Little things that annoy the hell out of you

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Japanese voice acting. It's unrealistic and clichéed in almost any anime or video game. It's gotten to the point where I'd rather watch the English dub, which nowadays usually isn't as shit as it used to be.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Everyone in my office is basically sick with cold / flu (no COVID positive tests so far) but nobody is bothering to wear a mask while they complain about how icky they feel. I hate how regressive North America has been about basic courtesy. Wearing a mask to protect others from getting sick is a pretty common sight in Asian countries, so why is it treated like such a burdensome affair?

My throat's fucking raw now that it's been passed on to me despite my best efforts. Ugh.

[neorichieb1971]

Studio Canal did a right balls up of the Ghibli spine numbers. One part of the studio was numbering them by order of theatrical release, another part was numbering them by order of them releasing them.

You ended up with duplicate spine numbers and when they came out you jumped from number 6 to number 17. It made no sense at all. Some smart guy got the font down and offered stickers that you could just place over the original number. 22 releases in all. I am not a fan of spine numbers because you feel obligated to get the movies you don't want because there is a numerical gap when they line up. Criterion I'm looking at you!!!

[BIL]

"EvEn OlD pEoPlE cAn UsE sMaRt PhOnEz 2 KeEp In ToUcH!!!"

The fuck they can. Getting a new smartphone sorted out for an elderly relative. Her current one is old as fuck and dying, possibly after being powerbombed onto tile by shaking hands a million times. MS, poor woman. Inane questions every torturous inch of the way. They don't even know what the fuck the thing is called. I barely know what they're called, I only encounter them when forced to by work/family. -_-

"Hi [chimp skullfucking a frog], ordered your new smartphone, will drop it off tomorrow. Love, [runner covered in his own shit]"

"ISNT IT A CELL PHONE?!?!?! THERE IS NO POINT OTHER WISE I HABE TO BE ABLE TO PHONE [tubgirl] FROM HOSPSHITAL!!!"

"Don't worry, it's exactly like yours that broke. Same thing. Has a wrist strap! Love, [Al Sharpton's AIDS]"

*next morning*

"LETS GET THIS SORTED OUT!!! I TOLD YOU I AM HAPPY WITH MY CELL PHONE!!!"

"CAN IT AT LEAST TAKE PHONE CALLS FROM LAND LINE"

"FORWARDED MESSAGE FROM [lemonparty]: Ordered your new smartphone"

?!?!?!"

"PLEASE READ!!!"

"I IMAGINE YOU ARE ASLEEP"

"OH I SEE WELL THATS A RELIEF"

"Haha yeah all good. Love, [Kill List hammer scene]

Well, no. Not "inane" questions. But maddeningly basic questions I've already proactively answered in painstaking detail. Questions that would be inane, if dealing with anyone but a living fossil *cough* sorry, I mean "cyber senior."

Liek hey bros! Did u kno WIMMENZ make up 800% OF GAYMERZ?!?! No shit. I'd be candy crushing all day too if I could stay home and watch Maury while microwaving chef boyardee for the kids. "omfg, ur sexis" I think you mean sexy.

Respect 2 random Chinese dude who tries to kill himself every day @ FoxConn only for the suicide prevention net AKA worker bee retention net to catapult him right back onto his workbench. 3; I hope one of those motherfuckers covers himself in razor wire so he goes *boof* right through the mesh, hitting supersonic like Ultraman, BOOM! OWNED iphonecunts, that productivity goin DOWN BITCH

[Udderdude]

Just get one that's so cheap if you try to do more than one thing at once with it, it explodes in flames. Problem solved.

[BIL]

Incidentally that's what I did It even has a wrist strap! Oh god. Burning electronics tethered to wrist. Gonna have to snip that I believe 3;

[KPackratt2k]

So, Micro$oft made this unwelcome change to Outlook. They made it so you have to use keyboard shortcuts when copying/pasting links to emails when using Firefox, and on top of that when copying multiple links to a message, only the last link on the list of links copied registers as a link! Also, when copying the links individually, it tries to be "helpful" by providing a preview of the link you're copying. I had to click the "X" EVERY SINGLE TIME I copied a link to make that shit go away. In my case, I was trying to share photos with someone, and because Imgur decided to 404 my album (even to the point where they wouldn't let me access it, even when signed into my goddamn account, where I made the motherfucking album nonetheless), I had to go into my images and copy the links of the individual images to my reply, there were 17 images, so that was one hell of a tedious process.

Fuck Outlook and fuck Imgur. I'm really considering migrating to Gmail and Google Drive respectively soon.

