• BallShapedMan@lemmy.world
      29·
      1 month ago

      The amount of “modern” companies I had to fax shit too when my dad died was infuriating! Hyundai, Target, etc etc etc. Email is a thing dumb ass companies! Fuck me.

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        13·
        1 month ago

        It already has. Vast majority of companies still handling fax are using VoIP fax modems with digital receivers that turn it into a PDF. I haven’t seen a functioning copper landline probably since 2015…

      • jdr@lemmy.ml
        22·
        1 month ago

        I think the reason I didn’t know it is because it isn’t true.

        Unless you’re a Lincoln truther who thinks he wasn’t killed in 1865 way before fax machines were available in the USA and Japan.

    • phoenixarise@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 month ago

      Faxes are common in healthcare facilities and hospitals. I would imagine that they’re safer when it comes to sensitive data.

        • Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          1 month ago

          THANK YOU.

          You know another fun thing that can happen? A doctor moves practices and changes fax numbers, and the old number gets assigned to a new, completely unrelated non-medical group. But no one told the medical entity that sends faxes, and no one updated the relevant records. All of a sudden several months worth of PHI has been getting sent to a women’s clothing store.

          Fax in the medical field needs to die. Between the possibility of this happening, higher probability of transmission failure, paper (where offices are still using physical faxes) getting misplaced before getting filed in charts, etc., it’s just a plain bad way to send medical information in 2026.

          Edit: OH, and don’t get me started on fancy, marketing-designed lab reports that use colored indicators to communicate treatment-critical information that no one checked for legibility in black and white, yet still get sent by fax. Like, fucking WHAT??

          • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 month ago

            on’t get me started on fancy, marketing-designed lab reports that use colored indicators to communicate treatment-critical information that no one checked for legibility in black and white, yet still get sent by fax. Like, fucking WHAT??

            holy fuck

      • twoBrokenThumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        Not really safer, they just work with the existing infrastructure. Personally, I think there’s still a place for fax, it’s essentially a convenient way to scan and transmit, and these days you can get them to your email or phone (not in healthcare because that’s not HIPAA compliant). Sure, not anybody’s first choice, but I think it’s still valid.

        • ChexMax@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 month ago

          It’s only convenient if you have access to a fax machine, which the majority of us don’t

          • twoBrokenThumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 month ago

            My comment was in context of existing business infrastructure. You’re right that most of us don’t have a fax machine, but many organizations still do and therefore it can be very convenient for B2B communication. And in the case of orgs that want faxes but you don’t have one, ifax is a thing as well.

            I’m not making an argument for faxes, I’m just saying for an outdated technology it’s stayed quite useful in the modern era.

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    40·
    1 month ago

    Honestly vinyl records, and I say this as a collector with joy

    I think it’s kinda surprising when you think that most people who enjoy music in 2026 have access to a good percentage of all music ever recorded as part of their music streaming subscription.

    It warms my heart that there’s enough people out there who don’t give a shit about the level of convenience provided by streaming that ultimately erodes the work of an artist, and they choose to buy an expensive plastic circle instead

    Tracks on an album are intended to be listened to in the context of that album. To normalise pulling pieces out and ignoring the rest is kinda destructive to the artists’ intent.

    Vinyl records are kinda the antithesis to that mindset. You’re kinda forced to engage with the album as an atomic piece of art

    So for me it’s not just surprising, but a thing of beauty

    • otacon239@lemmy.world
      111·
      1 month ago

      The album thing has bothered me for a long time. There are now tons of “internet artists” that all seem to release one or two singles every six months and that’s just how they release music.

      Albums aren’t just about a limitation of the medium. It’s about putting a concept together that’s bigger than a 3-5 minute idea you had one day. It’s about capturing a time of that artist’s or group’s life and progress. It gives you the chance to bind all of those tracks together and organize them in a way that you think will help guide your audience.

      With single-only releases, you may never really get to know the artist or what emotion they may be trying to convey in a greater sense. Or worse, all of their singles just sound like “them” and never evolve beyond that.

