Every product of a human is not perfect. Only God can make perfect things, but even those things made by God don't seem to be perfect from our point of view - e.g. illness, brutal death.
People expect technology to suck because it sucks
221–230 of 437 posts
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#222> or if I couldn’t use my phone without hitting “Cancel” every five seconds .... [I'd just google it] .... That these people mostly just lived with it means that these problems couldn’t have been markedly worse than technology has already been for them historically.
Other people's Iphones and the nearby Wifi notification! hahaha
Iphones are great for me because I fixed annoyances so fast that I forgot other people tolerate or judge iphones from them.
The nearby wifi popup can be disabled folks! Also shift some of your budget around and get a data plan!
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#223As an experiment, I logged every bug I encountered for a few days. I averaged 5 bugs a day, not counting dark patterns or bad design. Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1] Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages,…
Thank you for mentioning AirPods! I was so excited to buy them after a ton of reviews saying they just worked. They said the days of fighting with Bluetooth audio were gone. I believed them, then reality showed up. My Mac sometimes unpairs them and worst it doesn’t find them. Some times while my baby is sleeping I put my AirPods and play a loud video just to realize they were not connected. My wife’s right side AirPo…
I use my AirPods with multiple devices, and that process is also fraught with problems. Switching to another device takes an absurdly long time. About once per month, switching will make bluetoothaudiod peg a core and ultimately hard crash the entire computer. Yes, the kernel panics if it doesn't hear from this userspace process frequently enough.
Surprisingly, iCloud syncing works fine. If I pair my AirPods with one device, it always pairs with all of them.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#224The problem is with the idea of "continuous delivery". Many people fail to understand that technological advances only increase productivity if the innovations, the great leaps forward, are relatively rare, with long periods of stability and refinement in between. There's always an adjustment period, where people have to spend time learning a new technology, and any issues with the new technology need to be resolved.…
This criticism is based on the assumption that all updates are created equal. But they aren't.
One week, the update could be a relatively minor bug fix. The next week, a major feature upgrade that's been in the pipeline for months.
You also remove the ambiguity of "Is this worth pushing out? When should I push this out? Should I do some more fixes or push this one out first?". You got fixes, push them out in the next update.
Your criticism also assumes a small team. If you have a large enough team where you can split them into new feature development and current bug fixing, they're going to work at different rates and be ready at different times. If instead your entire team just works on "the product", then there is no effective difference between fixing issues and creating functionality.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> engineers care about quality; customers care about the fastest way of solving their problem Almost all customers care about quality. The problem is that many customers have only very limited information about products, so they have a hard time judging quality vs. competitors before (or even after) purchase. This reveals a general problem with the market: it doesn't select for quality. Otherwise we wouldn't be havin…
> Almost all customers care about quality. yes, but not to the exclusion of features. I work on a B2B product where our customers bill their customers by the hour, so they tend to have a pretty good idea of how much time a feature saves them. if a competitor adds a feature that cuts the time needed for a project in half (not unrealistic) but crashes and forces them to start over a quarter of the time, the customers w…
There's a big difference between not caring and making a tradeoff. You can care about A and B but decide B is more important than A. But if you don't care about A, then there's no tradeoff, you just choose B no matter what.
The question is, why do we make consumers make that tradeoff? Why are we shipping junk at all? There shouldn't be a reliability tradeoff. All products should be reliable. It ought to be a bare minimum standard.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#226I 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 know a product that can do more damage with an accidental backspace: the iMessage app for MacOS (Messages).
If you're any sort of power user, you likely know that you can backspace by the word instead of the by the character, using Ctrl + BS on Linux or Cmd + BS on Mac.
In the Messages app, the shorcut to delete your _entire chat history_ is also Cmd + BS, and it works even if your caret is in the text box. So if you type five words and then Cmd + BS six times, you will be prompted to delete your entire chat history.
I do this almost every day. So far I've never compulsively hit return but I am dreading the day it happens.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#227I can’t help feel like the agile in business mentality is somewhat to blame for this. Focusing on getting core functionality sprint after sprint is great for adding new features but there is never enough time to go back and fix annoyances that are minor. I was looking for a new microwave recently and since I’m a nerd I was looking into ones with smart features. So I read some reviews and guess what? The smart microwa…
It would greatly lower my shopping-anxiety if you shared the brands. Thanks!
