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People expect technology to suck because it sucks

• jpm_sd 6y ago
  Upvoted for the headline before I even read the post; and in full agreement after reading. I'm somewhat inspired to keep a similar diary of techno-suck moments... but there would be so many!
• salvadorellana 6y ago
  Hi, I never stopped to think about how much time I spend on this kind of request, just to get what I'm trying to obtain. Then, if we are worried about using our time wisely, what to do?
• Loughla 6y ago
  This might sound like a flippant question, but it's not. Isn't the point of tech to tinker? When did problems become problems that you shouldn't try to solve, instead of a reason to learn about the tech? I've really been down about technology lately, after working with 6-12th graders. They just don't get how anything works, if it doesn't immediately work for them. They don't want to take it apart and figure it out. This blog piece just seems like more of that. Why bother with figuring out how things work when you can just throw them away? Now get off my lawn, I guess.
  • lallysingh 6y ago
    .. sure, until you have to do something for realsies and the tech is the only way to do it. Then it's just fucking your life over.
    • Loughla 6y ago
      Explain further, please. I don't think I'm following you.
      • morceauxdebois 6y ago
        It's one thing to tinker with Linux to learn how the OS works and another thin to troubleshoot it just as you are about to give a presentation.
        • Loughla 6y ago
          Got it. Thanks.
      • MereInterest 6y ago
        Here's an example. I use Discord for keeping in touch with friends, running D&D sessions, etc. Discord on Linux has a random crash whenever in a voice call. I've followed up on threads, and others have this same issue, possibly related to glibc, but there aren't any definitive solutions yet. So, instead, I tinker. I make a quick two-line python script to launch discord repeatedly every time it crashes. Discord reconnects to the voice chat on restart, and all is well. Usually, people don't even notice that I've dropped out of 1-2 seconds. But Discord does more at startup than just reconnecting. It also checks for new updates, and refuses to start if there is an update waiting. So now I've dropped out of a call, I have self-opening popups letting me know that there is an update available, and I'm trying to download/install the .deb update before the D&D players get bored and start making puns. Nothing good happens when the players have started making puns. I like tinkering. I really do. But I like tinkering in order to solve my own problems, and to make my life easier. I don't like tinkering on limited time in order to add yet another support to a house of cards that is gently swaying in the breeze while I'm trying to hold a D&D session in the top room of that card-house.
  • ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    People want to drive cars, not all of them want to be mechanics. People want their phones and software to just work. Or at the very least not get bricked every friggin update.
    • nightski 6y ago
      I think that is a terrible analogy. A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B. If you only are capable of utilizing the bare minimum it's going to make life a lot harder. Take excel for example, the people who are able to reason about and write their own advanced excel spreadsheets in the workforce have a huge leg above those who only can do what the UI lets them do on their phone. There is a lot more to computing than treating it like a hammer.
      • 6_past_30_til_6 6y ago
        You can’t say that they have a leg up in general because It Depends. I’m an engineer and my job is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). My dissertation involved developing highly parallelized solution algorithms for a specific type of problem. As such, I am quite well versed in low level Fortran/C code and MPI because I wrote code to do that, “that” being to solve an equation. I know this set of equations like it was second nature because of how much time I’ve invested in it. Not only that, but I would consider myself somewhat of an “expert” in the underlying mechanisms to solve these equations. Those being finite element methods. I can talk to you about tensor spaces and discretization and derivation of the numerical algorithms to solve these problems. I’d consider the code that I wrote/extended to be tech. My current job role is “just” an engineer working for a company where all I basically do is run and analyze models using commercial software. Even though I know the underlying low level code/algorithms of what I’m doing, I would be the first to tell you that a 21 year old mechanical engineering graduate could do my job as effectively and as completely as I could. Because none of the above paragraph actually matters in what I do. Maybe it gave me a leg up in the hiring process, but the knowledge I am applying for my job (which I enjoy) is what you’d learn in a 4 year degree with electives in eg numerical methods and fluid dynamics.
  • 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
    > Isn't the point of tech to tinker? What no extremely not. It's to... do things? Tinkering with tech is cool if that's your hobby but it's not mine and I'm trying to do shit not pick up another hobby here. It's like the people that argue that cars have lost something intrinsic in recent decades and now no one knows how to do work on their own vehicles. That standard was an artifact of unreliability, not something to be applauded. Tech should get out of the way and let you do what you're trying to do. If "tinker" is that thing then sure have fun. But for most people that's not the point at all.
    • tashoecraft 6y ago
      I think the op was close. I don't expect everyone to tinker with something. Not everyone needs to be interested in cars, or computers, and want to build and maintain them. But, I think people need to put in a little more effort to have a general understanding of the tools they entrust with their life and use constantly. If you interact with a computer all day, every day, you should dedicate some time to understanding more about how it works. That's not saying you're tinkering with it or it's your hobby. But, when it's a main part of your life, not knowing anything is just bad planning. When things go wrong you're now screwed. It's just survival planning, you don't need to be an expert, but knowing a little bit puts you ahead of 90% of users.
      • 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
        How much do you know about metallurgy, plastics, concrete engineering, hydrocarbon refining, etc etc etc all the thousands of extremely specific domains of expertise that modern society is built upon? The fact that you can possibly get more out of some tech by knowing how it works is because most of it is very new, which is basically just an anomaly that is fading. Eventually how computers work will be like those other things: expert domains that we rely on but users don't need to understand. It's already largely like that and that is good. I get that everyone here is a nerd and grew up tinkering with their computers and this makes them sad.
  • throwanem 6y ago
    > Isn't the point of tech to tinker? No. We claim to be building tools, but nothing we build operates like a tool does. My hammers don't randomly lose their heads. My vise grips don't every so often fly apart into a collection of oddly shaped bits of metal, and require I painstakingly reassemble them by hand. My benchtop power supply doesn't require constant calibration. Even my oscilloscope, which actually is a computer that just happens to be built for signal processing, functions in a way that's predictable and reliable. And if any of these did misbehave in the ways I describe, I'd regard them as unfit for purpose and, while I would likely be able to repair them and put them back in service, the ideal outcome would be replacement with something that didn't require the same effort just to make it able to do the job it is sold as being able to do. Tools exist for the sake of making other tasks easier, not as a source of tasks in themselves. There is definitely failure happening here. But it's not on the part of people who are upset to have been told what they're buying are tools, only to have them turn out not to be.
  • jacobr1 6y ago
    I'm not sure there is an agreed point. The industrial revolution is still young. Most people made a substantial portion of the goods they use historically. Even when trading for goods, it often was for intermediate inputs like cloth rather than fully finished items. But even then, I would say no, tinkering was the point of hobbyist tech, or professional/craftsman tech. But the recent history of "consumer goods" hasn't been about tinkering ... I think the key difference in the past few decades is maintenance. Even in the era of consumer goods in the past hundred years or so, maintaining your possessions was expected. Some might pay a professional for specialized work, but since most things were maintained a large fraction of the work fell on the owner ... and this also leads to tinkering, not as an expectation, but an outcome. Consider darning your socks, or sharpening your hatchet. Shining ones shoes or replacing a sparkplug.
  • 6_past_30_til_6 6y ago
    The point of technology is to enable us to do things that we either can’t or don’t want to do. This ranges from simple time savings (don’t want to do/make things easier) to things we literally can’t do (high precision timing for example). Tinkering is a hobby, your hobby.
  • OkGoDoIt 6y ago
    Nowadays most software doesn’t let you tinker with it. Want to tinker with your chat client? Too bad, everything (that any of your friends actually use) is closed source and proprietary now. Frustrated with social media? Unless you can convince all your friends to switch to mastodon, you’re stuck with whatever Facebook/Instagram forces upon you. Excited about the future of virtual reality? Hope you don’t mind playing by Facebook/Oculus‘s rules. Want to fix an annoying issue with how your email client categorizes email? Well there’s no way to integrate with that system, google barely supports standards like pop and imap anymore, and outlook is transitioning away from a powerful plug-in system to a silly new web-based model. A very specific example: Something that’s been frustrating me for years is Google photos on iOS does not synchronize whether I have starred/favorited a photo on iOS‘s photos to google photos. I tried fixing this myself with a helper program, but the Google photos API does not let you set whether a photo is marked as a favorite, and you cannot manually add photos to the favorites album via API. I’ve tried several hacky workarounds but I simply cannot build the simple UX fix that seems obvious to me, nor can I get anyone from Google to acknowledge my many suggestions to them to implement this obvious feature. I looked into trying to use Plex or Microsoft onedrive as an alternate photo backup system, but they are much worse than Google Photos in terms of reliability and UX. I’ve looking into open source solutions to replace this whole workflow, but the amount of time and effort and money and compromises required for a system like that simply isn’t worth it. So I put up with the annoyance, since there’s effectively nothing I can do about it. I used to love programming because it made me omnipotent, I could change things as I wanted and tie together systems exactly the way I liked. But now I keep hitting brick walls, most of which are imposed because of business models and not for purely technology reasons. The frustration adds up, to the point where I no longer enjoy bothering to try at all. Now I am only involved in technology to the extent that I make money from it, and I’m in the process of transitioning my career away from tech altogether. So much potential squandered.
