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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

#391

Post by hrktb »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #324
hrktb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t reality suck the same ? My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention. My house decays days after day. Floors need constant cleaning, wall have holes from small impacts, paint contains inedible fragments and disperse nocive gas. Bees are building nests on my balcony and it’s definitely not what it was built for, nor where they should…

Not the same, we expect the problems you mention. There are just some laws of nature that we get used to dealing with. Tech has the tendency to produce random problems. The one we have all dealt with is, everything was working fine and then suddenly stopped. You call tech support and after an hour of troubleshooting it with them we get, the, "We've never seen this before. It must be caused by one of your other SUCKEE…

I think in 20~50 years those random software issues will be what we knew for our all life, basically what reality is, and we’ll just give warm patronizing looks to kids complaining stuff doesn’t work.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#392

Post by rmdashrfstar »

vsareto wrote: post #345
nicbou wrote: post #121

As 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,…

>Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. Most software is still net positive in productivity. We tend to place more emphasis on failures as users. Remember you're running millions of lines of code that talks to other computers running millions of lines of code that communicates over a network running millions of lines of code to deliver some information on the order of seconds to minutes -- and then something resp…

Everyone loves to complain and take for granted what good they have!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#393

Post by pvorb »

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…

Linux is also far from stable. There is the mess that is Linux desktops like Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Unity (okay, this was only an Ubuntu escapade). The init system changed and the result is that you have to think about things you usually don't want to. There's things like Snap and Flatpack, which pretend to make things easier, but ultimately lead to more complexity...

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#394

Post by m463 »

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 freaking microwave oven control panel

You mean where 99 is greater than 100?

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#395

Post by Macha »

mook wrote: post #381
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge, or at least the Chromium version of it, has changed the navigate back key to be ALT+Left Arrow instead of the backspace key. It was annoying at first because I have over two decades of muscle memory for hitting backspace to go back. After a couple of days I got used to it and now am happy I can backspace without accidentally navigating away because focus wasn't where I thought it was.

Alt+Left/Right navigating through history has been in IE since at least IE4. I don't recall if it worked before then, and trying to look up ~25 year old documentation is somewhat difficult (especially since it would have shipped in a WinHelp file with the software instead).

Pretty sure I've been using Alt-Left as my back shortcut in Firefox for over a decade also

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#396

Post by nullc »

renewiltord wrote: post #190
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.…

> Small gods have handed me tools to remake the world as I would see fit and I do not use them.

But they didn't give you the only tool you really needed: Time.

Having meaningful access to the source is very important, but its value is limited because even small improvements often take a large amount of time especially to code you're unfamiliar with. Once you've made that improvement, maintaining it (or up-streaming it so someone else might maintain it) can take a tremendous amount of time.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#397

Post by TeMPOraL »

vinceguidry wrote: post #193
TeMPOraL wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you're either an alien or you have grown a case of Stockholm syndrome for computing :). Absolutely everything is like this. Apple sucks. So do Windows PCs and laptops. Open source software stacks. And don't get me started on modern appliances with microcontrollers in them. Personally, I can produce a daily list 3x as long as TFA on my Linux desktop, and probably 1-1.5x as long on my Windows sidearm. The only re…

Free software, not open source. The difference matters. Copyleft is important. What OS are you running on that Linux desktop? I switched from Ubuntu to an Arch variant, Ubuntu was getting too corporatized for me what with snap and everything. Eventually I'm going to rip out the desktop environment and go window manager only. When I said, "only use tech that the people that use them can modify" I'm not messing around.…

> Free software, not open source. The difference matters. Copyleft is important.

I very much agree! I've learned to strongly appreciate the FSF philosophy. And I too appreciate (and use, and advocate for) end-user-modifiable software.

However, when talking about software brittleness, user-facing Free (as in Libre) software is usually even worse than non-Free Open Source software.

I'm currently running nth version of Ubuntu, but in the past I've been running Debian, Red Hat, (briefly) Gentoo, Slackware, and further in the past some others which I don't recall now. In my experience, things are systematically getting better over time, but are still fragile compared to Windows (and Windows isn't exactly a paragon of stability either).

(Of course there are many places where proprietary = worse, UX-wise. In particular, just about any crapware preloaded by seller/manufacturer on your computer or phone, or stuff that gets bundled with printers, scanners and other peripherals.)

My point isn't that Free Software and Open Source software are bad things. Just that they suck too, and when talking OSes and popular tools, they suck on average a bit more than proprietary software.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#398

Post by salawat »

mikewarot wrote: post #384
antipaul wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In wiring a house, there is a built in assumption that something could go wrong and disrupt the wiring. That's why we had fuses, and now circuit breakers, grounding, ground fault interrupters, metal conduit, etc. All of these serve to limit the side effects of faults. When you turn on a switch... it's part of a circuit which is current limited, and in fact there are several limits on that current, all the way back to…

The problem with an increase in security is that it almost always comes with a tradeoff of higher complexity. Higher complexity means more difficulty tracing. It also means the state space of a general purpose machine ostensibly there to be configured to fulfill the user's goals is a priori heavily constrained.

Point being, I don't see a shift in the direction of security above usability or ease of mentally modeling doing anything but worsening the problem. I could be wrong on that though, but the last 20 or so years of further encroachment by industry on User's perogative to configure their machine as they like doesn't inspire great confidence in me.

I can say I'm totally reading up on that though. I hadn't heard of it before, and it sounds interesting.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#399

Post by julianlam »

Aeolun wrote: post #380
TeMPOraL wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why do we have a touch panel on a fridge in the first place? The only thing we need to be able to specify is desired temperature...

... and at that, one could argue that even that isn't necessary.

I just checked my fridge, it has six buttons and an LCD panel, and in all my (4) years of home ownership, I haven't touched the buttons a single time.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#400

Post by julianlam »

x0x0 wrote: post #177
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…

Right, but my $400 bose headphones have a broken integration with my $2400 mbp. Swiping the volume controls on the headphones also moves the balance. Conveniently, because macos is ass, it's nondeterministic whether the balance controls display in Sound Preferences to fix the balance issue. You just have to open and close the settings panel in the hopes that it will display. I'm a software engineer and I don't even k…

This is the second time in as many weeks I've read a complaint about Bose headphones. The first was that their Bluetooth was so janky the audio itself was delayed multiple seconds and out of sync with video playing on the device.

That blew my mind, my $20 Amazon-purchased Bluetooth earphones just work™ with no delay.

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