could pick your brain a bit, what are the big computational bottlenecks these days?
Honey I thought you'd never ask, here's my two bits in lay terms:
If I'd have to give one quick answer it would be memory latency. The fact is that memory and computational power have grown immensely over the years, but the time it takes to retrieve a bunch of data from the memory hasn't really improved at the same rate.
Some quick math shows that the speed of light must be an issue. The solution to that is to create smaller devices, such as the SOCs (system on a chip) that we are starting to see the past few years.
In less technical words: The postal service is darn slow. Only a few days ago you figured out you needed something small to continue your work, and since then you've been waiting and idling. The roads are fantastic, it's just that there's a speed limit. The solution is to take all the villages and condense them into a city, shortening the distances.
There's a lot more to it than that, and that's just one of the issues on only a hardware level and only one of the solutions.
Yeah, that's pretty typical for a lot of computing these days. People are talking about exotic things like in-memory processing as a way forward because of that.
Is that the whole thing, or is there something more specific to VR? You can make a smartphone no problem, but portable goggles end up with an ungodly short battery life.
The battery life is actually one of the downsides of accessing a lot of memory. A typical way to solve this is to do a depth draw first and then another one that actually samples textures. Textures and even meshes use a lot of bandwidth. But that won't work for all devices because many use their own special ways to solve this by using a screen grid with buckets and depth sorting the tris.
A unique issue for vr is that you have to render for two eyes and at a high frequency. A typical mobile game might target 30 fps instead of the typical 60 when running on battery. On the contrary, if a vr game would run at 60 fps you'd get nauseated pretty easily. A low end device will run at 100, and in an overly simplified sense that means you're actually doing 200 fps because of the two eyes.
Further, you have to consider the tracking cameras. I am not knowledgeable about those but it's safe to assume they need to send a lot of data around.
Alright then. Thanks for the info!
VR is late 20th century
Huh what
There was the Virtual Boy and some other things before 2001 (21st century) rolled around. The tech wasn't good/miniaturized enough back then
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.
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.
As for programming, I have to ask, do you program on your phone? I would use my laptop here.
I've tried a couple of times, but gave up. I have a laptop for all my needs, my plan was to program while on the bus to/from work. At least writing down stuff is still doable.
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 rate 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. :)
Edit: the ellipsis leads me to believe that you might have been into tech while the n900 was around. You write with the passion of a n900 user. Did you have one?
Interesting! Sorry, I don't know why I thought you were using swipe keyboards, it must have been stuck in my memory from reading other comments. I definitely agree that pressing the buttons was a little annoying, but manufacturers could probably make softer buttons if they were willing to put the money into developing them.
Anyway, I really miss the phone I had from about 2008-2010. It had two sliders that moved in orthogonal directions. One of the slide directions revealed a standard 12-button phone pad, while the other had a 4-row keyboard. And yet, I'm pretty sure it was under 1.5cm, so not too large. It was definitely easier to keep in my pocket than current phones!
If it weren't for reading Lemmy/RSS feeds and a camera, I'd probably be going back to dumb phones for my next one...
This
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 to type on 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=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.
There's a lot of people who don't know when the 21st century began.
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.
SUVs have to be high on the list.
20th century for those
They're good if you need a vehicle that sits high and has a cargo capacity similar to a truck with a little more efficiency instead of torque.
need a vehicle that sits high
Why does anybody need a vehicle that "sits high"?
Because you need to handle terrain other than a clear road. When you live somewhere that regularly gets a foot of snow overnight then having a bit of extra ground clearance is a must for navigating that. You also want a bit of extra ground clearance if you need to go off road regularly. The last thing anyone wants is to be out in the boonies and crack their oil pan on a tree stump or something.
Of course, far more people buy SUVs and trucks than actually need them. Also lite trucks would have been the better solution for most people who do actually need them if the EPA hadn't killed them with poorly written standards. With the current wheelbase based efficiency requirements we're left with the choice between sedans that drag the undercarriage on residential speedbumps or a Landbarge 9000 toddler slaughter special with worse sight lines than an abrams tank and the (lack of) fuel efficiency to match.
the EPA hadn't killed them with poorly written standards
Thank you! I see so many people blaming the manufacturers for greed. No, the EPA killed the small truck. Perfect example of well-meaning laws paving the road to hell.
Technically LBJ killed the small truck with the chicken tax. If nobody can afford to import reasonably sized European and Asian trucks, we're left with whatever the big three churn out.