[Lander]

The term "Bullet Heaven". Bonus spleen if combined with "rougelite", "deck builder", and "overpowered builds".

Of all the genre names to describe Vampire Survivors - which I'm sure is a fine enough game in and of itself - the casual trend-chasing collective just had to pick the snappiest yet least sensical derivation possible. Psh.

So, Micro$oft made this unwelcome change to

MS, god kings of fixing what ain't broken.

Visual Studio Code was an awesome minimalist text editor for a while; light, no bollocks, nicely designed.
Then one day I boot it up to find a new "security" feature (think the "R U SURE?!?" User Account Control popup from Windows Vista) telling me that my fucking text files are insecure and need to be stratified into a MS-approved workspace for validation.

So I - a competent self-organizing individual - have to suffer because Joe Devops needs a virtual nanny to avoid toppling his Leaning Tower of Tech Stack onto the Launch Nukes button. Straight into the bin with it.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

MS, god kings of fixing what ain't broken.

Windows 7 introduced the convenient Snipping Tool for quickly grabbing screenshots of a portion of the screen. Click and drag to pick a portion of the screen, Save As to save in JPG or PNG format whereever you like. Easy.

Come Windows 10, and the program would now nag you to switch to "Snip and Sketch", their newer "improved" version that was burdened with a bunch of unnecessary stuff related to screenshotting and had a worse interface. Windows 11 apparently ditched Snip and Sketch in favour of Snipping Tool... but it's a mangled version no way to save screenshots to individual folders. Instead, taking a screenshot instantly copies it to the clipboard, with no way of saving as a JPG or PNG to the folder of your choice. Apparently the options do have a way of automatically saving what you screenshot to a file... but the options don't tell me the file path where it's supposedly automatically placing them or have an option to change it, and I couldn't find it for the life of me.

[null1024]

Is it just me, or is every Google product rapidly [like, within the year] becoming shit?
The thing that made me really step back was noticing Google Translate return completely empty strings for a given input text, but a lot of other things just feel like they lack the polish they had not even a year ago... and you can easily argue that their shit is worse than it was five years ago.
Like, yeah, Google's search sucks ass now too, to the point where even people who aren't that tech-savvy are noticing, but it feels like an across the board failure now.

[Koa Zo]

Is it just me, or is every Google product rapidly [like, within the year] becoming shit?
The thing that made me really step back was noticing Google Translate return completely empty strings for a given input text, but a lot of other things just feel like they lack the polish they had not even a year ago... and you can easily argue that their shit is worse than it was five years ago.
Like, yeah, Google's search sucks ass now too, to the point where even people who aren't that tech-savvy are noticing, but it feels like an across the board failure now.

Not just you. Search results are shit. Google maps has gone to shit.
This past weekend while out of town I searched "pizza near me" on my phone. First results are the chain franchise stores Pizza Hut and Dominos. Then some results for hot-wing places, and a bar ...I'd just driven by a good old-style Italian family looking type joint and wanted to call-in to order for pickup. It had to be the closest pizza shop in town yet wasn't in the list of results or on the map which was dominated by the large font displays for Pizza Hut and Dominos hovering over the map. When I slid to maximum zoom-in, the pizza shop showed up near where I was ...then I was able to search the name and get the phone number. The search results are so heavily skewed anymore to favor and push the paying advertisers, it's worrisome what will happen to information access.

[drauch]

It's pretty crazy, I've been noticing the search feature this past year going to the pasture. Super specific searches just turn up this yeti ice fishing and it pisses me off so much. What do you mean you don't have this JAV movie? Fuckin' liars.

[Udderdude]

What I think is happening with Google search is that it shows results that people click on more often, so trying to search for anything even remotely obscure results in buckets of popular stuff you weren't looking for, until you throw "fifteen" "different" "layers of quotes" and put a few -stop -showing -me -this -crap in there as well.

And even then sometimes it still doesn't work.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

And then there's services like DuckDuckGo that straight up ignore quotation marks and will give you irrelevant results you didn't ask for, or will "autocorrect" obscure terms to nonsense you aren't searching for. I'd much prefer a search engine accurately tell me "no results found" rather than quietly giving me pages of results that have nothing to do with my search term.

Discord, annoyingly, also seems to do this too. A search for something like the word "searches" will also pull up results for "search" and "searched" even if you use quotation marks.

Speaking of Discord, hey Udderdude, is the OST for XOP Ultra and XOP Ultra Black available anywhere? I was chatting with someone else who wanted to know, and the only place I could find was a weird polish filesharing site that was paywalled!

