7 ms·

Why Nothing Works Anymore

113 points by dthal 10y ago

ThePhysicist 10y ago
I find it extremely funny that loading the website shows me a message asking me to turn off my ad blocker. Seems that some things don't work anymore because we break them intentionally... BTW I'd be fine looking at some ads, turning off my blocker is not an option though as the third party ads always track your behavior and often store personally identifiable data without user consent.
- recursive 10y ago
  The argument can easily be made that your ad blocker is the component that's intentionally breaking things.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    For values of breaking that include - Keeping your pc free of malware. - Keeping people from trying to aggressively promote lies, half truths, and nonsense in your own home. - Making the web work both better and faster.
  - ThePhysicist 10y ago
    As I said, I don't have a problem with ads per se, what I find objectionable is that most display ads download Javascript into my browser that tries to do funky things (like use HTML Canvases for fingerprinting, inject stuff into the local-/sessionstore) and usually sends data to some remote hosts that could be used to de-anonymize me (even revealing my IP address is enough to do that in many cases). From my own experience (I did various research projects on this working with journalists) the data usually ends up in places where it's not supposed to be and might cause a lot of harm in the future, hence by blocking this content I'm trying to protect myself as good as I can. I'd accept ads if the following conditions are met: * They are served through a trustworthy CDN, which guarantees that my IP information will not leak to the ad network operator. * They do not execute JS and consist of elements whose safety can be (reasonably) proved, e.g. images and text. * They do not blink, move, break the page or hide the content that I want to read. * They do not try to "contact the mothership", sending back personally identifiable information to their overlords. Sadly, I have not seen a single serious effort to implement this, instead websites just ask me to disable my ad blocker and expose myself to privacy risks. No.
- jimbokun 10y ago
  I can easily imagine the author including this in his original version of the article, and being asked to take it out by his editor!
dmitrygr 10y ago
You can see this in websites too. Each year they get bigger and slower while offering nothing (of value) new to the user. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
dfmooreqqq 10y ago
I tend to think that this is a product of the "newness" of technologies. Old technologies - such as paper, pens, flush toilets, etc. - lasted in part because they were robust and not-precarious. We don't remember the technologies that fell by the wayside along the way - they simply didn't last.
PaulHoule 10y ago
It reminds me of the bathrooms at the conference center at the Union Square Hilton where a sensor will ejaculate some white creamy foam soap on your cuffs if you aren't careful.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I once saw a soap dispenser which had gotten stuck in a loop. If no one caught the soap, it fell past the sensor, triggering another soap release, and so on. I'm sure it was a special case, some obscure failure of the repeat-dispense lockout or something. But I couldn't help marveling at how much effort had gone into making such a singularly crap product; it was behaving worse than would even be possible for a lower tech device.
  - agency 10y ago
    Reminds me of this marvel of modern engineering: http://imgur.com/Na9jGYR http://imgur.com/Na9jGYR
  - taco_emoji 10y ago
    I drive past a spotlight every day on my way home from work which just flashes on and off the entire time. I'm quite sure it's because the dusk-to-dawn sensor senses dark, turns on the light, which then hits the sensor and turns it off again, ad infinitum.
vorpalhex 10y ago
This reads like a general lament about the world at large declining.
- _rpd 10y ago
  The declensionist narrative is really in fashion right now.
  - zokier 10y ago
    People have been pining for the past golden days since antiquity. I'm not really sure if it truly can be said to be "in fashion right now"
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I learned a new word today. I spent a full minute wondering what you meant to say, because declensions are grammatical patterns, then finally realized that "declension" actually has "decline" as a root.
kristianc 10y ago
In most of these cases technology seems to have replaced something that was fairly precarious and imperfect before. Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all. Unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers replaced... unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers. Amazon's tyranny of choice replaced being price gouged because the thing you wanted was only stocked by one retailer in town. This folksy techno-luddism is quick to point out the foibles of what we have now, but almost never points out how shit things used to be. At least it doesn't end in the same place as most of these pieces, with a vacuuous assertion that we all need to start living 'in the moment.'
- waqf 10y ago
  > Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Seems like you don't remember email on your PC. > Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all. Seems like you don't remember Napster either. Where were you in the decade 1995–2005?
  - stinos 10y ago
    > Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Seems like you don't remember email on your PC. Or simply sms without autocorrect. OP has a point, but this indeed is a bad example. As far as I can see autocorrect for messaging being wrong didn't replace anything, it's something new which just doesn't always work properly. Which is exactly the point of the article.
