Cannot stand Duo and Microsoft Authenticator. Proprietary MFA clients should be ridiculed.
Hyperbolic and lacking nuance? Yes. But I came here to shout into the clouds, not to be fair.
Europe:
Power plugs
Train gauge and electricity
Online payment without credit cardsWorld wide:
Driving on the right
Driving on the left you mean. It’s better since most people are right-handed.
Using your dominant hand for gear shift makes more sense than the alternative. Disagree?
No one has manuals anymore.
Yeah, so use your left hand to steer and right hand for everything else.
Prioritise everything else over where the car goes? Madness.
Weaves wildly onto the pavement full of school kids but accurately adjusted the aircon
That effect is vastly overblown and doesn’t really matter.
Sure, if we only started driving today, we should pick the best side from all perspectives, but changing that now will just be extremely expensive for a very limited gain.
The same goes for switching any island nation from left to right.
Women having class.
Standardize not holding women to ambiguous and hazy hierarchical standards like “class” 🙄
Standardize letting women just be people and minding your damn business. Like wtf is this answer?
I was expecting like the metric system, or the number of continents but no… I’m going to go outside and rip ass so hard today, just for you buddy. 👍
RIP, class 😎
Battery interfaces. We have a huge variety of batteries for a huge variety of devices. However, when you open the proprietary shell of these batteries what you often find inside is standardized 18650 cells. They have been playing us for absolute fools.
The ENG field has had two battery mount standards in the form of the V-mount and the Anton Bauer Gold Mount for decades now, and both are interchangeable; you could swap a Gold Mount plate for a V-mount plate or vice-versa.
And on the consumer front, Sony’s Infolithium might as well be standardized as there’s lights which use Infolithium packs and you can buy generic battery packs in that format and still be able to power your Handycam from the mid '90s, for example.
Those are some good examples, more of that please. Most of the lithium powered devices I’m using currently are power tools and they are exclusively repackaged 18650 and 21700 cells. It’s really not much of a technical challenge to make these things standardised but if there is no regulatory pressure it’s easy money for the OEMs and more toxic waste for us.
We, as consumers, really do need to step up our battery knowledge. I would say, general electronics should be a mandatory requirement. Heck it should be a major part of the curriculum.
That’s true, but it’s also a bit more complicated - you can’t just jam a handful of 18650 cells together and have it work. They need to be matched with cells having similar capacity and internal resistance and depending on the operating characteristics the tolerance can be quite low.
So it is possible to make your own packs or repair ones, but you have to test each cell in the existing pack, as well as test each cell your want to replace in and make sure that they’re all in tolerance to each other.
EV charging, a free (as in freedom) decentralised e2ee protocol for chat and calls, p2p mesh networks and (opensourced) SDI on consumer equipments.
Units of measurement. Imagine if there was one universal way of measuring something, be it temperatures, weights, pressure…
We’re close on this one but there’s a couple of holdouts.
Packaging. With everyone buying online the profusion of different types of packaging is wasteful. Packages are processed by machines and in many cases the packaging gets caught on things, gets stuck in conveyor belts or just slides right off. A huge number of items have to be manually processed because of the packaging. Standardised packaging would make automation much easier and lead to faster, cheaper processing. Unfortunately marketers want to use the super shiny slippery packaging with their brand all over it.
If your wine boxes are slippery they deserve to get dropped.
It looks like it is going to get solved with license plate readers, but toll road transponders. Make everything EZ Pass, that is what it was designed for.
We’re really all over with Spinosaurus.
It’s crazy how much it evolved in just a hundred years. Even crazier that it’s still evolving at all after being extinct for 100 million years.
All online forms.
I fill out a lot of forms and it’s ridiculous. Sometimes I’ll be at the bottom of the page, and I’ll get a message saying that I can’t continue until I fill out a ‘must answer’ question. Sometimes the programmer was clever enough to make it so I’m directed to the question, but more often than not I have to scroll through the entire form to find where I made my mistake.
And, when I have gotten to the end, it would be nice if there was a chance to review everything.
I’m not even going to start with the forms that make you use the calendar tool that takes longer than just entering the date.
Forms itself should be a thing of the past. They mimic paper based patterns which makes no sense for lost use cases in 2026.
What we need is standardized APIs through which you can share specific personal info if you wish to do so. E.g. SOLID implements this.
If additional info is needed a basic conversation with an agent could take the place of a form in due time (for those who wish to use this).
Grocery store layouts.
Oh man, I use a shopping list app, which lets you sort the products into aisles, so that you can just walk through the store and complete the checklist top-to-bottom as you visit each aisle.
This would be excellent for that.
Batteries. Phones, laptops, other random ecrap.
Weights and measurements
A voting test. To keep people from voting with “feelings in my bones” instead of knowledge about things.
A voting test would just become voter suppression and electoral tampering. Even if it was implemented in good faith (doubt), it would still be full of implicit biases from whoever made it
And even if you kept it about really basic civil questions, that would disenfranchise people who had terrible educations or childhood situations - a demographic with a big overlap with poverty and race etc
Packaging!!
