What old thing surprisingly still exists?
1mon 13d ago by lemmy.world/u/VirusMaster3073 in asklemmy
Fax machines.
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.
Many government departments and private companies consider faxed documents as a duplicated "original", instead of a copy. Because that totally makes sense.
IT MEANS FASCIMILE GOD DAMNIT
Totally.... 🤦
I can't exactly recommend the service which can be a bit annoying but clicksend allows you to send faxes and actually letters for pretty cheap. the letter thing is pretty nice when something demands a physical one. you upload a pdf and it gets printed and mailed out. fax works same way. fax is way cheaper obviously.
winfax.exe is looking at you and sneering...
we did all this, in a cave, with a 14.4 baud modem on windows 3.0
Why would someone need that instead of just printing it and mailing it themselves?
just faster. you have to have a printer and paper for it and envelopes and stamps. with the service you just upload the pdf and put in the address and hit send. I mean I think most could see how it can be useful. Bit cheaper to print and fold and seal and stamp and drop in the box but with as unoften as I need to send a physical letter I like it.
Then you need a printer, printer ink, an envelope, and stamps. If you really don't send mail out that frequently, I can see the appeal of it. Could easily be cheaper. I also imagine it might have some utility to ADHD folks.
It just occurred to me: I doubt my 26 year old son has ever sent anything in the mail himself. If he wants to send a message, it's email or text, and if he wants to send a gift, he'll order it on Amazon and have it delivered. I'll have to ask him if he's ever actually mailed anything.
Can't exactly trusr anyone with such sensitive documents that I'd have to print out and mail.
youd be surprised. most required mail stuff is straight up bullshit type stuff and not really that senstitive. its usually just hoops they through up to slow down and stymie anything your entitled to.
Why did target and Hyundai need to know your dad died?
He had accounts with them, that's part of the probate process. Letting them know.
Fax may outlast landline telephony.
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...
Did you know that it would have been possible for Abraham Lincoln to send a fax to a samurai?
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.
there was a period of around 12 years where it would have been possible, given that they had both been in scotland at the time. between 1853 and 1865 it would have to have been an ex-samurai.
I see the potential for a historical fiction masterpiece here
Erotic Lincoln-Samurai Fax Fiction
The first fax machine was invented in 1843.
But of course they had to wait for the second one to be invented...
Also maddening and frustratingly!
They still have some uses (Invidious: mirror selection or Nadeko).
Faxes are common in healthcare facilities and hospitals. I would imagine that they’re safer when it comes to sensitive data.
They are analog modems on a telephone line. There is no encryption at all, because they still need to be compatible with fax machines from the 1970s.
There was also an exploit where someone sent a manipulated image via fax, which would exploit an old bug in a jpg library that is used in the software stack, so you can run your own code.
comes to sensitive data.
not really. there's no encryption to faxing, and the software to fax from pc's directly (enabling faked records for example) has been ubiquitous since the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFax
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??
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
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.
It's only convenient if you have access to a fax machine, which the majority of us don't
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.
With a mail-enabled printer, you can send your scan directly to an email address.
I fail to see what you'd need a fax for.
Needed it just yesterday.
The baths on the Titanic still hold water today
There are more hydrogen atoms in a single water molecule than there are stars in the entire solar system!
That's good I'll admit it took awhile.
Did you mean water drop? Because I thought it was precisely two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms that make up a single water molecule...
Take another minute to think about just how many stars are in the solar system...
Damn I must've been tired. Thanks all lol.
Whoosh...
Incredible
There's an even more fucked up joke in there somewhere about the shared bathwater still belonging to the same people
A 5-day, 40 hour work week "standard"
Somebody saying "bless you" to someone else who sneezes
The president
Bless you is such a weird way to respond to a sneeze though. Fitting for the clusterfuck the english language is tbh.
From ancient Rome when they thought sneezing was an omen and may dislodge and expel the soul from the body (Pliny the Elder, Suetonius, Homer).
Sure feels like that sometimes.
Still weird that english uses it. Most other languages I k ow just say something about your health.
We know know sneezing can wake the small elf living in your stomach. According to RFK.
