Social media definitely. The whole internet probably.
Full Self-Driving: For sure next year… maybe.
“Artificial Intelligence”: CEO’s create a copy of themselves in a computer, creating an expert bullshitter program.
Customer Service: Most pre-recorded phone loops are actually built to try to frustrate people into giving up and not getting their issue resolved. Further, they record calls not because they care about your experience, but so they can collate tons of data to further exploit you and their workers. CEOs have purposefully insulated themselves from ever directly having to deal with a customer and hide behind “well we didn’t tell employees to break the law!” while demanding employees hit numbers that… aren’t… possibe… without… breaking… the… law.
If it’s from a corporation and the PR says its to “benefit consumers” it’s fucking Snake Oil, by default.
Full Self-Driving
Any idea that comes out of that prick’s mouth is snake oil if we’re going to be truthful about it.
Tesla driver here.
When I first heard the announcement that they were going vision-only, I thought ah shit they’re boned.
I replied on maybe a Reddit thread (?) that there was no way it’ll work up north in any kind of snowy conditions, and people called me an idiot etc
Fast forward a few years later, when I got to experience it first hand. Anytime I drive the car at night, warnings pop up on the screen like “front left camera is blocked or blinded” Cue Surprised Pikachu. In the snow, sometimes it can’t even detect a road.
I tried the free trial of FSD and, while it’s a neat gimmick, I think I was able to make maybe one or two short trips (2km) without needing to disengage it.
It was really bad
AirUp/Flavored water companies
If you want orange flavored water, squeeze an orange in your water, damn it! You don’t need a subscription service for some chemicals that taste like orange
All of them.
Television. I cannot understand why anyone would willingly pay money to be advertised to constantly.
Tylenol (paracetamol).
Literally never does anything but make me feel slightly poisoned, and there is still no clear explanation of how it “works”.
You might be slightly allergic or something, paracetamol in my experience has always helped.
No.
Paracetamol/Acetaminophen is well understood, and an effective drug when used where applicable.
You are right in that nausea and abdominal pain are common side effects for some people, and simply means you should be trying something else. I’ve personally never suffered this.
Its ability to reduce fever is unclear, and even in high doses the difference it appears to make is minor. But for pain-relief there is no doubt as to its efficacy, though its effect is inferior to most other drugs available.
However, when taken together with ibuprofen, it provides pain-relief even more powerful than either drug alone.
If your problem is with the brand Tylenol advertising it like snake oil, then you likely have a point.
It can’t relieve cold symptoms except for a stuffy nose or significantly reduce fever. It’s basically just a very weak painkiller. I only ever take it if ibuprofen isn’t doing enough.
https://medicine.tufts.edu/news-events/news/how-does-acetaminophen-work
Has there been progress since 2022 on figuring out its pain killing mechanism? If it just didn’t work for headaches I would understand, mine are migraine and no painkillers work for those, but it has not worked on anything I tried it for, I gave up years ago. It’s not even that safe, I don’t understand why it’s still around.
Lots of drugs and foodstuffs have biological effects we don’t understand.
Medicine doesn’t always work by looking at exactly how a molecule interacts with every other molecule in a living organism, but rather by simply observing the effects.
It doesn’t kill, and it works for most people. Ok, it doesn’t for you, that happens. But I can tell you for a fact it does for me.
That we don’t understand how it works doesn’t stop it from working, and that it doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it’s useless for everyone else.
I for one am happy I was able to buy paracetamol in addition to ibuprofen when I needed it to sleep during an extremely painful ear infection, because no over the counter drug on its own was enough.
If anything, public knowledge on what exactly it can and cannot do should be improved, as well as what side effects mean you need to look for something else.
I live in a country where there are strict laws regarding advertising of medical devices and drugs, so there’s very little “snake oil” bs around medicines here. If you let them brands try to claim every mild effect an effective ingredient might have makes their product a cure-all for a litany of symptoms.
Asking a pharmacist for a recommendation is always a good idea, that’s how I found out I could “stack” the painkilling effect of paracetamol and ibuprofen, and it worked extremely well.
Obviously, it would have been less ideal if like you I experienced side effects when taking paracetamol.
Hey, I heard (but have no proof so you will have to find them) that it is less effective on some ethnicities than others. If you are in that case, you may want to take a look ?
Really? It helps me with pain relief, even if no one knows why.
Software/game DRM/anticheat (as a service/product) that involves code obfuscation and/or kernel driver.
Accupuncture. It is a placebo at best. At worst it is the ccp’s way of expanding its influence In the world. It is medical astrology is what it is.
Lucas anything.
The current discourse around AI and how we are close from agi. Meanwhile we are just using machine learning… With a shit ton of gpus… All of that to approximate a math function.
The core slikt of anti aging creams and other hydration products.
I can get like, one. But god damned, my wife has so many different products They can’t all possibly be needed
Subscriptions.
IoT, AI, much of consensus based academia and press.
I feel like there is legitimate uses for IoT and Ai but it gets shoved into everything where it isn’t necessary.
How is IoT snakeoil? A great chunk of the world’s infrastructure runs on IoT devices. Your electric, gas, and water meters are almost assuredly IoT if you are serviced within the US.
