What is something you can’t live without, technology wise that saves you time?
I have to say it’s my virtual assistant I’ve made. It saves me a lot of time with making reminders and such alarms for meetings or interviews, music etc.
I’m pretty sure my washing machine is the thing that saves me most time. Washing by hand is fucking hard work and very time consuming. I would neither have the time nor the physical endurance to keep all my clothes and household items in a state acceptable to society.
Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it’s expectations. It’s also kind of wasteful to wash clothes too often.
Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it’s expectations.
Wouldn’t it simple revert to the class based system of cleanliness we had before?
- the rich would still have clean clothes with intricate designs and patterns that would be laborious to clean, but they have staff that clean their clothes
- the middle class would still have mostly clean cloths but would have much more simple to wash designs which are more durable, and a significant portion of household time would be spent on cleaning cloths
- the poor wouldn’t have clean cloths
Wouldn’t it simple revert to the
classwealth based system of cleanliness we had before?The problems you mention here comes from wealth inequality. We still have those problems when wealth inequality exists - people just find other things to differentiate themselves from the poor. I.e. instead of cleanliness, it is wearing the right (read: expensive) brand of clothing. Or owning an expensive car, or an expensive phone or an expensive anything.
Cleanliness used to be an expensive thing so the wealthy used that to show off their wealth. Nowadays, it is other things.
The solution to this problem is not to make things cheaper (again, there will just be other ways to show off status/wealth), but to reduce wealth inequality.
Basically the only point that needs to be made at the moment.
I think that counts as a kind of societal expectation adjustment
Makes me a bit glum to think about how this concept applies to other areas
Yeah, every time a new timesaving invention becomes mainstream the “meta” of society adjusts and everything gets faster. And more chaotic and insane and crazy. Modern life is weird
Yeah, ‘living within your means’ works in both directions.
That’s an interesting idea… can you explain more?
My dryer was down for a bit so I had to hang clothes to dry. Slight inconvenience that really made me appreciate having a washing machine that still worked.
mechanized laundry is second only to modern medicine, imo
followed closely by indoor plumbing and dishwashers
Massive respect to people (most often women) around the world who have washed clothes by hand. The cleaning of the clothes is bad enough but there’s also the fetching of (or travelling to) a lot of water.
Having just returned from a long carry-on trip, I concur.
I spent half April washing my socks and underwear in the shower. Even without washing my outer layers, it got really irksome. Thankfully, we had an apartment (with a washer) for the second half. That first load of laundry was magical.
My refrigerator/freezer. Lets me buy food at ideal times (sales etc) and keep it fresh until it is conveneient for me, sometimes months later in the case of the freezer.
Water infrastructure.
Be it indoor plumbing or a flushable toilet or a water treatment plant, without water infrastructure modern civilization would be impossible.
Password manager (saves time typing passwords) and adblocker (saves time wasted on ads and of course malicious content).
What password manager do you use? I use Keeper, but I wonder if there’s a cheaper alternative that’s just as good that I haven’t looked into. I never hear of anyone using this one on Lemmy.
The best is Keepass. The easiest is Bitwarden. Both are free :)
How do they make money?
From people like me who pay for Bitwarden.
Well I like free and I really need to tighten my budget with how expensive everything is getting. Thanks for the recommendations! Now for the hard part of figuring how to change all my passwords from one manager to another lol.
You should be able to export them in an appropriate format from your current pw manager and then import them into keepass or bitwarden. Unless your current manager has a proprietary format for vendor lock-in. I’ve transitioned google > bitwarden > keepass and it was fine. Consider making a donation if you find them useful.
I might have to do this too
Keepass + Syncthing
I hate to admit it, but it’s true to an extent: ChatGPT. I use it at work a lot more than I thought I would.
While it often makes mistakes and often misunderstands me, when I get it to work, it’s a great tool for starting a Powershell or Python script or a SQL or KQL query. I use them as a foundation and build off of them and they’ve helped me learn a lot about writing new scripts and queries of my own by following along with what I got as an input when I verify that it’s safe to run and is going to do what I wanted it to do.
It’s not the most important tool, but it’s been growing on me and I’m getting the hang of using it. I especially like that it responds to errors and tries to fix them or modify for my environment when we’ve disabled something or I’m using a different version.
I’ve also used it in my personal life to write letters and it is another good foundation to start off of. Not ever perfect, but good enough to get me going in the right direction with a few tweaks.
Why do you hate to admit that? GPT and LLM’s are tools
Because I originally viewed them as gimmicks than actual tools that would be useful.
They’re growing on me as I see their value more and more and they’re not just another fake promise of AI that I’ve grown accustomed to seeing in announcements for new technology.
