What is something you dislike but still begrudgingly use?
What is something you dislike but still begrudgingly use?
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.
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.
Facebook. I never willingly go on it, but my friends all use it for events and shit. It’s funny hanging out with them and having someone mention things from a group chat I’ve never even touched. I absolutely refuse to install that fucking malware they call Messenger.
Other than that, anything Google. Have to use it all for work.
Several things from Google.
- Google Maps - none of the OSM-bases options are there yet. I need traffic conditions and good Android Auto support. At the same time I hate that Google Maps is so full of ads. When I search for "breakfast" and the top result is a sponsored result for Dunkin and the closest is 50 miles away...
- YouTube - the content is there so it's hard to go to an alternative.
- Google Photos - my issue with this is really more tied to Gmail. If I stop paying for more Drive storage for my photos, I will stop receiving email because my account is full. But I did switch away from Gmail at least.
A car running on fossil fuel.
Well fossil fuel in general…
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.
Capitalism
Browsers. Firefox hasnt given me reason to doubt. Yet. And I find that odd. Still uses it. Because every other big browser have given me reasons.
Generally "free" stuff from big companies is giving me more and more the heebie-jeebies. Even if they have good reputation. But there's NO WAY I could ever pay for everything I use. Nor donate to every deserving person who has given their free time to create and publish FOSS.
money
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
YouTube, Amazon, Comcast Internet, and my employer. In fact, all employers.
Single use plastics 🤮
Cars
my body
iPhone. I travel a lot and I had my bags lost three times. Well no more thanks to AirTags.
We don’t know where your bag is, come back tomorrow and try . I understand you overworked and underpaid but my bag right behind that wall. Oh look it was.
This is only thing reason why I keep using it. I am not going to be hater . For some people it is a great phone but gods on high the limits all over the place.
Here is app drawer. Great can I change Categories? Nope have fun if an app is wrong category. At least I can change what icon gets big? Nope.
The keyboard? Where is the bloody , or ? Button? On android I can have button that lets me pick any of those. But not here I have to go into an under keyboard. But you can have auto prediction on! Not once have it given me a question mark during this whole rant.
The spellcheck. This is probably me being dumb but god, how do I correct? It doesn’t seem to work if I click the word it doesn’t work if I use spacebar to guide it to end of a word. Only seems to work if I somehow managed to click at the end of the word.
The first party cable missing the basic thing pretty much every 3 party cable using to prevent the cable from breaking but no need to 3d print option for it.
The lockdown. Now this maybe obsidian but I will blame Apple. I love lockdown and I probably should not use it yada yada. But why can’t I just a bloody list of all apps and white lists what I want? No instead I have do a big song and dance with sync on obsidian for over 3 hour’s then just one day it works and shows up.
The internet
- Cars, even if I use public transports and my bike as much as possible, I still have to use it sometimes
- Supermarkets, I try to buy things elsewhere but it's not always possible...
I waste time every day watching YouTube shorts.
The way it's designed, you can see a little bit of the next short, and the curiosity will get me, i'm always really tempted to scroll and find out what the next one is.
I wouldn't intentionally waste time like this, which is why i haven't installed TikTok; but i do watch YouTube every day, and so shorts come get me where i am. And honestly, it's a garbage experience. Part of me thinks i would probably have more fun on TikTok because their algorithm is better. Shorts keeps giving me these channels that edit bits of podcats, often MrBeast and Joe Rogan, and there's loads of channels doing this so i keep seeing it no matter how many i block. What content i do enjoy is drowned out by a lot of trash content like that, and would probably be better in long form anyway.
Holy crap, Lois. Where do I even begin?
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Microsoft on my desktop. Want to try out Linux but even boomers would make fun of my tech skills. That, and more games are on Windows.
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Cars. Born in bumfuck nowhere, and cities with public transit are expensive as hell. If I ever get a better paying job, I'm selling that shit and moving anyways, because cars are also a huge money sink in and of themselves.
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Google. I'll give them props, it's a good search engine even in its enshittified form, some of the ads I can deal with because if I am looking for a new t-shirt or something, then it would make perfect sense a Uniqlo ad would pop up. But its privacy that's the problem, and I try to be as "normal" as possible in this KiwiFarmsified hellscape. In the panopticon, the winning strategy is to not be interesting.
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My iphone (inb4 avocado toast Venezuela). It would be silly to trash this thing now by principle, but once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.
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YouTube. It's a Monopoly and my broke ass doesn't want to subscribe to curiosity stream. It's like Texas though, while it's mostly derivative cringe, there's small pockets of gold that keep me there.
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Linkedin. Pretentious garbage
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Suburban life. Again, I am not a suburbanite by choice, decent paying jobs are tight and it's even harder to find an apartment in a state I know I probably won't be killed in AND I can afford.
TL;DR: I REALLY need to start learning 2 tech so I can navigate tech alternatives. Oh, and I need to get my shit together in life so I can afford to live in a blue city.
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Human interaction.
anything proprietary
The English language.