[Lander]

I swear there was once a time when the notion of "search contract" was actually upheld; i.e. if you explicitly ask for X Y, it will give you X Y, or at least tell you X or Y couldn't be found but here are the partial matches just in case.
Hell, there was also a time where Google understood logical operators like AND and NOT, instead of the "quote for emphasis" thing we have now.

I've gotten to the point of binding mnemonic search shortcuts to more specific engines, like "gh thing" to search github, "d thing" for docs.rs, and so on, since general tools are going to keep getting less useful as the scope of the internet expands.

Windows 7 introduced the convenient Snipping Tool for quickly grabbing screenshots of a portion of the screen. Click and drag to pick a portion of the screen, Save As to save in JPG or PNG format whereever you like. Easy.

I don't recall if it was Snipping Tool specifically, but I definitely remember the upgrade nag trying to move me onto the Fisher Price version of some core program or other.
Irritating as hell, I doubt they'll ever truly recover from the catastrophic appification that was Win8, let alone the endemic problems we were all complaining about long before that.

On the bright side, desktop Linux is less terrible than ever, even if certain support forums still - paradoxically - seem to exist solely so vets can shit on newbies and throw the figurative (Wiki)Book at them.

[Specineff]

Customer service agents who work from home under the influence of drugs. Put all the shit you want in your body in your free time, but fuck you 10,000 times (alongside your pets, your parents, whomever still stays with you as your spouse/partner and your kids and grandkids) if you're too fucking high while on the fucking clock, and go silent for 20 fucking minutes because you fucking forgot you had a customer on the phone waiting for you to find out if their car is a total loss or not, you fucking fuckwad fucker of fucking fuckdom and fuckwittery!

[cfx]

Windows 7 introduced the convenient Snipping Tool for quickly grabbing screenshots of a portion of the screen. Click and drag to pick a portion of the screen, Save As to save in JPG or PNG format whereever you like. Easy.

Internet Explorer had a useful feature where you could highlight part of a webpage and print it; I found it especially useful for all those online store websites that don't give you a clean invoice for things you buy; you could usually get one with the feature since you could not select menus and such.

I'm not sure if the feature was still in the last version of IE, but it definitely is not in Edge. Edge has that thing that works a bit like the snipping tool, but you can't print from it unless you first paste what you select into another program first.

No other browser seems to have this feature either; it's not in Firefox at least.

On the bright side, desktop Linux is less terrible than ever, even if certain support forums still - paradoxically - seem to exist solely so vets can shit on newbies and throw the figurative (Wiki)Book at them.

Can't agree with that. I was a programmer in my other life, and I'm still 100% lost trying to install or set up any Linux to make it work and actually be secure. As much as I hate current Windows, at least Microsoft's documentation is better than Linux, and they have useful tools like Group Policy Editor.

[Lander]

Can't agree with that. I was a programmer in my other life, and I'm still 100% lost trying to install or set up any Linux to make it work and actually be secure.

I'm a programmer currently, and can confidently say it's better than it was a decade ago. Stuff actually works when you plug it in now

As far as security goes, a good distro should be secure by default, with convenience measues (like being able to shutdown / reboot without superuser powers) being the part that you have to spend time unpicking. Though admittedly, the best experience still comes from starting with a skeletal CLI and building both the OS and your ecosystem knowledge out from there, which is pretty time and effort intensive.

As much as I hate current Windows, at least Microsoft's documentation is better than Linux, and they have useful tools like Group Policy Editor.

They also still set the primary account up with admin privileges and reduce system security to a "you sure?" honor system as default, which makes it trivial for confidence tricksters to compromise grammy's laptop and rob her blind via remote desktop client (ask me how I know )

[BareKnuckleRoo]

They also still set the primary account up with admin privileges and reduce system security to a "you sure?" honor system as default, which makes it trivial for confidence tricksters to compromise grammy's laptop and rob her blind via remote desktop client (ask me how I know )

These scammers need to be shot into the sun. Absolutely awful reading about how many people fall for their "I AM CALLING FROM MICROSOFT, YES YOUR COMPUTER HAS A VIRUS" nonsense.

[Lander]

These scammers need to be shot into the sun. Absolutely awful reading about how many people fall for their "I AM CALLING FROM MICROSOFT, YES YOUR COMPUTER HAS A VIRUS" nonsense.

