5 ms·

Everything I love about tech is slowly being taken away, because technology is apparently too hard for the masses :(

by tomc1985 6y ago

Shared404 6y ago
r/unixporn and r/usabilityporn will welcome you. Probably a little too much customization to be totally honest. Edit: I guess this wasn't really related, but you may enjoy nonetheless. I personally found myself enjoying tech again by playing around with Linux/BSD and alternative software. YMMV
- tomc1985 6y ago
  It's so much more than that though. All of these things seem to be under direct attack, mostly by businesses, wantrepreneurs, and security considerations brought about by them: Extensibility. Manipulating files. Open standards. Options dialogs and deep customization. Information density. Consensual updates. Privacy. Multiple code paths. Low-level/technical details. Backwards compatibility. Secrets and easter eggs. Platform-native applications. Ownership of the bits in your possession. And I've been a linux geek for a while. It is still a bastion of "the old way" of doing things but there are so many people trying to rewrite the rules, pulling the platform in their own direction and writing new code when they should be contributing to existing code. Mastering Linux seems to entail mastering several sub-platforms all at once. If only they'd agree on conventions newer than 30 years old. BSD looks interesting though.... if only it ran software I actually want to use As an increasingly old computer nerd, I am yelling at clouds and holding on to what I have for dear life. Too much of my identity is wrapped around this idea that computers and tech are personal brain-amplification devices, and not appliances like everyone else seems to want them to be.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    They’ll sell all that back to us.
    - tomc1985 6y ago
      I don't want to upvote this, but it is so true.
      - donmcronald 6y ago
        Hopefully the large margins will create more competition. My wish would be for open source projects that rely on infrastructure as code to allow people to deploy apps on their own with some type of cost plus charge. The more efficient your app, the bigger the plus part can be while staying price competitive. It’s kind of possible already, but the massive profits in per user per month billing alongside feature tiers to maximize price discrimination means we’re stuck with the status quo for a while.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    I have to agree. I don't like the direction I see things going. I've tried more and more recently to shift to terminal usage only, as I find most terminal programs still respect the items you listed. I've actually been fairly successful, on my main machine the only dependencies I have on graphical apps are a web browser, image/video viewing/manipulation, and gaming. Everything else, I have at least one terminal based program that I use. > As an increasingly old computer nerd, I am holding on to what I have for dear life. Too much of my identity is wrapped around this idea that computers and tech are brain-amplification devices, and not appliances like everyone else seems to want them to be. I feel this. I hate seeing everyone become more and more sucked into technology, but with less and less understanding. I want to know my tech inside and out as much as possible, and be able to control it. --- As a preface to everything below this I'm not good at programming. I've got a theory. I think that there are two main philosophies when it comes to creating $THING. One is to focus on pumping out features, and one is to focus on correctness. Eventually, the project focusing on features will become unmaintainable, and a new project will form from the correctness project -- focused on features. This new fork/direction will continue, until it becomes to large to deal with. And thus the cycle repeats. I believe Linux is currently straddling the Features/Correctness line, and that BSD will be what follows up. This is obviously years/decades in the future though. I could also see something like RedoxOS catching on instead. Edit: Spelling. Probably still missed some. Also, image -> image/video.
    - tomc1985 6y ago
      I think you are right about the features/correctness thing. People seem to have a cargo cult fascination with new features. And if you keep piling them on and on eventually the whole thing will topple over. A new tower is then built, and far into the future it too will eventually collapse under its own weight. The fashionable way to break this cycle is to remove old things or unpopular things. But this creates all sorts of negative externalities with your users, and in my mind is the most selfish option for that choice. There is another option: saying 'no'. Calling something "done". Doing what you set out to do and then moving on. How to do this in a way that is sustainably profitable and prevents someone else from coming along and eating your lunch for as long as possible, is something I would very much like to learn how to do.
ngold 6y ago
Where's my barebones umatrix browser? That should be a thing...right?
- Shared404 6y ago
  What I really want is something that will translate HTML/HTTP to Gopher. I'm really just kinda done with the web. I still need to set up Gopher for my site, but it's on my to do list.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Gemini, maybe? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html
- vetrom 6y ago
  Have you tried uzbl? (see uzbl.org)
donmcronald 6y ago
Step 1. Build bad UI. Confuse users. Step 2. Don’t educate users. Blame them and call them dumb. Step 3. Remove features. Make UI worse. Step 4. GOTO 1. I also blame engagement metrics. “Hey look! We removed this useful widget and now users spend an extra 2 minutes in the app. They love it!”
- bhawks 6y ago
