My new phone update added a whole bunch of annoying AI stuff that I donāt want and additionally decided for me that I should no longer see the bluetooth signal in the statusbar unless I open up the notification menu, with no way to reenable it.
I turn off my headphones when Iām not using them and it was really useful to see at a glance, if they were connected and I had forgotten to turn them off.
This made me think about how in recent years it feels like every update I get on my phone and computer only ever makes things worse. So Iām starting this thread for everyone to vent about their woes with modern technology.
In Those earlier years it felt like technology was always getting better and could do anything. As soon as it felt like weād arrived, they started removing features.
Booting up this old Xbox, it still has entire playlists of custom music on it.
Uniquely, I had a weird problem using homebrew today, even. I went to hack a Wii, using a guide. Since 2011 Iād been hacking Wiis with my eyes closed using letter bomb. Today I decided Iād try the newest streamlined method using the Wii.hombrew.guide or whatever, which had me install a whole windows program the old fashioned way to program files, block stuff on my antivirus, only for it to just not even work on boot. I said fuck it and just did letter bomb in like 10 seconds lol.
I have become the family member that knows how to remove copilot and onedrive on windows and am becoming increasingly proficient at it. Iād rather just be switching everyoneās OS at this point.
But actually I have REAL BEEF with Apple and their stupid Books app
A normal book, you open it up and there will be a page on the left and a page on the right, the left page can be numbered something like ā66ā and the right page will be ā67,ā obvious, right?
Thatās how the app used to work except they updated it a year ago so now every two pages counts as one single pageā¦ So now page 66 and 67 combined are just page 33. Every 400 page book now says its only 200 pages.
I have no idea why they did this. No book works like this and itās blatantly less convenient. There is no option to revert it back to normal
I am so disillusioned with tech at this point. AI has really been the final straw for me, itās just so wasteful. It feels like every time I use a computer some tech company burns a barrel of oil in my name.
Slowly taking steps to distance myself from big tech. Itās kinda nauseating how tangled up in my life it all is. Switching to DuckDuckGo (who is also pushing AI sadly but at least lets you turn it off) from Google was made easier by how awful Google has become, Iāve tried switching search engines many times in the past but was always frustrated by how much worse the other options were at finding what I was looking for. I was hoping alternatives would improve, but I guess Google dropping to the same or lower level works too.
I am aiming to ditch Windows this year, at least as my main OS. I may run a dual boot just for gaming, but hoping that with how mature Proton is now I wonāt need to use it often at all. I am due for a CPU upgrade, so Iāll make the switch to Linux then.
I got a new phone recently that was basically the same phone I had before but more expensive and a little worse.
I was finally forced to accept that 3.5mm jacks are gone. Still using wired headphones through an adapter, because Iām old and set in my ways and also Iām correct.
I am so fed up with technology and the need people have to replace it every year, how phony the jobs are, etc etc. I could really pop off on so many tangents but the one thatās been really growing within me is just the reflection that we do not need this. People lived happily and fully for millennia without Apple Watches, AI, or smart fridges. Doing my best to regress and detach. Generous opinion, we should have stopped at PS2 level tech at most.
Idk in my scoring of pros and cons for modern tech the cons seem to be growing more all the time. About of convenience and āease of lifeā really reads as just adaptation to the tools more than an actual improvement.
Iām also not saying stop at some 2000 level use of tech, I think you would have really interesting, creative, useful developments if we were using dumber boards and less memory. But we would avoid a lot of what I consider useless and unnecessary and bad changes our advancements have lead to (āsmartā everything = more ewaste, AI, increasingly short timelines for work, always online, subscriptions for everything etc).
Most of it is the mechanical engineer in me being bummed that weāre moving to less tactile tech and growing further disengaged from our physical reality as the virtual becomes so necessary and intrusive. Iām still going to have a smart phone going forward and a computer but trying to rebalance. I just think thereās clear diminishing returns with the current path of tech that are hard to ignore or defend.
Iām with you on this 100%āmy wife and I deleted all of our social media in early 2021 as a sort of start to this and couldnāt be happier. Itās the oddest thing, every time I meet new people and are like, āoh hey what are your socials?ā I tend to always get a āugh I wish I could do thatā after I tell them I donāt have a twitter or insta or tiktok or whatever. And itās like JUST DO THAT THENāmake the choice!
