Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

People expect technology to suck because it sucks

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 437 posts

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#241

Post by _qulr »

leetcrew wrote: post #231
_qulr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between not caring and making a tradeoff. You can care about A and B but decide B is more important than A. But if you don't care about A, then there's no tradeoff, you just choose B no matter what. The question is, why do we make consumers make that tradeoff? Why are we shipping junk at all? There shouldn't be a reliability tradeoff. All products should be reliable. It ought to be a bare min…

> There's a big difference between not caring and making a tradeoff. You can care about A and B but decide B is more important than A. But if you don't care about A, then there's no tradeoff, you just choose B no matter what. fair enough, I probably overstated my point with some of the wording. > The question is, why do we make consumers make that tradeoff? Why are we shipping junk at all? There shouldn't be a reliab…

> doesn't really matter if someone else dumps a bunch of buggy new features in the meantime, converts our customers, and forces us out of business

This is always presented as the doomsday scenario, but how often does it actually happen?

The story of Apple in the Tim Cook era is unrelenting annual releases, more and more "subscriptions", massive return of cash to AAPL shareholders, but decreasing product quality. Did Apple make that tradeoff because they were scared of going out of business? No, they were doing very well before Cook took over. Cook simply has lower standards than Jobs, there's no other reason. He's been great for investors, not so great for customers.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#242

Post by Mountain_Skies »

julianlam wrote: post #139
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…

> 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 Nowadays, I would consider this a problem with the browser. How often does one navigate backwards with the backspace key? Recently, I had some doubts over whether or not I should clobber the native browser behaviour for "ctrl-s", but then I realized that nobody anywhere EVER saves a…

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.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#243

Post by KajMagnus »

hrktb wrote: post #95
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…

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…

> Doesn’t reality suck the same?

To me, software is as if when I open a book to read it, then, the book suddenly snaps itself shut, hurting my fingers.

Thereafter, the book gets wings, tries to fly away, but bumps into my coffee mug on my desk, so coffee spills on the floor. Then the book does fly out through the closed window — smashing the glass into pieces — and gets larger and larger wings, flying higher and higher until it disappears into the blue sky.

It's as if software was alive, and does random things I don't always agree with.

But actually — the bees building nests on the balcony: That feels pretty close to misbehaving software. Or the cat, bringing in a snake from outdoors. Or a squirrel shewing through a power cable, shutting down a city.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#244

Post by edanm »

marcosdumay wrote: post #234
leetcrew wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one fully expect the backspace button to work if I do not currently have a text field focused. once you learn keybindings for an application, there's usually no way to perform that function as quickly/efficiently with a mouse. please do not break the conventional ones. ctrl-s is probably fine to break though. even when it does "save" the page, it rarely does so in a useful way.

Oh, I fully expect CTRL-Q to close my browser window (with all the tabs) when I mistype CTRL-W. That doesn't make it any good. Do you know at all times what element has the focus? An error there can be of high consequence. (Even though browsers do make an effort to refill forms on page forward, it doesn't always work.) It is a very bad shortcut, and there's always an alternative one anyway, because it's not always av…

Fwiw, on Chrome in Mac, you can configure it so that pressing cmd-q won't close the browser without holding it for a few seconds.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#245

Post by parliament32 »

selestify wrote: post #191
elboru wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Shh nobody tell him AirPods are just bluetooth headphones :)

https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/specs/

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#246

Post by marcosdumay »

glaberficken wrote: post #24

Woah, have you tried the night mode on op blog? I have never seen anything like that before.

It really is night mode, not just some dark mode for a virtual world. It's even night on the wild mode; the author could add some crickets sound, it would make everything better.

The author also seems to be one of those people that think that sunlight is yellow.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#247

Post by SilasX »

machello13 wrote: post #239
SilasX wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention. That's not a good example, nor is it parallel to the dynamic the article describes. Your car stinks a lot less than cars did 10/30/50 years ago (emits less in the way of pollutants or CO2 per mile driven), is less likely to kill you in a crash involving the same size cars/velocities (despite we…

But devices have also gotten smaller, lighter and more efficient, and software can also do much more today than it could a long time ago. I think the analogy is fine.

When the analogy was built off of saying that saying that cars are bad my metric X, when the claim was that software has gotten worse by metric X, and cars have actually gotten better my metric X, no, it's not a good analogy.

And yes, there are some ways in which hardware has improved. But the claim is that, judged by what you're using it for, most UX-apparent aspects have gotten worse. Is there a clear way this is wrong? If you look at most UX-apparent metrics, it hasn't. Latency from keystroke to character render has gotten worse. App start time has gotten worse. Lots of other latencies have gotten worse.

None of the nightmares described in the article were typical of software UX.

These would be arguably fine if the additional features you get were a necessary cost, but they're not.

I'm also not sure that devices have gotten more efficient in all respects. Each version of iOS gets more energy-intensive, for example.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#248

Post by azhu »

Tech is bad because our hypothesis of "nature will help us adapt to our disregard for foresight" is proving false. Across the board: economic, social, manufacturing, education, environmental -- everything is giving us plenty of evidence that we are headed in the wrong direction.

All meaningful measures of human wellbeing are going down at increasing rates. We are making mistakes at a rate that outpaces our ability to learn from our mistakes and we doubling down on the strategy that got us here in order to get us out.

The line about us not knowing the future and needing to take the best guess we have and building more on it than we are confident in its correctness is illogical and clearly disordered.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#249

Post by ashtonkem »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #119
ashtonkem wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, as you’ve alluded to, the scope of what software does for us on a daily basis has expanded by several orders of magnitude. Not only have a number of devices that used to be purely electro-mechanical been reworked to use microcontrollers (cars, everything in the kitchen), but the scope of activities that have migrated onto the web or our phones is truly massive. 30 years ago, software bugs might interfere with yo…

> Not only have a number of devices that used to be purely electro-mechanical been reworked to use microcontrollers (cars, everything in the kitchen), Yup, and in most cases this not only did not improve them, but made them less useful and more fragile . Let's be honest: the software is there only because it can save on manufacturing costs, and sometimes can be used for extra marketing benefit. No attention is being…

Depends on what you’re talking about.

Car engines are vastly improved in both reliability, cleanliness, and efficiency by the introduction of computers into them. You might not like that when it goes wrong, but we all appreciate not breathing in pre-computerized car engine exhaust.

And that’s the rub. While shoddily written software shoehorned into cheap consumer goods obviously degrades the experience, there are tons of places where well written software has massively improved the quality of the goods that they’re added into. Objectively car engines are just better for the addition of software both in design and in operation. They’re smaller, more powerful, more reliable, cleaner burning, and more efficient than they were before we computerized them.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#250

Post by ars »

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…

> Until around 2007, games received no updates.

Warcraft II, from 1995 received multiple patches. So did many other games from that era.

Do you perhaps mean console games when you say "games"?

Post reply on HN