    • em-bee 6y ago
      that's why i use Free Software and Open Source. same bugs and same irritations, but at least i have the feeling that i could do something about it. instead of feeling helpless i get to make a calculation: ok, so to fix this issue i have to get the source version, identify the problem, figure out how to fix it, submit the fix upstream. hmm, 5 hours of work? do i have the time? can i pay someone to do it? is it worth it? if the answer is 'no' then i made a conscious decision to tolerate this issue, because i considered the tradeoff. because i have this choice, i feel empowered, even if i decide not to do anything about it. with closed source software i don't have this choice and any issue i run into makes me feel helpless.
• lallysingh 6y ago
  I'll point out that many of these annoyances don't have equivalents on the command-line. And the annoyances I do have on the command line I can mostly work around with wrapping things in shell scripts, aliases, or functions. It's nice to have a simple interface and high extensibility on top of it.
  • Joker_vD 6y ago
    Well, then there is also the annoyance of having way too many wrappers to wrap your head around, and it's one that I personally encounter somewhat regularly. Still has not figured out how to deal with that one.
    • gryfft 6y ago
      Well, there is no problem that cannot be solved by adding a layer of indirection, except the problem of too many layers of indirection.
    • lallysingh 6y ago
      Use names that you can find easily via tab completion from what you were thinking about. E.g., all my scripts for fixing transient problems are ~/bin/fix-*.sh
  • matthewmacleod 6y ago
    meh. I’ve noticed recently that Bash for whatever reason seems to just randomly erase my entire history, which is infuriating (though obviously not enough for me to invest the time to investigate or fix it at all). Stuff breaks all over, CLI or otherwise.
  • pixl97 6y ago
    Eh, it still happens. You'll find plenty of CLI utilities that can have small, but breaking changes between minor versions and require all kinds of hacks to get working correctly in a mixed environment.
  • csours 6y ago
    rm -rf / bin/bar/bash unexpectedly bricked my system
• CapitalistCartr 6y ago
  As Douglas Adams famously said, "Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet".
  • pitdicker 6y ago
    That is a quote I'll have to remember. Appearently it was Bran Ferren who said it, and was quoted by Douglas Adams (source with broken https: https://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html https://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html)
• scoutt 6y ago
  I kind of agree, but calling it technology is pretty broad (article it's mostly app related). Technology-wise, I also expect things ranging from a flashlight to a CT scan to not suck, and they usually do not. Edit: flashlight instead of torchlight.
  • typon 6y ago
    People literally have to get months of training to operate these machines because they are highly specialized, non intuitive and finnicky. Using medical instruments as an example of good software isn't a great idea
    • scoutt 6y ago
      I don't get the point of your comment. Sorry. What about the flashlight? Since the article talks about technology... Why is "technology = only software or apps or things related to a phone"? Technology can be something that goes from fire, passing through a pencil up to whatever application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. Edit: flashlight instead of torchlight.
    • StavrosK 6y ago
      Jeez man, what kind of torchlight did you buy?!
  • kroltan 6y ago
    Consumer technology would be a better qualification. Or at least computers. - The whole current USB ports fiasco; - Just look at any wireless headset and you'll find at least 2 major bugs, between connectivity, quality, or general usability; - Smart TVs suck terribly even at the high-ish level, both performance, image quality and usability; - Touchscreen stovetops get triggered by food splatter; And so on Basically anything that has a microprocessor anywhere is bound to go haywire somehow at some point.
    • scoutt 6y ago
      Yes, consumer technology is more appropriate. Better yet consumer software/electronics, I believe.
• commandlinefan 6y ago
  The sad thing is that it doesn't have to be this way. Business schools, in fear of phantom product development teams that waste huge R&D budgets developing beautiful products that cost too much for anybody to buy, spend all of their time preaching against quality in any form. Business school graduates are trained to be suspicious of any attention to detail and are explicitly incentivized to compress schedules for nothing more than the sake of compressing schedules.
  • unphased 6y ago
    I don't personally have an issue with this, as it makes the market perhaps slightly more friendly to those who do take (a little) extra time to put in some quality.
• airza 6y ago
  I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job it was to sit there and look for broken stuff. (I'm sure I'm biased as someone whose first job out of college was to sit there and look for broken stuff.)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    I agree with this sentiment in general. Of course, we have a ton more features than we used to have, but I think given the newness of software in years past, we were OK with bugs and issues because of the novelty of it all. Now we are in 2020 and iPhone updates STILL cause battery issues. The iPhone has been out for 14 years... Our expectations have changed. Tools like Excel should just work - and yet, when I try to save a file, sometimes it freezes and crashes. How is that acceptable now?
  • jjoonathan 6y ago
    Yeah, but then you'd have to raise the price to pay for the testing and the jokers a block down the street who YOLO'd their competing product into the marketplace without testing would grab all your sales. You'd be out of business and your competitors would be laughing their way to the bank while the customers still suffered constantly from a broken product.
    • Jtsummers 6y ago
      If it were only for novel products this would be a reasonable argument. See Netscape's rush to release their browser as an example of what you're talk about. But the worst part is that this is an issue with established products that have secured their market, and will even receive money every year from their customers. They have both the money and the time to pace themselves and test things properly, but they don't.
• morley 6y ago
  I think tech is other people. Tech doesn't suck because technology is bad: it sucks because life is complicated, and other people are prone to mistakes, or prioritizes that don't align with yours, or have limited attention. Case in point: I don't particularly like the design of this site, as I find it difficult to look at (even if I abstractly can see how the color choice is bold). The night mode toggle seems even harder to read; an uncharitable interpretation is the author thumbing their nose at people who want night mode. A charitable read is that it's a funny joke. The author / designer of the blog has different priorities than I do. An uncharitable way of putting this is that the blog design is "bad," but I really dislike that outlook. I'd much rather that people look at things charitably, and try to understand what other people are going for, and be willing to say "this isn't for me." I think the article doesn't quite do this.
  • thebean11 6y ago
    > I don't particularly like the design of this site, as I find it difficult to look at As someone who didn't realize I had a permanent eye floater until browsing this site, I agree.
• cj 6y ago
  > People expect technology to suck What people? Of the people I know not in the tech industry, most people like technology and talk more about the benefits than sucking. Including my 87 y/o grandmother who loves her ipad.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    That's kinda the point. People expect technology to suck so they don't bother complaining about it because they're just used to it sucking.
    • cyberbanjo 6y ago
      I thought it was kind of a mental thing where you're so used to technology sucking you don't even know that it could be better. There was another comment about a developer getting RSI and having to use an Android as their main device and not being familiar with the UI and feeling restrictive. Iff that's your default computing mental state and you don't expect computing devices to give you a lot more power you just expect and know them to be restrictive devices that you typically consume media from then you don't even have experiences to compare the suck to. The suck is what it is and you expect it to suck why would you say that. At least when you complain about the weather we both can acknowledge that the weather changes, unless you're a technological power user the weather doesn't change.
• gpspake 6y ago
  As soon as I clicked on this, I recognized the author's signature yellow background and font from their previous post about buying a new monitor (which I also found at the top of HN) https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/ https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/ I enjoyed both posts. Great titles, well written, serious but witty. Props to the author; I'll be subscribing for more.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jaclaz 6y ago
    I had missed that one, thanks for pointing it out.
• glaberficken 6y ago
  Woah, have you tried the night mode on op blog? I have never seen anything like that before.
  • pixl97 6y ago
    Day mode: With the power of 1000 suns I now declare you blind! Night mode: I've played this video game before. A monster is going to jump out and get me at any moment.
  • brendoelfrendo 6y ago
    You haven't seen anything like that before because it's awful and useless.
    • glaberficken 6y ago
      But the guy is a UI/UX consultant!
  • marcosdumay 6y ago
    It really is night mode, not just some dark mode for a virtual world. It's even night on the wild mode; the author could add some crickets sound, it would make everything better. The author also seems to be one of those people that think that sunlight is yellow.