      • jqubed@lemmy.world
        8·
        1 month ago

        Albums are a great statement from artists but in the history of recorded music the LP phonograph or album is relatively new, introduced in 1948. Before then artists basically only released singles. In a way the album was originally a value purchase; instead of buying 7 different singles you could buy one LP for a lower price. It’s almost more like the modern “greatest hits” albums successful musicians release.

        I don’t think it’s fair to outright dismiss someone who’s only releasing singles; it’s not actually a new phenomenon. Maybe they’re not saying as much as people releasing albums, but not all albums are really carrying a concept or bigger thought, either. Not everything needs to be a novel; there’s a place for short articles or random comments online.

        • otacon239@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 month ago

          I suppose my tone was a little off. I shouldn’t imply that it’s wrong to not pursue an album or that it’s a more correct approach to do so.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      1 month ago

      most people who enjoy music in 2026 have access to a good percentage of all music ever recorded as part of their music streaming subscription.

      For NOW they do. I suspect enshittification is forcing more capital investment in response.

      • freebee@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        1 month ago

        New records are ridiculously priced! There are jewels hidden in thrift store bins or in some of the more “messy” looking record stores for very reasonable prices. Digging through the pictures and the names you may or may not know, to select albums based on their title and cover: there’s an incredible charm to that. I visit a lot of record stores, the ones that look too neatly organised and every single record is in a sealed shrink wrap, are the ones I leave rather quickly. I want my record store to look and feel like an old attic :)

    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 month ago

      yep. outdated dogma holding back the species all over. we can’t have nice things because people keep killing each other based on some asshole’s ‘interpretation of god’s will’ - nevermind each of those ‘gods’ said repeatedly not to murder people, assholes will always twist it to their own ends as long as people continue to believe.

  • brillotti@lemmy.world
    331·
    1 month ago

    Film production and development. Yesterday I dropped off a couple rolls of 120 film shot on a 60 year old camera at a lab to develop and print it for me.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
      16·
      1 month ago

      We’re in a bit of a renaissance!

      Kodak just put out brand new Kodacolor 200 and Ektachrome 100 film

      I’ve not even got one developed yet!

    • WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 month ago

      Hell I just got my daughter a disposable camera for her school camping trip. No electronics allowed but they encouraged them to bring those. I was surprised to find one. I told her (11yrs) it was a one time use camera. The look on her face was priceless. She looked at me as if I were dumb and said, “so it takes one freaking picture?? That’s stupid, my phone takes all the photos I want!” She got further confused when I explained why there was no screen and how she had to get those photos lol.

    • radiofreebc@lemmy.world
      53·
      1 month ago

      Film is infinitely upscalable. No video format has ever been able to touch it. You can take films shot 100 years ago and upscale them to 4K/8K/etc. You can’t do that with any video format.

  • Ascend910@lemmy.mlEnglish
    29·
    1 month ago

    Japanese here, it is still crazy people need to bring a big wooden stemp around to sign government documents and contracts. and bringing physical documents around in a suitcase.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
      7·
      1 month ago

      Although they’re struggling at the moment, due to their blood being harvested for use in biomedical research.[1]. Although fortunately, there have been synthetic alternatives developed in the last few years, so hopefully their numbers should recover as that is phased in.

      Edit: if this makes you feel overly sad, here is a palate cleanser(30 minute long, ideally listened to in one uninterrupted block). It’s one of my favourite things I stumbled across last year, and it makes me feel hopeful about the world. It made me cry, but in a good way.

      [1]: Linked article has more info, but the TL;DR is that their blood clots in the presence of bacterial toxins, so it’s super useful in stuff like vaccine development and production. They capture the crabs, harvest the blood and return the crabs alive, and the stats that the system has on this says that only a small percentage of them end up dying as a result of this. However, given that we can’t see how many of them die or fail to reproduce in the weeks and months following their release, we can’t confirm that.

      We do know that the numbers of a bird that feasts almost exclusively on horseshoe crab eggs have seen severe reductions over the last 40 or so years, so it seems likely that the impact of this harvesting on horseshoe crab populations is more severe than the official data suggests.

