People expect technology to suck because it sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#181

Post by adamsea » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #124

happytoexplain wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is that the entire software/hardware stack is a world created entirely by humans, untouched by "reality" for the purposes of all these annoyances, so it feels like we should be able to wrangle it better after so many decades. It's entirely our own creation, and we decide every iota of it, and yet it bites us (justifiably or not - turns out thousands of people each creating different layers of a…

I hear you, but feel like we are biased by what we accepted as normal in our formative years, and that filter doesn’t apply on what we are discovering now that we’re grown up professionals. For instance books have been with us for centuries, and honestly most of them suck. Paper pages are thin and sometimes cut your finger (how many times did you get cut by an ebook ?), most are weak to liquids yet our world is fille…

We’ve also had centuries to improve the technology of books and I think that makes a difference.

Although the weaknesses you cite seem like problems in search of a solution. No one ever expected books to have variable font size ... why would they?

Lastly let’s recall the book five hundred years ago is dramatically different from the book of today. For example your point about liquids is now in many ways resolved by the cheapness and ubiquity of books. 500 years ago, not so much.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#182

Post by _qulr » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #170

_revy wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this is a reversal of cause and effect. Did consumers demand subscription services? Or did vendors (led by Adobe) decide to change to subscriptions to get uniform cash flow? At agencies I have worked at all creatives I worked with would prefer to spend $200-400 and have a permanent software license. Perhaps this isn't a representative group.

I'm not saying consumers demanded subscriptions. vendors push them because it's a saner way of managing revenue for products that require maintenance post-sale anyway. that said, I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives. one way or another, a product will stop receiving support when the money stops flowing in. with a permanent license, it ends when people stop buying l…

> I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives.

Funny how consumers tend to despise them though.

The term "subscription" itself a typically a euphemism for "rental". There are a small number of companies who offer a year of updates that you get to keep forever (which makes consumers play the game of when exactly to buy to maximize the new features in that year), but most so-called subscriptions disable the software entirely if you stop paying. In other words, rental.

Long-term rental is almost always a bad deal for consumers. One of the few exceptions is housing, because many consumers can't afford to buy a house, and also houses are one of the least liquid assets you can own, if you have to move it (and yourself). Otherwise, rental is going to cost you a lot more in the long run.

Financially, rental can work well for the seller, of course, but we end up with "subscription fatigue", where the market can't sustain as many sellers, and the few rich companies get richer (which is exactly why they were "pioneered" by BigCos such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple).

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#183

Post by bobochan » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #167

bobochan wrote: post #47

This is one of the strangest takes that I have ever read. I can remember my dad's turn on the waiting list finally coming up so that it was his turn to bring the HP calculator home from the government lab where he worked for the weekend. It was an absolute marvel. The whole family sat around the kitchen table for hours as he talked about RPN and showed us how the calculator worked. It was magic. Almost 50 years later…

> Almost 50 years later I have an incredibly powerful computer that I carry around in my pocket and I call it "my phone". It can solve all kinds of mathematical equations, display live video, and communicate in real time with the furthest corners of the globe. And you use it mostly to browse cat pictures :). Perhaps it takes a technologist to notice, but for every actual technological improvement that happens, the UI…

Thank you, that was a very inspiring response.

I completely agree with you about the unrealized potential, but my greatest regret over the past 50 years is not about the technology, but our ability to harness it. I remember helping to setup a computer show at our local high school when I was still very young. The local vendors had agreed to donate an Apple //+ to the school in return for having space to show off all of their wares. We were thrilled and I can vividly remember my father saying that my generation would be the last one to learn programming as an add-on elective skill. He imagined a world where everyone could harness the power of digital technologies and that programming, building, tinkering, would be second nature to all of us.

We spend our time thinking about UI glitter because we gave up on that dream of having every student learn to program. We took the exercises out of math and science books where we asked students to write programs to use the Pythagorean theorem or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. It became "enough" to learn how to enter a few numbers in a spreadsheet and perhaps add a trend line.