    - thinkmassive 10y ago
      I could type faster using T9 on a 10-key flip phone than I can on an iPhone today. On Android I used SwiftKey for many years and would bet I'm fastest on that, but I decided to try an iPhone 6S and it seems like a huge step back regarding input. I still can't believe they don't have a swype-like input method.
purplethinking 10y ago
This is one reason I have almost no interest in IoT / home automation. It just replaces extremely mild annoyances (turning on the lights) with something complicated and fragile.
- audleman 10y ago
  The geek side of me really wanted to install a smart thermometer. It would record my movement and learn when to turn the heat on for me! Then I realized I could just program my old one to turn on in the morning and evening when I am home on my set schedule. It works just fine, and I know enough to think that replacing it with a complicated machine-learning process might cost me more headache than occasionally turning the heat up.
- xiphias 10y ago
  There's one part of home automation that's interesting I think: energy savings. With electric cars, electric batteries and solar panels and smart heating getting cheaper than the gas version, there is a need for all home devices related to high energy usage to be automated...and sadly machine learning needs lots of data that is going to be provided on the internet by the home devices (that will create lot of privacy issues of course).
- Unkechaug 10y ago
  I concur. Are there benefits and use cases for some of these things? Sure, but in the vast majority of cases it's simpler, easier, and less expensive to go with what we've got now.
- conductr 10y ago
  Agree. The fact that IoT's are dependent on the most fragile part of my home, the wifi, makes me lose interest in all of it.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  But there are ways to build/architect home automation so that it's an "addition" and at worst will go back to "dumb switch". Most of the light switches in my house are wired up through Z-Wave. Those z-wave boxes are in the electrical box in-between the normal, everyday, traditional light switch and the power. 100% of the time, if i flip the switch a direction, it changes the state of the light. It never fails. Power just came back on? still works. Z-Wave controller down? Still works. Internet out? still works. Then, I can "add on" automation using that zwave network to do things like turn lights on/off from my phone. If anything were to cause issues, have bugs, have problems, etc... I can unplug the controller and it goes back to fully functioning light switches.
ianferrel 10y ago
While automatic bathroom fixtures are a bit touchy, I think the author hasn't really considered how much they improve the worst case. I used to regularly walk into public bathrooms in which someone had used the toilet and simply not flushed it. That doesn't happen much any more. I'm willing to deal with a lot of phantom flushes to not deal with someone else's literal shit. I used to regularly find public bathrooms where someone (I'm assuming a vandal, although it could just be a distracted or careless person) has left the water running. A fully open faucet can erase the gains of more judicious human usage pretty quickly. The author waxes nostalgic about those cloth towel roll dispensers. His experience does not match mine. I generally see those things in old gas stations where the cleanliness of the towel is deeply suspect.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Automatic faucets are one of my favorite examples of positive added technology. They're flaky and annoying to activate, but compared to the possibility of leaving a faucet running full-blast for (potentially) hours? That's a huge improvement. Automatic soap dispensers are much less persuasive to me, though. There was no "just open" state to get rid of, so the flakiness is offering much less benefit. You have to touch pump-dispensers, sure, but that's also done before you wash your hands.
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping? My pet hate of public toilets now are the airblade style hand dryers. My hands are seemingly too big, so to dry the top (closest to my wrist) I need to bend my fingers to avoid touching the puddle of water and dirt in the bottom.
    - gr3yh47 10y ago
      >What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping? dirty hands touch them a lot and you have to touch them multiple times during handwashing, re-dirtying your hands if the stream actually lasted a reasonable amount of time it would be less of an issue but i dont think i've seen that ever
meesterdude 10y ago
> devices like automatic-flush toilets acclimate their users to apparatuses that don’t serve users well in order that they might serve other actors, among them corporations and the sphere of technology itself This nails it. It's not that things couldn't be implemented in a way that serves the users, it's that they're optimized to serve the interests of other parties first.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
valine 10y ago
> The iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard works, in part, by trying to predict what the user is going to type next. It does this invisibly, by increasing and decreasing the tappable area of certain keys based on the previous keys pressed. I've had an iPhone since iOS 2 and I never realized the key's touch area could change size. If you ask me the iPhone keyboard works perfectly.
- tbihl 10y ago
  Absolutely agreed. I could type better on an iPod touch with its tiny 2010 screen than I can on my 6 inch Android screen (despite my large hands.) Outside of that, the author nailed it. Especially the phone system, though he could have taken it further in saying that the humans after the recordings is also taught to not serve the user, but rather be an obstruction with just enough "give" to prevent legal action. The exceptions to the seem rare, but I definitely cling to them.