Permanently Deleted
Permanently Deleted
capitalism
Google Workspace. I have several clients who insist on using it for unknown reasons. It creates unprofessional looking work products. And in some cases, it is just plain kludgy (slicers randomly shoot themselves over the Sheet, page numbers randomly renumber when the footer is updated, etc). The part that gets me the most is that it is similar in price to other productivity suites, but often our clients opt to buy Zoom and Slack on top of that - basically doubling the price.
Google, this fucking phone, the cesspool of fezbuk, the shittified streaming services I can’t manage to unsubscribe from…
Cars
Plastic
All my durable medical equipment like CPAP machine, DirecTV, and Walgreens for anything.
My life
Reddit.... Google drive....
Whatsapp and google classroom
A government
Google play services, Discord, and Snapchat.
Money
Passwords.
I prefer password-less logins with a hardware key but only a few online services offer it.
Planes/Airports... I travel for work and I hate them, uncomfortable, crowded, huge waste of time and lots of problems just waiting to pop out.
Secret Server (Thycotic/Delinea). What a crock of shite that is. I was trying to replace it but people at work who have more influence than I do actually like it. I guess they've never used a decent password manager. If we ever actually get to the point where we have to pay for it maybe they'll change their mind.
Centrally controlled undemocratic fiat. ... Usury.
A new Google Pixel phone as they have supported GrapheneOS. Super huge, ugly, everything Glass for no reason and no headphone jack...
To that, Bluetooth. I will have to use it with this phone, or suffer from iphone-like Dongles like a cringe applekid.
Windows, ArcGIS, MSOffice, Microsoft services everywhere, for University.
Kit Kat (Nestle)
This house, my parents, the government, police, the council, the courts, corporate bought statutory regulations, surgeons, roads, cars, petrol, proprietary hardware and driver blobs, youtube (until tomorrow, when I start notubevember), systemd (from ubuntustudio I hijacked), portrait monitor arrangements and low vertical pixels, single monitor, ptsd/sad/sad/pda, iron supplements, calcium supplements, emf, and doubtless many more things.
But not tobacco. Thanks Allen Carr's easy way (& caryophyllene, cbd, psilocybe microdosing and iboga microdosing)... and why is that thing Windows, vi, or Ansible?
My motorcycle.
It was bought due to a necessity.
I didn't quite get the motorcycle I was looking for, and had to settle for this one from a different manufacturer. During the short test ride the problems were not glaring, it was when I rode it for a somewhat long duration that I came to know how bad it was. What's worse is things changed and my necessity to need a personal mode of transport was eliminated, so I barely need to use it daily anymore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tried getting a few modifications done to make it a more comfortable ride, and while it's better than stock now it's still not where I need it to be.
Starlink, mostly because of Musk being Musk, but also because the replacement schedule of the satellites is against what I would prefer for a more sustainable service. Yeah I am well aware of why they replace them that often but I would rather they didn't.
I only use the service as I travel in a RV a lot, 4g/5g just cannot compete for high speed internet in the middle of nowhere or even the middle of somewhere, and that's with a proper roof mounted and powerful external aerial. Cost vs. Other mobile satellite services starlink is just massively cheaper for large amounts of data. It seems expensive compared to 4g or 5g but it really isn't when compared to satellite services.
Cars. There is no direct bus to the grocery store from my apartment, so it's way easier to drive than get on 1 bus, transfer to a different line and then go there.
Websites to pay traffic citations.
Every console I've ever had. I have a lot of games I like on the Gamecube, Nintendo Switch, Gameboy, etc. but all the games felt misplaced on the consoles that had to be used to play them. The only exception to this and the only one I ever genuinely liked was the Wii U, but Nintendo did a trash job with it and it really messed up how I was able to go about games in the future, since they made the Nintendo Switch overlap with the Wii U in terms of console generation.
Adobe Illustrator - No way to use it on Linux without jumping through hoops like a circus poodle, but my school pays for it, and I don't know how to use Inkscapes at the level that I know how to use Illustrator.
My country's healthcare system
Amazon. The past year, the quality of their shipping, delivery has gone way downhill. I'm charged for things, then orders canceled, then last month yet again delivery driver did not read delivery instructions, and box was stolen. Again.
I'm on ssi, no car. Lot of stuff I need, no stores nearby that carry them. I cannot afford to spend $10 on something that will get stolen. That's a week's worth of food.
Been over a month since my last order. Desperately trying to find an Amazon alternative.
Trade Republic
App's pretty meh and it's generally pretty meh but it's dirt cheap. 1€ per transaction is amazing when all I really do is passive investing.
They did notify me that they're going to delete my personal data when I hadn't followed up on my registrations for a few months which suggests they take data privacy serious and is the reason I ultimately went with them. Scalable Capital (another "cheap" neo-broker who I started the signup process with at about the same time) OTOH hasn't sent a word tome to this day; I should send a GDPR request soon.
Gmail
Facebook/Meta Messenger
Almost everything in society.