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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.
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 :)
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.
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 😅
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).
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.
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
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.
Modern social media
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SUVs have to be high on the list.
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
need a vehicle that sits high
Why does anybody need a vehicle that “sits high”?
Elderly people and people with certain disabilities can have difficulty entering and exiting low vehicle seats.
And loading/unloading a car trunk.
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.
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.
If you’re in the <1% of SUV users that needs to drive through unmaintained trails or similar.
20th century for those
The Internet of Things
Comment sections
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.
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.
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those are 20th century
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.
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.
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.”
I really hope this goes out of style eventually, and one day gets remembered alongside proprietary hardware connectors.
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…
corporate personhood.
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.
That’s pre-21st century though.
It’s a bad enough idea we don’t need anymore for the next few centuries.
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!
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.
