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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

#191

Post by selestify »

elboru wrote: post #149
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,…

Thank you for mentioning AirPods! I was so excited to buy them after a ton of reviews saying they just worked. They said the days of fighting with Bluetooth audio were gone. I believed them, then reality showed up. My Mac sometimes unpairs them and worst it doesn’t find them. Some times while my baby is sleeping I put my AirPods and play a loud video just to realize they were not connected. My wife’s right side AirPo…

To provide an anecdotal counter-example, AirPods have worked seamlessly for me so far. Much quicker to connect and more reliable than Bluetooth. So their marketing isn't completely off-base :)

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#192

Post by Regenschirm »

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 Windows 10 Desktop runs very well.

My FreeNAS, Arch Linux and my Android phone as well.

I think, we get paid because we are building new stuff and have to maintain shitty stuff. If my job would literaly just desigining it high level, clicking it together and then it works, no one would need me.

Yes its frustrating sometimes.

I would like to cure cancer instead of debugging why this update broke our system.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#193

Post by vinceguidry »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #157
vinceguidry wrote: post #80

> That’s the world WE ALL are living in now. No Nikita, this is the world you live in. I saw this happening five years ago and ripped Apple out of my life like a band-aid that's been there so long the skin's closing up around it. It sucked, but now it's a million times better. There simply isn't enough manpower, capital, or willpower to create decent software when you also have to contend with the profit motive. The…

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. Any time I have an issue with tech, I go looking for where proprietary software invaded my life, rip it out, and go on with my day.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#194

Post by foobiekr »

brundolf wrote: post #76
airza wrote: post #16

I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…

I would tell a slightly different version of this story, focusing in on "rollout-based quality assurance". I would say that effortless, automatic updates are to blame. When you can always just push an update, the impact of a given bug goes way down. It's no longer mission-critical to exterminate flaws before shipping; a totally broken feature becomes a mere annoyance. So project prioritization shifts from polishing a…

I have witnessed this first hand comparing two systems.

One system has no patching, and updates incur some non-trivial amount of effort on the part of the installer. Releases are a few times a year, at most.

The other system has patching, updates are lighter weight, and as a result, the system has THOUSANDS of patches released over the last decade, north of 2 per work day.

Guess which system is higher quality? The former.

Much, much higher quality.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#195

Post by _2xvp »

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…

>As a buyer, I don't expect my software to need maintenance. I expect it to work out of the box (just like I expect every physical product to work out of the box)

Software is far more complex than most physical products. There are only so many failure modes for a screwdriver or a couch and they're all pretty foreseeable. The most complicated physical systems, like a car, house, or even a human body, do need maintenance.

I'm frequently frustrated with software bugs like everyone else (my building and apartment have this awful smartlock system that's riddled with bugs and which bricked me out of my own home due to a bad app update a few weeks ago--shoutout to Latch) but I'm not sure I'm on aboard with an anti-maintenance attitude. If there are bugs I'd like them to be fixed!

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#196

Post by vinceguidry »

Finnucane wrote: post #141
vinceguidry wrote: post #80

> That’s the world WE ALL are living in now. No Nikita, this is the world you live in. I saw this happening five years ago and ripped Apple out of my life like a band-aid that's been there so long the skin's closing up around it. It sucked, but now it's a million times better. There simply isn't enough manpower, capital, or willpower to create decent software when you also have to contend with the profit motive. The…

But it's not just Apple. Apple has its own set of issues, but they are not really worse than others at this point, just not much better any more. I have mostly old, 'dumb' appliances in my house. My car is more than 20 years old. I have become a total luddite with respect to things. As far as I'm concerned a lot of 'smart' technology is still in the unproven, experimental stage and I am too old now to deal with that…

Of course it isn't just Apple. But when you build the foundation of your computing life on Apple, you're asking for pain. I applaud your dumb appliances and car.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#197

Post by burlesona »

It’s interesting, there are a lot of little bugs in software today, but I think it’s easy to forget that common bugs used to be a lot worse.

In the 90s it was pretty common to have a kernel panic and hard crash, blue screen of death, etc. Data loss was common.

Folks who lived through that have such a strong compulsion to hit CMD-S every few minutes, that a lot of cloud software today offers a “save button” that actually doesn’t do anything because the document auto saves as you type anyway.

To some degree I think this may be related. Bugs that crash the computer are a little bit easier to detect (If only because the users come screaming at you) compared to bugs where the app scrolls incorrectly once every million scroll events.

Overall I would say that software has become much more complex and much more reliable at the expense of being more inscrutable. People are able to operate in a degraded condition now because software is capable of working that way, whereas in the past it would just fail completely.

Is that better? Maybe not by much, but I think most normal users would say software is easier to use and more reliable today compared to decades past.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#198

Post by fma »

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,…

I rsearched the ReMarkable 1 and 2. I ended up just getting a Rocketbook. It's very simple concept. "Paper" in the form of hard plastic. The pen it uses is the Pilot Frixion, which is an erasable pen. Hence you have a notebook to record notes for a while. If there's anything important I'll manually transfer it to my OneNote (I don't use Rocketbook's picture taking app).

Most notes I take only need to exist for a few weeks and then I erase...so transferring it to "long term storage" is rare.

I do have an iPad and note taking apps like Notability if I know something will need to go to "long term storage" but I find I use the Rocketbook more.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#199

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

jmholla wrote: post #178
LolWolf wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Mac the other default for navigating backwards is Cmd-[, if that helps any! (It's also a default in many applications for navigating backwards in whatever sense the app may intend.) I don't use Windows other than for gaming, so I'm afraid I don't know if there are other shortcuts other than backspace.

Alt-Left is back and Alt-Right is forward. Sadly, their equivalents on Mac are also for navigating to the beginning and end of the line so if you're in a text box you lose that control. Your alternative is handy. I wonder if it also works on Linux.

Command-[/] for history navigation and command-{/} for switching tabs are macOS conventional keybindings that work almost anywhere there’s a concept of history or tabs.

they may work on Linux in an attempt to support Mac users.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#200

Post by leetcrew »

_qulr wrote: post #182
leetcrew wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying consumers demanded subscriptions. vendors push them because it's a saner way of managing revenue for products that require maintenance post-sale anyway. that said, I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives. one way or another, a product will stop receiving support when the money stops flowing in. with a permanent license, it ends when people stop buying l…

> I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives. Funny how consumers tend to despise them though. The term "subscription" itself a typically a euphemism for "rental". There are a small number of companies who offer a year of updates that you get to keep forever (which makes consumers play the game of when exactly to buy to maximize the new features in that year), but most s…

> Funny how consumers tend to despise them though.

sure, and as an individual I behave the same way. I always want to solve my problem in the cheapest possible way. still, I can't help but notice that products with stable ongoing revenue tend to get much better support.

I think the clearest example is with games. most games get released with a pile of bugs. a bunch get fixed in a release day patch and then there are a few more patches over the next few months (when most of the sales happen). once the initial wave of sales subsides, you tend to be stuck with whatever bugs remain. cs:source had several game breaking bugs for years (defuse kit over bomb blocking defuse, defusing through walls, etc.) despite being one of the most popular FPS titles of its time. AFAIK, most of these still exist fifteen years later. csgo, which is monetized through microtransactions, gets bugs fixed almost as fast as they can be posted to reddit/youtube. microtransactions aren't quite the same as subscriptions, of course, but they generate revenue proportional to the current userbase, rather than the rate that people buy the game for the first time (which will inevitably dry up).

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