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Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

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Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

#41
post #13

Phone -> USB Cable -> Computer. Transfer images via said cable. Select images, put in email and send to mum. Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.

> Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.

Part of the problem I think comes from feeling like you are in control in one moment then having that control taken from you for stupid or selfish reasons.

For example, I was listening to music with PowerAMP the other day on my android phone as I walked home from work. Spontaneously, my phone just switched over to playing a completely different playlist. It turns out some Google music app had taken over my phone out of the blue.

I tried to shut it off. I could not. I could stop the music, but there was no fucking "close" option anywhere in the app that I could find so that I could go back to listening using the app I had already fucking chosen to play my music with. I found a "send feeback" option (I sent a message "fuck this app how do I shut it off"). Eventually, I found the place in the Play Store where I could completely remove the "Google Play Music & Movies" app, which finally worked.

Seriously? In what fucking world does it make more sense to design an app that's easier to uninstall than to simply terminate. Yes I was mad. I was enjoying the music I was listening to on my walk home, when some fucking Google bullshittery interrupts my walk for no reason at all other than they are either incompetent or complete assholes.

Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

#42
post #5

He's right. What surprises me is the readiness of people to put up with that shit. I'm not sure if their patience with horrible design is just a result of their ignorance.

It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware, or most of the mobile apps being useless and ugly and broken. I think most of the people just don't expect anything better, blindly accepting whatever is there because they can't imagine that technology could actually be good. I can, and I sometimes wish I couldn't - so that web and mobile experience wouldn't be so goddamn annoying.

> It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware

People actually BUY computers bundled with those (Windows loaded with crapware). And work their way through it. It's so painful.

Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

#43
Sometimes I use the classic version of Gmail just because it loads the whole page in less than 1 second and I can read my e-mail in another 0.5 seconds. With the "modern" version I have to stare at a blank screen with a stupid progress bar for about 2-3 seconds before seeing anything.

Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

#44
post #23

Yes please! I'm so tired of all the annoying bloat all over the web that makes (not only) older browsers die just thinking about visiting the sites. It looks like the "progress" nowadays is going for "more complex and resource-demanding with less features and control".

> less features and control

Oh there is more control. Just not for you, the user.

Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

#46
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware, or most of the mobile apps being useless and ugly and broken. I think most of the people just don't expect anything better, blindly accepting whatever is there because they can't imagine that technology could actually be good. I can, and I sometimes wish I couldn't - so that web and mobile experience wouldn't be so goddamn annoying.

> It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware People actually BUY computers bundled with those (Windows loaded with crapware). And work their way through it. It's so painful.

Because they don't have a choice, so they don't expect anything else. Only the technical folks know how and where to buy a clean computer. Hell, the first computer the younger generation bought themselves was most likely already loaded with a ton of such crap, and that sets the baseline of their expectations.

Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

#47

"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic or something very stable and non-computer related, so I could just work away in my shop and not have to ever touch this fucking demon box." What was nice about working in scientific research back in undergrad in that whenever you got tired of coding the demon box, you could do some good physical labor in the lab.

"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic"

I read the same and interpreted it somewhat different. Although your take was correct on its parallel path.

Web designers and SaaS architects ONLY design to impress other web designers and SaaS architects yet never eat their own dog food and don't care about the users. Its widely believed by non google employees that nobody ever got a job at Google (or whatever their personal definition of "win" is) by putting something into their portfolio that is simple, maintainable, easy to use, straightforward, clear, that they'd use themselves or the end users would like. This is a MAJOR systemic cultural malfunction in the business. Sooner or later some MBA will "discover" this and write a famous book about how shortsighted the internet techies were in the second or so decade of the widespread public internet. I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail fins" or something. Basically we're building 70s American muscle cars... we can impress each other, but they fall apart in two years if that and the public hates them.

The car analogy would be a bunch of mechanics standing around trying to impress each other "Yeah man I had one of those cars that needed the engine to be pulled from the car just to get access to replace the rearmost spark plugs" "Oh thats nothing, I had to do over 50 labor hours to replace the heater core, practically had to disassemble the entire car to fix that coolant leak" "well I don't have as impressive of a story but I worked on a car once that could only have its oil changed on a hyd lift with the passenger front wheel removed, impossible to do it otherwise". Now the mechanics are VERY impressed with the quantity and quality of work they had to do to accomplish what are fundamentally, normally, very simple tasks, and they're very impressed with the engineers that created those systems that guarantee them such amazing labor hours of wonderment. It must have taken petacycles of CAD/CAM work to make something that messed up that none the less technically kinda somehow works. HOWEVER, and this is critical, the general public just sees a lemon of an overpriced hard to fix car, and just wants a simple reliable toyota commuter car (which the mechanics mercilessly make fun of and insist no one wants despite actual sales figures). "So what, because teenagers, a group widely renowned for good taste and excellent judgment (LOL), love our products"

Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

#49
post #2

10 years ago, you would have to pay a photographer to develop the photos and go to a fucking post office, then your mom would wait a week to receive them.

If you had developed your photos 10 years ago using analogic methods, your negatives are still usable, and your positive (if they were not too exposed to the sun thus conserved normally) would still be there. Whereas if you already had a digital camera, the raw are either lost because the media has decayed, you forgot backup, or worse to index your database. Your positive have all turned yellow unless you spent 10 times more in ink and paper per photo.

In 10 years you probably will have migrated these photo to the cloud and you will both have to pay a recurring costs for life to keep your data (that will die with you), or the photo will die with the service.

In 20 years, you will be more likely to find the old documents made on papers by your ancestors than any of your digital productions to your grand kids. And if you still have them entropy will win. You will not be able to find the relevant piece of data.

Analogic photo is the only long term low cost solution for now.

Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

#50
There's tons of problems with Google's services. They make radical changes that bloat them and slow them down. They cut services that people find useful because they're not as big as something like Maps or Gmail, or even for no reason at all. But no matter how much you complain, either on a blog post or to Google themselves, if you just come back to them at the end of the day you've changed nothing at all.

Not liking Google Photos? Get Dropbox on your phone and upload your pictures there! Blogger doesn't give you enough control? Use Wordpress or Medium instead, or run your own blog! Google has too many users on their services to care about you. If you want change, go out and make the change yourself.

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