bckid 10y ago
Ok this seems like a good time to get something that's been bothering me off my chest. Can we please start using pressure sensors on toilet seats instead? It kind of feels like it always should have been that way.
- morinted 10y ago
  Lots of people stand when they wipe: http://deadspin.com/5424415/sitters-vs-standers--the-great-wipe-hope http://deadspin.com/5424415/sitters-vs-standers--the-great-w...
  - ashark 10y ago
    Finding out about this a few months ago was enlightening. Entire classes of messes I've seen in public restrooms that were previously inexplicable short of deliberate action became comprehensible through a combination of stand-to-wipers plus carelessness.
  - curun1r 10y ago
    Okay, then let's get rid of wiping too. It's basically non-existent in parts of Asia, and after spending six months doing it their way, I'm a convert, especially when it's the integrated bidet rather than the hose. You just feel so much cleaner afterwards and the savings on toilet paper is an added bonus.
douche 10y ago
I'm a software engineer, and I work with technology all day long, and am mostly thankful for it - it pays the bills, after all. But I dearly love going back home to Hicksville a couple weekends a month. Most of the stuff my parents have and use on a daily basis is older than I am, and it just works, because it is all mechanical and built to a much higher standard than you can get without spending an exorbitant amount of money now, if indeed you can get that kind of quality at all. It's not like it was high-end stuff at the time they bought it, either - I'm talking about a 1930s John Deere farm tractor, a couple 1980s Ford pickups, kitchen appliances from the 1970s, hand tools that could collect Social Security. Stuff that just works, and if it breaks, any idiot with some basic tools can fix. Even mundane objects that nobody (I hope) is ever going to try to put a WiFi card in are not-so-subtly more terrible than they used to be. My favorite example is the five-gallon gasoline can[1]. [1] http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas-cans-that-dont-suck/ http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas-ca...
- jonnycoder 10y ago
  That reminds me of an old electric range/stove I took to the dumps. It was the ugliest looking thing that came out of the 1980s, with it's electric stove coils that didn't always sit level, but man did it just work up until the day I took it out. At least my new gas stove cooks more evenly.
- liveoneggs 10y ago
  wow thanks for linking to that article. My current gas can is ridiculously difficult to use.
  - zip1234 10y ago
    That's partly because of safety regulations making it have anti-spill features.
lsc 10y ago
This reminds me of the "everything is awesome and nobody is happy" essay. We are most of the way to the wonderful goal of being able to use the bathroom without touching anything anyone else has touched, and all this person can do is complain that it isn't quite perfect. Do you remember the 80s solution for public faucets? They used springs to turn off the water after five seconds. You had to press a button really hard, then wash really fast. The electric things aren't perfect, but they are a big improvement. The complaints about auto correct are especially funny. I had a palm 5 and a wonderful folding keyboard and a cdpd modem. But only one serial port on the palm, so it was connectivity or keyboard, not both. Graffiti was terrible compared to any modern input system. The smartphone in my pocket is amazing. Swype is what it took to make me abandon thumb boards, and Swype is amazing.
ouid 10y ago
I think autocorrect provably does not provide any value. When you make a typo, then the autocorrect mechanism is making an inference on your input that the receiver of that message would be able to make better, since they have way more context, and humans are still much better at this kind of problem than computers.
socrates1998 10y ago
I think it's interesting how PC technology has changed in the past 30 years. I remember when PC's first were everywhere in the late 80's. They generally worked, but when they went down (like a virus), they were down for a long time and sometimes never came back. This is all subjective, but I feel like the end of the 90's and early 2000's was the low point for PC's and computers in general. Viruses were everywhere it seemed. Things would break all the time. Shit was never compatible. You had to have detailed knowledge of how software worked in order to fix it. I remember the day I was trying to fix my PC when I finally looked some of the more under the hood files and programs, and was blow away at the complexity. It was very humbling. Then, somewhere in the late 2000's, something changed and I feel like computers have been working better. I don't have to fix my computer nearly as much. It just sort of works. Sure, there are issues, but the frequency and intensity are much less (knock on wood).
kirykl 10y ago
I think we're in the dark ages of user interface currently. It feels like we've mastered skeuomorphism and moving away is fine, but we're in the infancy of whatever's next.
bobbytherobot 10y ago
> Digital distribution has also made media access more precarious. Try explaining to a toddler that the episodes of “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” that were freely available to watch yesterday via subscription are suddenly available only via on-demand purchase. It was a pain trying to explain to a toddler why they couldn't watch Sesames Street right now because it wasn't currently airing. Generally, explaining anything to a toddler is a pain.

