For no reason today I find myself idly thinking about the number of things that are casually faked at me in a day. Static on a TV, is the sort of thing I mean; there's no unconstrained cathode ray tube spraying noise in a LCD, and what you're watching is a looping movie of pretend static that someone created.

Same thing with a phone "ringing", that's just a .wav file the phone system plays until the other person picks up.

I wonder how many of these are in my life.

There are plenty of examples in my phone - even _phone numbers_ are an example of this sort of nonsense, certainly keyboards are - but another example is my car, an EV, that creeps forward when I'm not touching the gas (lol) pedal the same way an automatic transmission, internal combustion car might.

I wonder how many of these retroformed artifacts are sitting there in plain sight in the various corners of my life my life, invisible to me, hidden by muscle memory and unconsidered history.

@mhoye I thought static on a TV was radio noise being interpreted as an analog television signal rather than from the CRT?

@mhoye some artificial sensory triggers are pretty old-fashioned: e.g. the smell added to gas so that people can easily detect a leak

@mhoye

A smartwatch can display analogue hands. Geared rotation used to be fundamental to the way a watch worked; now it's a fashion choice.

My current smartwatch face mimics an old seven-segment LCD, similarly.

Some car speedometers still display a needle on a dial rather than a digital readout, similarly.

A digital piano and (often) an electronic drum kit aim to sound as much like acoustic instruments as possible. An electronic kit is configured and played like an acoustic kit because drummers want to be able to move between the two without relearning, rather than because the electronic kit needs that layout. (Playing technique is different, but not as different as if the instruments were played via, say, a rectangular grid of buttons.)

Most popular music is still written as songs the right length for one side of a 45RPM single. When did you last play one of those?

Some flashing LEDs lamps (e.g. on road signs) take a while to dim from light to dark because that's what incandescent ones did and, perhaps, it makes the blinking easier to see. But it's actually harder to implement like that; presumably there's some form of pulse width modulation, rather than a simple on–off mechanism.

A lot of ultra-processed food is completely divorced from the wholesome food it pretends to be, but it keeps up the pretence because that's what we're used to and that's what our bodies crave. (If you don't believe me, look at the ingredients of a bag of chicken crisps. Not much actual chicken going on, is there?

@noisytoot @mhoye A lot of the static was the sun and you can make a nifty receiver with an antenna and an old TV.

@mhoye My favourite is the haptic feedback in laptop trackpads. People will get into fistfights about whether or not the pad really moves when it fakes a “click”.

@mhoye And every time I fly on a plane: no large aircraft in commercial service has any connection to any control surface that would cause a stall condition to rattle the yoke. Every large aircraft in commercial service detects a stall condition through instrumentation and a mathematical model, and then simulates the rattling yoke via solenoids connected to the airframe, not the control surfaces.