  I recommend balancing this perspective with the fact that most users are using your UI to get a small fragment of their job done. Expecting them to spend time to learn and configure your UI is not cost free. Therefore it needs some convincing value to justify the investment. If that can't be done for most users simplification (by way of removal) is a valid way of caring for your user ecosystem.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    > If that can't be done for most users simplification (by way of removal) is a valid way of caring for your user ecosystem. It's valid, but extremely selfish. I think one should strive to minimize the amount of negative externalities one creates for their users, especially by removing something that people use. I'm not against removing things -- it's just that the current development zeitgeist seems to believe in killing things as soon as they hit a growth peak, and not when that something is nearly dead. To this end I really admire(d) Microsoft for just how much they cho(o)se to keep in their big ol enterprise platforms like Windows or Office. Hell the Mac OS versions of Office have the same menu layouts that I learned when I was in elementary school. There are so many things they could/should kill -- please God let Wordart be on that list -- but don't, because they know people have muscle memory, and because they know a platform with lots of diverse capabilities is part of how their customer base thrives. The Office ribbon may be a fantastic UI design, but people hate it because it broke muscle memory and shattered expectations. Some of the groupings make no sense, and people constantly have trouble finding things, is at least partially attributable to just how long is takes for intuition and expectations to die.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    Yes. Definitely. A lot of my complaints come from hidden UI components and a lack of discoverability. For example, I think it’s Chrome where the action to clear download items is hidden behind a ... menu even though “Clear All” is the only option. Why not put that right there instead of the ...? I think it’s ok to have some expectation for the user to learn the UI. As a user though, it often feels like the designers want to impede my ability to learn the UI. I used to be able to click around and discover everything. Now I need to sort through 50 articles of blog spam to find out what gestures or hidden menus to use. Even the docs suck (or don’t exist).
Santosh83 6y ago
That may be one of the stated pretexts but its false. The real reason is as always in history: inordinate corporate greed for wealth and power. Corporations are just privatised govts. Unless there are ever-evolving checks and balances, they will inevitably attract control to themselves.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Small correction: corporations are private military-style top-down dictatorships, not just any kind of government.
athrun 6y ago
At the same time, there's never been so much open-source software and hacker-friendly hardware available. It's true that the average computing device is turning into an appliance (is it a bad thing?), but it also appears the options for DIY are ever-expanding.
- GeneralMayhem 6y ago
  >the average computing device is turning into an appliance (is it a bad thing?) Yes, for those of us who mostly want the appliance, but sometimes want to tweak it. I don't want to have to build a system from the ground up to get my desired experience if it's 98% the same as the appliance would have been out of the box; I'd much rather start from the appliance and just change the 2%.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  The problem is these new DIY platforms don't have the kind of reach that mobile or even desktop computing has. Even 30 years ago you had people buying PCs by the droves for all sorts of general-purpose tasks. Raspberry Pis and such are great for a lot of niche use cases but you don't have people buying them as a GP computing platform.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    Not yet. I know of one company that has a few "desktops" that are Pi4 and I've seen loads of them powering "active terminals" - like in-store menu and office status screens. Gotta start somewhere. Special case and move towards general case (some call it crossing the chasm)
- bitwize 6y ago
  At the same time, when I think "appliance" I think something like a toaster. Push down the lever and the wire gets hot. Dead simple, nothing hidden or artifically withheld from the user. But that's not what modern appliances look like; we're getting ever closer to the future described in "Unauthorized Bread". As Strong Bad might say, we have too much appliance in our computers, and too much computer in our appliances.
bitwize 6y ago
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the more of a system you open up to customization via plugins/extensions/add-ons, the more damage a malicious plugin/extension/add-on can do. So, sorry, suck it up: extensions will be limited and restricted, especially in as security-critical a program as a browser. But note that, say, programmers' text editors suffer from the same issue. How many of you Emacs users download entire distributions of packages for Emacs without even thinking about it? Have you audited them all? If it can be loaded into Emacs, it basically has arbitrary access to the entire session, and anything your uid has permission to access. We've already seen several malicious npm packages... all it takes is one strategic MELPA bomb and Emacs may not be able to recover from the black eye to its already diminished reputation. Contrast that with Visual Studio Code, which has a restricted, well-defined API extensions may use. Oh, and the other thing about restricted, well-defined APIs? You're not locked into your present architecture. You can rewrite the entire code base, and all extensions will Just Work provided you reimplement the extension API. Extensions in the Emacs paradigm of having all system internals exposed to them will break the moment those internals change. Restricted, well-defined APIs are system design 101.