• martythemaniak 6y ago
  It "sucks" because we're constantly changing stuff and making new stuff. We do this because we want new stuff. There are plenty of industries where things don't change quickly and people complain about everything taking forever. To use an analogy, you can have things work like NASA's SLS Rocket - expensive, slow, well-thought-out and reliable. Or you can have things work like SpaceX - impressive pace, bleeding edge, occasional explosion. There's no happy medium, so careful what you wish for. I'd rather deal with all the author's problems than deal with a Nokia phone.
• tannhaeuser 6y ago
  It seems we had it right around 2006-2010 or so, then decided it's too boring and perfection doesn't bring in money anyway.
  • taylodl 6y ago
    What do you think we had "right" in the time period and what made it "right"?
    • tannhaeuser 6y ago
      Mac OS 10.6, Ubuntu 10.04, Firefox, a pluralistic web based on progressive enhancement, music downloads, even Windows 7, all came to work towards what people actually wanted around that time. Then came the iPhone (not bad per se, but creating the mobile web crisis), AWS, Google dominance, fscking big data
    • kroltan 6y ago
      Computers were good enough to perform basically any task a regular person would need, but simple enough that they couldn't fail in too many ways. User interfaces were honest about what was going on instead of giving blanket error messages with dead help links. I really wish it was just nostalgia, but my parents somehow were able to fully use MSN Messenger's features with not much hassle, but if I even as much as show a screenshot of Discord, Slack, or even modern Skype, they might just shriek at the sight, let alone be able to use those softwares. So I don't see how we've improved at large. Yes, UIs are prettier to look at and we have more animations and higher image quality and all that, but if anything functionality is very much stagnated, though I wouldn't be as bold as to say regressed.
• katsume3 6y ago
  I try to train my systems to behave just the way I like them. It's no different than coding: you are bending tech to your will. I don't see the difference in configuring a brand new Virtual Machine and that of coding a new piece of software. For me, the definition of non-sucky technology is the ability to configure, tinker, and otherwise mess with systems to make them do your bidding. This is why I love computers, because no two computers are in the same state, and I always laugh using other people's computers because you can be sure they have configured it in a weird idiosyncratic way, entirely different than one's own configuration.
  • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    The definition of non-sucky technology is not having to waste time on any of that. If you think tinkering and configuring are fun you should stay as far away as possible from software design, because you have no insight into what most users expect from tech.
    • katsume3 6y ago
      > If you think tinkering and configuring are fun you should stay as far away as possible from software design You overlook that not giving the user options to configure their systems is bad practice as it can force all manner of dark patterns on them, and they are left constrained in that software, unable to bend it to their will. Let them tweak, I say!
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        Let them tweak, yes, but they shouldn't have to tweak just to get things to work as expected.
• jacobr1 6y ago
  A big part of the problem is how new everything is. We keep improving it and rebuilding it. You can many of his examples would have all their bugs removed if we heavily constrained the features added and didn't migrate to new platform. Of course real people also want new features! We can probably expect increased quality when the rate of change decreases and we either see more stability and incremental growth or stagnation. But if new technology is be invented (not just new applications or iterations) we are going keep seeing issues. I'd rather just ride the tech-accelerate curve myself, but does come at a cost.
• tyingq 6y ago
  For me, part of the "suck" is the sprawl of so many different technologies and specialization areas. Back in the 70's, there weren't so many technology choices, and there weren't so many different job titles and roles. So, typically, a tech team had a pretty clear path on what technology to use. And, you could get 3 or 4 "tech lead" type people in a room, even for a huge application, and between them, they knew the system from top to bottom. And they all understood who was responsible for what. I understand we can't go back to that. But it's hard to deliver quality with today's sprawl.
• phaedrus 6y ago
  The whole enterprise of writing software, from top to bottom, (historical) beginning to present day, has been based on the fallacious, machismo idea of perfect execution by the programmer of writing correct forms. This is actually impossible thus our software is terrible.
  • NickM 6y ago
    I don't buy that excuse at all. Sure, perfection is impossible, but there's a very, very broad spectrum of quality that spans between "perfect" and "completely unusable". To say "well, we can't be perfect, so everything is terrible" seems absurdly black and white to me.
• jayp1418 6y ago
  Simple solution use Gnome3
• agustif 6y ago
  - My macbook keyobard sucks, some keys dont press, other get pressed double or tripe. I deal with this using a bluetooth keyboard on top of the mac kb lol - WSL Stopped working a few weeks ago after a windows update, I haven't been able to fix it, my only option is format and reinstall OS at this point... - My phone screen broke a little first, then it stopped working for it's top half, Since it's an iphone x, I deal with this by using the little trick to reach the top parts of the screen with the thumb, and that's how I almost don't use my phone. I can also get random stuff open if I leave it unlocked, since it's touchpad gets activated like crazy by itself, I luckily enough have an official cover which keeps it blocked if it's lid is closed. LOL, and I'am a power user who can fix things and google for solutions, we're just f
• baq 6y ago
  IOW the ROI on delivering quality is surprisingly (to some) low. Release early, release often.
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    The market encourages competition, not perfection. If you want to see some high-quality but low-feature software, look in spaces where there is less market competition but the risk of failure is death (and the civil and criminal penalties attached for failure are high). You'll find programs that do only one or two things but definitely do them, as specified.
• cmiller1 6y ago
  I've used many of the same technologies he's talking about and have experienced almost none of these issues... maybe I just got lucky but it seems we have the bigger problem that these systems are so complex that they've almost reached chaos theory levels of total randomness of behavior from small changes to initial inputs.
  • jodrellblank 6y ago
    See "The mess we're in" talk by Joe Armstrong (Erlang creator) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 - from 6 years ago. Your computer with 1TB storage has ~2^8trillion possible states it could all be in. Number of states you could count through if you burnt up The Sun trying: ~2^128 or so, tops. Atoms in the universe: ~10^80.
• bobochan 6y ago
  This is one of the strangest takes that I have ever read. I can remember my dad's turn on the waiting list finally coming up so that it was his turn to bring the HP calculator home from the government lab where he worked for the weekend. It was an absolute marvel. The whole family sat around the kitchen table for hours as he talked about RPN and showed us how the calculator worked. It was magic. Almost 50 years later I have an incredibly powerful computer that I carry around in my pocket and I call it "my phone". It can solve all kinds of mathematical equations, display live video, and communicate in real time with the furthest corners of the globe. Saying that I "expect technology to suck" is just completely bizarre. I have witnessed amazing changes and have access to technology that were just Star Trek visions when I was young.
  • jessriedel 6y ago
    Being grateful for technology that didn't exist 20 years is not incompatible with criticizing real, large, and avoidable failures that are infused with all the tech we use. Likewise, I can criticize a car model that is constantly breaking down because of owner-hostile choices made by the manufacturer even though it's better to live now than 200 years ago when there were no cars.
  • kps 6y ago
    Quoting from https://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm https://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm: 2.02 ln ex resulted in 2 rather than 2.02. When the bug was discovered, HP had already sold 25,000 units which was a huge volume for the company. In a meeting, Dave Packard asked what they were going to do about the units already in the field and someone in the crowd said "Don't tell?" At this Packard's pencil snapped and he said: "Who said that? We're going to tell everyone and offer them, a replacement. It would be better to never make a dime of profit than to have a product out there with a problem".
  • happytoexplain 6y ago
    This is just the "there are children starving in Africa" argument, but across time instead of space.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
• lukeschlather 6y ago
  My most trouble-free period was when I was using Xubuntu exclusively for several years with a single monitor. Now I've been using Windows again for several years and I've grown accustomed to things just not working, ever, with tons of visual lag, usually just a few hundred milliseconds but sometimes stretching into seconds. On Xfce I would sometimes idly hold down win-t to create a bunch of terminals then alt-d to close them one by one. As I might idly bounce a pencil up and down back when I used pencils. On Windows/OSX/Gnome I would never dream of just idly opening a bunch of applications for fear of what might happen.
• lultimouomo 6y ago
  That's a bit like saying that flying intercontinental sucks because the low aire pressur and humidity make the food tasteless. Of course it does, and of course it's annoying, yet almost noone crosses travels on ocean liners anymore, because for all the rough edges that air flight has is still beats spending weeks travelling. People expect techonology to have countless minor flaws, which it has, because techies spend their time pushing tech forward at a crazy speed instead of slowly polishing it.
  • falcolas 6y ago
    But most of the time we're not actually pushing anything forward, we're just adding more features that we think people need (not to mention many developers enjoy creating new features, not polishing existing features).
• pkorzeniewski 6y ago
  This made me realize that my default expectations for anything tech related are very low and when something works the way it should, I'm amazed... I guess it should be the other way around. The amount of bullshit I have to deal with all kind of tech made me pretty much numb to it, I have no hope of things getting better so I just deal with it. What's even more sad is that in many aspects tech has become so much worse than it was in the past...
