Is this enshittification or the convergence of objects into the same design due to regulation/demand/function/etc. (I’m sure there’s a name for this but I can’t recall it)?

Cell phones are certainly enshittified with planned obsolescence or incompatible text messaging protocols or ‘walled gardens’, but what else should a cell phone be besides a cellular networked pocket computer with a camera?

What features (besides a dedicated headphone jack) is missing from a modern cell phone that your old one had?

Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality comes to mind.

Hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality.

However, after thinking up some doom and gloom shit about the future, I reversed course: Why speculate about future kids when most of us grew up with a manipulative media diet? Saturday morning cartoons were wildly manipulative, the emergence of social media damaged a lot of people’s expectation of reality, and the last three election cycles in the US were heavily impacted by the ability of certain populists to generate memes.

AI will speed up the content generation process and introduce some absurd elements like six-fingered watch models, but I don’t think it will be more manipulative than media already is, just weirder and faster.

My ultimately positive forecast: the kids of the future will create their own networked spaces outside of the mainstream internet and just continue on with their lives ignoring what doesn’t interest them and seeking out what does. Regardless, we’ll never understand it anyway.

Wow, what a terrible design. My experience with QMK- powered keyboards didn’t let my mind entertain the thought of that being controlled externally from the board. I knew people shit on Razer and other “gamer” products but I always chalked it up to aesthetics and advertising gimmicks.

True, but I’d take a bluish/purplish white over ever having to desolder a through-switch led ever again.

Even a RGB board should have controls for color, brightness, and pattern. Shouldn’t be too difficult to turn it off or adjust the color to something more natural.

That said, none of the keyboards I currently own and use have anything more than an indicator LED.

And the ‘it’s just a flu!’ people pissed me the fuck off.

I think many people haven’t actually had the flu or have had it after a vaccination or a during mild year.

That shit is awful, and it can and has killed. Hell, 100 years before COVID there was the 1918 Flu Epidemic which killed nearly three times as many people as COVID. So when some chucklefuck prattles on about “it’s just the flu,” my response is always, “that doesn’t make it safer.”

I’ve experienced the language skills of Nederlanders first hand! What I found to be most striking was hearing people having trilingual conversations especially in restaurants where the waitstaff were actively communicating individually with dozens of people in two to three languages.

I’ve tried to keep up with language skills but starting a language in high school or college just didn’t work for me. Especially since the application of those skills prioritizes written communication. I always end up with an understanding of pronunciation, some grammar, and a handful of vocabulary that I can’t actively use.

I don’t think any Americans are judging you too harshly for UK spellings. I think keeping track of all the slang and colloquialisms would be the greater challenge. I was taught “grey” and “colour” as a kid and the only problem I have is with spellcheck. 😂

That’s one way to do it!

I had problems with TSA before because my real ID confused them and they didn’t believe it was a valid US ID. Granted, this was at a regional airport, but it’s literally the ID that complies with requirements set by Homeland Security for the specific purpose of use in airports by TSA.

Edit: and my ID isn’t even from New Mexico!

Your English is also better than people in my family whose ancestors were 18th-century British colonists.

I once had a heated argument with a coworker about where the capital of the US is located. He was of the opinion that Washington state was the capital and Washington, DC was a US city located in Colombia (he also had difficulty understanding that Colombia and Columbia were spelled differently). He wasn’t trolling; when I finally got to a map (pre-smart phone days) and showed him where DC is located, he got really mad.

Interesting take. I’ve always interpreted this phrase as a folksy way of saying a cascade of causality or a progression of responsibilities.

I think this phrase also has origins in extreme poverty, not from extreme wealth. Greed has a lot to do with why the world is shitty but I don’t think that’s the “wisdom” this phrase is trying to express.

This can even be checked at https://tools.usps.com. Try to track the number or use one of the drop downs to see what different USPS service tracking numbers look like.

I have received a legit “undeliverable package” status before but it will never be sent in a text like that. It will only display on the tracking history/status on the USPS tracking website for a given parcel.

Adjusted for inflation, that $0.25 is now equivalent to $68 million dollars, so…

I think that word is tyranny, if we’re sticking with Greek.

Cue the Scroll Phone^TM.

I can’t even imagine the nightmare UI that would accommodate that type of screen.

Mechanically, I could see a device that has a slide down keyboard and a roll up screen. Functionally, I can’t see how it would be useful for daily smart phone actions like one-handed use or swipe-gestures.

I went through a McDonald’s drive-thru the other day and had the most insane experience. For the context of this anecdote, I don’t do that often, so, what I experienced was just weird.

While not quite “AI,” the first thing that happened was an automated voice yells at me, “are you ordering using your mobile app today?”

There’s like three menu-speaker boxes, and due to where the car in front of me stopped, I’m like in between the last two. The other speaker begins to yell, “Are you ordering using your mobile app today?”

The person running drive-thru mumbles something about pull around. I do. Pass by the other menu “Are you ordering using your mobile app today?”

Dude walks out with a headset and starts taking orders from each car using a tablet.

I have no idea what is happening. I can’t even see a menu when the guy gets around to me. Turns the tablet around at me.

I realized that I was indeed ordering using the mobile app today.

I think the difference is that one case is a collective noun and the other is a fallacy.

Contrast with using females as a collective noun which can been seen as reductive or offensive on its own without the fallacious logic.

I’m bothered when ever I hear someone use females as a collective noun for women. Not necessarily because it offends me or because I’m offended on behalf of someone else, but because it sounds so strange to me and the context where it is used is often wildly inappropriate.

The usage is odd; in my experience people who refer to women collectively as females often do not refer to men collectively as males which is often telling about other beliefs and ideas. Also, male/female and man/woman are dichotomies, and using men/females sounds really off.

Referring to people using technical terminology feels reductive and weird to me. Replace female with any other technical identity term and use it the same way: it will get really awkward really fast.

I am aware that the majority of people who use females collectively are not doing so to offend. Hell, the other day, I heard a teacher refer to the girls in her class as females. I doubt she was using it as a pejorative, but she referred to the boys as… boys. The whole thing was weird to me.