Everything I love about tech is slowly being taken away, because technology is apparently too hard for the masses :(

r/unixporn and r/usabilityporn will welcome you. Probably a little too much customization to be totally honest. Edit: I guess this wasn't really related, but you may enjoy nonetheless. I personally found myself enjoying tech again by playing around with Linux/BSD and alternative software. YMMV

tomc1985 6y ago
It's so much more than that though. All of these things seem to be under direct attack, mostly by businesses, wantrepreneurs, and security considerations brought about by them: Extensibility. Manipulating files. Open standards. Options dialogs and deep customization. Information density. Consensual updates. Privacy. Multiple code paths. Low-level/technical details. Backwards compatibility. Secrets and easter eggs. Platform-native applications. Ownership of the bits in your possession. And I've been a linux geek for a while. It is still a bastion of "the old way" of doing things but there are so many people trying to rewrite the rules, pulling the platform in their own direction and writing new code when they should be contributing to existing code. Mastering Linux seems to entail mastering several sub-platforms all at once. If only they'd agree on conventions newer than 30 years old. BSD looks interesting though.... if only it ran software I actually want to use As an increasingly old computer nerd, I am yelling at clouds and holding on to what I have for dear life. Too much of my identity is wrapped around this idea that computers and tech are personal brain-amplification devices, and not appliances like everyone else seems to want them to be.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  They’ll sell all that back to us.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    I don't want to upvote this, but it is so true.
    - donmcronald 6y ago
      Hopefully the large margins will create more competition. My wish would be for open source projects that rely on infrastructure as code to allow people to deploy apps on their own with some type of cost plus charge. The more efficient your app, the bigger the plus part can be while staying price competitive. It’s kind of possible already, but the massive profits in per user per month billing alongside feature tiers to maximize price discrimination means we’re stuck with the status quo for a while.
- Shared404 6y ago
  I have to agree. I don't like the direction I see things going. I've tried more and more recently to shift to terminal usage only, as I find most terminal programs still respect the items you listed. I've actually been fairly successful, on my main machine the only dependencies I have on graphical apps are a web browser, image/video viewing/manipulation, and gaming. Everything else, I have at least one terminal based program that I use. > As an increasingly old computer nerd, I am holding on to what I have for dear life. Too much of my identity is wrapped around this idea that computers and tech are brain-amplification devices, and not appliances like everyone else seems to want them to be. I feel this. I hate seeing everyone become more and more sucked into technology, but with less and less understanding. I want to know my tech inside and out as much as possible, and be able to control it. --- As a preface to everything below this I'm not good at programming. I've got a theory. I think that there are two main philosophies when it comes to creating $THING. One is to focus on pumping out features, and one is to focus on correctness. Eventually, the project focusing on features will become unmaintainable, and a new project will form from the correctness project -- focused on features. This new fork/direction will continue, until it becomes to large to deal with. And thus the cycle repeats. I believe Linux is currently straddling the Features/Correctness line, and that BSD will be what follows up. This is obviously years/decades in the future though. I could also see something like RedoxOS catching on instead. Edit: Spelling. Probably still missed some. Also, image -> image/video.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    I think you are right about the features/correctness thing. People seem to have a cargo cult fascination with new features. And if you keep piling them on and on eventually the whole thing will topple over. A new tower is then built, and far into the future it too will eventually collapse under its own weight. The fashionable way to break this cycle is to remove old things or unpopular things. But this creates all sorts of negative externalities with your users, and in my mind is the most selfish option for that choice. There is another option: saying 'no'. Calling something "done". Doing what you set out to do and then moving on. How to do this in a way that is sustainably profitable and prevents someone else from coming along and eating your lunch for as long as possible, is something I would very much like to learn how to do.

ngold 6y ago

Where's my barebones umatrix browser? That should be a thing...right?

Shared404 6y ago
What I really want is something that will translate HTML/HTTP to Gopher. I'm really just kinda done with the web. I still need to set up Gopher for my site, but it's on my to do list.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Gemini, maybe? https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html
vetrom 6y ago
Have you tried uzbl? (see uzbl.org)

donmcronald 6y ago

Step 1. Build bad UI. Confuse users. Step 2. Don’t educate users. Blame them and call them dumb. Step 3. Remove features. Make UI worse. Step 4. GOTO 1. I also blame engagement metrics. “Hey look! We removed this useful widget and now users spend an extra 2 minutes in the app. They love it!”