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    On the other hand I don't want to go back to the time where I had to re-install Windows every 6 months because the registry was falling over or watching macOS kernel panic because I unplugged a USB stick.
• lucideer 6y ago
  Me: Agrees with title but decides to read the post before commenting WOAH my eyes! Aha, there's a dark-mode switch. Maybe if I click that I'll be able to read this blinding page * CLICK * Nope
  • lucideer 6y ago
    I should add: I do appreciate the creativity of the page design (and especially of the switch). But on an article about software UX... well.
  • falcolas 6y ago
    I dove into the inspector interface, and changed the background color. No change. Also had to delete a 1 pixel background image of the same color. W. T. F.
• Macha 6y ago
  It's interesting that he uses "Phone at 5% brightness" as an example of a problem that needs urgent fixing. My phone has a perfectly functioning brightness slider and the only time I feel a need to put it brighter than 10% is when I'm using it outside on a sunny day. >60% indoors on a cloudy day or evening is obnoxiously bright.
• ben-gy 6y ago
  I couldn’t agree more - for better or worse, the expectation for a perfect “it just works” solution (of course, being relative to the exact use case) is at an all time high ( in my opinion anyway) - I’m very interested to how incumbents respond (or don’t respond) to this dynamic in the coming few years...
• typon 6y ago
  Ironic how on his own blog the night mode feature doesn't work correctly (the embedded videos are not affected)
• gridlockd 6y ago
  Sounds like Apple software and its ecosystem has gotten worse than Windows.
  • thewileyone 6y ago
    It has but no one else wants to say that. I'm totally surprised that I had to scroll down this far to find your comment.
• vinceguidry 6y ago
  > That’s the world WE ALL are living in now. No Nikita, this is the world you live in. I saw this happening five years ago and ripped Apple out of my life like a band-aid that's been there so long the skin's closing up around it. It sucked, but now it's a million times better. There simply isn't enough manpower, capital, or willpower to create decent software when you also have to contend with the profit motive. The author of the article went down a massive list of annoyances that just shouldn't happen, and they all stem from the need to keep Apple's technology proprietary. This need goes all the way back to the Apple II, when Jobs made the prescient observation that people want to buy full packages of hardware and software, not bits and pieces that they have to assemble themselves. To do that, you need to make a company to do it, then control the platform, hardware and software, to ensure a good user experience. This is the DNA of Apple and it's served them well and we got a lot of great tech out of it. He was right, until he was wrong, and he didn't really start being wrong until technology complicated to the point where a profit-seeking enterprise stopped being able to keep up with market demand. I'll tell the author or anyone else what they should do if they want to stop being constantly annoyed by technology. Use tech that is modifiable by the people that use them and not tech that is only modifiable by people you buy it from. If you do that, then you can lean on a community of people for support instead of a faceless corporation. Apple is slowly morphing into 90s-era Microsoft as they keep holding on to the need for dominance over their platform.
  • Finnucane 6y ago
    But it's not just Apple. Apple has its own set of issues, but they are not really worse than others at this point, just not much better any more. I have mostly old, 'dumb' appliances in my house. My car is more than 20 years old. I have become a total luddite with respect to things. As far as I'm concerned a lot of 'smart' technology is still in the unproven, experimental stage and I am too old now to deal with that shit.
    • vinceguidry 6y ago
      Of course it isn't just Apple. But when you build the foundation of your computing life on Apple, you're asking for pain. I applaud your dumb appliances and car.
• _qulr 6y ago
  The problem is with the idea of "continuous delivery". Many people fail to understand that technological advances only increase productivity if the innovations, the great leaps forward, are relatively rare, with long periods of stability and refinement in between. There's always an adjustment period, where people have to spend time learning a new technology, and any issues with the new technology need to be resolved. The gains in productivity happen mainly after the adjustment period. But we've eliminated the periods of stability and are constantly pushing for more "innovation", which means we're in constant periods of adjustment and resolving problems, where the promise of increased productivity is never fully met. The worst idea ever in technology is regularly scheduled updates. Innovation has never and will never happen on a schedule. This is simply greed-driven, promotion-driven, pointy-haired-boss-driven development. Produce something new and great... but then let us all enjoy the new thing for a while. Novelty for its own sake is not productive.
  • leetcrew 6y ago
    > The worst idea ever in technology is regularly scheduled updates. Innovation has never and will never happen on a schedule. This is simply greed-driven, promotion-driven, pointy-haired-boss-driven development. this is sort of uncharitable. the development/maintenance cycle for software is incompatible with the traditional way of monetizing a product (ie, design it up front, manufacture at scale, and then the buyer gets what they get, barring severe safety defects). buyers of software expect the product to at least mostly work in the first place, but they also expect bugs to continue to be fixed after the sale, even if the bugs are introduced through unforeseeable interactions with other software. imo, subscriptions are actually the ideal way of aligning incentives for products that involve ongoing maintenance. but buyers tend to consider this a ripoff if they don't actually see a stream of new features in development. while it introduces some unfortunate constraints in the dev cycle, bundling up features in a scheduled update is a good way to make it visible to users that their subscription dollars aren't just falling into a black hole. trickling out new features "when they're done" earns the respect of engineers, but results in the average user simply not noticing that progress is being made.
    • _qulr 6y ago
• efitz 6y ago
  I have worked for software companies for over 25 years, mostly on teams building software, and I hate software. I find bugs in every software I use (my freaking microwave oven control panel!). In addition to questionable quality, software is often downright hostile (lose all the data you typed into a web form if you accidentally backspace while not in a text field, because it navigates off the page). Ironically software engineering tools (build systems, etc.) are some of the worst. I don’t know what has to happen for people to stop tolerating software as it is.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    Cobbler’s children have no shoes.
  • rootusrootus 6y ago
    > accidentally backspace while not in a text field Thankfully that can be disabled, but I find it to be one of the most infuriating 'features' of Firefox. If it weren't something that could be turned off, it would be a deal killer all by itself.
    • TakerofVita 6y ago
      Well, Chrome used to do this too until they removed it in 2016. Internet explorer does this. It was more of a default than a 'feature of Firefox'.
    • throwaway8941 6y ago
      I didn't even know this "feature" was available on Firefox (despite using it since version 2). Turns out, it is only enabled on Windows: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action Maybe it was copied from IE to keep "closer to the platform"?
      • rootusrootus 6y ago
        It's definitely not limited to Windows. I am exclusively a MacOS user (for my workstation, at least) and I have had to disable it on any new Firefox install.
• ghransa 6y ago
  I like to think about it like little minecraft characters beating on a piece of code until it works right. It's like smithing, you have to put it through it's paces and iterate as a developer, since thinking of all the complexity on large projects is infeasible. The only thing to do is to write it, test, redo it, test some more, test on a wider test bed, release, get complaints, add more tests, and finally you are at the start.
• SuperCuber 6y ago
  I like the blog and all but WHY IS IT SO YELLOW?! It hurt my eyes enough for me to switch to Firefox's reader view which resets most of the page's CSS.
• bobwall 6y ago
  There is still great software being made. I would say that the interface in a Tesla is pretty great. There is just more software out there now, so the number of bad pieces of software are magnified that much more. But, I think great software is dependent on how willing the developers are in making it great. Yes they need support from management etc., but there is tons of great software out there, it is just that there is more and more mediocre and bad software being made as well.
  • gfody 6y ago
    Tesla's music player is pretty bad - the bug where it duplicates artist names for each album when you browse by artist has been there for years, if you try to switch between specific albums and back it frustratingly scrolls you back to the top each time. these are just my pet peeves see google for laundry lists and angry users.
  • Sevii 6y ago
    It’s quantity * quality. If you use one piece of software that works 99% of the time it’s great. But if you use 1000 programs a day that work 99% of the time then 10 of your programs are broken all the time. We need to figure out how to increase quality and reliability somehow or it’s just going to keep getting worse.
• taf2 6y ago
  my favorite quote... or way of thinking about software in general: "it's not a question of whether there is a bug in this code. it's a question of how impactful the bug is on the people using it."
• hrktb 6y ago
  Technology sucks because it works. Otherwise it would be in the junkyard and nobody would be complaining about constant annoyances. All the annoyance cited come from having a pocket computer that is reliable enough that we use day in day out, charge it every night, and do important enough tasks on it to be annoyed when it doesn’t work. Nobody complained that a mainframe’s batteries were depleting during the night. In all seriousness, I think it’s important to acknowledge stuff that doesn’t work, and make efforts to improve them. But this need to come from the perspective that the app/device has a purpose, and understand how much of that is working. Dealing with annoyances from something that fulfills 90% of its purpose is completely different from dealing with an app or device that is mostly polished but doesn’t help much. That perspective seems mostly missing from the rant.
