Asklemmy

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Your caveman brain. People think they're educated an enlightened and everything they do now is so well thought out. Nope, the caveman is in the driving seat for all of us. Even your most high level meetings and interviews are influenced by how hungry, horny, or hurt you are by a teasing comment yesterday. Everyone is looking to establish dominance at any cost, when you don't really need to.

Caring about your employees as if they were humans.

Buttons, knobs, plastic bezels.

At least according to the industry those are all in the past. The future is screens that go to the very edge of the device and absolutely nothing tactile.

And it is bullshit. It is less reliable, less convenient, less cool -- To say nothing of the safety disaster that nailing a tablet computer to the dashboard of every car has been.

Paper; Notebooks. Key only physical door locks. Manual transmission cars. Not having any IoT appliances, and not connecting everything you own to WiFi. Hard drive full of MP3s. Cash. Not being available for a call if you're not at home.

Source: work tangential enough to cybersecurity.

Safty razors! Why would anyone spend 20$ on the new fangled 30 million blade razor that mighy last one shave? When you can spend pennies even if you change blades every shave.

IRC: simplest way of communicating online, and a bouncer can be availed for free

Forums: great store of knowledge and friendly, helpful people. If you ask a question in discord, nobody will ever see the answer again.

Guillotines

Magnetic tape. It's one of the better long-term offline backup solutions. It is compact, inexpensive, has no moving parts (bearings, motors, reader heads), no scratchable surfaces, and can last for decades in a moderately climate-controlled room.

Just keep it away from magnets... or iron vaults. According to an anecdote (that I can't find right now), a large bank vault was repurposed as an offsite backup storage, except it kept wiping the magnetic tapes because the thick iron walls reacted to changes in the geomagnetic field.

Wrist watches. Extremely convenient, even when your phone is buried or you don't want to be distracted.

CDs/DVDs/BluRays

I don't want to support Spotify, which is owned by tencent. I don't want to spend a fortune on streaming services. I don't want to sell my data to google by using YouTube, and I want to be able to listen to music/ watch movies when offline.

Obligatory thought to cobol, which is stil the backbone of banking computers.

I would also think to the good old electromechanical relay which are still pretty common

More political, but whatever what imperator Musk thinks Privacy isn't obsolete

Measles

Phones from 2000-2010. Linux/PostmarketOS allows you to run these as mini webservers with webcam's built-in (depending on chip support)

Also PostmarketOS are looking for a new name, so if you've got a suggestion put it here: https://nextcloud.postmarketos.org/apps/forms/s/cAYZZrCqLnrfMPEMAAonCWwx

Tape drives. Remember those big reels of tape on mainframes in the 80s? They don't look exactly like that anymore, but tape is still used for backups/long term archival because they offer the lowest cost per gigabyte and decent longevity without needing to be powered, as long as you don't need to access the data all that fast or often.

Those dank memes and cat videos you posted in 2010 are probably on tape in a data centre somewhere

Printing out tickets as a backup. I do this for concerts and travel because then I don't have to worry about batteries dying, wifi/roaming not being available, getting logged out and having trouble getting back to the ticket, etc.

I also print out maps when doing wilderness backpacks because even if you download the map you'll burn through your battery life well before the hike is over but a paper map is just as good. If I really need to confirm my location I can occasionally turn on the app and shut it off. I keep the maps in a gallon ziplock so water isn't an issue.

Writing your passwords in a piece of paper. Safer than storing it digitally and easier for people that don't know how to use password managers or computers in general to understand what to do to access your stuff if you're under a difficult situation or dead.

Also, physical photos. Yes yes, we all have gigabytes of photos, but almost never check any of them. Physicals catch my glance at home very often, great decoration. I've also took to writing the day, place and people on the back, plus any other important bits of context.

Pretty much anything in a machine shop made in the last 80 years or so. So many people turn up their noses at anything that isn't computer controlled anymore. Yknow what a big old mill can do that a CNC can't? It can make every single part needed to make a new mill. It's a self replicating machine with the right know how. People don't respect that kind of quality anymore.

Developers. Yes, AI can sling a lot of code, but it can't make business decisions and it can't please a difficult customer.

Analogue clocks, particularly clock towers in towns, but also just basic clocks on the wall in your home. With smart devices everywhere, it seems like they're not needed and probably old-fashioned. The circular 12-hour clock face probably feels like the floppy disk icon or the rotary telephone, in terms of how 'of another era' it is, but it's still a fantastic and resilient form factor for the purpose of visualising the passage of time. Digital is great, but analogue will be with us for the foreseeable future (and I'm including in that the representation of analogue in a digital form, e.g. on smartwatches that provide a classic clock face graphic).

Pencils. The ones where you need a pencil sharpener to sharpen them every so often. Mechanical pencils just aren't the same.

I'd say vinyl. Looks like a thing from the 60s but it's still pretty relevant today

IRC

Leeches are still used in some surgeries.

Wired headphones

Awnings

Small phones, structuralism, and Mr. Rogers.

Fortran, probably

Being kind to one another

I'd probably say something like my Sony Discman or any other CD player, if we're talking the general public. CDs aren't anywhere near as popular as they used to be thanks to streaming, but if you're collecting like I am, a dedicated CD player is a necessity.

Fax machines. Government and medical offices would grind to a halt without them. That's just reality.