Poor design and implementation. The S in IOT stands for security. So many devices connected to the internet that don’t need to be. I get that it’s cool to control devices from your phone, but why is it necessary to send data from the device to a company’s server so I can retrieve it with an app? I should be able to connect to the device directly from the app, across my local network, without having to send private data to the cloud.
I don’t disagree, but that’s not “snakeoil”.
Snake oil is a term used to describe deceptive marketing, health care fraud, or a scam. Similarly, snake oil salesman is a common label used to describe someone who sells, promotes, or is a general proponent of some valueless or fraudulent cure, remedy, or solution.
Thankfully. I do not need to tolerate the bullshit that Americans apparently have to.
As someone with deep experience in analysis of power sector, I can assure you that anything “smart” or “intelligent” will pointlessly increase cost to the final consumer, and margin for the owners of supply-delivery-chain. No exceptions.
Hi-resolution audio, especially for streaming. The general idea is that listening to digital audio files that have a greater bit depth and sample rate than CD (24-bit/192Khz vs 16-bit/44.1 KHz) translates to better-sounding audio, but in practice that isn’t the case.
For a detailed breakdown as to why this is the case, there’s a great explanation here. But in summary, the format for CDs was so chosen because it covers enough depth and range to cover the full spectrum of human hearing.
So while “hi-res” audio does contain a lot more information (which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money), our ears aren’t capable of hearing it in the first place. Certain people may try to argue otherwise based on their own subjective experience, but to that I say “the placebo effect is a helluva drug.”
I’ve always kinda wondered about this. I’m not an audio guy and really can’t tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons ‘experts’ telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.
So I’m curious if there’s just a natural variance in an individual’s ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?
Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can’t. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.
I think this is the case where certain people simply can’t see it here the difference.
I collect video game and movie soundtracks and the main difference I can hear between a 320kbps VS a FLAC that’s in the 1000kbps range is not straight up “clarity” in the sense that something like an instrument is “clearer” but rather the spacing and the ability to discern the difference where instruments come from is much better in a Hi-Res file with some decent wired headphones (my pair is $200). All this likey doesn’t matter much though when most users stream via Spotify which sounds worse than my 320kbps locally and people are using Bluetooth headphones at lower bitrates since they don’t have better codec compatibility like aptX and LDAC.
i think hi res is for professional work. If you’re going to process, modify, mix, distort the audio in a studio, you probably want the higher bit depth or rate to start with, in case you amplify or distort something and end up with an unintended artefact that is human audible. But the output sound can be down rated back to human levels before final broadcast.
O couse if a marketing person finds out there is a such a thing as “professional quality”. . . See also “military spec”, “aerospace grade”
Yeah to expand on this, in professional settings you’ll want a higher sampling frequency so you don’t end up with eg. aliasing, but for consumer use ≥44–48kHz sampling rate is pretty much pointless
It’s a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between, say, AAC @ 256kbps and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes people with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of those few who can, they generally can only tell by listening to very the specific characteristics of the specific encoder used, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.
Right you are, but don’t start telling everyone so I can’t silently download my lossless albums from Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz anymore.
A lot of it will depend on your output device; cheap headphones will wreck audio quality.
I remember the bad old days when .mp3 files for streaming were often 128kbps (or less!); I could absolutely hear audio artifacts on those, and it got significantly worse with lower bitrates. 320kbps though seems to be both fairly small, and I can’t personally tell the difference between that and any lossless formats.
which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.
50 GB for a BRD rip is one that is not re-encoded, that’s a straight rip from the disk.
50GB for the simple dual layer discs. You can theoretically reach 100GB with triple layer disks. The largest BDRip I have is 90GB for the Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Edit: UHD Blu-ray only supports dual and triple layer disks, not quad. Quad layer discs do exist though, with up to 128GB of capacity.
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to “CD quality” FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming 192/24 audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping tenfold for no discernable benefit.
An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.
I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it’s an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it’s no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.
It’s for all the pets at homes hearing the same audio, now with original insects and birds outside and mice in the walls.
True. There’s something to be said for pleasuring any passing bats who might be in the vicinity.
What genres are your bats listening to?
Goth.
Conversely low res audio clearly sounds like trash.
Up to a certain point, yes. >192k AAC / OGG / Opus sounds just as good as FLAC in a blind test, though. Even with good equipment.
Yeah, I’m thinking of circa 2000 MP3s. 128k was the good stuff and lower was still common.
Oh yeah. 128k rips from back then were rough. MP3 has gotten somewhat better then, to be fair. V0 VBR is still perfectly fine to listen to; it’s just not as efficient as the newer codecs.
Back when a 4 minute song was like 1.5MB so you could fit more music on your 256MB mp3 player because you could not afford an iPod.
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Yeah they do, although CBR performs noticeably worse than VBR with Lame MP3. As I mentioned elsewhere, MP3 @ V0 or V1 VBR sounds just as good as the above. I just personally haven’t used MP3 for years because the newer codecs are more efficient.
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All you really need is the Nyquist frequency of human hearing to know. That’s a good breakdown for audiophiles I’m sure but it is broadly as simple as the Nyquist frequency.
The News on TV. Misinformation, disinformation and propaganda.
