I don't know how my PS2 controller never had stick drift once after being literally thrown across the room multiple times but my modern-day xbox controller, PS4 controller, and switch controller all break if you breathe in the same room as them

there's a specific reason for this:

every time you boot up the PS2, the controller auto-recalibrates its sticks. they DO have drift -- it's just that whenever you start playing again, the "at rest" position is automatically set to the current value and the drift is eliminated at the software level.

you lose like, 5/10% of sensitivity on the long run? but trust me when i say you are never ever going to notice the difference. if things go south and the drift gets noticeable (i have never in my life seen that happen, and i own a PS2 to this day, but if), you can manually recalibrate the whole system by just rotating the sticks as the console boots.

see the PS2 instruction manual (pictured above) for the exact motion if you want to be precise, but really, any motion will do. you're setting the new minimum and maximum values when you do that. it fixes itself as you use it.

that's it.

the DualShock 2 is a beast of a controller and possibly the best controller ever made, it's packed with features that are barely discussed and that we never saw again. this could theoretically be implemented in any controller though and it's an indictment of the current state of hardware: we had stick drift solved in the early 2000's, but that drastically reduces the number of new controllers you can sell.

Edit: as someone rightfully pointed out, the PS2 isn’t the only console that did this - and yes, the DualShock absolutely has issues with the stick getting sticky after some time. I still think analog face buttons were brilliant though but they were criminally underused and completely forgotten

wait controllers don't do this anymore???????? what the fuck

apparently the plan was to use humans to train an ML system but it never ended up getting good enough to take over

the Mechanical Turk strikes again

Many years ago, a few biiiig companies started to have this really neat automated phone tree system. You called in, the robot said you were allowed to ask for whatever you wanted, and then it shut up. If you said some long sentence explaining what you wanted, it somehow knew where to direct your call. Background noise? No problem. Not sure what department you need? No problem, it just knows! What a cool robot, right?

Anyway, they accomplished this using cheap human labor. Not sure if they still do this stuff today, but it seems likely, right? I worked at one of these facilities. It was a sad little office building, unlabeled and hidden between a bunch of warehouses. There was one pathetic break room and then The Computer Zone that looked like a middle school computer lab.

You sit at a computer, log in, and put on a headset. A "call" comes in. When someone tells one of those phone tree robots "Hey I need to know how to buy a ____", it sends that audio clip to your headset while simultaneously showing a bespoke array of buttons on your computer screen. The buttons represent different parts of the phone tree. "Billing", "Repairs", etc. As you listen to the audio, you click one of the buttons to direct the call to the correct part of the tree. In order to help with accuracy, 2-3 people receive the same audio clip at the same time. Whichever phone tree button got the most "votes" is where the call went.

The truly disgusting part of it all is they turned this into a competition. You could see your answer speed scores as you went through your shift. You were trying your best to direct a call before the other two people hearing the same clip as you. But if you were TOO quick on the draw and directed a call before the audio clip finished (and it was revealed the caller actually wanted something else at the last second), you were punished for rushing. FAST but not too fast. Those with higher scores on the honest-to-god leaderboard would get a slightly higher hourly wage for a given paycheck. Of course, this leaderboard constantly reset. There was no way to do well and then coast on a higher wage. You were fighting a bunch of other disgraced souls for the chance at maybe getting a few more scraps that week.

Humans crammed in a gray room getting carpal tunnel at lightning speed, all racing in the hopes of getting a bit more than minimum wage. You were listening to audio clips NON-STOP your entire shift. Rapid fire. Pain, suffering, torture, with no way to listen to music or look at your phone or talk to another human being.

And then you went home. Another day of a job well done, helping these massive corporations get a bit more wealth by talking up their cool "artificial intelligence".

I quit that job after a month. It really broke something inside me. When I walked up to the desk where the Computer Lab Warden sat, I just said "Hey I don't think I can do this anymore. I wanna quit." And no shit, the guy was like "Oh sure. Thanks for coming up to say something, most people just stop coming in one day."

I have to imagine every big innovation is like this.

(okay I know full well I'll be telling on myself here, so: no, I have not worked corporate retail. I've done retail, but not at a huge chain, so I'm sure the following was only news to me - but also take my word for it that i assumed this existed, I just didn't know what it was called, or that it was quite this stark)

I was at Fred Meyer today and as the cashier rang me up, I happened to notice a big red exclamation at the bottom of the register screen next to a number and the letters "IPM." i immediately guessed this was "items (scanned) per minute," because of course that would be printed on the screen in order to keep the staff continuously scared, and yes that is what it means, and yes she was failing to meet the threshold

i googled it and the first results were exactly what i expected: people saying that their bosses didn't even fucking care if the cash drawer balanced at the end of the day, nothing mattered except ipm. which is of course because their bosses don't care about anything else, because this is the KPI of the week. sometimes i wonder whose sanity suffers more from this shit, the front liners or the fucking managers

on waypoint radio a few years ago @austin was talking about the kellogg’s factory in venezuela that workers seized bc the company abandoned it

and that conversation is generally great but specifically there’s a part where he’s talking about randos on twitter losing their minds, not out of concern for the livelihood of these ppl, but over the thought that they might be selling Corn Flakes without changing the branding.

“what about the rooster? isn’t that a trademark?? isn’t this illegal???”

austin says, i think a couple times:

you can’t even imagine a world.

and i’ve had that phrase, in austin’s voice with that specific inflection he puts on world, stuck in my brain ever since.

a few months after that episode aired i started transitioning and i told this story pretty much every time i came out to someone. it’s given me so much strength.

(also i was looking into this again recently and it sounds like “Socialist Kellogg” is still going strong, at least as of late 2021)

I love (hate) how every scientific study into why seemingly no-one can sleep properly anymore ignores the giant elephant in the room: that the work schedules imposed on us by modern society aren't just unnatural, but entirely unreasonable in both the rigidity of their timing and their expected workloads

5 minutes late for work because the person you expected to pick you up never arrived and didn't communicate? you have to stay behind for 15 minutes. why?

done your assigned work for the day? no you haven't, here, have more work. hope you don't mind being as productive as ten people from a generation past and that somehow still not being enough as you make record low income!

why should we be expected to wake up earlier than our body is comfortable with? why should we be expected to commute an hour each way every day, especially if it's work that can now be done remotely? why are we expected to routinely ingest stimulants in order to just make it through the day?

it's all incredibly fucked, at every rung of the ladder. employers will bleed you dry of your limited time on this earth, and not even compensate you with enough fictional tokens to allow you to live comfortably within the confines of this system we've built. why is sharing food and shelter looked down upon? why is not being able to keep up with unreasonable demands seen as a moral failing?

why the fuck are we expected to tolerate workplace harassment and office politics? why is working smart a punishable offence; why does finding a way to automate your job land you a dismissal, rather than a promotion?

it's no fucking wonder why no-one can sleep at night.