• maxbond 6y ago
  I am a life long Linux user and programmer well accustomed to searching for support and fixing issues with software. Recently I got an RSI from programming and could not use a keyboard for 10 months. I could only use my Android phone. There were so many problems and I had so little insight. I _did_ search for answers and found contradictory or incorrect instructions. Often I had to resort to uninstalling apps and taking my chances on their competitors. This strategy had a very low rate of success. Many things I just gave up on. I essentially lost 10 months of productivity and became despondent. One specific problem I had was that I was unable to control which PDF viewer would open automatically when I downloaded a PDF. For not particularly interesting reasons regarding my workflow, it was important to me that Adobe open instead of the viewer built in to the file navigation app. I followed the instructions online to rectify this. However when I navigated the menu to the appropriate place, the option simply didn't exist. I don't fully understand, I'm not and will never be an Android dev, but I believe it had something to do with the built in viewer not being a first class app but some sort of "applet". Deep in this frustration it clicked with me; this is how most people see computers. Black boxes that work against you. Unfathomable and unserviceable. PSA: Stretch your hands. Take care with the ergonomics of your keyboard, mouse, and desk. If typing hurts - stop.
  • unphased 6y ago
    Hope you're feeling better now!
    • maxbond 6y ago
      Much better thanks! Probably should've mentioned that!
• Kapura 6y ago
  I know there are some people who won't like to hear this, but the reason technology sucks, generally, is because of capitalism. It is more profitable to release an avalanche of broken software than to spend the time to craft and maintain software that works well. A "software will always suck" mentality is only true if you hold capitalism as an invariant law of nature. But it is not.
• nicbou 6y ago
  As an experiment, I logged every bug I encountered for a few days. I averaged 5 bugs a day, not counting dark patterns or bad design. Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1] Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages, even though it works just fine. Most online stock brokers have issues at the worst possible times. My bookkeeping app is frequently wrong, per my tax advisor. Since everything is broken, the best I can do is to mentally assign all those apps a trustworthiness score, and avoid betting too much on them. The worst part is that support for all that software has been largely automated. If you have a problem that can't be fixed by a chatbot or a crowdsourced support community, you are largely helpless. Google can wipe everything you love, and there's no one to punch in the face (to borrow from Grapes of Wrath). So far, my only solution to this is to be a late adopter, and to favour simplicity over sophistication. I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store. The Surface Go wanted me to go through a setup wizard (after dismissing a few notifications). Two of the 4 iPads had working pencils. The ReMarkable reviews mention a host of issues. I never encountered any bugs with my Moleskine. It pairs flawlessly with any pencil I want, including older models. [1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUpset.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUp...
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store. Good, you dodged a bullet there. I mean, I love my 2-in-1 Dell (a slightly cheaper but still high-end Surface-like device). The pen, as much as it's useful (I'm not even considering buying a touchscreen-enabled device without solid support of a pen anymore; it's so much better UX than fingers), still has lots of subtle and annoying bugs. Maybe in 20 years people will work out the kinks. More likely, the concept will be abandoned in favor of some new modality that will also never be perfected.
  • elboru 6y ago
    Thank you for mentioning AirPods! I was so excited to buy them after a ton of reviews saying they just worked. They said the days of fighting with Bluetooth audio were gone. I believed them, then reality showed up. My Mac sometimes unpairs them and worst it doesn’t find them. Some times while my baby is sleeping I put my AirPods and play a loud video just to realize they were not connected. My wife’s right side AirPod just stopped working after one year of use... If apple is considered top tier in reliability, then technology in general really just sucks!
• n0on3 6y ago
  Advancement in tech are nowadays driven only by profit, which in turn is driven by sales, which prioritise what people are likely to pay for. People expect technology to be affordable and they really don't care what the effect of this is. Put competition in the mix and you get a lot of stuff that sucks because the field of battle is not the quality, is pricing and marketing. And then stuff dies after a short time. And/or is just left forgotten because it's more broken/an annoyance than it is useful. Or, and this is key, you are stuck with it because for a mix of reasons there is no viable alternative. One would expect that on the long run the ultimate victims of this (the users of technology) would realise that rather then the ten thousand loads of tech crap they buy they would be much better off with a bunch of stuff that actually works without annoyances for a better quality of life but people just don't. Because again, pricing and marketing. It used to be _create value and make a profit from it_, now it's the other way around: _aim for profit and consider creating value as a cost of doing so_ (and therefore should be minimised, who gives a frack if the user is annoyed or the thing is broken as long as there is profit). People has been even trained for decades by major products in the industry to accept that tech doesn't work/is broken/sucks. The good stuff we have exist because at some point for some small time quality became competitive advantage, then on top of that other cycles of craploads piled on. We did this.
  • LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    Expecting that billions of people will simultaneously act against their incentives is madness. You can't assign collective fault to "we" who did this by making bad choices individually. It's a system that has optimized itself to this end goal. I feel pretty good about my choices in comparison. I use an older, sock Android device, with simple wired headphones, so that particular issue with AirPods has never occurred to me. My laptop is a bulletproof old Thinkpad running Ubuntu LTS, which is likewise pretty reliable. Software that I have to use for work but that I expect to be crappy goes in a VM. I use this crappy software to the best of my ability to create other software and hardware that I expect to work reliably, and to do so for decades. But none of those signals and "good choices" ever feed back into better choices by the titans of our industry. When an iPhone or AirPods device uses up all the recharges available in it's battery, that shows up as profit in the numbers Apple uses to make decisions. Don't blame the victims for the situation they're prey to.
• RandallBrown 6y ago
  > In macOS context menu, “Tags” is in smaller font If you think technology is broken, don't take a look at your physical stuff. The baseboard in my hallway is a little wavy. The road in front of my house has lots of potholes. The tile in my bathroom is slightly off of parallel from the wall. The front door of my house sticks. My takeout order was wrong. My air conditioning in my car stopped working. Technology is amazing. A friend sent me an animated gif, from hundreds of miles away and I was able to take that same animated gif, replace the face with my own, and send it back, in less than 10 seconds. All from a tiny brick that fits in my pocket. I'll deal with my scroll position being reset on instagram occasionally.
• protoster 6y ago
  Is the yellow background some sort of a inside joke or satire? For me it is unreadable without changing it through the browser's dev tools.
• Tea418 6y ago
  I don’t expect software to fail generally, but I’m getting used to a recurring stimulus quickly, especially if I underestimate its importance. Perhaps it’s a kind of habituation. I feel like it’s getting harder to estimate importance properly as the complexity of an abstract system grows. People tend to click the same error message they don’t understand away each day, because it hadn’t had any negative impact (so far).
• montjoy 6y ago
  I can’t help feel like the agile in business mentality is somewhat to blame for this. Focusing on getting core functionality sprint after sprint is great for adding new features but there is never enough time to go back and fix annoyances that are minor. I was looking for a new microwave recently and since I’m a nerd I was looking into ones with smart features. So I read some reviews and guess what? The smart microwaves are buggy! Sure the core functionality works but the UI is terrible and prone to crashing. Another example is the new combo washer dryer my parents bought. Dryers have had a beeper go off at the end of the cycle since forever. So this dryer has the electronic equivalent of the old turny knobs and yes core functions all work fine. It dries clothes. It beeps when it’s done. But unlike every other dryer I’ve used before it keeps beeping forever. You have to open the door to make it stop. Oh but the washing machine in the same unit? It beep 3 times then stops. Different development teams I guess. I’m screaming inside just thinking about it. The only fix (and this was from the manufacturer support forum) is to cut the wire to the speaker.
  • compiler-guy 6y ago
    Software sucked in this way long before Agile, and will continue long after Agile stops being a trend. Of course, if is is truly a result of Agile, that is only because the team using Agile wasn't truly doing it right.
    • montjoy 6y ago
      I’m sure you’re right. I’m probably projecting issues I see in my own organization since we switched to agile. Or attempted to. Or are continuously trying to attempt to.
  • elsonrodriguez 6y ago
    It would greatly lower my shopping-anxiety if you shared the brands. Thanks!
    • montjoy 6y ago
      For the microwave I was focused on Whirlpool since they had gotten high reliability rankings from a well-known reviewal magazine. However I did look at other higher end brands too and they all seem to have issues in the smart appliance space. I ended up buying a basic model instead. The washer/dryer is a Frigidaire laundry center. (Stacked washer/dryer)
• nehushtan 6y ago
  Don't get me started on my mother-in-law's tech problems. It never ends... almost anything she wants to do requires three things to work together that simply won't. Even a simple issue like "which remote control do I use" is a disaster that keeps happening, pointlessly, again and again. Yesterday we tried to get her iPhone to operate the Spectrum app on the Roku device connected to her Sharp TV - just so she could change channels by number. It can't work. Can we all just get along?
