Minor things that bother you

[kphoger]

One person's scammer is another person's marketer.  ← FALSE

One person's spammer is another person's marketer.  ← TRUE

[Scott5114]

One person's scammer is another person's marketer.  ← FALSE

YouTube has recently done this thing on Android where, when a full-screen video is paused, the video reduces in size and moves to the left, and an ad appears on the right side of the screen. However, the ad appears right where the "drop out of full screen" button is when the video is not paused. So I've mistakenly tapped on ads I didn't want to tap on because the button I was intending to tap on moved out from under me faster than my brain could process what was going on. YouTube's marketing department surely likes the resulting high click-through rate, but intentionally deploying crappy UI design to trick people into doing something they don't want to do sure feels pretty scammy to me.

I may just start reading books before bed like I used to do before YouTube existed...

[7/8]

One person's scammer is another person's marketer.  ← FALSE

YouTube has recently done this thing on Android where, when a full-screen video is paused, the video reduces in size and moves to the left, and an ad appears on the right side of the screen. However, the ad appears right where the "drop out of full screen" button is when the video is not paused. So I've mistakenly tapped on ads I didn't want to tap on because the button I was intending to tap on moved out from under me faster than my brain could process what was going on. YouTube's marketing department surely likes the resulting high click-through rate, but intentionally deploying crappy UI design to trick people into doing something they don't want to do sure feels pretty scammy to me.

I may just start reading books before bed like I used to do before YouTube existed...

I would highly recommend disabling the YouTube app and watching through Firefox browser and U-block Origin extension. No ads, and you can even listen to videos after changing tabs or with the phone locked!

[Scott5114]

I would highly recommend disabling the YouTube app and watching through Firefox browser and U-block Origin extension. No ads, and you can even listen to videos after changing tabs or with the phone locked!

I might try that. Last time I tried watching it through the browser on mobile, there was some reason I didn't like the experience, but I don't remember what it was. It might have been fixed by now.

In this house, I also have a TV in my bedroom for the first time since I was a kid. I think there might be some way of watching YouTube on that, but I've been too lazy to set it up, since I'm not generally much of a TV watcher. (Or a YouTube watcher, for that matter; I usually watch one ~20-minute video from the same artist while lying in bed and then go to sleep.)

[Rothman]

One person's scammer is another person's marketer.  ← FALSE

YouTube has recently done this thing on Android where, when a full-screen video is paused, the video reduces in size and moves to the left, and an ad appears on the right side of the screen. However, the ad appears right where the "drop out of full screen" button is when the video is not paused. So I've mistakenly tapped on ads I didn't want to tap on because the button I was intending to tap on moved out from under me faster than my brain could process what was going on. YouTube's marketing department surely likes the resulting high click-through rate, but intentionally deploying crappy UI design to trick people into doing something they don't want to do sure feels pretty scammy to me.

I may just start reading books before bed like I used to do before YouTube existed...

I would highly recommend disabling the YouTube app and watching through Firefox browser and U-block Origin extension. No ads, and you can even listen to videos after changing tabs or with the phone locked!

^Just made the switch the other night.

[jeffandnicole]

On 130 South approaching 322 West for the Commodore Barry Bridge, they had the direct ramp closed. The interchange is a cloverleaf, so the signed detour was to simply take the ramps to 322 East, then 130 North, then 322 West. Unfortunately I was in the back of a line of 7 vehicles because the front vehicle was skittish to comprehend this and was doing about 15 mph. Then a car, a few in front of me,  wasn't comprehending it and kept exiting the line of traffic, only to have to fight their way back in across the hash marks upon seeing the detour sign that everyone else was following with ease. The lead car in this line still wasn't sure about what they went thru, as they decided to do 30 in the 45 zone upon finishing the detour.

[wxfree]

The tendency for search results to be overwhelmingly commercial

Commerce has always been widespread in search results, and I learned to deal with it.  But Google is completely different than it was the last time I used it.  Results from a search I just did include a description generated by artificial stupidity that may or may not be true and then 10,000 places to buy things.  The artificial description includes information from social media sites, where anyone can write anything.  Those words that may or may not be true were repackaged into other words that may or may not mean the same thing.  Information that's both useful and reliable, what I actually want, is suppressed in the results and hard to find.