      It’s unfortunate because they fall between the cracks when it comes to animal research ethics. For one, the research isn’t being done on them, so they probably wouldn’t be protected under most existing legislation anyway. But also, animal research legislation doesn’t tend to give much protection to invertebrates (with the exception of octopuses, which are smart enough that they get additional protections).

      I think it’s a pretty interesting case study of a big gap in the legislation that protects the rights of animals — existing legislation focuses a lot on our duty to individual animals, but here, despite the harm to any one horseshoe crab seeming to be tolerably low, the vast scale at which we have been harvesting them has had an impact on the species as a whole.

      My view is that an anthropocentric framework that puts humans above all other animals is probably harmful in general and something we should work to undermine, but that if we are taking that tack (which seems necessary for the utilitarian view of “harvesting these crabs’ blood has saved many human lives” that most people seem to take on this topic), then we must also accept that we have an ethical duty to be good stewards of the natural world. We can’t have it both ways and think of ourselves as so rational and smart, but not accept the responsibility that would come with that.

      I find the legislative angle of it especially interesting, because most people I have told this to are shocked to learn of how they’re not protected, and they share at least some of my view that effective animal research ethics legislation should surely account for our duty to ecosystems as a whole. People far more learned than I in legal matters have struggled to think of ways we could effectively legislate this though. It’s possible that additional legislation isn’t the best way to handle this, and that we would be better served to aim to regulate in opposition to the economically extractivist ideology that seems to be the default setting nowadays (because horseshoe crabs are just an illustrative case study of the problem).

      I apologise for info dumping in reply to your joyful comment with such downer info. I do feel hopeful about the progress of synthetic alternatives though. I also find it a fascinating topic to learn about, even if it is a bit depressing

      1. 1 ↩︎

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        12·
        1 month ago

        One I’ve heard recently was…the hair styles you see on ancient Roman art look remarkably modern. Art historians got to wondering just how they managed such complex hairstyles without modern hairspray, plastic clips or elastic bands? A hairstylist took one look and said “They’re sewn.” The historians go “NAAAAAH that can’t be it. Whoever heard of sewing hair?” The hairstylist goes “Hairstylists. Watch” and then she replicated the styles on the statues by sewing.

        Here’s another one: Marine biologists long struggled to understand/describe the shapes of certain marine life, including corals. They had these weird wavy patterns that didn’t make sense to us rectangle building monkeys. Meanwhile, a mathematician studying hyperbolic geometry realized that crochet patterns that add loops with every row achieve wavy ruffles in a hyperbolic pattern. It took a few others to piece those two ideas together, to recognize the coral structures as having hyperbolic geometry as a means of maximizing surface area while minimizing volume. The Crochet Coral Reef project has been making crocheted models of sea life ever since.

        As a woodworker, it amazes me how the mortise and tenon is still hanging on.

        If you aren’t familiar, a mortise is a square or rectangular hole in a board, might go all the way through, might not. A tenon is a square peg basically cut on the end of a board to fit into a mortise. This produces a very strong joint.

        The very oldest intact wooden structure known on earth - a well head in Germany - is held together with mortise and tenons. We don’t know the name of the man who built it, because written language hadn’t been invented yet.

        There is a thing called a floating tenon. Imagine you want to join two boards, but don’t really want to cut a tenon onto either. Make a mortise in each, then make a third smaller board to fill both tenons. Floating tenon, loose tenon, there are many words for it. The Ancient Egyptians held boat hulls together this way, the hull planks were joined edge to edge with loose tenons which were then cross-pinned with dowels. One such boat was found disassembled in a pit next to the Great Pyramid at Giza; the seal on the chamber was so good they said it smelled of cedar when opened. The ship was assembled and is currently on display.

        All the way on this end of history, the European tool brand Festool has a tool called a Domino. It has the form factor of a Lamello-type biscuit joiner, but the domino cuts with a wagging router bit to form a wide, short, deep mortise to insert store bought loose tenons into. This tool is so new, it is still protected under patent.

        We’ve been making mortise and tenons for tens of thousands of years, and yet we’re still innovating on the concept.