• QuadrupleA 6y ago
  Sounds like this might have been prompted by Jonathan Blow's talk, Preventing the Collapse of Civilization: https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk It's a shame that there isn't usually enough incentive in mainstream software practice (or business reality) to polish and make things work flawlessly - day to day life could be a lot nicer if we dived deeper and thought longer-term.
• dsjoerg 6y ago
  we're talking here about the Total Cost of Ownership of software. people are learning to evaluate for themselves how well stuff works, and buy/notbuy or use/notuse accordingly. someday there may be a market opportunity for software that is less broken than the usual. arguably Apple used to occupy some of that niche.
• Upvoter33 6y ago
  I have actually the opposite reaction. It is easy to be cynical and say "everything sucks". But if you look around, you'll actually see that many things work and do so surprisingly well. You can literally rent 1000 computers for an hour for a few bucks. It works! It's amazing. You can use a little device you carry around as a phone, for email, to look up information on machines running anywhere! There is a lot to marvel at. Sure, things could be better - so work on them and make them so. But don't pretend everything is terrible. It's not!
• burlesona 6y ago
  It’s interesting, there are a lot of little bugs in software today, but I think it’s easy to forget that common bugs used to be a lot worse. In the 90s it was pretty common to have a kernel panic and hard crash, blue screen of death, etc. Data loss was common. Folks who lived through that have such a strong compulsion to hit CMD-S every few minutes, that a lot of cloud software today offers a “save button” that actually doesn’t do anything because the document auto saves as you type anyway. To some degree I think this may be related. Bugs that crash the computer are a little bit easier to detect (If only because the users come screaming at you) compared to bugs where the app scrolls incorrectly once every million scroll events. Overall I would say that software has become much more complex and much more reliable at the expense of being more inscrutable. People are able to operate in a degraded condition now because software is capable of working that way, whereas in the past it would just fail completely. Is that better? Maybe not by much, but I think most normal users would say software is easier to use and more reliable today compared to decades past.
  • newsbinator 6y ago
    > Folks who lived through that have such a strong compulsion to hit CMD-S every few minutes, that a lot of cloud software today offers a “save button” that actually doesn’t do anything because the document auto saves as you type anyway. This describes me. And I often wonder if the presence of the "save button" is what causes the compulsion: in web apps that auto-save, I trust/assume they're auto-saving, and feel more free. In web apps that have the save button, it's always occupying some part of my mental capacity to keep hitting it after significant edits.
• alexashka 6y ago
  If Nikita stepped out in the real world and tried to get other humans to do their job right and recorded how often that gets screwed up, he'd run right back to his computer, because at least with computers, you can eventually get it right, with humans, you are always at the mercy of someone having a bad day, being born an idiot, being distracted, etc, etc... It's just life and that's how it goes :) When you measure everything in relation to how you would've handled it, you get posts like these. The more different you are from an average human being, the more frustrated/bewildered you will be, until you have the epiphany that others are not like you and cease expecting them to be. One question to ask is, if everything is so broken, surely you can become rich through this massive opportunity to improve upon it and then proceed to solve a lot of the frustrations you have with money? Go on then :)
• thebeefytaco 6y ago
  As someone with a SaaS software startup, this is something I have to remind myself from time to time. Particularly because when you're so close to the product, you're intensely aware of the bugs and issues. It's comforting to know people do have a tolerance for minor bugs and issues. We were pleasantly surprised how much positive feedback we'd get, even when encountering bugs though and I believe overestimated how "perfect" it needed to be for the first release. From experience I've learned it's much better to ship it and improve it with incremental updates rather than to try and wait for "perfection".
• dgudkov 6y ago
  Any software application has two states: "doesn't work" and "barely works".
• smashpanda 6y ago
  Y’all can’t even imagine how bad healthcare IT is. Multiply all these problems by the cost of human life. If you think you’re frustrated imagine a heart surgeon trying to access a patients file but their password keeps getting rejected. Or they were forced to change their password monthly for sECurItY and theY can’t remember it. And the reset process involves calling the Hospitals IT Helpdesk
• lukash995 6y ago
  Every product of a human is not perfect. Only God can make perfect things, but even those things made by God don't seem to be perfect from our point of view - e.g. illness, brutal death.
• vmception 6y ago
  > or if I couldn’t use my phone without hitting “Cancel” every five seconds .... [I'd just google it] .... That these people mostly just lived with it means that these problems couldn’t have been markedly worse than technology has already been for them historically. Other people's Iphones and the nearby Wifi notification! hahaha Iphones are great for me because I fixed annoyances so fast that I forgot other people tolerate or judge iphones from them. The nearby wifi popup can be disabled folks! Also shift some of your budget around and get a data plan!
• wazoox 6y ago
  Ah yeah. I recently switched from ADSL to fibre. Speed-wise, it's full joy. However the now incredibly advanced modem/set-top-box/DVR is an utter mess. There are two boxes : a network server/DVR/router and a TV set-top-box. The server part so far behaves reasonably well (apart for a couple of interface quirks). But the set-top-box is a nightmare. It all started with networking. The system ships with PLC adapters. It turns out that nothing reliably works with these. I switched to WiFi. It's worse. I finally gave up and now have a 15 m ethernet cable going around my living room. You have random error messages every time you turn on the set-top-box. When switching from the TV function to some other (like chromecast, or youtube), half the time the sound from the last TV channel you visited can still be heard. You have to hard reset the box to solve the problem. Once the bluetooth remote stopped working. I tried everything (swapping batteries, resetting everything, etc), no luck; finally I had to do a full factory reset of the set-top box and pair it again with the remote (takes about 30 to 40 minutes I probably could have enjoyed more doing anything else). The box has an integrated chromecast. However it can't be seen on the network about half the time. I've found that by turning the box off and on, then going to some network app (like youtube), it's back. Then half the time chromecast playback is choppy and unreliable. You have to turn it off and on, etc. Then you have the same sort of weird behaviour with Youtube, Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc you name it. Not a single app works reliably (i. e. the first time, and most of the time). I complained on the forum. People yelled at me because literally millions of people are using the same setup as I am, and don't complain, so it's probably that I'm too fussy. I'm not. It's really awful. Fortunately I don't watch TV anymore, but I must intervene at least once or twice a week to sort out bugs for my family. What's surprising is actually that millions of people probably have a hard time now simply watching TV, because all of these "smart devices" are so broken.
  • atoav 6y ago
    Just judging the symptoms looks to my like one of those classical "cobbled together" pieces of software, where they only wrote the glue code and once it was OK shipped it. The of intricate that have to work (read: that can go wrong) on a modern device is just baffling.
• DayDollar 6y ago
  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.
• azhu 6y ago
  Tech is bad because our hypothesis of "nature will help us adapt to our disregard for foresight" is proving false. Across the board: economic, social, manufacturing, education, environmental -- everything is giving us plenty of evidence that we are headed in the wrong direction. All meaningful measures of human wellbeing are going down at increasing rates. We are making mistakes at a rate that outpaces our ability to learn from our mistakes and we doubling down on the strategy that got us here in order to get us out. The line about us not knowing the future and needing to take the best guess we have and building more on it than we are confident in its correctness is illogical and clearly disordered.
• bad_alloc 6y ago
  Technology usually only sucks where there is no immediate consequence of this. For example I am currently working with some tools related to robot control and machine safety. Crashes are expensive and errors in safety can get you sued. That part of the software works perfectly. Similarly, your engine control unit, airplane avionics etc. all work well because if they did not, the producer would be punished monetarily. User interface stuff is crappy because it does not matter in the sense that you can immediately break expensive things. Unless people raise a stink to the point where the producers are scared for theri bottom line, this will not change.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  When i find bugs or 'featues' that make me waste time i blame developers. They clearly don't care anymore. So ordinary users have resorted to quiet desperation through learned helplessness. Like all those 'redesigns' that remove features and turn what used to be a few memorized keystrokes to an agonizing series of scrollers, popups and "UX" animations. I just think developers don't care anymore. They don't yell enough at their marketing teams when they push for obvious bullshit features. They make so much money that they have no interest for the users, in fact nobody does. There's no way out of this, until AI replaces developers. When users can talk to their apps and customize them to 100% fit their needs, without the need for any developers, the users will have got their revenge
  • vkou 6y ago
    The grass was greener when I was younger, and the sugar is sweeter. Most software has always been crap. There never was a golden age, when developers 'cared'. The truth is, some developers produced polished, well-working, well-made software. Some developers still do that.
