This question was inspired by my hatred of Temporal Anti-Aliasing which, in many games nowadays, is poorly used as a performance bandaid. On lower resolutions it will smudge and blur the image and certain bad cases of TAA will cause visible ghosting.
Yet in spite of all this, certain games won’t let you turn it off or have hair/fur/foliage look like dogshit without it so sometimes I still use it.
Reddit… Google drive…
It’s not just one thing. I can easily whip up a list:
- Cars - they strangle out the city and make our urban communities dystopias
- MS Office - I can mostly avoid it, but every time I have to use it, WTF?
- Java - the syntax is fine. It’s the whole universe of build/config/versioning tools that gets me
- Pure Capitalism - I’m ready to protest the hell out until we get some democratic socialism
- First Past the Post Voting - It just degrades into a two party lockdown
modern internet
Socks. If I’m at home you’ll never see me wearing socks, not even if it’s -5°C out there. But got to use them while wearing shoes, I guess.
I don’t mind socks but I hate shoes and I don’t like dirty socks. The sandals I wear all the time have a toe thong so no “socks with sandals” for me.
Really? I’m the opposite. My feet are usually always freezing even if it’s warm outside! So I wear socks.
Google, YouTube, Gmail, chrome.
Duck Duck Go, Grayjay, Protonmail, Firefox.
Nebula is great too!
Facebook because my family is on it.
I can manage to skip FB altogether, but 99% of my friends and family are on Messenger
Credit cards
Just a slimy middleman taking a cut of every transaction and trapping people in debt. But a bit of a tragedy of the commons because merchants raise prices to accommodate CC fees and the rewards are hard to pass up.
Credit cards also incentivizes more spending than other forms of payment, so the merchants that are lobbying for legislation want to have their cake and eat it too. In fact, retailers did not lower prices after the Durbin Amendment capped debit card fees. Also, you’re kinda ignoring the insane amount of protections that credit cards have that debit cards and cash don’t, and those come at a cost. If we’re talking about mom and pop shops, sure they’re evil. But for a lot of consumers, they’re just another tool that they shouldn’t be guilty for using effectively.
Credit cards also incentivizes more spending than other forms of payment, so the merchants that are lobbying for legislation want to have their cake and eat it too. In fact, retailers did not lower prices after the Durbin Amendment capped debit card fees. Also, you’re kinda ignoring the insane amount of protections that credit cards have that debit cards and cash don’t, and those come at a cost. If we’re talking about mom and pop shops, sure they’re evil. But for a lot of consumers, they’re just another tool that they shouldn’t be guilty for using effectively.
Illustrator. It’s industry standard for graphic design, but has the stability of a toddler on ice
I’ve built plugins for Illustrator and other adobe projects and their internal API is trash.
This is the company that re-deployed their entire history of support forums accumulated over decades, into a new forum software, without realizing they were breaking twenty years’ worth of links.
Those forum posts, which took the place of their nonexistent documentation, were the community’s collective work product and the company just said “fuck it” and broke every link and bookmark anyone ever had to any obscure topic about adobe tech.
Fucking… Wow. I personally never had any luck on their shite forums, but that’s terrible.
I wish Astute Graphics would just make their own vector design program, their plugins are what make illustrator tolerable
Single use plastics 🤮
Almost anything Google. I have an Android because I hate the restrictions of iOS, but forcing me to sell my location to Google if I want to know where I am (even in an open source app because location is a system thing).
Ah man it’s depressing watching the fall of google. From my gmail beta account which was incredible to do no evil, google are great, theyre open, to so many cancelled projects replaced by similar ones(ehem chats and video chats) and so much bad behavior with their ads.
GrapheneOS! The catch is you need to buy a google pixel.
If you don’t want that, you should look into microG. It replaces Google Play Services with an open source reimplementation, so apps that use it and stuff like location still work but without actually talking to Google. If an app uses Google Maps, it will instead use OpenStreetMap, for example. There’s a version of LineageOS, which ships without Google stuff and instead with microG and F-Droid as well.
Google.
Reddit - I don’t post there any more, but sometimes I still end up there looking for answers and information.
BUT most of all:
LinkedIn - This platform is built to benefit companies, employers and managers, not the masses of people scrambling to use it to get noticed and build their careers. There are so many things that bug me about LinkedIn, but ONE is definitely that I have no real options NOT to use it (without suffering terrible economic penalties if I you know, don’t want to give them my data). I get resentful and anxious every time I look at it.
If you work in IT, LinkedIn is just another spam source.
I deleted my account the first time they were hacked. So much fluff and fake networking. Any employer that relies on that shit is a place I don’t want to be.
Windows
How else would you get natural light into your house?
Human interaction.
My vote goes to Google, to whom I am tightly married. It’s ecosystem and interconnectivity between apps as well as devices is unbeatable. It’s super reliant.
It’s the one entity that can wreck my online and offline presence. I mean, I use android and Google to login everywhere. If Mr. Google so decrees, my phone could wipe and google account be gone tomorrow. Same applies to Apple and Microsoft, but I don’t use their systems as much. The poison I picked is Google and I hate it.
I feel like I don’t use that many Google services (mostly because I’m not convinced they won’t shut down), but the ones I do use are the ones that would really suck to lose access to. I realized this a few months ago and have at least been working on moving my email away from Gmail to my own domain since that is the critical one that could screw everything up.
I moved to protonmail years ago for this reason, but then my friend gave me a free paid YouTube account so I created a new Gmail account and found a new love for heavy metal. Since then the algorithm has learnt my tastes so well I would be devastated to lose my account, but I made a pact with myself that if my friend ever decided to ditch her account that I wouldn’t pay for my own. So I’m totally at the mercy of her whims, and she doesn’t even know!
In the last months I tried to cut as many Google services as I could. I use the Proton suite now, it’s nice.
Unfortunately I still heavily rely on them for Android phone and TVs… Not to mention YouTube, which is yet to have a good competitor.
I doubt we’ll ever see competition to Youtube. It has reached the point where they will basically have to be antitrusted like AT&T to see a competitor.
I don’t even know if YouTube will be around in 30 years, let alone not have competitors.
All gigantic businesses think they’re too big and entrenched and used every day to fail, until they do. Just look at Yahoo! as one example from recent memory.
So, we’ll see, I suppose!
I mean…you’re probably right. But there’s a little part of me that thinks…they said the same thing about Facebook, that it wouldn’t last five years, that it would go the way of MySpace and something else would jump in, but… it’s been just a few months shy of 20 years now, and even though it’s not the juggernaut it used to be, it’s entrenched in a way I never expected.
And then there’s, like, GE, which is 130 years old…or Cigna, Remington, Citi, or Chase, which are older. Some others, like AT&T, do a little dance and come back…I dunno. Some companies just have staying power (in the case of Cigna, I think it might be a pact with some unholy abomination). And they’re all still dominating or at least leading their respective markets.
Even your example, Yahoo, while certainly not the cultural force it once was, is still around in a slightly different incarnation. Nothing ever really dies, it seems.
In the end I am just a dummy on the internet speculating. For all I know climate change will be coming down from the top rope and take Google with it.
Sent from my pixel 6
Capitalism