113 points by dthal 10y ago

I find it extremely funny that loading the website shows me a message asking me to turn off my ad blocker. Seems that some things don't work anymore because we break them intentionally... BTW I'd be fine looking at some ads, turning off my blocker is not an option though as the third party ads always track your behavior and often store personally identifiable data without user consent.

recursive 10y ago
The argument can easily be made that your ad blocker is the component that's intentionally breaking things.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  For values of breaking that include - Keeping your pc free of malware. - Keeping people from trying to aggressively promote lies, half truths, and nonsense in your own home. - Making the web work both better and faster.
- ThePhysicist 10y ago
  As I said, I don't have a problem with ads per se, what I find objectionable is that most display ads download Javascript into my browser that tries to do funky things (like use HTML Canvases for fingerprinting, inject stuff into the local-/sessionstore) and usually sends data to some remote hosts that could be used to de-anonymize me (even revealing my IP address is enough to do that in many cases). From my own experience (I did various research projects on this working with journalists) the data usually ends up in places where it's not supposed to be and might cause a lot of harm in the future, hence by blocking this content I'm trying to protect myself as good as I can. I'd accept ads if the following conditions are met: * They are served through a trustworthy CDN, which guarantees that my IP information will not leak to the ad network operator. * They do not execute JS and consist of elements whose safety can be (reasonably) proved, e.g. images and text. * They do not blink, move, break the page or hide the content that I want to read. * They do not try to "contact the mothership", sending back personally identifiable information to their overlords. Sadly, I have not seen a single serious effort to implement this, instead websites just ask me to disable my ad blocker and expose myself to privacy risks. No.
jimbokun 10y ago
I can easily imagine the author including this in his original version of the article, and being asked to take it out by his editor!

dmitrygr 10y ago

You can see this in websites too. Each year they get bigger and slower while offering nothing (of value) new to the user. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

dfmooreqqq 10y ago

I tend to think that this is a product of the "newness" of technologies. Old technologies - such as paper, pens, flush toilets, etc. - lasted in part because they were robust and not-precarious. We don't remember the technologies that fell by the wayside along the way - they simply didn't last.

