4 ms·

An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they wan

by geocar 7y ago

An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

atoav 7y ago
It is a mix of challenge, curiosity and (probably) the will to be in total control of a little subsection of reality. And it certainly isn’t dead.
- lsofzz 7y ago
  > And it certainly isn’t dead. Or to put it another way, it's alive and kicking ass :-)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! I'm not sure if that's true all that much, if you take into account the scary things regular people do with Excel and Access, or did in the past with HyperCard. I think a big part is that as an industry, we've told people that the right way to use a computer to solve your problem is to track down and buy some piece of software that does it (proliferation of open source merely made the "buy" part optional). We then proceeded to take away the means of self-sufficiency, widening the initially small gap between "end-user" and "programmer" into a chasm and hollowing out the middle. It's no surprise people only consume apps, when solving any problem yourself without an off-the-shelf solution requires you to become a programmer. And now the final nail is driven into the coffin with proliferation of SaaS which take away both your data and any ability to control and modify the behavior of an application.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  But excel, google sheets, IFTTT and other tools still exist. Some of them are just more successful than others. There is still a lot of people out there who can access computers and before couldn't, but have no interest in automating any of the work. Case in point: a lot of people don't even use keyboard shortcuts, why would they use a hypercard clone?
  - bambataa 7y ago
    Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't have a good idea of what interfaces between things are available on my phone. The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is probably even on the technical end of technical. But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the potential.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Right. Discoverability. And I'd also add, paradox of choice. If you have 20 different ways you could use to automate some things you need (but not all, and solutions only partially overlap in the problem space), you may as well have none. Defaults matter. I doubt we would be able to have a third-party solution reach ubiquity again, the way e.g. Flash had, so having powerful functionality integrated at the OS level would be very helpful, as it would remove the problem of figuring out what to use.
      - yoz-y 7y ago
        macOS had automator for a long time and even usage of that must have went quite down for them to let Sal go. It's quite sad because as others have said I think the percentage went down mostly because of more people coming in. Now that they have introduced Shortcuts to iOS I would be curious about how many people use them and to what extent.
mntmoss 7y ago
One of the things that makes me sigh is how we've gone and built up a huge slate of "required features" for apps that are very effective at professionalizing software and yet may not do much of anything for the end user. In that respect I think we've hit some kind of endgame for software as it's historically been done - the bells-and-whistles show - because smaller, more targeted software so often hits the mark better. For example, when people ask how to get into playing piano, I steer them away from a MIDI controller and software and towards the cheap home portable hardware. The hardware has nearly ideal software for the task: it starts instantly, never crashes or glitches, never needs to update, can only be hacked with physical access, has ideal latency, and does not require additional plugs or configuration. Put in batteries and flip the switch and you can practice. And past the very most inexpensive ones, they all have the connectivity needed to control software. And yet many technically inclined people - my previous self, friends, etc. - will hear that recommendation and still opt for that MIDI controller and get a gadget with more knobs and wheels, instead of a perfect learning tool, just because of the temptations of software that could "do anything." There's a shopper's high in it. But guess what the last software purchase I made was? An emulation of old home portable keyboard sounds(Plogue PortaFM). What goes around, comes around.
shantly 7y ago
> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! I feel this way. I've been at this a long time but all my non-work computing is either futzing about or incredibly low-value. Spreadsheets are pretty nice but I could do without them. Some kind of instant messaging or email is pretty useful. Calendar reminders are nice. But there are decent alternatives to all of them that aren't really that much worse, for personal use, while computers are expensive and take up a lot of time, especially to get good enough to use them without constantly being confused and mystified (see: any non-nerds using computers). 90%ish of what I get out of all this, personally, is media access, which could be almost perfectly replaced by living somewhat closer to a library and having a Netflix DVD subscription. I kinda think the everything-always-available aspect actually makes things worse, so a little extra friction or forcing choices might be an improvement. Ditto spending—I think any savings from online shopping is probably exceeded, for most people, by increased total spending. It's looking increasingly likely I'll never start a significant side-project, let alone found a product of any significance whatsoever, because I just can't think of anything useful to do with these magical boxes that's not already being done. Since everyone says that business ideas are the easy part I guess I'm truly fucked because I can't even come up with one of those that survives a day of thought and research. I look at computers and the Internet and see a time-suck that is, most of the time, ill-applied, dangerous, and probably harming productivity in most areas. [EDIT] to support the "expensive" thing, say it's about $2000 every four years per person to keep in smartphones and larger computing devices that don't take up too much space (laptop or tablet), that work well enough to actually be semi-useful rather than just a constant pain in your ass, and that will actually probably last and remain usable for four years, on average. Two adults in a household, that's about $1,000/yr in hardware, no tinkering, no gaming consoles, no bling'd out new phone every year, no peripherals, just to basically get the "job" done. Two streaming services of some kind, call it $20/mo, and that's a pretty low count. Good home Internet plus the Internet portion of your cell phone bill, for me, that's about $110/mo combined for the two of us (kids don't have their own stuff yet, and hell, may not at all until they can pay for it, because this stuff's expensive). That totals to about $2500/yr. You can buy a hell of a lot of physical media, (physical) games, postage stamps, puzzle books, whatever, for $2500/yr, and if you don't just throw it away you can keep using all that stuff the next year, and the one after, without paying again.
II2II 7y ago
I think that it is more accurate to say that people don't realize that they can tell the computer to do something. My boss had a time consuming task to do weekly. I looked at the steps, which were very basic and repetitive. It is the type of thing that a small program could easily handle. So I automated it. The problem is that most people see the tasks that they perform as a job that must be done. They may think about delegating it to other people, but they rarely think that it can be delegated to the machine. Which is ironic when the machine is involved in the process. I suspect that there are many reasons why people don't think about writing a program. One reason is that software developers rarely make such possibilities clear to the end user. Another reason is that there is an aura of wizardry around programming. In a sense there is: programming languages rarely allow users to express a task in the terms process that they would use while performing it in an application. (Another irony, since the user is essentially telling the program what code to execute.)