bhawks 6y ago
I recommend balancing this perspective with the fact that most users are using your UI to get a small fragment of their job done. Expecting them to spend time to learn and configure your UI is not cost free. Therefore it needs some convincing value to justify the investment. If that can't be done for most users simplification (by way of removal) is a valid way of caring for your user ecosystem.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  > If that can't be done for most users simplification (by way of removal) is a valid way of caring for your user ecosystem. It's valid, but extremely selfish. I think one should strive to minimize the amount of negative externalities one creates for their users, especially by removing something that people use. I'm not against removing things -- it's just that the current development zeitgeist seems to believe in killing things as soon as they hit a growth peak, and not when that something is nearly dead. To this end I really admire(d) Microsoft for just how much they cho(o)se to keep in their big ol enterprise platforms like Windows or Office. Hell the Mac OS versions of Office have the same menu layouts that I learned when I was in elementary school. There are so many things they could/should kill -- please God let Wordart be on that list -- but don't, because they know people have muscle memory, and because they know a platform with lots of diverse capabilities is part of how their customer base thrives. The Office ribbon may be a fantastic UI design, but people hate it because it broke muscle memory and shattered expectations. Some of the groupings make no sense, and people constantly have trouble finding things, is at least partially attributable to just how long is takes for intuition and expectations to die.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  Yes. Definitely. A lot of my complaints come from hidden UI components and a lack of discoverability. For example, I think it’s Chrome where the action to clear download items is hidden behind a ... menu even though “Clear All” is the only option. Why not put that right there instead of the ...? I think it’s ok to have some expectation for the user to learn the UI. As a user though, it often feels like the designers want to impede my ability to learn the UI. I used to be able to click around and discover everything. Now I need to sort through 50 articles of blog spam to find out what gestures or hidden menus to use. Even the docs suck (or don’t exist).

Santosh83 6y ago

That may be one of the stated pretexts but its false. The real reason is as always in history: inordinate corporate greed for wealth and power. Corporations are just privatised govts. Unless there are ever-evolving checks and balances, they will inevitably attract control to themselves.

tsimionescu 6y ago
Small correction: corporations are private military-style top-down dictatorships, not just any kind of government.

athrun 6y ago

At the same time, there's never been so much open-source software and hacker-friendly hardware available. It's true that the average computing device is turning into an appliance (is it a bad thing?), but it also appears the options for DIY are ever-expanding.

GeneralMayhem 6y ago
>the average computing device is turning into an appliance (is it a bad thing?) Yes, for those of us who mostly want the appliance, but sometimes want to tweak it. I don't want to have to build a system from the ground up to get my desired experience if it's 98% the same as the appliance would have been out of the box; I'd much rather start from the appliance and just change the 2%.
tomc1985 6y ago
The problem is these new DIY platforms don't have the kind of reach that mobile or even desktop computing has. Even 30 years ago you had people buying PCs by the droves for all sorts of general-purpose tasks. Raspberry Pis and such are great for a lot of niche use cases but you don't have people buying them as a GP computing platform.
- edoceo 6y ago
  Not yet. I know of one company that has a few "desktops" that are Pi4 and I've seen loads of them powering "active terminals" - like in-store menu and office status screens. Gotta start somewhere. Special case and move towards general case (some call it crossing the chasm)
bitwize 6y ago
At the same time, when I think "appliance" I think something like a toaster. Push down the lever and the wire gets hot. Dead simple, nothing hidden or artifically withheld from the user. But that's not what modern appliances look like; we're getting ever closer to the future described in "Unauthorized Bread". As Strong Bad might say, we have too much appliance in our computers, and too much computer in our appliances.

bitwize 6y ago

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the more of a system you open up to customization via plugins/extensions/add-ons, the more damage a malicious plugin/extension/add-on can do. So, sorry, suck it up: extensions will be limited and restricted, especially in as security-critical a program as a browser. But note that, say, programmers' text editors suffer from the same issue. How many of you Emacs users download entire distributions of packages for Emacs without even thinking about it? Have you audited them all? If it can be loaded into Emacs, it basically has arbitrary access to the entire session, and anything your uid has permission to access. We've already seen several malicious npm packages... all it takes is one strategic MELPA bomb and Emacs may not be able to recover from the black eye to its already diminished reputation. Contrast that with Visual Studio Code, which has a restricted, well-defined API extensions may use. Oh, and the other thing about restricted, well-defined APIs? You're not locked into your present architecture. You can rewrite the entire code base, and all extensions will Just Work provided you reimplement the extension API. Extensions in the Emacs paradigm of having all system internals exposed to them will break the moment those internals change. Restricted, well-defined APIs are system design 101.