And partly because I’m still a bit scared of where this can take us as a species. Maybe the current iterations are harmless especially with how frequent their mistakes and misunderstandings are, but this growth and their future potential worries me and I don’t like being apart of their success in that sense.
Yeah I wouldn’t feel guilty in the least my friend, highly competent people are using LLM’s to improve their efficiency. People have an unfounded fear (for now) that AI is going to replace them and their job, but the reality is that someone who is efficiently using AI is going to take their job if they’re not
My fear is less about job security and more with the militarized use of it, to be truthful. It’s inevitable and maybe we won’t hit Skynet levels of AI, but somewhere near there. And just the unknown of new technology and what capabilities we may not even realize as we implement these into more and more existing technology as time moves on, military or not. The fear of what can be possible that we may not even realize until it’s too late. Maybe not ChatGPT, but an iteration or fork later down the road.
It’s probably mostly paranoia on my part. As I write this, I imagine I sound like some people of the past who felt the same about the computer and other tech of past generations too. Though, to their credit, we can see some of the evils of those technologies like the good and bad of the internet in today’s world. Things you couldn’t even begin to describe to someone just 20 years ago that is happening now.
You’re not crazy.
Think of Alfred Nobel: inventor of dynamite and exasperated that it was used for evil, not just for good. Founded the Nobel Peace Prize to make amends.
Air fryer. Honestly, this thing just makes cooking easier. I don’t need to stand in front of the oven or grill to make something. Just bung stuff in and come back in 15 mins.
Autohotkey
Limitless custom hot keys on my computer. Each one saves me a few seconds, adding up to hours and hours saved, especially having stuff automated so I can save the headspace
Have you tried Linux?
There is no one true replacement for AutoHotkey on Linux.
If you’re into scripting anyways you have a lot more power on a Linux system. Windows was never intended for automation
My urine bottles. Standing up to go to the toilet is too hard for me.
Edit: Also my phone is great because it enables me to call my wife (or my caretaker if he is approved) to give me food or new urine bottles.
Google Maps. On the day before a long weekend, my drive home can turn into a two-hour slog. I keep Google Maps open and there’s nothing better than hearing that “Ping! We’ve found you a faster route.”
@spittingimage Google is pretty good at its job, I can say that.
A digital calendar that actively reminds me of upcoming events. I put my whole life in my calendar: chores, appointments, work, social stuff, etc. I would probably forget to go to something if my phone didn’t tell me it was happening soon.
What’s your flavor? My brain is going mushy, and I stress myself out constantly by worrying about missing appointments/deadlines.
Google Calendar. I know, I know, say goodbye to privacy. I do want to switch to something like Proton or even self-host, but I’ve built up more than a decade of muscle memory and habits with Google.
Ah, that’s fair. I guess I just need to commit to one path and just start developing habits. Thanks!
Waze. It really is exceptional at avoiding traffic. I know it’s dependent on higher user volume, but, in my area it is very popular with a lot of input.
I also love the user warnings. I’ve dodged many things I’d rather not run over in my car. From dead skunks to a ladder in middle of the highway.
Yes, Waze is amazing! Works really hard well, especially when there’s unusual traffic. Love it.
I don’t know if it saves time or not, but all the ad-busting plug-ins and PiHole I have installed. I set up a VPN that I can connect to with my phone that sends the connection through the PiHole so I get to enjoy less ads on the mobile, too.
I really despise the “open” unfiltered internet. It’s become a cesspool of ads. Mobile sites that leave you with an inch to view the site as the top and bottom become cluttered with banners, autoplay ads, cookie demands, all with super tiny “x” that are designed to not register or deliberately mis-tap to open the ad. Desktop sites with full-screen ads, autoplay, etc.
Yeah. I don’t know about “can’t live without”, but ad-scrubbing and blocking is a huge necessity just to get things done and not have to deal with all the garbage being inserted between you and what you need to do.
Yes it saves time. More than you know.
And while you could live with out it, you shouldn’t - ad block has become the one of the first layers of internet security. You can’t download more ram if you don’t see the link.
My bash scripts. They are saving me lots of time at work, performing screen scraping, filling reports and monitoring old servers.
At home they are making backups and automating repetitive tasks.
I just love shell scripting in general. I should probably own a shirt that says “go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script”.
My kindle changes the books I read into OpenDyslexic font, which allows me to read much faster and with less fatigue.
Does every model have that?
Water heater.
Also washing machine and dish washer. As someone living alone, this is the tits.
A dishwasher is a luxury for sure, but it’s also more economical when it comes to water and electricity than your sink is. Plus it saves quite a bit of time.
