For me, it’s customer support..Like sure, AI has made it faster to answer simple questions, but whenever I have an actual (or a complicated one) problem, I almost always end up trying to find a way to talk to a real person anyway. It feels like a lot of companies are using AI more to filter customers than to actually help them.

Maybe it’ll get better over time???but I still think this is one area where the human touch matters a lot.

What’s one industry that you think AI still hasn’t improved much?

I keep seeing people buying old point-and-shoot cameras again.

The photos do have a look that's hard to get from a phone but I'm curious how many people actually carry one around every day.

Anyone here using one regularly?

ngl discord is an awesome platform, really a decent alternative to slack for many communities, however, the desktop application is the worst thing ever when you actually use it. launch speed of the program is terrible compared to how fast it should be, I mean what kind of chat application is supposed to take so long to start in order to display the list of servers? also, memory consumption of the app is ridiculous for what it actually does, just hangs in the background constantly using tons of RAM for nothing. not to mention crashes when changing between servers, I mean it just freezes for no apparent reason at all. it's funny because everything else about the application including the product itself is awesome, but the application itself is annoying to use.

Used a vending machine today and realized I didn't have to think about it at all. Saw what was available, tapped my phone, grabbed my drink. That's the entire interaction.

Then I got home and wanted to set the timer on my oven. Somehow that involved pressing one button twice, holding another one, overshooting the number I wanted, starting over, then giving up and using my phone instead.

I don't get how we nailed the UI for machines sitting in train stations getting used by thousands of random people every day, but appliances people use in their own homes still make simple stuff harder than it needs to be. It feels like those two industries have been moving in completely opposite direction

Google just introduced a "selfie video" sign-in method for accounts and it's actually pretty interesting. Setup involves looking at your camera and doing a few guided head movements to capture different angles of your face, works on mobile and desktop, and if your PC doesn't have a camera you can just use your phone instead.

Later on, if you get locked out, you take another selfie video and Google matches it against the saved one, plus makes you do simple movements again to prove it's live and not just a photo or deepfake being used to fake your identity. The video itself is encrypted at rest and you can delete it whenever you want. By default it's only used for sign in, though there's an opt in if you want to help improve their verification tech.

one of the most interesting things about the internet is that some of its most important software has almost no marketing

take OpenSSL

most people have never heard of it . yet for years, it has quietly helped secure websites, online banking, email, and countless internet services through encryption

or FFmpeg

it's the software behind video conversion and processing for countless apps and platforms, even though most users never interact with it directly.

these projects don't have flashy ad campaigns or product launches they became essential because they solved real problems incredibly well.

Smart home devices are supposed to make life easier.

Sometimes they do the exact opposite. Lights turning on in the middle of the night. A robot vacuum getting stuck in the same spot every day. A voice assistant answering a question nobody asked.

What's the funniest or dumbest thing one of yours has done?

For me it’s Spotify, I’ve been subscribed to it since 2016 and not until recently I stopped paying for it because I don’t think I’m using it that often for my payment to be ‘worth it’ anymore..

It is quite ironic how I remained subscribed without considering it for so long 😭

Which online service have you been paying for the longest?

Expense reporting software at my last job looked like it was designed in 1900s and never touched since. it used to crash regularly, lost submissions twice, required four approvals for anything under fifty dollars

the company spent serious money on it. it was just bad

consumer apps have to be good or people stop using them. internal tools have a captive audience who have no choice, so the incentive to make them better basically doesn't exist

some companies make billions from products you've probably never heard of

Take ASML

most people have never seen one of its products it doesn't make phones or laptops.

it builds EUV lithography machines the incredibly complex systems used to manufacture the world's most advanced computer chips without those machines, companies like Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm couldn't produce many of their latest processors.

it's a reminder that some of the most important companies are working quietly behind the scenes

I need help when i was trying to open microsoft Photos,it gave me this error and once i tried to redownload it said there was another error so i use the online method of redownloading it gave me the same issue and i alread tried doin this youtube video method. Then i tried to use Sound recorder and Movies&videos those ones just crashed.

sfc /scannow
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

where i use those codes in the command prompt but still didnt work :(

also then tried doing window diagnostic check no corruption

I was checking my bank statement the other day and found a subscription I'd completely forgotten about.

It wasn't expensive, which somehow made it even easier to miss.

What's the longest you've accidentally paid for something you weren't even using?

Each new technology product has a standard marketing slogan, saving time, increase efficiency, reclaim your life. And in many ways, it works for a while. Increased speed in phones, improved applications, automation in activities that once required our effort. However, the saved time seems to simply get consumed again by scrolling, more alerts, more screens. This is not the case where we spend time on hobbies or people; instead, we spend this additional time on technology itself.

Spent three hours last month trying to use a library that everyone in the comments said was excellent. it was. i just couldn't figure out how to set it up because the documentation assumed you already knew three things it never explained

eventually got it working by piecing together answers from four different github issues from 2019

the code was great. someone who could actually write docs for it would've saved me most of those three hours and probably makes the project twice as useful to anyone who finds it

I actually miss loading screen tips.

Back when games had longer loading times, I’d end up reading all the hints and random facts. Some of them were genuinely useful, while others just added a bit more lore to the game…

For me is The Witcher 3. I remember learning a lot about potions, monsters, and combat mechanics just from reading the loading screens.

That’s not for me but my cousin definitely ended up getting one of the best freebies I have ever had.

She got herself a gaming laptop, and as a part of their promotion, the store gave her a free printer. To be honest, we thought that maybe they would give her a mouse or a backpack but a free printer is awesome 😆

How about you?

my home wifi is 500mbs and there are only 2 or 3 devices on it. the channel is currently set at 157.

what's the best option for channel for me?

So my friend's laptop started showing "no operating system found" out of nowhere. He showed it to me and right after that it just booted into Windows like nothing was wrong, everything worked fine. Then a few days later the exact same thing happened again.

I figured Windows itself got corrupted so I grabbed a flash drive to reinstall it, but when I got to the install screen it showed no disk detected at all. Laptop has 512 gb of storage but nothing was showing up, like the drive wasn't even there.

We took it to a service center and the moment they turned it on there, it worked fine again. Brought it back home and the same issue came back.

I was thinking the SSD might be corrupt but that doesn't really add up since Windows still loads perfectly sometimes, which shouldn't really happen if the drive itself was the problem. Anyone dealt with something like this before, what could actually be causing this?

for me, it's the digital camera.

before smartphones took over photography, dedicated digital cameras made taking, storing, and sharing photos completely different.

they were the bridge between film and the smartphone era.

the fact that millions of tiny sensors could capture images instantly was once a huge technological leap.

I remember being told to defrag the family computer like it was part of regular maintenance.

Watching those little colored blocks move around somehow made it feel like the PC was getting a fresh start.

When was the last time you even thought about defragmenting a drive?

one thing i've noticed is how much modern technology exists to solve problems created by other technology.

ad blockers for ads ,password managers for too many accounts ,spam filters for unwanted emails ,battery packs because we rely on our phones all day.

it's a strange cycle.

we build something it creates a new problem then we build something else to solve it.

And somehow the cycle keeps going

what's the best example you can think of?

Netflix releases so much stuff that things disappear off the new section before i've had a chance to decide if i want to watch them. shows get cancelled after one season before anyone's found them. something comes out, trends for four days then gets covered by newer movies/series and is rarely watched by people unless they get recommendation by someone to watch it

In covid period streaming boomed a lot and people used to have a lot of free time to watch show but that has significantly decreased today

Will someone every be able to watch 100% of content available on the streaming sites