    • cblconfederate 6y ago
      Try using some old software. Like windows 7 or vim or emacs , or PHP or old reddit. Due to their age , they 've accumulated a lot of fixes to their bugs. They may look weird and old , but they waste less of my time.
      • sabujp 6y ago
        old.reddit.com is the best, is there a plugin/extension or some script to force chrome to always redirect to old.reddit.com for all reddit urls? edit: found https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/pajiegeliagebegjdhebejdlknciafen?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/pajiege... and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/pajiegeliagebegjdhebejdlknciafen?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/pajiege... this one seems to be pretty popular (requestly) : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect-url-mo/mdnleldcmiljblolnjhpnblkcekpdkpa https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect... anyone have better solutions?
• young_unixer 6y ago
  Bugs are not our biggest problem, our biggest problem are deliberate decisions that privilege vendor control, tradition, and ease of implementation instead of good architectural design. All three major desktop operating systems (Windows, MacOS and Linux distributions †) are so bad that it's infuriating at times. We can't have a single operating system to rely on and say: "This system works well and won't give you unnecessary headaches." How can we develop good end-user products when the very tools software developers use to create those end-user products are broken? † The kernel may be decently reliable, but the actual distributions are an ungodly mess.
• tracerbulletx 6y ago
  Am I the only one who completely disagrees with this premise and find that software is not only doing more incredible things than ever before, but is much more reliable than it ever has been? And when I run in to problems they don't prevent me from doing my work, are at worst mildly annoying, and are exceedingly rare considering I now have a running computer in my pocket 100% of the time 24/7 and do all of my work on a computer? I honestly don't get this grumpy attitude everyone has about software, are people expecting some kind of platonic ideal of software?
• l0b0 6y ago
  How do we, users, makers and managers alike, move away from this awful state of affairs? Some random ideas: - If anyone manages to build some truly fantastic software for massive numbers of end users, maybe those users will start expecting a higher bar for other software. Consider for example search engines pre/post Google. Naive search engines just don't exist anymore, because they were several orders of magnitude less efficient at getting useful responses. So that was a sea change. (Unfortunately monetization, SEO, sabotage and things like ignoring search keywords have resulted in search engines regressing in the last several years.) - Long term design. Commercial software seems to be redesigned massively every few years, which is terrible UX. On the other hand, the vast majority of F/LOSS is designed once and either never changes again or just gets added to until it drowns in clutter. Even though the latter is caused at least in part by a lower budget, and often ends up being pretty bad UX-wise, I actually prefer it. One good balance is Amazon's web site. From a quick glance it looks like everything is where it was a decade ago, and overall it just looks familiar. - UI convergence. Web browsers have converged so strongly that being able to do things like navigating and filling in a form in a completely unfamiliar browser is very likely to succeed. And browsers are so enormously popular that they have set expectations for how UIs work in other software. - Quality assurance in all its myriad forms. A lot of energy is being spent touting the One True Silver Bullet, when in reality every approach has diminishing returns and shortfalls. If you use only manual tests every version is going to have more bugs than the last, because you don't have $MM to spend testing every single detail for every release. If you only use integration tests the suite is eventually going to run for longer than your release cycle and will be skipped and trimmed in ways which mean you'll miss bugs. If you only use unit tests you can only release fizzbuzz-size chunks reliably. And so on. Instead use every technique you know of until you hit similar diminishing returns for each of them.
• jondubois 6y ago
  Because companies treat developers like replaceable cogs... So developers don't feel invested in the products that they're creating, so they don't really care about the result and it shows.
• allenu 6y ago
  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 playing audio again... and the problem fixes itself. Rebooting fixes it, but you just know it'll be back, so you learn to live with it, or use headphones if you absolutely must have audio for a meeting. Another thing that's sort of in the same domain is websites being more user hostile. Popups, intrusive ads, auto-play videos, and so on. I'm at the stage where if I get too many of these I have to just close the app or web page and give up on the article I'm trying to read.
  • bpanon 6y ago
    Have you tried disabling bluetooth?
    • allenu 6y ago
      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.
• WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
  Yes, it sucks but it's the very nature that lets tech be so flexible that gives us the bad tech experience. The things in our lives that are are very stable are the ones that do one thing and they do it very well. They do one thing and we know how to use them. Tech, software, is so versatile that it's hard to know when to stop adding new functions and every time a new function is added we add unintended consequences. We can start with the IC's in our gadgets. Some contain billions of different parts. It's a miracle that they even work. Add other components and software and we can see why tech sucks. Getting all those parts to work in unison all the time is next to impossible.
• holidayacct 6y ago
  There are all sorts of problems with technology but technology "sucking" isn't one of those problems: The problem is people: 1.) Don't remember far back enough to when everything was literally more difficult to do. They don't actually understand how much easier their lives have become due to technology. If you grew up before cellphones became ubiquitous you would understand how much of people's lives were devoted to traveling long distances and haggling with people just to get small things done. 2.) They are young enough that they expect everything to happen instantaneously because they grew up post ubiquitous cell phone. They won't ever be able to understand how easy technology has made our lives because they haven't experienced anything else. Every time someone writes articles like this they should be forced to live without any technology for a year. It's not perfect but its made life measurably easier for every single person in most countries. With that said there is a legitimate problem with technology: People don't know how to use it responsibly, many of them are addicted to their laptops, tvs and cellphones in ways that are frightening.
  • jdbernard 6y ago
    While I agree, quite strongly, about your general point regarding the short memory and ungracious expectations of people at large, I also disagree, strongly, with your dismissal of the problem addressed in this article. By and large these problems are all man-made and have known remedies. It is possible to be both grateful for the great advances, conveniences, and benefits of modern software and simultaneously frustrated with the very real, preventable, and fixable problems in most modern software.
    • holidayacct 6y ago
      I dismissed the article because I refuse to click on link-bait titles just to generate ad impressions.
      • jdbernard 6y ago
        Understandable, but please don't comment if you cannot add to the discussion (because you haven't actually read the article being discussed). In this case I think you've done yourself a disservice. I've generally found Nikita's blog worth reading, and he doesn't serve ads.
• codazoda 6y ago
  I enjoyed this article after I manually turned off the background image and background color using Firefox's developer tools. At the bottom it says he's writes about UI design. That black on yellow was pretty hard on my eyes at the end of a long day. I just couldn't read it as-is.
• Ono-Sendai 6y ago
  I was about to click on the comments link for this article, but chrome on Android hung for > 10 seconds. I had to switch to another app and back for it to work.
• titzer 6y ago
  For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises. With no agency, they are at the mercy of other people's bad ideas that keep changing. Everything needs to be updated because everything else needs to be updated, because everything needs to be updated. Duh! Software updates! Guess what! Here's a new UI for ya. We moved all the stuff! It's like someone threw you a surprise birthday party, but not on your birthday, on their birthday, and their idea of the best gift evar is to hire an interior designer (for free! lucky you!) who completely rearranges your house inside and out and springs it on you after you return from the grocery store. And there's no going back. At first it was exciting--when I was 15--then it's slightly bothersome, then downright annoying, then it's infuriating, then it's just tiring. Your brain learns that there is no point in learning anything anymore because they're just going to scramble it again anyway. Learned helplessness. People age out, ended up feeling old and useless and jaded because their skillset is completely inapplicable, after just a few years. Yeah, I can understand why people hate tech.
  • canada_dry 6y ago
    > I can understand why people hate tech. To add to that, now that I'm a retired lifelong techie I realize why "old folks" back in the day would hesitate to give up the old, outdated software that they knew how to use. E.g. I'd prod older friends and family to give up wordperfect - which they knew and loved - in order to progress to the feature-rich-new MS WORD. Now I'm a linux advocate with its archaic terminal commands and I can empathize with anyone who wants their laptop, phone, TV, microwave, etc. to stop evolving!!
    • samatman 6y ago
      Water under the bridge now, but I bet you did some of them a real disservice. Wordperfect had "reveal codes", so when the WYSIWYG gave you something you didn't want, you could pop open the actual document representation and wrangle the tags until you What You Want Is What You See. MS Word has no such function, so when it screws you, and it does, you're good and screwed.
      • 6y ago
• overton 6y ago
  Tech sucks for the same reason that Exxon buried their own climate science, or the tobacco industry hid their knowledge of polonium 210 in cigarettes. Capitalist corporations by and large have nothing but amoral contempt for their customers and the general public. Tech can be good, but not within this irrational and obviously decaying economic system.
• em3rgent0rdr 6y ago
  The "Move fast and break things" philosophy bears a lot of blame.