In Germany we say (literally) "Health" as in "Get better"
Love the joke from (probably not actually) nazi times
"Heil Hitler!" "Seh ich aus wie ein Arzt?" Or " Heil ihn selbst!"
In english: "Heil Hitler" "do i look like a doctor?" Or "heal him yourself"
Love it
I know. We do the same
The english language has a lot of religious language hidden away in expressions
For example, goodbye is just a shortening of "god be with ye"
"langaige"
Seinfeld suggested: "You're soooo good looking!"
David Attenborough, and I hope he's around for as long as he wants to be.
It's his hundredth birthday in 2 days!
Can some one ask him how feels without lego?
homeopathy. you'd think germ theory would have killed it, but no.
To be fair my old high school acquaintances swear their oils made from magic plants literally healed their child's cancer and my kid is only autistic because we took her to a doctor one time years ago.
I once told a homeopathy person that my sister had a normal kid, then took the kid to a homeopath and now the kid is badly disabled.
If they can make up shit, we can too.
It's honestly troubling. I've seen homeopathic 'treatments' sold right next to real medicine in mainstream stores, with similar packaging, similar pricing, and only tiny fine print on the bottle saying that it's homeopathic. And you have to know what 'homeopathic' means in order for that to have any impact; many don't. It would be very easy to accidentally buy the homeopathic 'treatment' instead of one that actually works. I've almost made that mistake before myself, before I read the package more closely.
(For anybody who doesn't already know 'homeopathic' does NOT mean 'herbal' or 'natural' or anything like that. It's not alternative medicine -- it's not medicine at all. Homeopathy is old, very debunked, and very bullshit psuedo-science that a traveling conman made up after supposedly having it supernaturally revealed to him in a drunken dream. The idea is that for any ailment, you take what causes that ailment, massively dilute it in water (or another substance) so much that there likely isn't a single molecule of it left, and then the water will 'remember'. Homeopathic medication is literally nothing. It's plain water (or, in stores, often plain sugar pills). It contains no active ingredients of any kind, and it's -- at best -- a placebo. It's always a waste of money and may be dangerous if you fall for it and take it instead of actual, effective medicine.)
Homeopathy is old, but like, not even that old. It was invented in 1796. It's younger than the united states, and was invented while France was doing their first revolution. They like to frame it as ancient wisdom rather than some German in the late 18th century took one idea off Paracelsus way too far, then retooled it until it stopped actively doing harm (because it did nothing) and came up with some bs to explain why it "works"
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
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.
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.
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.
Except that it is.
And I will die on this hill.
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.
If only the prices were not so 2026y.
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 :)
I love them making a come back. If only the more enviormental friendly material would be used more widespread :(
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.
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!
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.
Should've showed her the clip from The Office where Erin(?) takes a picture with a disposable camera and then throws the it in the trash and wonders why people use them, seems such a waste to throw it away and never see the pictures.
Not infinitely. I had a film scanned at 14k and it’s starting to look a bit grainy.
Wouldn't that depend on the format, too? Like I kinda doubt 8mm/Super8 and 16mm/Super16 is infinitely upscalable, ditto for 110 or 35mm half-frame.
Me
Came here to say this.
Now that's rude :(
Twinings Tea has been in business since 1706.
Zildjian, the cymbal company, was started in 1623.
Fascism.
Hey, it's neo now.
Nothing new under the sun.
less surprised, more disappointed.
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.
A wooden stamp or is stemp something I'm unaware of?
Speling. It's spelled speling.
/s
Its \s, actually
*I'ts
It's actually called a hanko! I think they're pretty neat. You get a custom one that counts as your signature.
Kind of silly in he modern era, but also neat. Maybe they gotta start putting in security chips for like cryptographic signatures.
Signing your name is equally as silly. They don't know why my signature even looks like lol
I see nothing wrong with a giant wooden stamp.
Bring back melted wax letter seals too.
I made a wax seal last year so that I could be an extra bitch when sending letters to my friends.
I like sending people letters and postcards, because the added friction of the physical process makes it feel more meaningful. It's almost got a ritual feel to it.
How else will I sign for packages in dog form?
