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.
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.
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 now fully recycled (as long as it's opened/not sealed)
It was a massive problem. Keurig did their due diligence and took care of it, significantly.
I promise I'm not a shill. I worked for Keurig and quit my first day because I got yelled at for bleeding on the product when a kcup cut my finger. I don't like Keurig. I don't use kcups.
But your sentiment isn't as valid as it once was. Theyve improved.
Interesting, did not know this.
They actually re-use the plastic? For more cups? As in, full cyclic product? That's pretty damn cool!
I still think something like the systems from Philips (excuse the german) or CoffeeB that do not need plastic in the first place for their single-serving pods is superior, but it's cool that plastic recycling can now do this instead of having to heavily push recycled plastic downstream to other use cases where less quality is needed.
That's good to hear that they took steps to make kcups recyclable. It's a whole other conversation if plastic recycling isn't pretty useless in of itself. I too don't use kcups, hell I don't even drink coffee. Thanks for the information!
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.
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.
Is that really a 21st century idea? I would have thought that was a reaganomics reform tbh
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.
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.
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
Influencers
Back in the day, they were just people of varying fame, whether warranted or not.
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
Modern social media
Clickbait.
Internet advertising.
Social Media 100%.
I'd say specifically the predatory algorithms.
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.
Can you give a few examples of older stuff worth getting? I’m looking to update my kitchen soon :)
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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....
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
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.
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.
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
The generative AI's that "creates" content. Just dumb black boxes remixing what you give them, overconfident and inaccurate, yet seen as the ultimate tools by people.
They do create content, though, regardless of it you personally think they're smart in the process of doing so. Like, there's actual papers that are devoted to making sure.
There's a lot of people who don't know when the 21st century began.
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.
We knew about piss poor encryption a long time ago, every modern algorithm is quantum proof. That includes AES, Kerberos and even 3GPP encryption used in mobile networks. So unless you're using old crap, you're safe even if quantum computers will become powerful tomorrow.
No? Shor's algorithm breaks RSA and literally anything elliptic curve-based, which covers all conventional asymmetric algorithms. Symmetric algorithms like you listed aren't effected, but are useless for communication unless you have an asymmetric algorithm or, like, a physical carrier pigeon to share a secret beforehand.
This is why NIST is currently finalising several post-quantum standards. Which work, but don't do anything fancy, and have comparatively gigantic primitives you have to send back and forth - i.e. are worse.
subscriptions
I'm not sure how far back you have to go, but those are definitely pre 19th century
Generative AI
Twitter
Generative AI or facial recognition tech.
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.
Plastic and PFAS
20th century for those
Full scale mass surveillance capitalism. Governments used to have to hire agents, dress them up, and have them bug peoples phones. Now they can just buy it in bulk. No warrent, no black site op, just cashing checks.
Although initially good, the internet. From malware to corporate tracking, it’s become a cesspool. And yet, here I am.
I think despite the downsides of the internet that it's clearly overwhelming good for society.