by geocar 7y ago

atoav 7y ago

It is a mix of challenge, curiosity and (probably) the will to be in total control of a little subsection of reality. And it certainly isn’t dead.

lsofzz 7y ago
> And it certainly isn’t dead. Or to put it another way, it's alive and kicking ass :-)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! I'm not sure if that's true all that much, if you take into account the scary things regular people do with Excel and Access, or did in the past with HyperCard. I think a big part is that as an industry, we've told people that the right way to use a computer to solve your problem is to track down and buy some piece of software that does it (proliferation of open source merely made the "buy" part optional). We then proceeded to take away the means of self-sufficiency, widening the initially small gap between "end-user" and "programmer" into a chasm and hollowing out the middle. It's no surprise people only consume apps, when solving any problem yourself without an off-the-shelf solution requires you to become a programmer. And now the final nail is driven into the coffin with proliferation of SaaS which take away both your data and any ability to control and modify the behavior of an application.

yoz-y 7y ago
But excel, google sheets, IFTTT and other tools still exist. Some of them are just more successful than others. There is still a lot of people out there who can access computers and before couldn't, but have no interest in automating any of the work. Case in point: a lot of people don't even use keyboard shortcuts, why would they use a hypercard clone?
- bambataa 7y ago
  Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't have a good idea of what interfaces between things are available on my phone. The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is probably even on the technical end of technical. But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the potential.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Right. Discoverability. And I'd also add, paradox of choice. If you have 20 different ways you could use to automate some things you need (but not all, and solutions only partially overlap in the problem space), you may as well have none. Defaults matter. I doubt we would be able to have a third-party solution reach ubiquity again, the way e.g. Flash had, so having powerful functionality integrated at the OS level would be very helpful, as it would remove the problem of figuring out what to use.
    - yoz-y 7y ago
      macOS had automator for a long time and even usage of that must have went quite down for them to let Sal go. It's quite sad because as others have said I think the percentage went down mostly because of more people coming in. Now that they have introduced Shortcuts to iOS I would be curious about how many people use them and to what extent.