Mail man just thinks im a good puppy.
Religion. And it all needs to go.
Amen to that.
Polytheistic religions that don't try to take over the world are nice enough. (I mean, monotheistic religions that don't try to take over the world are also fine, but I personally prefer "our gods are our gods. you have your own gods? cool!" to "there is ONLY our god. Your gods are FALSE.".)
-- Frost
In my mind, I always envisioned a scene that explains why Christianity struggled to take off in India.
I imagine an old missionary, some old missionary in a robe, holding a Bible, talking to the locals in India and telling them about Jesus.
Missionary: "And that is why you should follow the teachings of Christ!"
Local, thumbing through Bible: "you know, you're right. This Jesus guy does sound really great. Thanks for telling us about him!"
Missionary: "wonderful! So you'll worship him as your Lord and savior?"
Local: "Sure! Alright boys, add this Jesus guy to the wall!"
Camera pans over, and some stone mason starts adding the name Jesus to a large wall listing hundreds of various gods, in a position of no particular centrality or importance.
<Missionary curses and wanders off.>
There's a Trevor Noah bit like this
King James Bible has a bit in "Acts" about this actually: 22 Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. 23 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
(then theres a lot of "Paul made really good arguments for God and some people agreed with him)
Caveat-I have read most of the Bible in bits and pieces but it's been a while, I think I got the context though.
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.
I would specify it to religion as an institution. Religion alone isn’t so bad.
This. Organised religionwith heirarchy and enforcingone specific way to interpret the spiritual, is dangerouse.
But that goes for everything not just religion
Hinduism isn't an organised religion. Lots of diversity of thought across the subcontinent.
It still has led India into an authoritarian conservative hole.
I think any sort if non-rational thought, mass adopted, becomes a problem. It being organised or not doesn't matter.
Not hinduisms fault but the cast system
Hinduism IS caste/varna system. It's present right from rigveda. You might have encountered only the "mystic" and "spiritual", sanitised version of Hinduism in the west, but here it's still the biggest detrimental influence on people's lives in contemporary times. I would even say that Hinduism is the first major example systemic racism. KKK could only dream of reaching the depths Hinduism once reached.
Any mass belief based on unscientific guesswork becomes harmful eventually. It's true for all major religions today.
All religions need to go. They should have no place in future. I cannot see a single exception to this.
"Your mom" jokes.
Also, your mom.
Joe is so old
What’s ligma?
How about dragon?
How about dragon.
How about dragon my balls across.. wait. I think I'm into fitness. Yeah good health and fitness.
Horseshoe crab. These things existed before DINOS! AND ARE STILL AROUND!
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
Dude, I live with alligators, actual living dinosaurs. There's an 8 footer in the pond directly across the street from us. His name is Rocky. He's always basking on the bank on a sunny day.
Sorry to disappoint but alligators are not closely related to dinosaurs even though they have existed for a long time. Birds on the other hand are dinosaurs.
He looks pretty dinosaury to me.
We also look very monkey. We have a comon ancestor with monkeys but arent monkeys ourself. The same thing goes for crocodiles and aligators
Because that's what defines something.... A banana can look phallic but that doesn't make it an "actual living penis".
How the fuck does someone in 2026 not know that alligators and crocodiles, reptiles, aren't dinosaurs?
The chicken I ate last night is more closely related to dinosaurs then the alligator.
I love them! Little cute babies with their scuttling legs and long spike!!
Litteral little living roombas.
Hmmm if they would get along with cats?
Leather burnishers have been pretty much unchanged for 50,000 years
I need more of these.
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.
That's dope af
Cnidarians. (The sort of animals that includes jellyfish and sea anenomes and coral and such). Theyre so old that the first known predatory animal as far as I'm aware was one of them, and some of them still resemble those ancient versions to a significant degree. Even tho every time theres a mass extinction corals seem to be some of the first things to go, and jellyfish tend to be slow, stupid and not very good at controlling where they go, it somehow works out for them.
Oh, and them:
They are related. Say hy to Jerry.
The entire animal, including tentacles, is several meters long.
Wow, that was an evolutionary dark alley.
Basically the minimal assembly kit of a higher organism.