We need options, such as filtering out commercial results.  There's a shopping category, so there needs to be a non-shopping category where you can learn about something that just happens to be a consumer good (its history, how it works, different designs, and such) without falling into an ocean of advertising and information desert.  I wouldn't mind an option to exclude artificial stupidity descriptions, but I can disregard them.  These machines don't understand what they read, they take good information and turn it into garbage, and they have a tendency to make things up.  They have an imagination but no understanding, and they're good at making lies seem believable.  They're a nice combination of conspiracy theory freaks and politicians.  Maybe they're a good test for whether people are worthy of the civilization we have, but they're not good sources of information.

[thspfc]

The tendency for search results to be overwhelmingly commercial

Commerce has always been widespread in search results, and I learned to deal with it.  But Google is completely different than it was the last time I used it.  Results from a search I just did include a description generated by artificial stupidity that may or may not be true and then 10,000 places to buy things.  The artificial description includes information from social media sites, where anyone can write anything.  Those words that may or may not be true were repackaged into other words that may or may not mean the same thing.  Information that's both useful and reliable, what I actually want, is suppressed in the results and hard to find.

We need options, such as filtering out commercial results.  There's a shopping category, so there needs to be a non-shopping category where you can learn about something that just happens to be a consumer good (its history, how it works, different designs, and such) without falling into an ocean of advertising and information desert.  I wouldn't mind an option to exclude artificial stupidity descriptions, but I can disregard them.  These machines don't understand what they read, they take good information and turn it into garbage, and they have a tendency to make things up.  They have an imagination but no understanding, and they're good at making lies seem believable.  They're a nice combination of conspiracy theory freaks and politicians.  Maybe they're a good test for whether people are worthy of the civilization we have, but they're not good sources of information.

100% agree. When I google something, I'm either a) looking for very quick, simple, objective information, or b) going straight to Wikipedia because that's the only place that gives answers in a straightforward format without asking me to buy something and slapping me in the face with 40 other pop up ads.

[vdeane]

IONOS has changed their ssh settings for session timeout.  Previously, it would only time out if the session was inactive (fair, though I think they were a little quick on it).  Now it times out after 20 minutes no matter what you're doing.  20 minutes is not enough time to get an entire site update of photos added and tagged in the database, so I'd have to log in again, navigate to the current direction, re-establish the command chain that I go through on each photo page, 4-5 times in a single update.  This is seriously making me wonder if it's time to switch web hosts (though I just paid for the year, so I'm stuck with them for a while, and my hosting and domain aren't in sync, which sucks from a switching perspective).

Not a recent change, but PHPMyAdmin will log out after an hour no matter what as well.  I normally don't run into this limit, but it was a thorn in my side when I was working on consolidating the overlap coverage in my site's photo gallery.  I'd have to log in multiple times without fail, often several on the days I focused the most on it.

And to make matters worse, I can't establish a FTP connection to my web storage without changing my DNS provider in my network settings.  Why?  Who knows, the support person I contacted didn't know, didn't care, and I don't think she even knew what DNS is based on the things she wanted me to try.

[ZLoth]

IONOS has changed their ssh settings for session timeout.  Previously, it would only time out if the session was inactive (fair, though I think they were a little quick on it).  Now it times out after 20 minutes no matter what you're doing.

Have you tried running top to keep the session active?

[vdeane]

IONOS has changed their ssh settings for session timeout.  Previously, it would only time out if the session was inactive (fair, though I think they were a little quick on it).  Now it times out after 20 minutes no matter what you're doing.

Have you tried running top to keep the session active?

It doesn't seem to care whether the session is active or not.  I've gotten "connection closed by [remote host]" within a minute of running a command.  Used to only be a problem when adding metadata for a long string of photos (since responding to prompts from the Perl script that does it doesn't signal that it's active), but I didn't have any of those today.

[wanderer2575]

I had to buy a new electric razor the other day because the shaving assembly on my previous one broke, you can't buy an original equipment assembly on its own, and the third-party ones suck.  So I have a new electric razor.  One, to register the purchase with the manufacturer to get their discount on replacement heads, etc., I have to register an account.  F*ck that, another username and password I have to remember, for what?  I'm not regularly participating in a forum discussion on shaving issues.  Two, the thing came with a charging cable with a USB connector, not a wall plug.  Yeah, like I always plug personal grooming equipment into a lamp base or my desktop computer to charge it.  What the f*ck?!

[mgk920]

I had to buy a new electric razor the other day because the shaving assembly on my previous one broke, you can't buy an original equipment assembly on its own, and the third-party ones suck.  So I have a new electric razor.  One, to register the purchase with the manufacturer to get their discount on replacement heads, etc., I have to register an account.  F*ck that, another username and password I have to remember, for what?  I'm not regularly participating in a forum discussion on shaving issues.  Two, the thing came with a charging cable with a USB connector, not a wall plug.  Yeah, like I always plug personal grooming equipment into a lamp base or my desktop computer to charge it.  What the f*ck?!

