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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

#361

Post by salawat »

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…

Books are also capable of being copied before or when damaged, passed on trivially, and are not prone to sudden existential failure because a server on the other side of the world was deactivated.

They can't be stolen back by the publisher or seller, can be trivially transformed into different formats, can take annotations, can be rebound with wear, and even if paper has it's faults, reading a page of a well maintained page in 1000 years is as easy as as the day it was written, even if significant swathes of technological backslide occur, and is only prone to the challenge created by human cultural evolution as opposed to loss of the processor or software required to decode/convert/display it.

An HDCP protected chunk of media may as well not exist in 1000 years.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#362

Post by jszymborski »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #353
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 alter…

Adam Savage was talking about a scribing tool for machining which was very expensive, but which he likes very much [0].

Before recommending it, however, he felt it important to mention that for people who don't machine very much, far cheaper scribes work well because unless it's your job, your tooling is less likely to be the bottleneck, and you have fewer resources. When you machine professionally, you're tooling is likely your bottleneck and you've more resources.

I think this holds for tech and software. Think of resources here as "time spent learning APIs, bash, and remembering tar mnemonics".

At first, dragging and dropping folders isn't going to be your bottleneck. Need to move 1000s of folders scattered on the hard-drive? If you're not using a terminal, you'll be in trouble.

Everyone cares about UX, it's their experience when using tech. It's just that GUIs are better for some contexts than others.

[0] https://youtu.be/n5laGi3GO7M?t=356

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#363

Post by canada_dry »

samatman wrote: post #360
canada_dry wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, since I was their go-to tech support I paid the price!

re: Reveal codes - not being able to press ALT F3 and cleanup the formatting mess that MS WORD would inevitably get into was torture!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#364

Post by antipaul »

salawat wrote: post #359
scubbo wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with the sentiment of the post and the replies.

Yet your examples hint at something more.

Those massive failures are by people not by tech. Mismanagement and incompetence and systems designed to obfuscate accountability.

Which happens aplenty in non tech fields.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#366

Post by swiley »

ghostpepper wrote: post #226
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 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 y…

Coaca uses the Emacs style GNU readline keys in all the text fields, just use c-w.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#367

Post by swiley »

jszymborski wrote: post #362
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alter…

Adam Savage was talking about a scribing tool for machining which was very expensive, but which he likes very much [0]. Before recommending it, however, he felt it important to mention that for people who don't machine very much, far cheaper scribes work well because unless it's your job, your tooling is less likely to be the bottleneck, and you have fewer resources. When you machine professionally, you're tooling is…

Except with tar you don't even have to memorize anything, tar --help will tell you what you forgot.

   ~ $ tar --help
   BusyBox v1.31.1 (2020-03-26 00:59:22 -00) multi-call binary.

   Usage: tar c|x|t [-ZzJjahmvokO] [-f TARFILE] [-C DIR] [-T FILE] [-X FILE] [--exclude PATTERN]... [FILE]...

   Create, extract, or list files from a tar file

        c       Create
        x       Extract
        t       List
        -f FILE Name of TARFILE ('-' for stdin/out)
        -C DIR  Change to DIR before operation
        -v      Verbose
        -O      Extract to stdout
        -m      Don't restore mtime
        -o      Don't restore user:group
        -k      Don't replace existing files
        -Z      (De)compress using compress
        -z      (De)compress using gzip
        -J      (De)compress using xz
        -j      (De)compress using bzip2
        -a      (De)compress using lzma
        -h      Follow symlinks
        -T FILE File with names to include
        -X FILE File with glob patterns to exclude
        --exclude PATTERN       Glob pattern to exclude
   ~ $
And what's the recent surprise UI change? That xz decompression gets autodetected and doesn't need -J? Most software isn't even as friendly as that infamous command.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#368

Post by scrapgardener »

swirepe wrote: post #301
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an old house, and routinely discover ugly hacks that were done by the previous owner, presumably due to laziness, cost or just lack of skill. For example, they buried tons of stuff (toys, furniture, water heater etc) in the backyard and built a terrace on top of the pile to cover it up, apparently because they were too lazy to take it to the dump. The terrace decayed, so I had to tear it down, but in doing…

To be fair, the previous person didn't know you were going to try to plant vegetables in their landfill.

to be fair ulrikrasmussen didn't know the previous owner was trying to plant scrap trees

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#369

Post by acituan »

titzer wrote: post #342
acituan wrote: post #213

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. Humans, as the makers of these systems, are part of that reality, which was not created by us. The reality is that we are great apes writing precise machine instructions…

> If anything users are becoming too egocentric, expecting the world to conform to their comfort, with a dash of construal level fallacy, underestimating from a mile away how easy it would be to write bug free programs with perfect designs in a real world, by real people, with real budgets etc. Selection bias. You only hear from users who want new features. You rarely hear from users who don't want new features and j…

I was talking about the “users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.” so the selection bias is yours.

Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. You can recover with some frustration and wasted time. The perception of these being catastrophic failures shows the sense of entitlement users have because they are used to a certain smoothness in their experience and expect everything to go their way. This doesn’t match the underlying realities of the task; it is very easy to construe a sense of a working program in one’s mind but it is exponentially difficult to make the implementation actually bug free, usable and functional the way user wants.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#370

Post by plankers »

stevesearer wrote: post #355
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…

Also half-jokingly I feel like the exact same thing happens in grocery stores.
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