People expect technology to suck because it sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#401

Post by julianlam » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

megameter wrote: post #331

selestify wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the move towards cheaper and lower-quality is more the fault of the current economic system and its incentives than it is the fault of software.

It's very instructive to look back to the 70's when electronics running a little bit of software had just come into being. The big deal, at first, was really with memory . Your alarm clock could ring at the same time reliably. If you invested in a VCR, it could record at a programmed time. If you had a synthesizer it could store and recall exact preprogrammed patches. Pinball machines could downsize in weight and kee…

"Kind of" like that?

Every other week I read about someone's entirely-too-roundabout way of doing X via an IoT device (requiring packets to probably circumnavigate the globe). Meanwhile I'm sitting here opening my garage door with a physically wired switch like a pleb.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#402

Post by gruez » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

plankers wrote: post #370

stevesearer wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I logged into Mailchimp yesterday and found that they moved the header navigation to the left side. Instead of the previous menu option words like Campaigns or Audience there were icons signifying each that I had to hover over to figure out what they might mean. Then when I went to my Reports the css breakpoints seemed to be wonky making that screen hard to read and use. Half-jokingly It almost feels like constantly…

Also half-jokingly I feel like the exact same thing happens in grocery stores.

That they frequently change the layout of their stores? I've never noticed that at any of the stores I shop at.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#403

Post by fuzzygroup » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

plankers wrote: post #370

stevesearer wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I logged into Mailchimp yesterday and found that they moved the header navigation to the left side. Instead of the previous menu option words like Campaigns or Audience there were icons signifying each that I had to hover over to figure out what they might mean. Then when I went to my Reports the css breakpoints seemed to be wonky making that screen hard to read and use. Half-jokingly It almost feels like constantly…

Also half-jokingly I feel like the exact same thing happens in grocery stores.

You aren't wrong at all. Stores regularly re-organize and what it says to customers is "your knowledge is worth nothing". The disregard of customer knowledge is an absolute anti pattern.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#404

Post by DayDollar » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

Ive just set up a linux mint installation, added a vm, lots of little tweaks here and there. Restart it- and the stupid oem "feature" kicks in undoing all my changes.

Its a miracle that we are not chased down and made to answer for our criminal wasting of other peoples lifes with the same amount of time as punishment.

The abstraction safes.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#405

Post by acituan » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #387

acituan wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about the “users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.” so the selection bias is yours. Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. You can recover with some frustration and wasted time. The p…

> Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. So what? Users get upset when your crap doesn't work. Stop being flippant and pushing back. Pushing back is not your (our) job. Complaining how hard your job is not your job. Griping and moaning about irate users is also not your job.…

> Pushing back is not your (our) job

Please tell me more about my job internet stranger.

You’re making the same arguments without adding substance, just emotional rhetoric and unnecessary personalizing.

> Imagine your power steering goes out on left hand turns going north downhill.

Imagine that steering wheel stopped working depending on the highway you’re driving on (software & hardware platform). Why didn’t they test this on every single highway? Because that would be was combinatorially explosive.

I’m glad you’re making a physical world analogy. Comparable physical world projects have orders of magnitude less moving parts that need to interfit, and assembly gives immediate feedback whether they can fit. They also have orders of magnitude less inputs they are expected to operate on, which makes it easier to exhaustively test their function.

“Shut up and just make it work” might have been popularized by certain tech personas, but unless you have Steve Jobs levels of clout, pulling that stuff in most dev shops will quickly make you very unpopular whether you’re a IC, a manager or a product manager.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#406

Post by vinceguidry » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #397

vinceguidry wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Free software, not open source. The difference matters. Copyleft is important. I very much agree! I've learned to strongly appreciate the FSF philosophy. And I too appreciate (and use, and advocate for) end-user-modifiable software. However, when talking about software brittleness, user-facing Free (as in Libre) software is usually even worse than non-Free Open Source software. I'm currently running nth version of…

Hmm, I recognize your personal journey with tech as very similar to my own. You're at that phase where you got sick of the churn and so just want to settle on something that's not going to change out from under you. You went through the "try everything" phase years ago. I understand the reluctance to go back to that life, I really do.