PaulHoule 10y ago

It reminds me of the bathrooms at the conference center at the Union Square Hilton where a sensor will ejaculate some white creamy foam soap on your cuffs if you aren't careful.

Bartweiss 10y ago
I once saw a soap dispenser which had gotten stuck in a loop. If no one caught the soap, it fell past the sensor, triggering another soap release, and so on. I'm sure it was a special case, some obscure failure of the repeat-dispense lockout or something. But I couldn't help marveling at how much effort had gone into making such a singularly crap product; it was behaving worse than would even be possible for a lower tech device.
- agency 10y ago
  Reminds me of this marvel of modern engineering: http://imgur.com/Na9jGYR http://imgur.com/Na9jGYR
- taco_emoji 10y ago
  I drive past a spotlight every day on my way home from work which just flashes on and off the entire time. I'm quite sure it's because the dusk-to-dawn sensor senses dark, turns on the light, which then hits the sensor and turns it off again, ad infinitum.

vorpalhex 10y ago

This reads like a general lament about the world at large declining.

_rpd 10y ago
The declensionist narrative is really in fashion right now.
- zokier 10y ago
  People have been pining for the past golden days since antiquity. I'm not really sure if it truly can be said to be "in fashion right now"
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I learned a new word today. I spent a full minute wondering what you meant to say, because declensions are grammatical patterns, then finally realized that "declension" actually has "decline" as a root.

kristianc 10y ago

In most of these cases technology seems to have replaced something that was fairly precarious and imperfect before. Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all. Unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers replaced... unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers. Amazon's tyranny of choice replaced being price gouged because the thing you wanted was only stocked by one retailer in town. This folksy techno-luddism is quick to point out the foibles of what we have now, but almost never points out how shit things used to be. At least it doesn't end in the same place as most of these pieces, with a vacuuous assertion that we all need to start living 'in the moment.'

waqf 10y ago
> Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Seems like you don't remember email on your PC. > Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all. Seems like you don't remember Napster either. Where were you in the decade 1995–2005?
- stinos 10y ago
  > Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Seems like you don't remember email on your PC. Or simply sms without autocorrect. OP has a point, but this indeed is a bad example. As far as I can see autocorrect for messaging being wrong didn't replace anything, it's something new which just doesn't always work properly. Which is exactly the point of the article.
  - thinkmassive 10y ago
    I could type faster using T9 on a 10-key flip phone than I can on an iPhone today. On Android I used SwiftKey for many years and would bet I'm fastest on that, but I decided to try an iPhone 6S and it seems like a huge step back regarding input. I still can't believe they don't have a swype-like input method.

purplethinking 10y ago

This is one reason I have almost no interest in IoT / home automation. It just replaces extremely mild annoyances (turning on the lights) with something complicated and fragile.

audleman 10y ago
The geek side of me really wanted to install a smart thermometer. It would record my movement and learn when to turn the heat on for me! Then I realized I could just program my old one to turn on in the morning and evening when I am home on my set schedule. It works just fine, and I know enough to think that replacing it with a complicated machine-learning process might cost me more headache than occasionally turning the heat up.
xiphias 10y ago
There's one part of home automation that's interesting I think: energy savings. With electric cars, electric batteries and solar panels and smart heating getting cheaper than the gas version, there is a need for all home devices related to high energy usage to be automated...and sadly machine learning needs lots of data that is going to be provided on the internet by the home devices (that will create lot of privacy issues of course).
Unkechaug 10y ago
I concur. Are there benefits and use cases for some of these things? Sure, but in the vast majority of cases it's simpler, easier, and less expensive to go with what we've got now.
conductr 10y ago
Agree. The fact that IoT's are dependent on the most fragile part of my home, the wifi, makes me lose interest in all of it.
Klathmon 10y ago
But there are ways to build/architect home automation so that it's an "addition" and at worst will go back to "dumb switch". Most of the light switches in my house are wired up through Z-Wave. Those z-wave boxes are in the electrical box in-between the normal, everyday, traditional light switch and the power. 100% of the time, if i flip the switch a direction, it changes the state of the light. It never fails. Power just came back on? still works. Z-Wave controller down? Still works. Internet out? still works. Then, I can "add on" automation using that zwave network to do things like turn lights on/off from my phone. If anything were to cause issues, have bugs, have problems, etc... I can unplug the controller and it goes back to fully functioning light switches.

