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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 18th, 2023
  • paultimate14@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen
    2·
    1 month ago

    Oh yes I was not commenting on any of that. Data privacy and the reliability of computer hardware and software over time are separate issues.

    I was just speaking from the basic-level user experience of operating a vehicle- touch screens are terrible. Pretty much everything you want to do in a car should have 3 requirements:

    1. Keep your eyes on the road. Controls need to be in consistent locations and have some other way of communicating what they are and what their status is non-visually. Dials, knobs, buttons that lock in-or-out, switches, levers, sliders. Anything close together needs to be differentiated- buttons with different textures, shapes, or resistance for example. This is very difficult and almost antithetical to touchscreens. The strength of the touchscreens is their flexibility- they can have deep menus that re-use a small amount of space efficiently, but the trade-off is that they need the user’s vision to work.

    2. Non-visual feedback to the user for their activation. Touch screens CAN do this with haptics and sounds. And there are physical inputs where this can be a problem, like regular buttons or knobs with uniform shapes. Levers, sliders, switches, and dials have this as inherent properties

    3. Response time. Touch screens on vehicles are usually underpowered and seem to take seconds to register an input, then apply it. If the music changes and is suddenly way too loud, it’s annoying to be subjected to that for 5 seconds while navigating the touch screen and waiting for it to work, in contrast to a regular old volume potentiometer that operates basically instantly. Really any music or audio controls can get really annoying with delay, though I’ll admit those are a luxury. Things like the lights are not.

    4. Not a requirement, but cars should be judged on whether these things FEEL good. Touch screens have improved slightly over time with better materials and haptics, but that only applies to higher-end ones and still isn’t great. Cheap physical inputs can suck too, though they are usually still better than touch screens.

  • paultimate14@lemmy.worldtoFunny@sh.itjust.works•Recently, I was shopping for a hard drive at a big box store and tried to filter by capacity ...
    1·
    6 months ago

    I remember back in 2013 I built a PC for my wife, and in 2014 one for myself. At that point, buying something online still felt a bit odd. It was reserved for specialty items, shipping would often take at least 2 weeks, or even 6 weeks depending on where it was coming from. I was no stranger to purchasing online, but brick-and-mortar stores with real stock still existed and could get me what I purchased much more quickly.

    I remember being so impressed with Newegg’s website. It made it so easy to build a computer and make sure everything was compatible. It was really easy to compare different options. The filter system was intuitive and comprehensive. I remember thinking “wow this is a perfect shopping experience. The future has arrived”.

    I went to build my next PC in 2019, and dear Satan was it so much worse. I had heard about Newegg getting bought out by a larger company in 2016, and it showed. They opened it up to 3rd party sellers. The filters got clogged with garbage and don’t seem to work properly anymore. The sort function became a joke. The UI got rearranged to be less intuitive. I think they purposefylly wanted to make a worse shopping experience to make people frustrated, to get them to give up on looking for deals and pay a bit extra just to be done with it. I ended up having to go to a 3rd party website (PCPartPicker) to figure out what I needed and where to get it. And some of those parts I had to order on eBay (some even from Newegg’s eBay account which is just… Why are we doing this?), some on Amazon or Best Buy. And it’s only gotten worse since.

    This same experience has happened everywhere. Just this morning my wife was checking out Culture Hustle to see if they have any interesting new paints and commented on how much worse the website was now than when we last used it a few years ago.

    This may make me sound like an old curmudgeon yelling at clouds, but I think the Internet peaked a while ago. There are arguments over exactly when, but sometime between 2008-2016. I remember in 2012 in talking to my fellow students about how Google search results were getting worse.