They need a skin bag to put all that stuff in, and cover it with some pretty scales or feathers or something.
Nah, it's all modular. No size fits all.
Oxford University started sometime around the year 1100.
Cobol on old systems that are too ancient to touch but are generally fine as long as you don’t touch them.
An IBM AS/400 has entered the chat.
My asshole puckered every time we had to reboot that sucker.
Trump.
Combustion engines
Combustion engines are used to ship cargo worldwide, mine all the material for everything we use, among other things that require dense energy storage and quick refills of fuel. They won't be going away anytime soon
Someone sent me a link to a file through Limewire today. That had its heyday so long ago that I think this is actually the first time I've ever used it.
afaik limewire rn is not what it was before, someone just bought the old branding
We all know what happened to Napster, but I wonder what happened to the KaZaA and Morpheus and the other non-FOSS P2P networks
Shareaza is still around. Not in active development but you can still download it.
Gnutella was not GNU???
I get all my content from TPB. It's regularly updated, it's free, and it's good enough for 1080p.
The Pirate Bay is just a symbolism of piracy, it has long lost its usage since the original founders left.
???
It's still my primary source for pirated shit, and works fine. I'll only go elsewhere when I can't find what I'm looking for there ... which is pretty rare.
I like it because it’s single click. I have a plugin that connects with qbit in my server, so I click one button and it goes in my server. 1337x etc takes two clicks and I just don’t have time for that! I’m very very busy doing……. Nothing.
Facebook.
Credit card imprinters. Went to a car rental that required a card to be swiped with that thing. Needless to say the card got canceled the second it got in there lol
At this point, all but one of my cards would be completely incompatible with those things. They're completely flat, with printed numbers on the back instead. I hadn't even thought about that change in a while, but I am glad that my wallet is a little bit thinner.
Retails stores sometimes still have these in high-volume areas. Imagine your store loses power on Black Friday weekend. Some stores live or die by a few critical weekends a year. You might lose some merch through declines later but avoiding the loss in total sales will almost certainly make up for it.
In my retail years, we called those "Knucklebusters"
Those are just identity theft devices.
Credit card imprinters.
In western Canada the electronic ones used to be called sliders (from when the magnetic strip was still widely used, before chip & pin), and these were called strikers (from how the card was pressed or physically struck onto the paper).
Vinyl records. Its a very... space inefficient way to store your music, but they are pretty to look at.
And the dust on the needle sounds pleasing
Also incredibly heavy
Civilization started somewhere around 12 thousand years ago
False. Civilization only dates back to September 1991.
...am i civilisation?
You weren't, now you are
New Theory of Mind just dropped
Jericho in Palestine is the oldest currently inhabited city and was founded in ~9k bce
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
The Amiga.
The latest update of AmigaOS was October 2025. MorphOS (which I'm using): January 2025.
The latest "complete" new hardware I'm aware of is Apollo Accelerator's A6000 from September 2025.
As an original Amiga 1000 owner when it came out, this blows my mind.
I will always have a soft spot for the Amiga. I assume you now get preemptive multitasking WITH memory protection, lol.
craigslist
RIP missed connections. Local radio used to read them on Wednesday mornings. Pure gold.
The Craigslist Best Of could be some fun reading
Ah that melancholy drip, loved that
Still better than facebook marketplace.
Craigslist doesn't deliberately waste your time with a bad search algorithm just to cause you to spend more time there ... like Facebook does.
I sold a lawn mower on Craigslist just yesterday. Eat shit, Facebook!
I bought a folding bike off it last year. Good deal, good bike
Teletext
MSN Explorer, the browser, got an update in 2021. You can still download it. https://membercenter.msn.com/download.aspx
There's a screenshot on the Wikipedia page.
Current Windows 11 still has Internet Explorer installed.
Coffee grinder. The pure mechanical one: a wooden box with a stylish crank on top.
I love those! My mom still uses the one that her mother used. It's close to 100 years old now.
I have a more modern one, it's an aluminum cylinder with the crank on top. Still a nice morning ritual, and much easier to hold.
I use the one from my grandma daily. Must be about 60 years old now (the grinder, not my grandma).