ianferrel 10y ago

While automatic bathroom fixtures are a bit touchy, I think the author hasn't really considered how much they improve the worst case. I used to regularly walk into public bathrooms in which someone had used the toilet and simply not flushed it. That doesn't happen much any more. I'm willing to deal with a lot of phantom flushes to not deal with someone else's literal shit. I used to regularly find public bathrooms where someone (I'm assuming a vandal, although it could just be a distracted or careless person) has left the water running. A fully open faucet can erase the gains of more judicious human usage pretty quickly. The author waxes nostalgic about those cloth towel roll dispensers. His experience does not match mine. I generally see those things in old gas stations where the cleanliness of the towel is deeply suspect.

Bartweiss 10y ago
Automatic faucets are one of my favorite examples of positive added technology. They're flaky and annoying to activate, but compared to the possibility of leaving a faucet running full-blast for (potentially) hours? That's a huge improvement. Automatic soap dispensers are much less persuasive to me, though. There was no "just open" state to get rid of, so the flakiness is offering much less benefit. You have to touch pump-dispensers, sure, but that's also done before you wash your hands.
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping? My pet hate of public toilets now are the airblade style hand dryers. My hands are seemingly too big, so to dry the top (closest to my wrist) I need to bend my fingers to avoid touching the puddle of water and dirt in the bottom.
  - gr3yh47 10y ago
    >What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping? dirty hands touch them a lot and you have to touch them multiple times during handwashing, re-dirtying your hands if the stream actually lasted a reasonable amount of time it would be less of an issue but i dont think i've seen that ever

meesterdude 10y ago

> devices like automatic-flush toilets acclimate their users to apparatuses that don’t serve users well in order that they might serve other actors, among them corporations and the sphere of technology itself This nails it. It's not that things couldn't be implemented in a way that serves the users, it's that they're optimized to serve the interests of other parties first.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

valine 10y ago

> The iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard works, in part, by trying to predict what the user is going to type next. It does this invisibly, by increasing and decreasing the tappable area of certain keys based on the previous keys pressed. I've had an iPhone since iOS 2 and I never realized the key's touch area could change size. If you ask me the iPhone keyboard works perfectly.

tbihl 10y ago
Absolutely agreed. I could type better on an iPod touch with its tiny 2010 screen than I can on my 6 inch Android screen (despite my large hands.) Outside of that, the author nailed it. Especially the phone system, though he could have taken it further in saying that the humans after the recordings is also taught to not serve the user, but rather be an obstruction with just enough "give" to prevent legal action. The exceptions to the seem rare, but I definitely cling to them.

bckid 10y ago

Ok this seems like a good time to get something that's been bothering me off my chest. Can we please start using pressure sensors on toilet seats instead? It kind of feels like it always should have been that way.

morinted 10y ago
Lots of people stand when they wipe: http://deadspin.com/5424415/sitters-vs-standers--the-great-wipe-hope http://deadspin.com/5424415/sitters-vs-standers--the-great-w...
- ashark 10y ago
  Finding out about this a few months ago was enlightening. Entire classes of messes I've seen in public restrooms that were previously inexplicable short of deliberate action became comprehensible through a combination of stand-to-wipers plus carelessness.
- curun1r 10y ago
  Okay, then let's get rid of wiping too. It's basically non-existent in parts of Asia, and after spending six months doing it their way, I'm a convert, especially when it's the integrated bidet rather than the hose. You just feel so much cleaner afterwards and the savings on toilet paper is an added bonus.