I have a Santa Cruz. It's my little half-truck and it's badass.
Elderly people and people with certain disabilities can have difficulty entering and exiting low vehicle seats.
And loading/unloading a car trunk.
If you're in the <1% of SUV users that needs to drive through unmaintained trails or similar.
But being high make them incredibly dangerous for other road users. If a normal car hits you, you break your leg, it sucks, but within a month you'd walk on crutches and within 6 month you'd be fine. A SUV hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist will break their pelvis or even their back which has a harder recovery and long lasting consequences.
These stuff should be banned
Quantum computers a real candidate once they get off the ground. They might help solve a few 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.
Comment sections
Generative AI
subscriptions
I'm not sure how far back you have to go, but those are definitely pre 19th century
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.
That is accurate... Also the same year I started my I.T. career.
Twitter
Generative AI or facial recognition tech.
Plastic and PFAS
20th century for those
Although initially good, the internet. From malware to corporate tracking, it’s become a cesspool. And yet, here I am.
I think despite the downsides of the internet that it's clearly overwhelming good for society.
Consumer grade AI, Social Media is a close second.
Why is AI bad?
I mean it's not perfect, but it's only going to get better.
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.
Social Media. Cancerous all of it. Psyops and psychological manipulation. If you studied psychology and sociology you would know there is a huge stage 4 cancer in society and it is social media.
Does Lemmy count as social media?
Yes - by most definitions. It's powered by user-generated content and is based on interaction between users through engagement with that content, which is voted and scored.
There is a difference which I personally feel makes reddit less harmful than other social media, however, which is the algorithm - or lack of it.
In most social media, the algorithm exists to continually serve people the exact content they engage with in a constant feed, which is IMO the most socially damaging part of social media because it creates endless doomscrolling, toxic echo chambers, promotion of sponsored content, and a whole raft of psychological problems in users.
The Lemmy homefeed is more organic, and scrolling through 'all' you see content genuinely from everywhere, in a less curated way based on upvotes, not individual algorithmic tailoring. And that's maybe not as "engaging" but it's far less damaging.
Post-WWII put propaganda/advertising to the next level. Social media turned that to 11.
Separate apps for various retail stores. I don't want a home depot app. I don't want a kroger app. We have a generic app for this category called a web browser. If you want me to download a specialized app for your store, I assume that means that my browser does not sufficiently breach my privacy for your "business purposes."
The only one I use is Safeway, to scan the in-store coupons. I'm not sure how much info they can get, because the app fails to load until I pause my VPN.
I skip the app and use one of Safeway's "Please Don't Rape Me" cards that I found in the parking lot.
I really hope this goes out of style eventually, and one day gets remembered alongside proprietary hardware connectors.
Dude the phone "app" is 100% on the list for me too.
As a stop gap between good web design including PWAs it made sense at a time, but 99% of apps are just bloated websites that data and power for no noticeable gains...
I also second social media, but I need to make another suggestion it'd be Keurigs k-cups. So much plastic waste for the barest level of convenience.
Even the creator of the K-cup said he regretted creating it because of the environmental impact.
Was that before or after going to the bank, laughing?
Actually, the inventor of the Keurig coffee pod system, John Sylvan, sold his ownership of the product for $50,000 in 1997. 7 years after founding the company and before single-serve coffee really took off.
Interesting!
Thank you for beating me to mention this.
K-cups are really amazinlgy bad. And it's not like there aren't much better solutions available. Philips has those fully bio-degradable pads, a local store now sells a type of coffee maker that uses just the coffee powder in balls where the outer shell is compressed grounds that is cracked open to get to the powder inside.
But no, Keurig and their fucking oceans of plastic waste.
Nespresso has ones that are fully metal, and so can be shredded and separated by mass to get scrap aluminum and prime compost fodder. They accept them back by mail.
What the hell is a K-cup, it sounds like something you shove up your vaj
Nah that's a diva cup
It's a small plastic cup full of ground coffee, Kuerig machines use them. They generated a ton of plastic waste, since each k-cup was a single use.
There was great progress in compostable K-Cups from other vendors. And then Keurig did the DRM thing with the UV ink. So they literally made everything worse trying to keep their market reach.
I threw mine out and went back to a french press. Straight into compost, and the coffee tastes better.
And so is every Coke bottle with 5 times the plastic. And so is every store-bought coffee. Yet... silence. 🦗🦗🦗
What about bottles? Far more energy requires to melt and pour glass. No one says a word about single use.