A few hard working people in a garage can still turn out wonderful things, but if we really want to see the promise of technology then we need to fix the bigger problem of building an educational system that empowers many more people.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#184

Post by Upvoter33 » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

I have actually the opposite reaction. It is easy to be cynical and say "everything sucks". But if you look around, you'll actually see that many things work and do so surprisingly well. You can literally rent 1000 computers for an hour for a few bucks. It works! It's amazing. You can use a little device you carry around as a phone, for email, to look up information on machines running anywhere! There is a lot to marvel at. Sure, things could be better - so work on them and make them so. But don't pretend everything is terrible. It's not!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#185

Post by leetcrew » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

bsanr2 wrote: post #171

leetcrew wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst idea ever in technology is regularly scheduled updates. Innovation has never and will never happen on a schedule. This is simply greed-driven, promotion-driven, pointy-haired-boss-driven development. this is sort of uncharitable. the development/maintenance cycle for software is incompatible with the traditional way of monetizing a product (ie, design it up front, manufacture at scale, and then the buyer…

No, subscriptions introduce the perverse incentive to release unfinished products and slowly drip-feed fixes. Having to test extensively before a one-and-only release may not drive nearly as much revenue, nor provide a running deliverable stream for a given engineer/product manager's CV, but it is clearly the better user experience.

you say this, but given a choice between a "finished" product and a competitor with more bugs and more wanted/needed features, users will almost always pick the latter unless it catastrophically affects their workflow. engineers care about quality; customers care about the fastest way of solving their problem.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#186

Post by selestify » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #169

julianlam wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer I think blaming software for this is a little naive. Take a look at consumer reports for any modern fridge, stovetop/oven, washer/dryer, etc, and you will see complaints about fridge motors dying, touch panels going on the fritz, etc. -- none of which involve anything more than low level firmware. If you want to put a…

> If you want to put a tinfoil hat on, you can consider that it may be planned obsolescence, but to put the blame squarely on software, I would disagree with. You don't need tin foil hat when facing the truth :). Also, while things you mentioned aren't software-related, they're modern tech-related . Like, last 20 years. Fridge motors dry out because they're being made cheaper, with not enough lubricant put into them…

Right, but the move towards cheaper and lower-quality is more the fault of the current economic system and its incentives than it is the fault of software.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#187

Post by rootusrootus » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

throwaway8941 wrote: post #164

rootusrootus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> accidentally backspace while not in a text field Thankfully that can be disabled, but I find it to be one of the most infuriating 'features' of Firefox. If it weren't something that could be turned off, it would be a deal killer all by itself.

I didn't even know this "feature" was available on Firefox (despite using it since version 2). Turns out, it is only enabled on Windows: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action Maybe it was copied from IE to keep "closer to the platform"?

It's definitely not limited to Windows. I am exclusively a MacOS user (for my workstation, at least) and I have had to disable it on any new Firefox install.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#188

Post by _trampeltier » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

cedilla wrote: post #136

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there are things that don’t work, but it’s not nearly comparable. In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer, my closet Just Works, books Just Work (with an ink smudge maybe every 50-100 reading hours) etc. I can expect each of those things to last decades. Looking at the goods I’ve bought on Amazon recently, digital electronics/software as a category doesn’…

Well, digital services are much more complicated than a fridge, or a book. Not only that, but they also require a machine to run that is also orders of magnitude more complicated than a fridge or a closet.

Do you know how hard it is to produce a book from nothing? Make paper, all the same thick, print and so on. Or just a steel tube .. all can be done without computers and software. The process behind is difficult for every step. I work in industrie automation and I can tell you, right now, with this quality in software and "computer everywhere" we are building a super high tower in the softest sand.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#189

Post by foobiekr » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

efitz wrote: post #83

I have worked for software companies for over 25 years, mostly on teams building software, and I hate software. I find bugs in every software I use (my freaking microwave oven control panel!). In addition to questionable quality, software is often downright hostile (lose all the data you typed into a web form if you accidentally backspace while not in a text field, because it navigates off the page). Ironically softw…

I am the same. I have a motto, actually, for more than a decade: the more software you add to something, the worse it gets.

I coined it watching the robotic soda vending machine crash and reboot frequently.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#190

Post by renewiltord » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

efitz wrote: post #83

I have worked for software companies for over 25 years, mostly on teams building software, and I hate software. I find bugs in every software I use (my freaking microwave oven control panel!). In addition to questionable quality, software is often downright hostile (lose all the data you typed into a web form if you accidentally backspace while not in a text field, because it navigates off the page). Ironically softw…

I prefer open-source tools because I know where the agency for pain lies: myself. With modern Rust and Go tooling you can download an application's source code, modify it, and compile it painlessly in half an hour.

So why do I tolerate bugs in software like that? Because I know I can fix them. And I also know I won't always. Small gods have handed me tools to remake the world as I would see fit and I do not use them. Are they at fault for not having made the world as I would prefer? Or am I at fault for not using the tools?

In any case, I've noticed a sort of dichotomy among users in their reaction to tools that fail. There are those who go "this tool sucks how can I do my work" and there are those who go "my work is what I want to do which tool can I use instead". The latter set get a lot more done. Once observing this I have attempted to modify my behaviour to be like the latter and have effectively become better.