Several years ago I replaced a rechargeable one with a hard-wired one (very inexpensive, too, BTW).  Before that, for many years I had one with an asynchronous AC drive motor, but even though I really liked it, the power switch on it ultimately failed.  The rechargeable one had TOTAL CRAP Ni-Cad batteries that gave up their ghost in a little over a year.  The current hard-wired is powered by a 'wall wart' power supply.  It is significantly weaker than the old AC one, but I have grudgingly learned to live with it.

Mike

[kphoger]

Electric razors...  heh...

I just used a razor that was manufactured 61 years ago and still going strong, with a blade that cost 10¢.


Speaking of...  Minor things that bother me...

The fact that Russian-made razor blades are much more difficult to purchase now, because of the war in Ukraine.  My top three blades are all manufactured in St Petersburg.

[kernals12]

The inconsistent level of technology in science fiction. In Cyberpunk 2077, cars still have internal combustion engines and people still have chauffeurs (the latter is made even sillier when you consider that there is a feature in the game where your car will drive itself to you).  In Star Wars, they have robots advanced enough to serve as doctors but still Uncle Owen needs his nephew to provide labor on the moisture farm.

[kphoger]

The inconsistent level of technology in science fiction. In Cyberpunk 2077, cars still have internal combustion engines and people still have chauffeurs (the latter is made even sillier when you consider that there is a feature in the game where your car will drive itself to you).  In Star Wars, they have robots advanced enough to serve as doctors but still Uncle Owen needs his nephew to provide labor on the moisture farm.

Wow, you do realize that the authors can't actually predict the future, right?

In the Jetsons, they have video calls, but they're on CRT television sets with an external antenna.  And George was employed as a digital index operator, which you'd think could be handled by AI.

These things really bother you?

[Max Rockatansky]

The inconsistent level of technology in science fiction. In Cyberpunk 2077, cars still have internal combustion engines and people still have chauffeurs (the latter is made even sillier when you consider that there is a feature in the game where your car will drive itself to you).  In Star Wars, they have robots advanced enough to serve as doctors but still Uncle Owen needs his nephew to provide labor on the moisture farm.

Wow, you do realize that the authors can't actually predict the future, right?

In the Jetsons, they have video calls, but they're on CRT television sets with an external antenna.  And George was employed as a digital index operator, which you'd think could be handled by AI.

These things really bother you?

Obviously given how frequently he complains about works of fiction.   He seems to forget (or not understand) that movies, novels and shows are supposed to be entertaining above all else.  Strict adherence to accuracy doesn't often make for an entertaining product. 

[1995hoo]

The inconsistent level of technology in science fiction. In Cyberpunk 2077, cars still have internal combustion engines and people still have chauffeurs (the latter is made even sillier when you consider that there is a feature in the game where your car will drive itself to you).  In Star Wars, they have robots advanced enough to serve as doctors but still Uncle Owen needs his nephew to provide labor on the moisture farm.

Wow, you do realize that the authors can't actually predict the future, right?

In the Jetsons, they have video calls, but they're on CRT television sets with an external antenna.  And George was employed as a digital index operator, which you'd think could be handled by AI.

These things really bother you?

kernals' comment and kphoger's reply made me recall a comment British author John Christopher made. It turns out kernals' comment is very similar to drivel MultiMillionMiler spouted a few years ago complaining about various aspects of science fiction. It turns out I had quoted John Christopher's comments in that thread. It's now locked, so I've copied them here:

The comments about buttons and stuff on a starship remind me of something British author John Christopher once wrote. You might recognize his name from his best-known work, the White Mountains trilogy published in the late 1960s (also often called the Tripods Trilogy) about aliens who conquer the world using mild control. In the late 1980s, Mr. Christopher published a prequel and made the following comments in a foreword he added some years later. I'm looking at it right now on my Kindle because the comments above prompted me to look them up. The context for these comments is that the BBC had attempted an adaptation of the original three books but pulled the plug for various reasons, and the story didn't follow the latter half of the first book very closely and didn't follow the second book closely at all.

While the second series was showing, it was discussed in a television program by a panel of viewers, among them the leading British science fiction author of the time. He was very critical of what he had seen on his screen. He commented on the fundamental improbability of the Tripods—who, he scornfully pointed out, had used mere searchlights in hunting the fugitive boys—being able to overcome the technological might of the human race. How could one take seriously an interplanetary invader who didn't even have infrared?