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#228As an experiment, I logged every bug I encountered for a few days. I averaged 5 bugs a day, not counting dark patterns or bad design. Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1] Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages,…
Thank you for mentioning AirPods! I was so excited to buy them after a ton of reviews saying they just worked. They said the days of fighting with Bluetooth audio were gone. I believed them, then reality showed up. My Mac sometimes unpairs them and worst it doesn’t find them. Some times while my baby is sleeping I put my AirPods and play a loud video just to realize they were not connected. My wife’s right side AirPo…
My manager had to buy new headphones as when she is WFH she used airpods and iphone to connect to calls and the irpods constantly cycled leaving garbage audio whenever she tried to speak.
I'm using a BT Jabra headset, with noise cancelling I got for about the same cost, 16+ hours of battery, easy pairing and super useful phone app, great ANC, and solid audio quality, at least to a non-audiophile. My biggest complaint is the closed back design leaves my ears a bit irritated after 4+ hours of use. Not an airpods competitor but for the cost I am way happier.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#229Advancement in tech are nowadays driven only by profit, which in turn is driven by sales, which prioritise what people are likely to pay for. People expect technology to be affordable and they really don't care what the effect of this is. Put competition in the mix and you get a lot of stuff that sucks because the field of battle is not the quality, is pricing and marketing. And then stuff dies after a short time. An…
Expecting that billions of people will simultaneously act against their incentives is madness. You can't assign collective fault to "we" who did this by making bad choices individually. It's a system that has optimized itself to this end goal. I feel pretty good about my choices in comparison. I use an older, sock Android device, with simple wired headphones, so that particular issue with AirPods has never occurred t…
I don't see your point, it's obvious that among billions _some_ made better choices, but collectively it's still our choices that led to this.
And I think it's pointless to blame "titans of the industry" while almost literally everyone else too buy into the same pattern, or you mean to tell that there is a _signigicant_ sum of companies in the tech industry that ships with a "quality first" mindset? I do not mean to be sarcastic, if that's your point please make a list, I would really appreciate that.
And yes, I blame the victims for their/our short-sightedness, it's not like anyone forced people to buy and re-buy broken products for decades.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#230As an experiment, I logged every bug I encountered for a few days. I averaged 5 bugs a day, not counting dark patterns or bad design. Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1] Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages,…
Thank you for mentioning AirPods! I was so excited to buy them after a ton of reviews saying they just worked. They said the days of fighting with Bluetooth audio were gone. I believed them, then reality showed up. My Mac sometimes unpairs them and worst it doesn’t find them. Some times while my baby is sleeping I put my AirPods and play a loud video just to realize they were not connected. My wife’s right side AirPo…
I really don't get it.
Personally, I hate ear buds and, as such, never bought ear buds. Rather, I spent ~$20 on SoundBot bluetooth headphones starting some five years ago (long before air pods, methinks) and haven't had problems with them at all.
I also have a seven year-old phone (HTC OneMax) running custom (unofficial/ported by a random hacker) Android[0], and it pretty much works.
Sure the battery life has degraded since 2014, but that's to be expected, no? I wish I could replace the battery (as I did with my 15+ year-old Panasonic cordless phones), but there really aren't too many mainstream mobile devices that allow that any more.
As for poor quality software/hardware, if you don't like it, vote with your feet and/or wallet.
If stuff doesn't work, why use it? Even more, if stuff doesn't work and you can't/won't fix it yourself, then don't use it.
Software devs and hardware manufacturers don't care about whiny blog posts or complaints on HN, they care about the bottom line. Impact the bottom line and you may have a chance at improvement.
Stuff that actually addresses the issue is useful. A great example is the lack of Android support after 4.4/KitKat on the HTC OneMax mentioned above and the abandonment of it on Cyanogenmod/LineageOS in 2017, where those (myself included although I'd never hacked on Android ever -- and failed miserably -- thankfully someone else did not) impacted by this took action to provide the latest Android on an old, unsupported, discontinued device.
If you're not taking positive action toward making things better (whether that's fixing the problems or voting with your feet/wallet), then you're not going to have any impact.
While whinging about it on your blog may be a way to relieve the stress you feel about whatever issue(s) you may have, it's not constructive or useful.
That is unless your goal is to get lots of comments on HN where the Apple Fanbois sagely agree, and lament there's nothing to be done about it because Apple is the pinnacle of tech and since no one could possibly do anything better than Apple (or the apps that run on their gear) therefore all technology sucks.
And that's objectively false. There's lots of tech out there that's quite good. I suggest using that and shunning rather than using, then whinging about the stuff that sucks.
[0] https://forum.xda-developers.com/htc-one-max/rom-lineageos-1...
Edit: Fixed typos/formatting issues.