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People expect technology to suck because it sucks

tonsky.me

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Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#41

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

katsume3 wrote: post #30

I try to train my systems to behave just the way I like them. It's no different than coding: you are bending tech to your will. I don't see the difference in configuring a brand new Virtual Machine and that of coding a new piece of software. For me, the definition of non-sucky technology is the ability to configure, tinker, and otherwise mess with systems to make them do your bidding. This is why I love computers, be…

The definition of non-sucky technology is not having to waste time on any of that.

If you think tinkering and configuring are fun you should stay as far away as possible from software design, because you have no insight into what most users expect from tech.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#42

Post by 6_past_30_til_6 »

nightski wrote: post #14
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want to drive cars, not all of them want to be mechanics. People want their phones and software to just work. Or at the very least not get bricked every friggin update.

I think that is a terrible analogy. A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B. If you only are capable of utilizing the bare minimum it's going to make life a lot harder. Take excel for example, the people who are able to reason about and write their own advanced excel spreadsheets in the workforce have a huge leg above those who only c…

You can’t say that they have a leg up in general because It Depends. I’m an engineer and my job is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). My dissertation involved developing highly parallelized solution algorithms for a specific type of problem. As such, I am quite well versed in low level Fortran/C code and MPI because I wrote code to do that, “that” being to solve an equation. I know this set of equations like it was second nature because of how much time I’ve invested in it. Not only that, but I would consider myself somewhat of an “expert” in the underlying mechanisms to solve these equations. Those being finite element methods. I can talk to you about tensor spaces and discretization and derivation of the numerical algorithms to solve these problems. I’d consider the code that I wrote/extended to be tech.

My current job role is “just” an engineer working for a company where all I basically do is run and analyze models using commercial software. Even though I know the underlying low level code/algorithms of what I’m doing, I would be the first to tell you that a 21 year old mechanical engineering graduate could do my job as effectively and as completely as I could. Because none of the above paragraph actually matters in what I do. Maybe it gave me a leg up in the hiring process, but the knowledge I am applying for my job (which I enjoy) is what you’d learn in a 4 year degree with electives in eg numerical methods and fluid dynamics.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#43

Post by pixl97 »

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…

Um, how long have you been in the industry?

Software has always sucked and had these issues. It has nothing to to with automated QA. The reason you see more issues is 'way back in the day' your software had a very limited number of things that it did, and in general it did not involve accessing a network or chugging down massive volumes of data from untrusted sources.

I work for a company that has a lot of individuals that test for QA issues, they have list miles long of things to check and write reports on.

The problem is more of "It's much easier to write mountains of code than it is to ensure that it works in all cases"

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#45

Post by MereInterest »

Loughla wrote: post #7
lallysingh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. sure, until you have to do something for realsies and the tech is the only way to do it. Then it's just fucking your life over.

Explain further, please. I don't think I'm following you.

Here's an example. I use Discord for keeping in touch with friends, running D&D sessions, etc. Discord on Linux has a random crash whenever in a voice call. I've followed up on threads, and others have this same issue, possibly related to glibc, but there aren't any definitive solutions yet. So, instead, I tinker. I make a quick two-line python script to launch discord repeatedly every time it crashes. Discord reconnects to the voice chat on restart, and all is well. Usually, people don't even notice that I've dropped out of 1-2 seconds.

But Discord does more at startup than just reconnecting. It also checks for new updates, and refuses to start if there is an update waiting. So now I've dropped out of a call, I have self-opening popups letting me know that there is an update available, and I'm trying to download/install the .deb update before the D&D players get bored and start making puns. Nothing good happens when the players have started making puns.

I like tinkering. I really do. But I like tinkering in order to solve my own problems, and to make my life easier. I don't like tinkering on limited time in order to add yet another support to a house of cards that is gently swaying in the breeze while I'm trying to hold a D&D session in the top room of that card-house.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#46

Post by cmiller1 »

I've used many of the same technologies he's talking about and have experienced almost none of these issues...

maybe I just got lucky but it seems we have the bigger problem that these systems are so complex that they've almost reached chaos theory levels of total randomness of behavior from small changes to initial inputs.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#47

Post by bobochan »

This is one of the strangest takes that I have ever read. I can remember my dad's turn on the waiting list finally coming up so that it was his turn to bring the HP calculator home from the government lab where he worked for the weekend. It was an absolute marvel. The whole family sat around the kitchen table for hours as he talked about RPN and showed us how the calculator worked. It was magic.

Almost 50 years later I have an incredibly powerful computer that I carry around in my pocket and I call it "my phone". It can solve all kinds of mathematical equations, display live video, and communicate in real time with the furthest corners of the globe. Saying that I "expect technology to suck" is just completely bizarre. I have witnessed amazing changes and have access to technology that were just Star Trek visions when I was young.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#48

Post by lukeschlather »

My most trouble-free period was when I was using Xubuntu exclusively for several years with a single monitor. Now I've been using Windows again for several years and I've grown accustomed to things just not working, ever, with tons of visual lag, usually just a few hundred milliseconds but sometimes stretching into seconds.

On Xfce I would sometimes idly hold down win-t to create a bunch of terminals then alt-d to close them one by one. As I might idly bounce a pencil up and down back when I used pencils. On Windows/OSX/Gnome I would never dream of just idly opening a bunch of applications for fear of what might happen.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#49

Post by bredren »

pixl97 wrote: post #43
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…

Um, how long have you been in the industry? Software has always sucked and had these issues. It has nothing to to with automated QA. The reason you see more issues is 'way back in the day' your software had a very limited number of things that it did, and in general it did not involve accessing a network or chugging down massive volumes of data from untrusted sources. I work for a company that has a lot of individual…

Software has never been better; there are just more users to please.

And despite the issues lamented in this think piece, it is _Apple_ that the author should blame for setting technology expectations impossibly high.

No organization had been remotely as successful in understanding and releasing tech products that were truly great.

Everything since is just a comparison to expectations Apple set. Even when Apple fails, it is in comparison with an Apple that does not.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#50

Post by matthewmacleod »

lallysingh wrote: post #6

I'll point out that many of these annoyances don't have equivalents on the command-line. And the annoyances I do have on the command line I can mostly work around with wrapping things in shell scripts, aliases, or functions. It's nice to have a simple interface and high extensibility on top of it.

meh. I’ve noticed recently that Bash for whatever reason seems to just randomly erase my entire history, which is infuriating (though obviously not enough for me to invest the time to investigate or fix it at all). Stuff breaks all over, CLI or otherwise.
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