Cashiers not being able to sit down
For real?!? Which inhumane country are you talking about?
America lol
Shoe horns. My 86 year old father in law still uses one and swears by it. Doesn't put shoes without the assistance of the horn. I've seen it in action, and it seems to work? Even on some tied shoes!
Next you're surprised that hammers still exist?
I consider any home without a shoehorn to be uncivilized
I have one, I just don't know where it is. Do I count as civilised?
What a weird take.
Well there was that brief period in time where everyone thought self lacing shoes were the future.
Im in my 30s and use one daily.
I dislike having to tie laces every day and i can slip my feet into my shoes (while perma-tied) like butter.
Yes the laces are slightly looser than a fresh re-tie but not uncomfortably so or slopping around when i walk.
I wear faily flexible everyday shoes though, would not reccomend this technique with rigid leather dress shoes or work boots which need to be tied every time.
shoe horns are fucking awesome!
when you get old and it hurts to tie your shoes it's nice to sit down and just "slip em on".
I don't own a shoe horn, but I use my finger to the same effect on tied shoes. I have one pair that I only tie every few weeks.
Convinced. Sounds like I need to invest in a horn. I'm clearly lacking civility.
Me.
I mean, I'm not particularly old — only 29. But I'm super surprised I still exist. And it's not for lack of trying. It just turns out that even though I'm pretty mediocre at living, I'm even worse at dying. Fortunately, I'm in a place now where that's a thing I'm happy about, for the most part.
I've got at least 8 different attempts under my belt, and the way that some of them failed makes me feel like it's almost offensive to be an atheist. For instance, when I swam out into the sea, as far as I could until I couldn't anymore, and the next thing I remember was waking up on the beach, not super far from where I'd swam from. I thought that was a thing that only happened in movies. Granted, I'm not a strong swimmer, so I didn't get very far out, but still.
That was one of my attempts as an adult, but I had a lot as a teenager too. When I was about 16, I was resentful of all the people who cared about me, because the guilt I felt over hurting them was the only thing keeping me alive. Building off of the crisis management advice that I'd seen that said it's good to try to put some distance between you and your suicidal feelings by trying to hold off until the next day, for instance, I resolved that I would stick around until I was 20, and if nothing had improved by then, I would kill myself and fuck anyone who begrudged me this escape — no-one could say I didn't try.
Well, it turns out that some things did improve by age 20 — enough that it suggested there was a non-zero hope that I could some day live and actually be happy to be alive. I still struggled a lot after that point, because it's not like my mental health was magically resolved (it still isn't), but I'm glad I stuck around.
In a way though, things got harder after age 20. Ironically, there were countless times throughout my late teens in which looking forward to my death was the only thing that saved my life. When things were particularly rough, I would work out how many days I had to go before I could rest, and it soothed me. After I was 20, however, I was unanchored. I had a life that didn't feel like it was my own, because I never expected to make it this far. Even now, it still sometimes feels like I'm in a bonus level. It's a bizarre feeling.
But yeah, I, and many of the people who know and love me, are surprised that I'm still around. I'm proud of myself, even if a significant part of why I'm still here is sheer luck. Obviously this wasn't what you meant when asking your question, but I've been reflecting on my progress a lot lately, and the idea of giving this answer amused me. It feels healing to joke about this stuff a bit, I think
Sometimes it's good to fail, even eight times, and I'm glad you did. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you continue to do so.
Dial-up internet
Casio digital watches.
You’ll always catch me strapped with a F-91W
Currently rocking my AE-1200 Casio Royale.
Sundials date back at least as far as Egypt and Babylon. They're still found in gardens and old cities. Can be tricky to set the time accurately! helps to have a compass.
I’ve got one. It’s somewhere where the clocks change twice a year. It took me about a second to decide to align it for summer time; made the most sense.
Without a compass you can set it perfectly around midday on the 23rd / 24th of June.
My grandpa. Hes in his 90s, ready to go, and not only still alive, his mind is still there and he's still sharp.
Chalk boards
Me!
Outside.
Wisdom tooth
The bicycle hasn't changed its basic design in 135 years.
