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People expect technology to suck because it sucks

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Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#271

Post by joshspankit »

vkou wrote: post #267
cblconfederate wrote: post #265

When i find bugs or 'featues' that make me waste time i blame developers. They clearly don't care anymore. So ordinary users have resorted to quiet desperation through learned helplessness. Like all those 'redesigns' that remove features and turn what used to be a few memorized keystrokes to an agonizing series of scrollers, popups and "UX" animations. I just think developers don't care anymore. They don't yell enoug…

The grass was greener when I was younger, and the sugar is sweeter. Most software has always been crap. There never was a golden age, when developers 'cared'. The truth is, some developers produced polished, well-working, well-made software. Some developers still do that.

I mean, there are actual measurable cases where “sugar was sweeter”: less chemicals, larger sizes, being produced closer to where you buy it and therefore being fresher, and smaller producers who delivered polished well-made product being squeezed out by large multi-national corporations.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#272

Post by floren »

csours wrote: post #74
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.

rm -rf / bin/bar/bash unexpectedly bricked my system

"rm deleted my entire root filesystem because I told it to" seems along the same lines of unexpectedness as "i handed the homeless guy a $100 bill instead of $1 because i didn't look closely" :)

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#273

Post by swills »

sabujp wrote: post #270
cblconfederate wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using some old software. Like windows 7 or vim or emacs , or PHP or old reddit. Due to their age , they 've accumulated a lot of fixes to their bugs. They may look weird and old , but they waste less of my time.

old.reddit.com is the best, is there a plugin/extension or some script to force chrome to always redirect to old.reddit.com for all reddit urls? edit: found https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/pajiege... and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/pajiege... this one seems to be pretty popular (requestly) : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect... anyone have bette…

Yes, "Old Reddit Redirect":

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#274

Post by rglover »

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…

Discipline and professional responsibility on the behalf of programmers, coupled with patience.

Everyone is in such an irrational hurry, it's been built into the "culture" such that rushing and making messes is acceptable. And by extension, customers expect things to be shit so you don't get in much trouble for doing it.

It's a feedback loop that only stops if companies (and individual programmers) start taking pride in craft > careless speed and money like they used to do back in the 50s/60s.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#275

Post by partyboat1586 »

vkou wrote: post #267
cblconfederate wrote: post #265

When i find bugs or 'featues' that make me waste time i blame developers. They clearly don't care anymore. So ordinary users have resorted to quiet desperation through learned helplessness. Like all those 'redesigns' that remove features and turn what used to be a few memorized keystrokes to an agonizing series of scrollers, popups and "UX" animations. I just think developers don't care anymore. They don't yell enoug…

The grass was greener when I was younger, and the sugar is sweeter. Most software has always been crap. There never was a golden age, when developers 'cared'. The truth is, some developers produced polished, well-working, well-made software. Some developers still do that.

I think what GP is saying is that there has been a paradigm shift away from unintuitive maximalist apps that are fast once learnt to intuitive minimalist apps that are slow as treacle because everything is in size 16pt font and designed for the first time user. Both have their downsides so in a way software has always been 'crap' but the ways in which it sucks have changed.

I've worked on 'revamp' or 'refresh' projects and it's all about stripping out features with the misguided idea that somehow one particular piece of functionality is a vastly more important value proposition to the user than all the other features.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#276

Post by bsanr2 »

leetcrew wrote: post #185
bsanr2 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You state that "unless" as if it weren't generally the common state of "competitor with more bugs."

No, users pick a finished product.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#277

Post by swills »

vkou wrote: post #267
cblconfederate wrote: post #265

When i find bugs or 'featues' that make me waste time i blame developers. They clearly don't care anymore. So ordinary users have resorted to quiet desperation through learned helplessness. Like all those 'redesigns' that remove features and turn what used to be a few memorized keystrokes to an agonizing series of scrollers, popups and "UX" animations. I just think developers don't care anymore. They don't yell enoug…

The grass was greener when I was younger, and the sugar is sweeter. Most software has always been crap. There never was a golden age, when developers 'cared'. The truth is, some developers produced polished, well-working, well-made software. Some developers still do that.

Actually, the sugar was sweeter when you were younger, because as you age your taste buds become less sensitive:

https://www.comfortkeepers.com/info-center/category/senior-h...

"Between the ages of 40 and 50, the number of taste buds decreases, and the rest begin to shrink, losing mass vital to their operation. After age 60, you may begin to lose the ability to distinguish the taste of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter foods. The sense of smell does not begin to fade until after the age of 70; its decrease exacerbates the loss of taste for those affected."

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#278

Post by com2kid »

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 find bugs in every software I use (my freaking microwave oven control panel!).

My dishwasher, which has only buttons to select what to do during the next wash cycle, has a firmware bug.

Sometimes when the door is closed, it will start one of the pumps. If I cycle "heated drying" on then off again, the pump will stop. I figured this out because, well, I've worked on firmware and I understand the how of how software can be stupid.

After I learned to recognize watchdog resets, I started seeing them more and more often, and became even more terrified of how bad software is.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#279

Post by sumtechguy »

malaya_zemlya wrote: post #205
brundolf wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would tell a slightly different version of this story, focusing in on "rollout-based quality assurance". I would say that effortless, automatic updates are to blame. When you can always just push an update, the impact of a given bug goes way down. It's no longer mission-critical to exterminate flaws before shipping; a totally broken feature becomes a mere annoyance. So project prioritization shifts from polishing a…

absolutely this. Back in the early 2000s quality assurance was insane. A release is was working on (aaa title from a major studio) was blocked because players' eyes were rendered incorrectly and you had to really zoom in to even see the glitch. And of course you had to find and fix all bugs before october, or else you won't be able to hit Christmas sales. Once internet updates became the norm, it all became pretty mu…

Or as I tell my wife. I am playing my favorite game 'updating playstation'. I turn the thing on so rarely by the time I usually do turn it on there is 1-2GB of updates waiting. Glad I have a semi decent internet connection these days...

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#280

Post by jodrellblank »

cmiller1 wrote: post #46

I've used many of the same technologies he's talking about and have experienced almost none of these issues... maybe I just got lucky but it seems we have the bigger problem that these systems are so complex that they've almost reached chaos theory levels of total randomness of behavior from small changes to initial inputs.

See "The mess we're in" talk by Joe Armstrong (Erlang creator) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 - from 6 years ago.

Your computer with 1TB storage has ~2^8trillion possible states it could all be in.

Number of states you could count through if you burnt up The Sun trying: ~2^128 or so, tops.

Atoms in the universe: ~10^80.

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