I will say my eschewing a lot of new tech has a lot to do with my desire to reclaim my own decisions and thoughts. By that I mean the decision to listen to music primarily by way of minidiscs or a refurbed iPod is about my desire to make the act of music both intentional from a device perspective but also to stop Spotify from making my listening choices for me. The same goes for my carrying around a point-and-shoot little digital camera instead of just using my phoneāI donāt like the idea anymore of a single device being everything; it robs the enterprise of a sort of intentionality that i feel robs it of some of its humanity
Iām reading a book by journalist Chris Hayes called āSirens Callā and he puts forth a really compelling idea thatās really sunk in with me, where he applies the idea of the alienation Marx proposesāthe extraction of labor into a commodity, thereby robbing work of its humanityāto devices and attention. Smartphones and the modern social media algorithm-driven internet has commoditized our attention to the point where attention paid to these things (smartphones, social media apps, etc) feels lacking in humanity because of the way our attention is being mined, extracted and commoditized to serve capital
Like, if my choosing to use a minidisc player to avoid having to spend an additional second using something on a smartphone helps reclaim at least a tiny fraction of my soul, itās worth any tradeoff
Iāll probably need to start looking into getting a different car in the next year or so as I can see the wear and tear piling up on my current one. I think it sucks so bad that every car seems to have, at minimum, a touchscreen interface to engage with the radio/Soundsystem. Sometimes in my current car, the screen becomes totally unresponsive due to what Iām guessing is slight condensation between layers or something. And I hate the little bits of silence in between stations. I just got a little boombox from the thrift store, and I really missed that kind of stuff. I love static and imperfect signals. For my next car, I just want an analogue box with wheels that preferably runs on something besides gas, has pretty colors and is cheap which doesnāt exist, but it should!
I donāt think thatās a problem with the tech, thatās a problem with global society. Weāve incentivized grift and killing the planet, tech (and war, which is also tech) is just the easiest way to do that (I guess thereās also still oil). My problems are with things like capitalist excess (we inefficiently produce more than we need due to insufficient societal planning) and landlordism (you pay rent for everything now).
Tech is just moving into the cruel new spaces society has carved out for them.
Well said, thatās more of the driver to my pushback than anything. Most of my resistance to modern tech is on the software side related to social media and subscriptions than anything else. Just new and improved ways for the capitalists to bleed us.
Also tired of touchscreens, give me doodads and buttons and gizmos. Using old cameras, the way they are fully mechanical and use springs, gears, levers to maintain 1/4000 of a second shutter speed half a century since they were built still feels like magic.
And the work front, we have such great efficient tools but just increased our timelines due to ācompetitionā. We make the deadlines!!! Drives me absolutely insane.
I was a relatively late adopter of a smartphone. Behind the developments in technology are developments in strategy that limit choice.
For instance, many tools seek to replace active consent with passive consent. In active consent, you choose to have something on and choose periodically to keep using it. Manually paying a bill is a kind of active consent. Toggling the location setting on each time you want to find yourself is a kind of active consent. Passive consent is where the tool presumes you have consented until you go in and withdraw consent. Renewing subscriptions are passive consent. Automatically enabling invasive tools and making you have to hunt carefully to disable them is deceptive and passive consent. Hiding settings to make it less likely youāll change your mind further manipulates this passive consent. Making EULAs and privacy agreements so long and complex people are unlikely to understand them and allowing a two second scroll and click is passive consent masquerading as active consent.
The effect of all this passive consent is to get around a real, genuine choice, from the tiny (what we use, what we renew) to the large (whether we even perceive data as our own, let alone whether we exercise that ownership).
I do agree that social media specifically (at least in the general sense of that term, this forum is also a social medium) seems like it might actually be a real problem in itself. I donāt know if smart people have examined why exactly it is. And I personally donāt know what to do about it. Talking to each other has historically been a big driver of technology, but now weāre all talking to each other at the same time constantly and it seems to have done bad things.
There was a really interesting pilot-study recently published that separated smart-phone use from social media use in children and found that, if they didnāt use social media, the phones very clearly improved their lives. Interesting stuff, and Iām sure weāll find out more interesting stuff in, uh reads article 25 years when the study is finished.
The preliminary study showed that cellphone use is linked to increased well-being among the 1,500 Florida preteens surveyed. Furthermore, these kids spent more time with their friends in person and said they felt good about themselves.
It showed that posting on social media can be detrimental to youth well-being ā with increased symptoms of depression, anxiety and trouble sleeping reported.
Even small doses of cyberbullying were shown to be harmful for some participants, with links to depression, short tempers and difficulty putting phones down.
The preliminary survey also showed that efforts to reduce digital media use among children arenāt working. Specifically, 72% of 11-year-olds have a cellphone, compared to previous studies that placed that number around 50%.
EDIT:
And the work front, we have such great efficient tools but just increased our timelines due to ācompetitionā. We make the deadlines!!! Drives me absolutely insane.
Yeah this is infuriating because, in my experience, only the workers are actually held to that deadline. Things can always be a little flexible for the managers.