But it's better now, and Arch Linux is that better. I'm using the Openbox version of Arco Linux, because it gives me a usable desktop right out of the box. Another significant source of instability is desktop environments, the number of times I pulled my hair out over Gnome is many. It's hard to go against the grain when running Ubuntu, but it's really easy with Arch.

Eventually you'll hit that sweet spot of stable usability. But you have to build on a real foundation. Ubuntu can't be that anymore. Package management with Arco is stupidly easy, just 'yay anything' and it'll give you a list of stuff to install. You have to learn how to script it if that's what you want to do but it's worth it in the end.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#407

Post by renewiltord » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

nullc wrote: post #396

renewiltord wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer open-source tools because I know where the agency for pain lies: myself. With modern Rust and Go tooling you can download an application's source code, modify it, and compile it painlessly in half an hour. So why do I tolerate bugs in software like that? Because I know I can fix them. And I also know I won't always. Small gods have handed me tools to remake the world as I would see fit and I do not use them.…

> Small gods have handed me tools to remake the world as I would see fit and I do not use them. But they didn't give you the only tool you really needed: Time. Having meaningful access to the source is very important, but its value is limited because even small improvements often take a large amount of time especially to code you're unfamiliar with. Once you've made that improvement, maintaining it (or up-streaming i…

Haha, yes. Time is a thing no one can make for me. But they cannot make it for themselves either. So I take what is offered gratefully and make what I can from it.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#408

Post by renewiltord » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #327

renewiltord wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer open-source tools because I know where the agency for pain lies: myself. With modern Rust and Go tooling you can download an application's source code, modify it, and compile it painlessly in half an hour. So why do I tolerate bugs in software like that? Because I know I can fix them. And I also know I won't always. Small gods have handed me tools to remake the world as I would see fit and I do not use them.…

> "my work is what I want to do which tool can I use instead" I can't wrap my head around this, could you explain further?

For amusement sake I removed punctuation. The contrast is between people who find themselves unable to move when a tool sucks and people who just solve a problem. The latter just move on from tools that don't solve their problem or solve it poorly. If the problem is big enough they solve it themselves.

They don't have to be engineers. They'll pay $100 / mo to solve it or hire a guy on Upwork to solve it or cobble something together on Zapier + Airtable. The thing is, the tool is insignificant. They don't really spend an appreciable amount of time on complaining about it because it's faster to stop using it.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#409

Post by allenu » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

bpanon wrote: post #329

allenu wrote: post #323

The list of all annoyances in one day is an eye opener. I should try that just to see what I have been putting up with. One of the main ones I have is using macOS. My work MacBook pro (an expensive piece of equipment!) will just randomly have scratchy audio. There's absolutely nothing I've found that will make it go away, even restarting the core audio service appears to do nothing. But, leave it for an hour and try…

Have you tried disabling bluetooth?

Thanks for the tip. I have not tried that.

One thing that I will try as well is to plug the USB-C power cable into the right side of the laptop. I've read that surprisingly CPU utilization goes up when it's plugged in on the left.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#410

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

cedilla wrote: post #136

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there are things that don’t work, but it’s not nearly comparable. In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer, my closet Just Works, books Just Work (with an ink smudge maybe every 50-100 reading hours) etc. I can expect each of those things to last decades. Looking at the goods I’ve bought on Amazon recently, digital electronics/software as a category doesn’…

Well, digital services are much more complicated than a fridge, or a book. Not only that, but they also require a machine to run that is also orders of magnitude more complicated than a fridge or a closet.

Part of the complaint is that these things don’t have to be as complicated as they are. The fridge with the touchscreen screen is usually more frustrating than the fridge from thirty years ago. The smart TV is usually more frustrating for its smart features.

Things are getting more complicated, like you say, but they frequently aren’t getting enough better to justify the added complexity, especially given all the issues that come along with it.