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I get what you're saying, but it seems you already have a place you want to go and are using the article to get there -- much like the other commenters. While

I get what you're saying, but it seems you already have a place you want to go and are using the article to get there -- much like the other commenters. While these things are important, to me the critical phrase in the article is this: ...It seems highly improbably that, as one of the most qualified people to diagnose this bug, I was the first to notice it... My system hangs when typing text all of the time. Reading this article, this indicates to me that 1) It probably hangs for tens of millions of other people, and 2) Nobody either has the time or money to do anything about it. That sucks. Additionally, it appears to be a situation that's only gotten worse over time (for whatever reason). You can look for potential answers as you point out. More importantly, however, is the fact that nobody is aware of the scope of these problems. Millions of hours lost, the situation getting worse, and there's nobody hearing the users scream and nobody (directly) responsible for fixing things. In my mind, figure those things out and then we can start talking about specific patterns of behavior that might limit such problems in the future. tl;dr Who's responsible for fixing this and how would they ever know it needs fixing? Gotta have that in place before anything else.

MaxBarraclough 8y ago
> a situation that's only gotten worse over time (for whatever reason) The answer is ever-increasing complexity, no?
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. I don't want to over-state this, but it's a hell of a lot more important than people think, mostly because it attacks you in little bits here and there. It's never a direct assault. We are creating a consumer society in which we're becoming slaves to the tech. It entertains us, it connects us, it remembers for us, it guides us. All of that might be fine if that's your thing. But there are dark sides too. These kinds of hidden bullshit annoyances are one of the dark sides. The root of the darkness is this: if you steal just a few minutes per day here or there with hung-up text editors and such, how many man-years of productivity are you stealing from mankind? I really think we need to go back to the metal and start designing systems with separate fault-tolerant systems dedicated to being humane to the users by invisibly handling the kinds of things that keep wasting huge parts of our collective lives. Or, as you said, we could just keep adding complexity. That's always the answer, right? sigh
  - abainbridge 8y ago
    > Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £2500 to fix, and even then they'd be guessing. It would be better if car engines were simpler, like they used to be before they had to start passing artificial emissions tests that don't measure the impact for the whole life-cycle of the vehicle.
    - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
      It's actually a very good example. I drive a 1978 GMC pickup. Once a year I drop it off at a place and the guy does maintenance. That and adding gas are all that I do. When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about. These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of living hell is it where everything we touch is complex like this?
      - magduf 8y ago
        This is ridiculous. I have a pretty new car (2015), with GDI, and I sure as hell don't have to "reboot" it. It's been perfectly reliable. The infotainment system does have a few issues, but it has nothing to do with the driveability of the car (the engine, and other critical systems are not tied to it). Modern cars are FAR more reliable than anything made in 1978, this is a simple fact proven by mountains of data. Cars last far longer than they used to; you can easily go 200k or 300k miles with basic maintenance, and I'm sorry, but despite what you might want to believe, that was just not the case in 1978. And BMWs are terrible examples; those cars seem to be designed for expensive and necessary maintenance, so they can extract more profit from their owners. Japanese and American cars aren't like this.
      - nappy 8y ago
        A modern car is far safer, far more reliable, far more efficient, far more powerful, and far better than the environment. The added complexity only makes things better, in this example.
snaky 8y ago
That's 80-20 economy which is growing more and more, going hand in hand with "economy of scale". If tens of millions are less than 20 per cent of users - so be it, nobody cares. What does matter is 80 remaining per cent.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
We've all been trained by web apps that stuttering, jaggy rendering and hangs are normal and expected. I've railed against web apps for a decade now, most to deaf ears. They are so broken, unperformant, unreliable that in a previous time they would have never released with problems like those. But now desktop apps have the same issues. And its not going back to where we were. So I guess we'll get used to it.
- piercebot 8y ago
  Jittery rendering, hangs, and high-latency are deal breakers in Virtual Reality. I think things will get better as a matter of necessity for VR and AR, and then "veterans" from the field will bring back "new ideas" about performance and user experience. Or, if you prefer your optimism a bit more dystopian-flavored, some megacorp will come around with a walled garden whose user experience is just so good that users will flock to use it, and the rest of the industry will have to adapt to compete. In either case, I don't think getting used to it is our only choice :)
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    Except in VR's case they just ask you to purchase a $1000 set of kit and if you experience stuttering just shrug and suggest upgrades

MaxBarraclough 8y ago

> a situation that's only gotten worse over time (for whatever reason) The answer is ever-increasing complexity, no?

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. I don't want to over-state this, but it's a hell of a lot more important than people think, mostly because it attacks you in little bits here and there. It's never a direct assault. We are creating a consumer society in which we're becoming slaves to the tech. It entertains us, it connects us, it remembers for us, it guides us. All of that might be fine if that's your thing. But there are dark sides too. These kinds of hidden bullshit annoyances are one of the dark sides. The root of the darkness is this: if you steal just a few minutes per day here or there with hung-up text editors and such, how many man-years of productivity are you stealing from mankind? I really think we need to go back to the metal and start designing systems with separate fault-tolerant systems dedicated to being humane to the users by invisibly handling the kinds of things that keep wasting huge parts of our collective lives. Or, as you said, we could just keep adding complexity. That's always the answer, right? sigh
- abainbridge 8y ago
  > Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £2500 to fix, and even then they'd be guessing. It would be better if car engines were simpler, like they used to be before they had to start passing artificial emissions tests that don't measure the impact for the whole life-cycle of the vehicle.
  - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
    It's actually a very good example. I drive a 1978 GMC pickup. Once a year I drop it off at a place and the guy does maintenance. That and adding gas are all that I do. When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about. These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of living hell is it where everything we touch is complex like this?
    - magduf 8y ago
      This is ridiculous. I have a pretty new car (2015), with GDI, and I sure as hell don't have to "reboot" it. It's been perfectly reliable. The infotainment system does have a few issues, but it has nothing to do with the driveability of the car (the engine, and other critical systems are not tied to it). Modern cars are FAR more reliable than anything made in 1978, this is a simple fact proven by mountains of data. Cars last far longer than they used to; you can easily go 200k or 300k miles with basic maintenance, and I'm sorry, but despite what you might want to believe, that was just not the case in 1978. And BMWs are terrible examples; those cars seem to be designed for expensive and necessary maintenance, so they can extract more profit from their owners. Japanese and American cars aren't like this.
    - nappy 8y ago
      A modern car is far safer, far more reliable, far more efficient, far more powerful, and far better than the environment. The added complexity only makes things better, in this example.

snaky 8y ago

That's 80-20 economy which is growing more and more, going hand in hand with "economy of scale". If tens of millions are less than 20 per cent of users - so be it, nobody cares. What does matter is 80 remaining per cent.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

We've all been trained by web apps that stuttering, jaggy rendering and hangs are normal and expected. I've railed against web apps for a decade now, most to deaf ears. They are so broken, unperformant, unreliable that in a previous time they would have never released with problems like those. But now desktop apps have the same issues. And its not going back to where we were. So I guess we'll get used to it.

piercebot 8y ago
Jittery rendering, hangs, and high-latency are deal breakers in Virtual Reality. I think things will get better as a matter of necessity for VR and AR, and then "veterans" from the field will bring back "new ideas" about performance and user experience. Or, if you prefer your optimism a bit more dystopian-flavored, some megacorp will come around with a walled garden whose user experience is just so good that users will flock to use it, and the rest of the industry will have to adapt to compete. In either case, I don't think getting used to it is our only choice :)
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  Except in VR's case they just ask you to purchase a $1000 set of kit and if you experience stuttering just shrug and suggest upgrades