Yes the frame is now welded but most bikes still have the cup and cone bearings that were the limitation of engineering in the 19th century.
I don't know if this counts.
The parts. The material. Positioning of the chains and brakes. Handlebar position. Pedal tech. Many more bikes have batteries on them.
There's a lot of changes to bikes that putting a 1900s bike to a modern one, and it's the difference between comparing the Wright brothers plane and a modern personal plane today.
OP is probably talking about the Rover Safety Bicycle, which is (at least) 135 years old. Modern bikes are effectively a refinement of that design.
Consider this, it's evolved less than the modern car. You could get on an 1886 Safety and likely have no troubles riding it, maybe after a slight adjustment period with it being a fixed-wheel. That is not the case with (for example) a Model A Ford, or most other pre-WWII cars, up until stuff like the shifter, pedals and steering were standardized. Hell, up until a few decades ago, the horn was a button on the floor you'd push with your foot.
That's not even close to true.
Clocks split into 60 minute hours.
That's rather unsurprising
That we still use Babylonian time notation?
there may be better alternatives, but migrating the WHOLE WORLD to a new system just because it's slightly better is not gonna happen. hence - unsurprising.
the fact that imperial unit system still exists IS surprising though
60 is such a nice highly composite number though!
Oooh, I didn't know this was the word for this. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with me
France tried decimalizing time around the revolution. People hated it.
And how should it be done?
if America has any say it would be by school bus or football field.
Internal combustion engines. Fuck ICE. Heh. That's a nice double entender.
I love ICE's.
But I understand they have to go :(
They make EV that make vroom vroom noises. Come on. You really missing the lack of torque?
Its not about the performance or whatever. Its about how amazing it is that the things work at all. Pieces of metal flying up and down, going round and round, opening valves, closing valves, spraying atomized go-juice mixed with air at with amazingly precise timing and amounts....
Its a miracle they don't just blow up 2 seconds after you start them. But instead they keep on going for hundreds of thousands of kilometers without much issue.
*with regular maintenance
EV are almost maintenance free. EV drivetrains can easily thrive a million kilometers with minimal maintenance. The batteries will likely die first.
Yeah I know, I used to be a car mechanic lol.
I mean I'm not trying to argue that ICE is better than EV. Thats why I said that I completely understand that ICE's are dinosaurs, looking in the sky wondering what that light, that is getting brighter, is. I like ICE's for emotional and weird reasons, not because they are easy to use, easy to fix, easy to run etc.
Some trees
Me
I was going to say my spinal disks
Vampires living in secret amongst us.
lol. mythical cabals of vampires and aliens running the planet. all us earth beings know that is not true.
Yep. The cabal of pedophiles running the planet is the real one.
About that: https://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
I just recently read Blindsight. People should stop recommending it. It's a shaggy dog story with some fucked up things to say about neuro divergence.
I didn't get any fucked up things about neurodivergence, and my son is way on the spectrum.
(But, yeah it is kind of a shaggy dog story - but with some interesting philosophic experiments along the way, the main one of which is directly relevant to LLMs now).
Door to door sales
Patriarchy
Ohhhhh yes
Paper visas. You have my passport number, is it not enough to check if I have valid visa?
Copper connections on a larger scale than inside a building. People still using POTS and dial up because we never rolled anything else out to their area.
I recently learned that the TOSLINK (S/PDIF) optical ports with the little door that I've seen on every game console and AV receiver my whole life and never thought about or used is from 1983. The same port is now used for professional digital audio with a different protocol too.
Old fashioned record players
78 shellacs are fucking amazing. to hear sound from a record where everyone, everyone, involved is long dead is like magic.
I've got some 78s from late 1800s early 1900s. every time I listen to them it boggles my mind.
Moneygrams
Our society structure. Society is still structured with a few persons living extravagantly like kings on the top, while the masses are mostly content with mediocre scraps.
Boomers
vacuum tubes
Hammers, irrigation systems, smithing.. etc
Not sure if any of it counts as surprising after rereading the prompt
Rudy Giuliani
Boomers.
It used to be a era of time. Now, it's a full blown personality type.
Sorry for your loss. That sucks.