Yeah, it's fucked up. A generation of people raised in a (relatively) more trusting world falling afoul of our collective descent into sociopathy. Even forewarned, some are just too credulous in the face of confident tone.
A ruthless individual would say caveat emptor - don't own technology if you can't handle the hazards - but that's borderline comedy given how aggressive the push to digital has been.

There's a degree of catharsis to be had from people like Jim Browning who act like proverbial tech Batmen without descending into poppy I RICKROLLED THE SCAMMER nonsense, but as ever, it's an order of magnitude easier to put bullshit out into the world that it is to refute or combat it.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I'm not sure we're collectively becoming more sociopathic... maybe the internet is fuelling some of that, but I think at the very least the internet makes it easier for sociopaths to take advantage of vulnerable people more easily and gives them a far greater ability to cast their net far and wide.

And yeah, just like homeopathy and flat earthism, the internet allows bullshit to spread shockingly fast, and to debunk takes ages by comparison, with sometimes minimal lasting impact. It's quite depressing.

[drauch]

Man, this Reddit blackout is annoying as shit. I'm not a Redditor by any means and don't actively use it, but it's undeniable that most hobby discourse resides there now. This has especially plagued Google's already worsening results for anything game-related. Obviously if I want some real-meal-deal information on side-scrolling action I'd come here, but searching for just general game information or opinions on builds, tactics, general info, w/e for other shit is going to be on Reddit. And with that dead for who-knows-how-long it's like it doesn't exist otherwise since that's all anyone uses. Fuckin' thing sucks.

[Lander]

Speaking of the reddit blackout; hemming and hawing over whether this would be better suited to the Apocalypse thread, but I stumbled across a recentish Cory Doctorow treatise on the enshittification of platforms while poking around the aftermath.

It's a lengthy read, though edifying if you're peripherally aware of the shit-gets-worse cycle but have yet to reify such thoughts into a concrete phenomenon. I thought I was relatively clued in, but the community as commodity hole goes deeper yet

[Platform] is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora.

...is a particularly choice line, if perhaps a little hot. I've felt for a while that I have a work of speculative fiction in me to that effect, waiting to be given form once I figure out how to render it into a form that isn't just trite 'capitalism bad' chewing cud.

I'm not sure we're collectively becoming more sociopathic... maybe the internet is fuelling some of that, but I think at the very least the internet makes it easier for sociopaths to take advantage of vulnerable people more easily and gives them a far greater ability to cast their net far and wide.

I hope not, though stuff like the above is some heady doom fuel. Overexposure to the movings and shakings of humanity's most prominent sociopaths has likely warped my perspective some - I have the withdrawal from news cycle social media poison down pat, but no doubt need to get out more

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

In films, when someone is hacking or doing shit on a desktop pc or laptop, and you hear those tinny chirpy "computer sounds" as if any fucking pc ever made those stupid sounds

[Udderdude]

I just reinstalled Windows 98 in a VM and heard lots of stupid chirpy sounds (until I turned them off). Then again, that was several decades ago .. lol.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

[orange808]

<rant> I'm annoyed with reddit, youtube, and discord. They're all bullshit.

Gaming and hardware discussion needs to move back to message boards and be compiled to wikis. There's nothing more beautiful than a well maintained humble wiki.

Videos are difficult to search and watching them is time consuming. It's also stupid. Fuck your logo and fuck your stupid generic local access television show. That's what you're making: a dumb local access television program with a ridiculously big potential audience. I didn't watch that crapola back in the day and I don't want to watch it now.

Discord is a fancy AOL chat room, kids. 'Nuff said. AOL chat is for tweens.

Reddit is a message board, but it's too big for it's own good. You give them all the content and they paywall it. Information needs to be in print, searchable, and available in the future. Stop trusting companies and decentralize, dumbass.

Yes, message boards are fragmented and websites go dark. That cant be helped. You can't find it all in one place? There's a search engine for that. (At least, there used to be.) The internet archive is my best answer to websites going down. I still prefer that over trusting a large firm with information.

And then, I've got all this "machine learning" shit. That's not going to help. Machine learning will take over as a moderator and censor my searches. If I query a machine learning (AI is a fucking stupid term) model, it's unlikely to have the accurate information I need. Even if the models get good, companies will pay or sue to shape the model and legitimate information I want to know won't be included.

We're going backwards. I miss my old boring text internet. I don't want to watch your dumb local access television show, I don't like AOL chat rooms, and I don't want a bunch of moron MBAs in suits controlling the message boards from a board room. The people in charge just want mountains of passive income, some kind of chemical high, and a sweaty pile of 19 year old prostitutes. They don't give a shit about anything.

