Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

People expect technology to suck because it sucks

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 437 posts

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#351

Post by neaanopri »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #138
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…

> buyers of software expect the product to at least mostly work in the first place, but they also expect bugs to continue to be fixed after the sale, Contrast that to traditional physical goods, where buyers expect the product to work as advertised, right out of the box, or their money back . Software in the Internet era has it easy, because it gets to release shitty half-finished versions, and then keep charging mon…

I find that what causes SW to break most often is changes to the OS, either other app updates or OS updates.

I work in a hardware company, and for any important function I usually set up a dedicated computer, install the software, and then never touch it ever

This is how the more sophisticated oscilliscopes etc. work. They often have Windows XP installed if you buy them used. Simple, doesn't break, no internet, if it's mission critical or expensive it's worth a dedicated and frozen computer

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#352

Post by Waterluvian »

titzer wrote: post #343

For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises. With no agency, they are at the mercy of other people's bad ideas that keep changing. Everything needs to be updated because everything else needs to be updated, because everything needs to be updated. Duh! Software updates! Guess what! Here's a new UI for ya. We moved all the stuff! It's like someone threw you a surprise birthday party…

Hot damn is this the most concise description of how I feel.

I’ve always described it as “the design team justifying their own existence after the job is done.”

Let software get stable and boring.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#353

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

titzer wrote: post #343

For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises. With no agency, they are at the mercy of other people's bad ideas that keep changing. Everything needs to be updated because everything else needs to be updated, because everything needs to be updated. Duh! Software updates! Guess what! Here's a new UI for ya. We moved all the stuff! It's like someone threw you a surprise birthday party…

The thing is, I do not really hate tech, if UNIX, and UNIX alone (no GUI), is considered "tech". Most of the programs in the freely available open-source UNIX OS I use do NOT need to be updated. They just keep working and are quite reliable (at least compared to their GUI alternatives).

I do sometimes wish that there could be alternative (not "replacement") ways to do things we use "tech" to do today, where the alternatives only required UNIX (no GUI). This way if we get frustrated with a graphical UI, and myriad "updates", we can just do these things the "old-fashioned way", with comparatively smaller, simpler, command line UNIX programs.

To me, the people who would be very opposed to this idea are not users, they are developers. Having been raised on computers in the 1980's I can attest that computer users never cared about "UI" or "UX", they just did what they needed to do to use the computer. It is developers, especially contemporarary, who are actually care about "UI" and "UX", not computer users. In fact, some of them are passionate about these aspects of using a computer.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#354

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

My microwave will run for a split second if you hit the start button. I suspect it’s running the software to operate where the time variable is 0 seconds. That there’s no guard against 0 so it just runs until the counter part of the code runs.

I’ve microwaved a burrito by mashing the start button hundreds of times.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#355

Post by stevesearer »

titzer wrote: post #343

For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises. With no agency, they are at the mercy of other people's bad ideas that keep changing. Everything needs to be updated because everything else needs to be updated, because everything needs to be updated. Duh! Software updates! Guess what! Here's a new UI for ya. We moved all the stuff! It's like someone threw you a surprise birthday party…

I logged into Mailchimp yesterday and found that they moved the header navigation to the left side.

Instead of the previous menu option words like Campaigns or Audience there were icons signifying each that I had to hover over to figure out what they might mean. Then when I went to my Reports the css breakpoints seemed to be wonky making that screen hard to read and use.

Half-jokingly It almost feels like constantly confusing people is a trick to boost engagement temporarily while people are forced to figure things out.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#356

Post by bergstromm466 »

titzer wrote: post #343

For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises. With no agency, they are at the mercy of other people's bad ideas that keep changing. Everything needs to be updated because everything else needs to be updated, because everything needs to be updated. Duh! Software updates! Guess what! Here's a new UI for ya. We moved all the stuff! It's like someone threw you a surprise birthday party…

> For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises.

I'd change that to: "For most people, corporate neoliberal technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises."

Writing that recognizes that we live with the most un-free market of all time:

"We are in the middle of a global transformation. What that means is, we're seeing the painful construction of a global market economy. And over the past 30 years neoliberalism has fashioned this system. Markets have been opened, and yet intellectual property rights have ensured that a tiny minority of people are receiving most of the income." [1]

And:

"How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?" [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnYhZCUYOxs

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#358

Post by overton »

Tech sucks for the same reason that Exxon buried their own climate science, or the tobacco industry hid their knowledge of polonium 210 in cigarettes. Capitalist corporations by and large have nothing but amoral contempt for their customers and the general public. Tech can be good, but not within this irrational and obviously decaying economic system.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#359

Post by salawat »

scubbo wrote: post #309
mikewarot wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is the last time leaving your keys in the car caused your house to suddenly slide 10 foot southwest? When is the last time you flipped a light switch, and suddenly your pool disappeared? Have you ever had French doors appear in your dining room because of a "Windows Update" on Wednesday morning? Have you ever had to wait for half an hour for your house to boot later on that same Wednesday? When is the last time…

I agree with your underlying point, but it's also important to point out that computers are also singularly wonderful in that it's usually much faster and easier to reverse failures, and then to diagnose and debug in a non-impactful manner. To take your second example - if I could then flip the light switch back, and the pool reappeared, then I'd be miffed but not particularly annoyed (assuming I was able to fix that…

Tell that to the 346 people who perished because of negligent and (in my opinion, malicious in terms of regulatory deception) undocumented, uncommunicated programming of the speed trim system of the 737 MAX.

Or the folks who perished because of badly programmed software interlocks on the THERAC-25 radiotherapy machine.

Just knowing or figuring out to flip that switch may be an insurmountable barrier depending on the circumstances when a failure state occurs. Especially when the implementation is intentionally hidden so as to facilitate continued market value extraction opportunities from the happy accident of information asymmetry.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#360

Post by samatman »

canada_dry wrote: post #347
titzer wrote: post #343

For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises. With no agency, they are at the mercy of other people's bad ideas that keep changing. Everything needs to be updated because everything else needs to be updated, because everything needs to be updated. Duh! Software updates! Guess what! Here's a new UI for ya. We moved all the stuff! It's like someone threw you a surprise birthday party…

> I can understand why people hate tech. To add to that, now that I'm a retired lifelong techie I realize why "old folks" back in the day would hesitate to give up the old, outdated software that they knew how to use. E.g. I'd prod older friends and family to give up wordperfect - which they knew and loved - in order to progress to the feature-rich-new MS WORD. Now I'm a linux advocate with its archaic terminal comma…

Water under the bridge now, but I bet you did some of them a real disservice.

Wordperfect had "reveal codes", so when the WYSIWYG gave you something you didn't want, you could pop open the actual document representation and wrangle the tags until you What You Want Is What You See.

MS Word has no such function, so when it screws you, and it does, you're good and screwed.

Post reply on HN