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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
Microtransactions in video games. Hell, I’d say that modern video games in general are pretty bad, ESPECIALLY modern mobile games.
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.
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.
Influencers
Back in the day, they were just people of varying fame, whether warranted or not.
subscriptions
I’m not sure how far back you have to go, but those are definitely pre 19th century
Comment sections
Anything cooking related. It all the same shit you already had but this time it’s plastic, harder to clean and only does 1 specific thing.
Not to mention the shit that’s completely fucking useless, like Juicero - a “juice squeezing machine” that only works with plastic bags you get from their subscription service.
You can also just… empty the bags manually. Without buying the super expensive machine.
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 :)
Nah because my kitchen is full of plastic junk 😅
A cast iron skillet. If you use it regularly the seasoning will be so good that it’s as functional as any PTFE nonstick pan, you can use metal cooking utensils on it instead of having to get plastic/silicon stuff (for PTFE), and it serves many purposes from stove top to oven. If you can find a “vintage” one at a yard sale from when they used to hand polish them smooth instead of pre-seasoning them with a rough texture, even better. When I bought a small Lodge one years ago, I used a grinder and sanding discs to polish off the factory textured seasoning and re-seasoned it myself, which worked a charm! If you go that route, I recommend doing it outside, because the amount of metal dust that it stirs up is impressive (and magnetic, so an absolute mess to clean up).
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 really hope this goes out of style eventually, and one day gets remembered alongside proprietary hardware connectors.
Social Media 100%.
I’d say specifically the predatory algorithms.
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.
I have a Santa Cruz. It’s my little half-truck and it’s badass.
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.
Elderly people and people with certain disabilities can have difficulty entering and exiting low vehicle seats.
And loading/unloading a car trunk.
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
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. 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 contebt 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.
Although initially good, the internet. From malware to corporate tracking, it’s become a cesspool. And yet, here I am.
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.
By the same token gait recognition.
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