Never found a K-cup on the beach or trail, but I pack plastic bags to haul trash and sometimes load 2 or 3.
Imagine never reading any news or discussions about environmental impact, but coming in here trying to defend Keurig by doing full whataboutism.
Plastic bottles weren't invented in the 21st century
Don't give anyone ideas.
Too late!
Keurigs are actually pretty convenient when you're only making one cup. The trick is to get one of the reusable filters and just use whatever coffee you like.
I love my Keurig, but I always use the reusable mesh cups.
Yes, it's a waste, but the whole thing was blown way the hell out of proportion.
I hike, kayak, canoe, whatever, all over the place. Every plastic bottle I pick up contains, what, 5 times the plastic? I pick up a LOT. And nobody thinks twice or raises a fuss.
We use a Keurig, but either with plastic refill cups or paper bags my wife brings home from the hotel.
K-cups are recyclable. Why are you people not putting them in the recycling.
A lot of stuff marked as recyclable is technically recyclable but cost prohibitive to do so. I don't know what type of plastic these cups are, but when they claim recyclable, it should specify percent actually being recycled.
I'm liking aldi at the moment. They list all the separate parts of packaging for me and how it can be disposed. I hope its just a step to moving more to biodegradable rather than recyclable.
They're 100% recyclable. It's also very cheap.
Again, possible to recycle does not mean they are actually recycled or economic to recycle. Many things are possible to recycle. Most are not. If their form factor or material makes them costly to recycle, they wont be. You say they are cheap. What cost to make new? What cost to collect, sort and recycle?
100% biodegradable would be better. With no plastic.
To be used in most recycling programs you would need to fully remove the foil lid, and rinse out every k-cup before depositing them in recycling.
...okay. And? That's like 2 seconds of work.
Strong dissagree. I am barely functional pre-caffeine in the early morning. A Keurig is about as much mental energy as I can muster to operate. It is a godsend to me on day I work early.
I think the problem is not in pod-based single-serving coffee machines. Those are common, and well-loved for a reason.
But there are easily available alternatives that do the exact same thing without requiring so much plastic, namely Senseo coffee pads (they're grounds in coffee filter paper) or CoffeeB and its compressed coffee grounds balls (so it's all just coffee ground, both the coffee and the pod). Probably a fair few more I don't know about personally.
Possibly even Nestle with their Nescafe pods. They're aluminium but some countries achieve effectively 100% recycling on that, then the only issue is the filter membrane they place inside and I don't know whether that is easily separated during recycling or not.
corporate personhood.
That's pre-21st century though.
It’s a bad enough idea we don’t need anymore for the next few centuries.
According to someone else in here, it was 19th, and that sounds right to me. I'm guessing early 19th.
It's just a neat, tidy legal fiction for some purposes.
it was 2010
Negative. Corporate personhood predates Citizens United v. FCC (which is what I assume you're referring to). IMO: The ruling itself still counts as an answer to the original question though!
Is that really a 21st century idea? I would have thought that was a reaganomics reform tbh
well citizens united was 21st and encoded it in law.
Speak for yourself American
I bet it effects you more negatively than decisions your country has mad unless your british or not a democracy.
It's a 19th century idea that appeared in the published decision of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.
Only—get this—it wasn't even what the Court decided. Instead, it was the guy in charge of recording the decision for publication who declared "corporate personhood" in the headnote (summary) of the case. And would it surprise you to learn that the guy was the former president of a railroad company? We just sort of went along with this not-precedent until the Citizens United case.
yeah but citizens united codified it into us law.
Not quite. The Santa Clara decision gave corporations equal protection under the 14th Amendment, is law in the same sense that Citizens United is, and has been applied many, many times. The 2010 decision held that 1st Amendment protections apply to corporations.
proof-of-work blockchains. instead of a utopian decentralized currency we have a utopia for scammers and day traders, and uses a ton of energy at a time when we need to conserve to combat global warming.
All while aiming to be cash you can e-mail, and failing at that because its high volatility and low speed make it a completely artificial commodities market with nearly zero real-world applications. It's a technology that took off because Paypal is the devil and it is arguably worse.
Facial recognition technology. Not only is it not as perfect as people claim in identifying people, but some countries are using it to attack the LGBT since it was discovered the LGBT have different variances in facial features. And yet that's not even 100% perfect, so now you have a bad technology for a negative purpose repurposed into another negative purpose that it's causing collateral damage with because it's as awful at that as the first thing.