douche 10y ago

I'm a software engineer, and I work with technology all day long, and am mostly thankful for it - it pays the bills, after all. But I dearly love going back home to Hicksville a couple weekends a month. Most of the stuff my parents have and use on a daily basis is older than I am, and it just works, because it is all mechanical and built to a much higher standard than you can get without spending an exorbitant amount of money now, if indeed you can get that kind of quality at all. It's not like it was high-end stuff at the time they bought it, either - I'm talking about a 1930s John Deere farm tractor, a couple 1980s Ford pickups, kitchen appliances from the 1970s, hand tools that could collect Social Security. Stuff that just works, and if it breaks, any idiot with some basic tools can fix. Even mundane objects that nobody (I hope) is ever going to try to put a WiFi card in are not-so-subtly more terrible than they used to be. My favorite example is the five-gallon gasoline can[1]. [1] http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas-cans-that-dont-suck/ http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas-ca...

jonnycoder 10y ago
That reminds me of an old electric range/stove I took to the dumps. It was the ugliest looking thing that came out of the 1980s, with it's electric stove coils that didn't always sit level, but man did it just work up until the day I took it out. At least my new gas stove cooks more evenly.
liveoneggs 10y ago
wow thanks for linking to that article. My current gas can is ridiculously difficult to use.
- zip1234 10y ago
  That's partly because of safety regulations making it have anti-spill features.

lsc 10y ago

This reminds me of the "everything is awesome and nobody is happy" essay. We are most of the way to the wonderful goal of being able to use the bathroom without touching anything anyone else has touched, and all this person can do is complain that it isn't quite perfect. Do you remember the 80s solution for public faucets? They used springs to turn off the water after five seconds. You had to press a button really hard, then wash really fast. The electric things aren't perfect, but they are a big improvement. The complaints about auto correct are especially funny. I had a palm 5 and a wonderful folding keyboard and a cdpd modem. But only one serial port on the palm, so it was connectivity or keyboard, not both. Graffiti was terrible compared to any modern input system. The smartphone in my pocket is amazing. Swype is what it took to make me abandon thumb boards, and Swype is amazing.

ouid 10y ago

I think autocorrect provably does not provide any value. When you make a typo, then the autocorrect mechanism is making an inference on your input that the receiver of that message would be able to make better, since they have way more context, and humans are still much better at this kind of problem than computers.

socrates1998 10y ago

I think it's interesting how PC technology has changed in the past 30 years. I remember when PC's first were everywhere in the late 80's. They generally worked, but when they went down (like a virus), they were down for a long time and sometimes never came back. This is all subjective, but I feel like the end of the 90's and early 2000's was the low point for PC's and computers in general. Viruses were everywhere it seemed. Things would break all the time. Shit was never compatible. You had to have detailed knowledge of how software worked in order to fix it. I remember the day I was trying to fix my PC when I finally looked some of the more under the hood files and programs, and was blow away at the complexity. It was very humbling. Then, somewhere in the late 2000's, something changed and I feel like computers have been working better. I don't have to fix my computer nearly as much. It just sort of works. Sure, there are issues, but the frequency and intensity are much less (knock on wood).

kirykl 10y ago

I think we're in the dark ages of user interface currently. It feels like we've mastered skeuomorphism and moving away is fine, but we're in the infancy of whatever's next.

bobbytherobot 10y ago

> Digital distribution has also made media access more precarious. Try explaining to a toddler that the episodes of “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” that were freely available to watch yesterday via subscription are suddenly available only via on-demand purchase. It was a pain trying to explain to a toddler why they couldn't watch Sesames Street right now because it wasn't currently airing. Generally, explaining anything to a toddler is a pain.