Live data from Hacker News

Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

cbloomrants.blogspot.com

81–90 of 294 posts

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

#82
post #65

I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…

Google Photos is a very recent addition to Google Drive[1]. I'm not sure the change even rolled out to everyone yet and still not all my photos have been migrated. They used to be only availble through the bizarre web interface within Google+ that OP described.

Despite that, I quite like Google's apps (and Google Apps). The month view in Calendar is back. The upgrade to Lollipop went smoothly for me and was a significant improvement. Some of them seem effectively abandoned (Blogger) but ones that aren't (Drive) are top notch: fast, attractive, full-featured, and with excellent integration between web and mobile.

[1] http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html

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

#83
User-facing software in general tends to hit a quality ceiling pretty early on based on the unwillingness of the developers to make further improvements. Contrary to the commenter who talked about NASA and the space shuttle software, this is actually a matter of willingness, not ability. I've filed half a dozen reports on bugs that would have been trivial to fix, and been refused every time. I've seen developers go out of their way to reduce the quality of their software and break things that used to work.

On the bright side, this means most domains of user-facing software still have open opportunities even when they should be thoroughly mature. If only there were more hours in a human lifespan, I'd love to fork Chromium or Firefox and just start fixing things at the browser end.

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

#84
post #65

I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…

I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap.

Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services.

I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, I'll just develop my own photos at home - seems like a good idea for everyone in the world to do.

FYI: ten years ago, we had e-mail, Flickr, Smugmug, web galleries, halfway decent digital cameras. Also, the thread starter was setting up a straw man, no one said that developing photos yourself was better. Just that the experience of many web applications is not so good. (Personally, I use BTSync's and/or Dropbox's photo sync, so that it shows up as a file on my machines. Sharing works fine as well, especially sinc…

Make it twenty then, I am not picky.

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

#86
post #78
post #65

I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…

> I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. It seems a common feeling that is spreading during the last year... Already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074704

What I _can't_ understand is why does Google rave all day about "material design" and such when they have dog crap all over their own doorstep?

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

#87
post #51
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.

Does this actually work for you with a recent Android phone? On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2 minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait 10 minutes while the computer is copying the files.…

I can relate to this. I transfer my files via SSH/SFTP when I have to because MTP is just completely unreliable, sometimes it works but most of the time it's just unpredictable.

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

#88
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Because they don't have a choice

Then set up a company that make fresh PC with windows installs without crapware and you have a business model right there. Choice is just a matter of people starting doing it. Or you know, buy a Linux computer (sure, the choice is not great there either, but it's something that a few manufacturers offer online: Lenovo, System75 and a couple others).

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

#89
As much as I hate almost everything, I always ask myself what's the baseline for those assumptions? How easy should it be to do the mentioned tasks?

Back in the days, we needed a camera and film, took pictures and get them developed, got a envelope and a stamp and finally sent the pictures to Mom. Obviously this is way more work than using the web, even if it's shitty.

I think we assume we could do things better and are used to things that work better without realizing the differences in their details which causes some tasks to be much more laborious than others.

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

#90
post #74
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this actually work for you with a recent Android phone? On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2 minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait 10 minutes while the computer is copying the files.…

I use an app called AirDroid ( https://www.airdroid.com/ ) to copy files to/from my Moto G. It works reasonably well in my experience. I have no idea what the benefit of MTP over USB mass storage was imagined to be.

> I have no idea what the benefit of MTP over USB mass storage was imagined to be.

Not having to unmount the phone when disconnecting, IIRC.

Post reply on HN