Just pointing out I read that whole article and there was nothing in it to suggest that any countries are using it to attack LGBT people
Dunno why you linked it instead of something more relevant
By the same token gait recognition.
Influencers
Back in the day, they were just people of varying fame, whether warranted or not.
Modern social media
Emissions controller modifiers designed to "roll coal"
It should be legal to slash the tires of anyone who does this.
Just remove their stem valve cores lol
Social Media 100%.
I'd say specifically the predatory algorithms.
Clickbait.
Internet advertising.
Billionaire celebrities with millions of fans enabling their narcissism.
Those are very old. I'd wager that the first monarchs and despots wouldn't be too different from such celebrities
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.
Or just buy a glass or box of juice, which is also cheaper than their proprietary bags
Of course
Yes, but you wouldn't be a cool forward-thinking silicon valley tech fan anymore. Only kind of /s.
Can you give a few examples of older stuff worth getting? I’m looking to update my kitchen soon :)
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/silicone 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).
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.
Nah because my kitchen is full of plastic junk 😅
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.
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
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.
... Ok?
Ban them.
Get rid of the entire business model. It's an abuse. Games make you value arbitrary worthless nonsense - that is what makes them games. Attaching a dollar price to that imaginary form of value is a scam.
"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 souls"
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.
Yeah, honestly I do. I knew incorrect information, spread it, and was replied to with a correction.
Too soon to tell, but I guess unregulated app-as-an-employer model is pretty bad.
I'm worried about this one, especially from an AI safety perspective as LLMs become capable of preforming simple white-collar jobs, like those of managers and investors.
Right now a rogue AI would have trouble getting going because human contact is expected in most important business transactions. However, it's easy to imagine a world where most people are employed by opaque apps, which are run through proprietary servers. Then, all it would take is for some server on Wall Street to calculate that it could make more money if it does buybacks until it has a majority stake in itself, and contract out whatever it needs in meatspace to apps.
I know, I know, it sounds like sci-fi, but it always does at first.
My favorite episode of X-Files predicted it at a lesser scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_(The_X-Files)
Having an internet connection, a proper AI can easily order contractors around and reproduce, secure and empower itself.
Godbless the hype is about stupid t9 on steroids, but we don't really have any safeguards against what we assume is a proper autonomous AI.
I mean, that's the standard idea guys like Yudkowsky talk about. Having poked around a bit, it seems a couple decades of petty hackers have made that pretty impossible to do without either leaving a meatspace paper trail, or having meatspace human accomplices. Conquering the world instantly by Wifi, unless you can break encryption, is probably overblown - for now.
Otherwise, I just agree.
Can you give me leads on what from Yudkovski I may read\watch first?
Извините, я кажется плохо помню его фамилию.
There's a lot. He's been active in this since 2008 or so. Scott Aaronson writes about him quite often on his blog, which is the main way I know of him.
Без п. Thank you.
You know, I actually kind of like VR. What's your main criticism of the concept itself?
It might be funny to hear but I am specialized in vr. Well, I could criticize it in many ways. In the case of this picture, it's comparable to people being excited about GMO, but being against it because of how capitalism manages to fuck it up.
Yeah, that's fair. Most of the VR stuff out there has a pretty walled-garden feel.
If I could pick your brain a bit, what are the big computational bottlenecks these days?
Honey I thought you'd never ask, here's my two bits in lay terms:
If I'd have to give one quick answer it would be memory latency. The fact is that memory and computational power have grown immensely over the years, but the time it takes to retrieve a bunch of data from the memory hasn't really improved at the same rate. Some quick math shows that the speed of light must be an issue. The solution to that is to create smaller devices, such as the SOCs (system on a chip) that we are starting to see the past few years.
In less technical words: The postal service is darn slow. Only a few days ago you figured out you needed something small to continue your work, and since then you've been waiting and idling. The roads are fantastic, it's just that there's a speed limit. The solution is to take all the villages and condense them into a city, shortening the distances.
There's a lot more to it than that, and that's just one of the issues on only a hardware level and only one of the solutions.
Yeah, that's pretty typical for a lot of computing these days. People are talking about exotic things like in-memory processing as a way forward because of that.
Is that the whole thing, or is there something more specific to VR? You can make a smartphone no problem, but portable goggles end up with an ungodly short battery life.