• known 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_to_noise_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_to_noise_ratio is high in technology
• pvorb 6y ago
  In the recent LTS version of Ubuntu, if I right-click something the context menu immediately disappears after popping up, soI have to right-click again until, for some unknown reason, it stays. I bet it's solvable, but I haven't bothered to solve it.
• sershe 6y ago
  Oh man, I could rant about this forever. I think the trick is to not annoy or interrupt the user and the only explanation I can come up with of why people do either when it would be simple to not do it is that an average UI designer or front end developer are either malicious or incompetent ;) 1) Do not ever block the UI thread except for updating UI. It's so simple! Well, except maybe in case of GC, but for most software it's not even close to worrying about that. Unless the software is literally running a surgery or a nuclear plant, there's at least one thing I can do at any time - close it (without resorting to kill -9). More likely, I could be doing something else with it. So, learn threading, it's 2020. I swear when we come to power, if you write code that causes a network request to block UI, you're going to be disbarred and can never make money in software ever again. Go flip burgers. I am looking at you, Outlook and Evernote. The same goes for excessive Javascript to display some text effectively blocking the UI, although that is a more complex subject. 1a) If you cannot do it, then do not do it. Timeouts on everything. If I hit autocomplete on a word in Eclipse and it takes 5 seconds to return, I'd rather just type it out myself. But the UI is stuck, and/or it will paste the autocompletion after whatever I've typed for 5 seconds when it finally finishes. Shut this crap down after 200ms. 2) If something can be done later, it can be done never. Literally make forced feature updates of paid software illegal. If companies claim to care for the users' security, they are allowed to have a separate security-patch-only line. If there's change to online APIs that are paid for, make it so that each version is supported for at least say 5 years, and/or mandate that a forced compat update should have a "no, instead cancel my subscription and switch to [competitor choice dialog]" button. That should align the incentives. Would force much better API design, too, if you are forced to support it for 5 years. 3) Never steal focus when the user is doing something. Actually I feel it was a much bigger problem ~15 years ago (in legitimate software, I'm not talking about popups), so not much to say here. These days it usually it happens when you break rule #1, and something takes a long time, so the user starts typing an email to aunt Marge in a separate window and then boom, your "would you like to delete this folder" dialog steals the keyboard. 4) Everything, and I mean everything, should be configurable, in particular it should be possible to turn every single feature off. Adding a feature? Add a flag to turn it off. It's dev 101 in backend software (nobody wants to redeploy if one small feature is broken, you'd rather just turn it off, at least to mitigate)... it should be in the frontend, too. It can be an obscure config file, but it has to be configurable. You are not smart; do not kid yourself (I certainly don't), you have no idea what users wants. 4a) Wishlist - have a checkbox for software to act dumb. Especially the IDEs. Sometimes your autocomplete/auto-compile/etc keeps doing something wrong, or something slow (or, more often, both). It would be really neat to just have a checkbox in front that would cause all the clever logic everywhere to go away and for the software to only do literally what you tell it to do, and no more. 5) Stop messing with the UI out of proportion to messing with the feature set (i.e. a major redesign of the UI is only justified if you made a major redesign of the user interactions), there's nothing wrong with your old UI. If your UI PMs have nothing to do now that you only add minor features that fit into existing menus, and suggest a redesign, just fire them instead.
• gitowiec 6y ago
  Recently Firefox just added it's own 5 cents to that with major update on Android. About 10 features I used and I liked where removed!
• chenglou 6y ago
  Jonathan Blow recently talked about this in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk. Maybe this is where the author got the idea of noting them down? These discussions usually invite lots of hand-wavy complaints and oppositions without more concrete progress. Out of boredom and to further better dialogues, I've tried to address every bug in that list: > iOS 14 discharged phone battery 80% to 20% during the night (no activity, much worse than iOS 13). There's a new AI system since before 14 that monitors your battery usage and e.g. refrains from charging during certain times, among other features. It's likely that this system got tweaked (as opposed to sudden battery failure and recovery). > YouTube.app randomly scrolled to the top. Dunno about this one. Did you touch the status bar at the top of the screen? > Instagram reset scroll position after locking/unlocking the phone. Probably forgot to add that bookkeeping to the before-locking hook, and/or the hook before getting evicted from memory. > Race condition in keyboard in DuoLingo during typing. Don't use DuoLinguo anymore. Can't comment. > AirPods just randomly reconnected during use. Bluetooth? > Shortcuts.app stopped reacting to touch for ~30 sec. Hard to say. Undefined state/exception bugs maybe. > Wondered why my apps were not up to date, found nine apps waiting for manual button click. Push/pull model problem, battery conservation heuristics, server's notification scaling being best-effort, etc. > Workflowy cursor obscured by Workflowy toolbar, typing happened behind keyboard Workflowy's iOS app uses web technology. The keyboard + floating bar layout is a recurring problem with said tech. > AirPods showed connected notification, but sound played from the speaker. Bluetooth...? > Passcode unlock worked for the third time only. Never happened personally. Can't comment. > Overcast widget disappeared while switching to another app. That one's almost 100% in the animation system's bugs introduced in iOS 7. Tldr uninterruptibility + special thread/process causing extra undefined state + GPU. > YouTube forgot video I was just watching after locking/unlocking the phone. Same as the instagram diagnosis. > YouTube forgot the resolution I chose for the video, keep resetting me to 360p on a 750p screen. Dunno. No longer use YouTube app. Network? Sometime the UI can be misleading. The quality option might be just a best-effort option that it doesn't guarantee to respect. Someone else check this. > 1 hour lost trying to connect 4k @ 120 Hz monitor to MacBook Pro. Definitely not enough stress/integration testing, so it's unsurprising that anything might happen. Sometime provably impossible to get right due to neither party controlling the whole stack. > Workflowy date autocomplete keeps offering me dates in 2021 instead of 2020. See earlier. It's not using the native NSDate (workflowy uses Momentjs). Plenty of room for error. NSDate's api usually won't nudge toward things like off-by-ones (I think). > In macOS context menu, “Tags” is in smaller font Intentional. > Transmission quit unexpectedly. And slowy =P. Likely due to exception/mishandling of memory. > Magic Trackpad didn’t connect right away after boot, showed the “No Trackpad” window. Lots of preemptive races possible here. > Hammerspoon did not load profile on boot. Dunno. I don't use it. > Telegram stuck with one unread message counter. A few other chat apps do that too. Often from the denormalization of unread messages count in DB. That or something about the notification system. > Plugging iPhone for charging asks for a software update. It's a feature, not a bug ™ =). > Dragging an image from Firefox doesn’t work until I open it in a separate tab. That dragging is reimplemented using cross-platform tech I believe. > YouTube fullscreen is disabled in an embed. Intentional. This is an option the embedder needs to opt into. > Slack loaded, I started typing a response, then it reloaded. Depends by "reloaded". Without further description, it might be either a crash + browser-driven page reload, or some long in-app rerender due to React, state and network. > Twitter was cropping important parts of my image so I had to manually letterbox it. Quite a few pieces of drama surrounding this recently. Won't comment. > TVTime failed to mark an episode as watched. Never used it. > Infuse took 10 minutes to fetch ~100 file names from smb share. No batched api + other shenanigans. Happens to Reminders too.
• User95682 6y ago
  Dear Techies, Thanks for educating me on Tech...actually almost none of your comments had much meaning for me, a user. I’m not even sure how I got to this site. Not your issue. The comparison between “reality” and Tech was revealing. If Tech mimicked reality there would be no fewer glitches but I think the nature of those glitches would be more understandable to the average user. Traffic slowing a page loading, moose on the roadway (download won’t actually do anything), no power to signal lights (display goes dark), those sorts of things. I imagine the real world mimicking Tech would be more alarming. One might wake up and head for the bathroom when your closet slides in, blocks your path, and asks if you’d like to re-paint it. You decline and it forces you to respond with “We can talk later...” In the meantime, your small appliances clamor for you to perform maintenance routines. You wade through them into your bathroom when you realize there’s no longer a commode, there. You no longer have the administrator permission to use that device. Your phone rings, it’s the developer that built your house asking you to leave the doors unlocked tonight so their maintenance crew can rebuild some parts of your house. Wait until you try to get to your mailbox! I, user, don’t really hate Tech. I just wish there was rule in your industry that required products to work WHEN they’re released. Not after endless bug fixes or security patches (Yes, I’ve read the standard BS notices) which make me think, “...this one fixes what they did last time...” Tech is like having cats. Entertaining, sometimes inspiring, but requiring so much attention and resources that it leaves you wondering whether it’s really what you want. NOTE! Cats won’t warn you when your power company’s Tech will decide its unsafe for you to have their services.