mntmoss 7y ago

One of the things that makes me sigh is how we've gone and built up a huge slate of "required features" for apps that are very effective at professionalizing software and yet may not do much of anything for the end user. In that respect I think we've hit some kind of endgame for software as it's historically been done - the bells-and-whistles show - because smaller, more targeted software so often hits the mark better. For example, when people ask how to get into playing piano, I steer them away from a MIDI controller and software and towards the cheap home portable hardware. The hardware has nearly ideal software for the task: it starts instantly, never crashes or glitches, never needs to update, can only be hacked with physical access, has ideal latency, and does not require additional plugs or configuration. Put in batteries and flip the switch and you can practice. And past the very most inexpensive ones, they all have the connectivity needed to control software. And yet many technically inclined people - my previous self, friends, etc. - will hear that recommendation and still opt for that MIDI controller and get a gadget with more knobs and wheels, instead of a perfect learning tool, just because of the temptations of software that could "do anything." There's a shopper's high in it. But guess what the last software purchase I made was? An emulation of old home portable keyboard sounds(Plogue PortaFM). What goes around, comes around.

shantly 7y ago

> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! I feel this way. I've been at this a long time but all my non-work computing is either futzing about or incredibly low-value. Spreadsheets are pretty nice but I could do without them. Some kind of instant messaging or email is pretty useful. Calendar reminders are nice. But there are decent alternatives to all of them that aren't really that much worse, for personal use, while computers are expensive and take up a lot of time, especially to get good enough to use them without constantly being confused and mystified (see: any non-nerds using computers). 90%ish of what I get out of all this, personally, is media access, which could be almost perfectly replaced by living somewhat closer to a library and having a Netflix DVD subscription. I kinda think the everything-always-available aspect actually makes things worse, so a little extra friction or forcing choices might be an improvement. Ditto spending—I think any savings from online shopping is probably exceeded, for most people, by increased total spending. It's looking increasingly likely I'll never start a significant side-project, let alone found a product of any significance whatsoever, because I just can't think of anything useful to do with these magical boxes that's not already being done. Since everyone says that business ideas are the easy part I guess I'm truly fucked because I can't even come up with one of those that survives a day of thought and research. I look at computers and the Internet and see a time-suck that is, most of the time, ill-applied, dangerous, and probably harming productivity in most areas. [EDIT] to support the "expensive" thing, say it's about $2000 every four years per person to keep in smartphones and larger computing devices that don't take up too much space (laptop or tablet), that work well enough to actually be semi-useful rather than just a constant pain in your ass, and that will actually probably last and remain usable for four years, on average. Two adults in a household, that's about $1,000/yr in hardware, no tinkering, no gaming consoles, no bling'd out new phone every year, no peripherals, just to basically get the "job" done. Two streaming services of some kind, call it $20/mo, and that's a pretty low count. Good home Internet plus the Internet portion of your cell phone bill, for me, that's about $110/mo combined for the two of us (kids don't have their own stuff yet, and hell, may not at all until they can pay for it, because this stuff's expensive). That totals to about $2500/yr. You can buy a hell of a lot of physical media, (physical) games, postage stamps, puzzle books, whatever, for $2500/yr, and if you don't just throw it away you can keep using all that stuff the next year, and the one after, without paying again.

II2II 7y ago

I think that it is more accurate to say that people don't realize that they can tell the computer to do something. My boss had a time consuming task to do weekly. I looked at the steps, which were very basic and repetitive. It is the type of thing that a small program could easily handle. So I automated it. The problem is that most people see the tasks that they perform as a job that must be done. They may think about delegating it to other people, but they rarely think that it can be delegated to the machine. Which is ironic when the machine is involved in the process. I suspect that there are many reasons why people don't think about writing a program. One reason is that software developers rarely make such possibilities clear to the end user. Another reason is that there is an aura of wizardry around programming. In a sense there is: programming languages rarely allow users to express a task in the terms process that they would use while performing it in an application. (Another irony, since the user is essentially telling the program what code to execute.)