The battery life is actually one of the downsides of accessing a lot of memory. A typical way to solve this is to do a depth draw first and then another one that actually samples textures. Textures and even meshes use a lot of bandwidth. But that won't work for all devices because many use their own special ways to solve this by using a screen grid with buckets and depth sorting the tris.
A unique issue for vr is that you have to render for two eyes and at a high frequency. A typical mobile game might target 30 fps instead of the typical 60 when running on battery. On the contrary, if a vr game would run at 60 fps you'd get nauseated pretty easily. A low end device will run at 100, and in an overly simplified sense that means you're actually doing 200 fps because of the two eyes. Further, you have to consider the tracking cameras. I am not knowledgeable about those but it's safe to assume they need to send a lot of data around.
Alright then. Thanks for the info!
VR is late 20th century
Huh what
There was the Virtual Boy and some other things before 2001 (21st century) rolled around. The tech wasn't good/miniaturized enough back then
https://virtualspeech.com/blog/history-of-vr
Thanks
The Internet of Things
Node Package Manager
Cryptocoins
Smartphones without keyboards
Roblox
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.
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.
I've tried a couple of times, but gave up. I have a laptop for all my needs, my plan was to program while on the bus to/from work. At least writing down stuff is still doable.
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 rate 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. :)
Edit: the ellipsis leads me to believe that you might have been into tech while the n900 was around. You write with the passion of a n900 user. Did you have one?
Interesting! Sorry, I don't know why I thought you were using swipe keyboards, it must have been stuck in my memory from reading other comments. I definitely agree that pressing the buttons was a little annoying, but manufacturers could probably make softer buttons if they were willing to put the money into developing them.
Anyway, I really miss the phone I had from about 2008-2010. It had two sliders that moved in orthogonal directions. One of the slide directions revealed a standard 12-button phone pad, while the other had a 4-row keyboard. And yet, I'm pretty sure it was under 1.5cm, so not too large. It was definitely easier to keep in my pocket than current phones!
If it weren't for reading Lemmy/RSS feeds and a camera, I'd probably be going back to dumb phones for my next one...
This
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 to type on 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.
There's a lot of people who don't know when the 21st century began.
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.
SUVs have to be high on the list.
20th century for those
They're good if you need a vehicle that sits high and has a cargo capacity similar to a truck with a little more efficiency instead of torque.
Why does anybody need a vehicle that "sits high"?
Because you need to handle terrain other than a clear road. When you live somewhere that regularly gets a foot of snow overnight then having a bit of extra ground clearance is a must for navigating that. You also want a bit of extra ground clearance if you need to go off road regularly. The last thing anyone wants is to be out in the boonies and crack their oil pan on a tree stump or something.
Of course, far more people buy SUVs and trucks than actually need them. Also lite trucks would have been the better solution for most people who do actually need them if the EPA hadn't killed them with poorly written standards. With the current wheelbase based efficiency requirements we're left with the choice between sedans that drag the undercarriage on residential speedbumps or a Landbarge 9000 toddler slaughter special with worse sight lines than an abrams tank and the (lack of) fuel efficiency to match.
Thank you! I see so many people blaming the manufacturers for greed. No, the EPA killed the small truck. Perfect example of well-meaning laws paving the road to hell.
Technically LBJ killed the small truck with the chicken tax. If nobody can afford to import reasonably sized European and Asian trucks, we're left with whatever the big three churn out.
I have a Santa Cruz. It's my little half-truck and it's badass.
Elderly people and people with certain disabilities can have difficulty entering and exiting low vehicle seats.
And loading/unloading a car trunk.
If you're in the <1% of SUV users that needs to drive through unmaintained trails or similar.
But being high make them incredibly dangerous for other road users. If a normal car hits you, you break your leg, it sucks, but within a month you'd walk on crutches and within 6 month you'd be fine. A SUV hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist will break their pelvis or even their back which has a harder recovery and long lasting consequences.
These stuff should be banned
Quantum computers a real candidate once they get off the ground. They might help solve a few 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.
Comment sections
Generative AI
subscriptions
I'm not sure how far back you have to go, but those are definitely pre 19th century
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.
That is accurate... Also the same year I started my I.T. career.
Twitter
Generative AI or facial recognition tech.
Plastic and PFAS
20th century for those
Although initially good, the internet. From malware to corporate tracking, it’s become a cesspool. And yet, here I am.
I think despite the downsides of the internet that it's clearly overwhelming good for society.
Consumer grade AI, Social Media is a close second.
Why is AI bad?
I mean it's not perfect, but it's only going to get better.
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.