I want my internet back. /rant

At lest this place still carries the torch. Thank goodness.

[Lemnear]

useless VG Articles, for example:

"is Starfield bigger or smaller than Fallout 4 or Skyrim?"

is that an article? WTF are you comparing the map dimension of a game made in 2011 vs a game of 2023 (and a notoriously big one), and before it's release???
Are you payed to write this???

They should get the "Charlie Hebdo 2015 treathment"...

[cfx]

Can't agree with that. I was a programmer in my other life, and I'm still 100% lost trying to install or set up any Linux to make it work and actually be secure.

I'm a programmer currently, and can confidently say it's better than it was a decade ago. Stuff actually works when you plug it in now

As far as security goes, a good distro should be secure by default, with convenience measues (like being able to shutdown / reboot without superuser powers) being the part that you have to spend time unpicking. Though admittedly, the best experience still comes from starting with a skeletal CLI and building both the OS and your ecosystem knowledge out from there, which is pretty time and effort intensive.

I've tried practically every distro that people recommend and not one of them was set up to be secure by default. Not a single one even included any kind of firewall or packet filtering. As for starting at CLI level, that's my original point; that requires knowledge that only true computer geek types are going to have. An application programmer (what I was) is going to be clueless about it, because those that designed linux and Unix before it seem to have taken some kind of pleasure in making everything as cryptic as possible. I know vi as I had to learn it for one job; it's a total piece of shit and just an indication of making things as unintuitive as possible; I'm sure whoever came up with it thought it was the simplest thing ever, a perfect example of why programmers aren't generally who should design user interfaces.

As much as I hate current Windows, at least Microsoft's documentation is better than Linux, and they have useful tools like Group Policy Editor.

They also still set the primary account up with admin privileges and reduce system security to a "you sure?" honor system as default, which makes it trivial for confidence tricksters to compromise grammy's laptop and rob her blind via remote desktop client (ask me how I know )

I can't argue with that, but I'm only talking about my own purpose and uses. I'd hate to have a person like that use Linux as well though as supporting them would be a nightmare.

I stand by my statement--MS gives me useful tools to change these things such as MMC and Group Policy Editor; linux does not.

[Lander]

I've tried practically every distro that people recommend and not one of them was set up to be secure by default. Not a single one even included any kind of firewall or packet filtering. As for starting at CLI level, that's my original point; that requires knowledge that only true computer geek types are going to have. An application programmer (what I was) is going to be clueless about it, because those that designed linux and Unix before it seem to have taken some kind of pleasure in making everything as cryptic as possible.

Fair, /etc/hosts isn't exactly best-in-class when it comes to fine grained network control, though part of the appeal is being able to pick and choose rather than having an enforced standard take priority.

Though I can't quibble about the propensity for the cryptic; said picking and choosing is liable to involve a lot of wiki / forum searching, and then a lot of man pages after that.

I know vi as I had to learn it for one job; it's a total piece of shit and just an indication of making things as unintuitive as possible; I'm sure whoever came up with it thought it was the simplest thing ever, a perfect example of why programmers aren't generally who should design user interfaces.

I spend most of my computing hours in neovim these days as I understand it, the original vi was built to make the slow keypress-response roundtrip less painful on remote dialup terminals - back when computers were mostly room-sized installations in university campuses - and that focus on efficiency was the happy accident that made it a hacker favourite.
It can be really powerful if you bang on it for long enough, but certainly has that Unix user hostility frontloaded given that any unmemorized command is a potential landmine waiting to blow a hole in your text.

I can't argue with that, but I'm only talking about my own purpose and uses. I'd hate to have a person like that use Linux as well though as supporting them would be a nightmare.

I stand by my statement--MS gives me useful tools to change these things such as MMC and Group Policy Editor; linux does not.

Well, look forward to future annoyanceposts on that front, since I've spent the last few days locking down a Debian 12 + GNOME install for maximal OAP compatibility
My hope is that beyond the learning curve and inevitable instances of Murphy's law, an intentionally-simplified UI and security through obscurity will pay off.

With that behind me, I can say there are somewhat comparable admin tools (ex. dconf Editor for GNOME), but they're desktop environment specific, and that whole post-X-server ecosystem mess is no hill to die on.
Though I can't say I'm particularly enamoured by the underlying machinery; lots of faffing with /foo/bar/whatever.d/00-disable-this-setting files that lack obvious errors or warnings, and a user-facing panel that only acknowledges about half of the stuff you set to read-only.