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People expect technology to suck because it sucks

tonsky.me

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Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#11

Post by 8fGTBjZxBcHq »

Loughla wrote: post #4

This might sound like a flippant question, but it's not. Isn't the point of tech to tinker? When did problems become problems that you shouldn't try to solve, instead of a reason to learn about the tech? I've really been down about technology lately, after working with 6-12th graders. They just don't get how anything works, if it doesn't immediately work for them. They don't want to take it apart and figure it out. T…

> Isn't the point of tech to tinker?

What no extremely not. It's to... do things? Tinkering with tech is cool if that's your hobby but it's not mine and I'm trying to do shit not pick up another hobby here.

It's like the people that argue that cars have lost something intrinsic in recent decades and now no one knows how to do work on their own vehicles. That standard was an artifact of unreliability, not something to be applauded.

Tech should get out of the way and let you do what you're trying to do. If "tinker" is that thing then sure have fun. But for most people that's not the point at all.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#12

Post by Joker_vD »

lallysingh wrote: post #6

I'll point out that many of these annoyances don't have equivalents on the command-line. And the annoyances I do have on the command line I can mostly work around with wrapping things in shell scripts, aliases, or functions. It's nice to have a simple interface and high extensibility on top of it.

Well, then there is also the annoyance of having way too many wrappers to wrap your head around, and it's one that I personally encounter somewhat regularly. Still has not figured out how to deal with that one.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#14

Post by nightski »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #10
Loughla wrote: post #4

This might sound like a flippant question, but it's not. Isn't the point of tech to tinker? When did problems become problems that you shouldn't try to solve, instead of a reason to learn about the tech? I've really been down about technology lately, after working with 6-12th graders. They just don't get how anything works, if it doesn't immediately work for them. They don't want to take it apart and figure it out. T…

People want to drive cars, not all of them want to be mechanics. People want their phones and software to just work. Or at the very least not get bricked every friggin update.

I think that is a terrible analogy. A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B. If you only are capable of utilizing the bare minimum it's going to make life a lot harder. Take excel for example, the people who are able to reason about and write their own advanced excel spreadsheets in the workforce have a huge leg above those who only can do what the UI lets them do on their phone. There is a lot more to computing than treating it like a hammer.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#15

Post by commandlinefan »

The sad thing is that it doesn't have to be this way. Business schools, in fear of phantom product development teams that waste huge R&D budgets developing beautiful products that cost too much for anybody to buy, spend all of their time preaching against quality in any form. Business school graduates are trained to be suspicious of any attention to detail and are explicitly incentivized to compress schedules for nothing more than the sake of compressing schedules.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#16

Post by airza »

I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance.

I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job it was to sit there and look for broken stuff. (I'm sure I'm biased as someone whose first job out of college was to sit there and look for broken stuff.)

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#17

Post by morley »

I think tech is other people. Tech doesn't suck because technology is bad: it sucks because life is complicated, and other people are prone to mistakes, or prioritizes that don't align with yours, or have limited attention.

Case in point: I don't particularly like the design of this site, as I find it difficult to look at (even if I abstractly can see how the color choice is bold). The night mode toggle seems even harder to read; an uncharitable interpretation is the author thumbing their nose at people who want night mode. A charitable read is that it's a funny joke.

The author / designer of the blog has different priorities than I do. An uncharitable way of putting this is that the blog design is "bad," but I really dislike that outlook. I'd much rather that people look at things charitably, and try to understand what other people are going for, and be willing to say "this isn't for me." I think the article doesn't quite do this.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#18

Post by gryfft »

Joker_vD wrote: post #12
lallysingh wrote: post #6

I'll point out that many of these annoyances don't have equivalents on the command-line. And the annoyances I do have on the command line I can mostly work around with wrapping things in shell scripts, aliases, or functions. It's nice to have a simple interface and high extensibility on top of it.

Well, then there is also the annoyance of having way too many wrappers to wrap your head around, and it's one that I personally encounter somewhat regularly. Still has not figured out how to deal with that one.

Well, there is no problem that cannot be solved by adding a layer of indirection, except the problem of too many layers of indirection.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#20

Post by gpspake »

As soon as I clicked on this, I recognized the author's signature yellow background and font from their previous post about buying a new monitor (which I also found at the top of HN) https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/

I enjoyed both posts. Great titles, well written, serious but witty. Props to the author; I'll be subscribing for more.

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