The remark about infrared is an interesting example of one of the basic weaknesses of science fiction: It is not very good at guessing the future, particularly in technical matters. When I wrote the books, infrared was little more than a laboratory tool; twenty years later it was in everyday use for switching television channels from the comfort of one's armchair. (Some older readers may recall that the very first remote controls were not infrared but optical, projecting beams of light.) For every roughly accurate prediction (such as the use of tanks as a military weapon, by H.G. Wells), there are scores, probably hundreds, maybe thousands of failures. No science fiction writer in the sixties, for instance, ever dreamed of the late twentieth-century innovation which was going to fundamentally change our lives: the World Wide Web.

It strikes me as a very interesting point.

Incidentally, in the prequel John Christopher poked fun at that other author: A schoolteacher ridicules the Tripods because one used a searchlight and said, "So it looks at though they don't even have infrared!" He was later one of the earlier people the aliens succeeded in hypnotizing.

Now, there are some things that science fiction deliberately overlooks in most cases, the most notable being time dilation associated with faster-than-light travel. Authors more or less have to ignore such things in the interest of telling a good story. But if you want a book that takes that concept seriously, read The Forever War. It was assigned reading in one of my college astronomy classes and it raises some interesting points, including how two people who leave Earth within minutes of each other may nevertheless be aged differently through time dilation. (I won't say much more in order to avoid spoilers in case anyone is actually interested in the book. A warning for those who care about such things, though: The book was written in the 1970s by a Vietnam veteran and it is a product of its era. Some reviewers in more recent years have complained about how the story treats homosexuality in the far distant future.)

Incidentally, I recall wired remote controls where a cord connected the remote to the device. In my fourth year of college, my roommates and I had a VCR with a wired remote. Why not a more modern design (by mid-1990s standards)? Because the one with the wired remote was free—someone gave it to one of my roommates.

[kernals12]

The inconsistent level of technology in science fiction. In Cyberpunk 2077, cars still have internal combustion engines and people still have chauffeurs (the latter is made even sillier when you consider that there is a feature in the game where your car will drive itself to you).  In Star Wars, they have robots advanced enough to serve as doctors but still Uncle Owen needs his nephew to provide labor on the moisture farm.

Wow, you do realize that the authors can't actually predict the future, right?

In the Jetsons, they have video calls, but they're on CRT television sets with an external antenna.  And George was employed as a digital index operator, which you'd think could be handled by AI.

These things really bother you?

It's called world building.

[Max Rockatansky]

The inconsistent level of technology in science fiction. In Cyberpunk 2077, cars still have internal combustion engines and people still have chauffeurs (the latter is made even sillier when you consider that there is a feature in the game where your car will drive itself to you).  In Star Wars, they have robots advanced enough to serve as doctors but still Uncle Owen needs his nephew to provide labor on the moisture farm.

Wow, you do realize that the authors can't actually predict the future, right?

In the Jetsons, they have video calls, but they're on CRT television sets with an external antenna.  And George was employed as a digital index operator, which you'd think could be handled by AI.

These things really bother you?

It's called world building.

You do realize the Jetsons is a Hanna-Barbera cartoon? 

[kphoger]

It's called world building.

Coat to cost.  I think this is needed.

[ZLoth]

This was visualized in 1958....

Also.... https://paleofuture.com/ - The future that never was.

[kernals12]

The inconsistent level of technology in science fiction. In Cyberpunk 2077, cars still have internal combustion engines and people still have chauffeurs (the latter is made even sillier when you consider that there is a feature in the game where your car will drive itself to you).  In Star Wars, they have robots advanced enough to serve as doctors but still Uncle Owen needs his nephew to provide labor on the moisture farm.

Wow, you do realize that the authors can't actually predict the future, right?

In the Jetsons, they have video calls, but they're on CRT television sets with an external antenna.  And George was employed as a digital index operator, which you'd think could be handled by AI.

These things really bother you?

It's called world building.

You do realize the Jetsons is a Hanna-Barbera cartoon? 

I wasn't referring to the Jetsons, I was referring to more serious sci-fi stuff.

[kphoger]

It's called world building.

I wasn't referring to the Jetsons, I was referring to more serious sci-fi stuff.

Wow, you do realize that the authors can't actually predict the future, right?

[ZLoth]

Wow, you do realize that the authors can't actually predict the future, right?

They can make educated guesses based upon the knowledge of existing technology. It's just that what actually occurs can take a much different path.

From 1993: