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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 th

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
> 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. And you use it mostly to browse cat pictures :). Perhaps it takes a technologist to notice, but for every actual technological improvement that happens, the UI glitter gets cycled 20 times. Majority of "change" in computing technologies isn't improving anything, it's only inciting you to throw away your old device and buy a new one. Technology is amazing. But if you think of Star Trek visions, you can realize that our technology could be 10x more ergonomic and better than it is, and could be solving 10x more problems than it is. That's what I read these complains are about - unrealized potential. But perhaps it's because I'm a techie and a trekkie that I see it this way.
- bobochan 6y ago
  Thank you, that was a very inspiring response. I completely agree with you about the unrealized potential, but my greatest regret over the past 50 years is not about the technology, but our ability to harness it. I remember helping to setup a computer show at our local high school when I was still very young. The local vendors had agreed to donate an Apple //+ to the school in return for having space to show off all of their wares. We were thrilled and I can vividly remember my father saying that my generation would be the last one to learn programming as an add-on elective skill. He imagined a world where everyone could harness the power of digital technologies and that programming, building, tinkering, would be second nature to all of us. We spend our time thinking about UI glitter because we gave up on that dream of having every student learn to program. We took the exercises out of math and science books where we asked students to write programs to use the Pythagorean theorem or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. It became "enough" to learn how to enter a few numbers in a spreadsheet and perhaps add a trend line. A few hard working people in a garage can still turn out wonderful things, but if we really want to see the promise of technology then we need to fix the bigger problem of building an educational system that empowers many more people.
atoav 6y ago
"Technology sucks" in my eyes just means there is a mismatch between expectations and reality. People expect their technology to solve their problems. But often their problems have nothing to do with their technology, and anything to do with outside aspects like how they use it. E.g. during Corona one boss at a institution I know bought a incredibly expensive Video conferencing "thing" and expected it to run incredibly smooth, which it didn't, because he neither was willing to invest into the buildings bandwidth/latency nor did he make sure the people on the other side also had that bandwidth/latency as well. People like to believe into technology, like they would believe into gods or magic words: they don't want to understand how it fits into the world they are part of: they just want it to make their problems go away.

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

> 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. And you use it mostly to browse cat pictures :). Perhaps it takes a technologist to notice, but for every actual technological improvement that happens, the UI glitter gets cycled 20 times. Majority of "change" in computing technologies isn't improving anything, it's only inciting you to throw away your old device and buy a new one. Technology is amazing. But if you think of Star Trek visions, you can realize that our technology could be 10x more ergonomic and better than it is, and could be solving 10x more problems than it is. That's what I read these complains are about - unrealized potential. But perhaps it's because I'm a techie and a trekkie that I see it this way.

bobochan 6y ago
Thank you, that was a very inspiring response. I completely agree with you about the unrealized potential, but my greatest regret over the past 50 years is not about the technology, but our ability to harness it. I remember helping to setup a computer show at our local high school when I was still very young. The local vendors had agreed to donate an Apple //+ to the school in return for having space to show off all of their wares. We were thrilled and I can vividly remember my father saying that my generation would be the last one to learn programming as an add-on elective skill. He imagined a world where everyone could harness the power of digital technologies and that programming, building, tinkering, would be second nature to all of us. We spend our time thinking about UI glitter because we gave up on that dream of having every student learn to program. We took the exercises out of math and science books where we asked students to write programs to use the Pythagorean theorem or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. It became "enough" to learn how to enter a few numbers in a spreadsheet and perhaps add a trend line. A few hard working people in a garage can still turn out wonderful things, but if we really want to see the promise of technology then we need to fix the bigger problem of building an educational system that empowers many more people.

atoav 6y ago

"Technology sucks" in my eyes just means there is a mismatch between expectations and reality. People expect their technology to solve their problems. But often their problems have nothing to do with their technology, and anything to do with outside aspects like how they use it. E.g. during Corona one boss at a institution I know bought a incredibly expensive Video conferencing "thing" and expected it to run incredibly smooth, which it didn't, because he neither was willing to invest into the buildings bandwidth/latency nor did he make sure the people on the other side also had that bandwidth/latency as well. People like to believe into technology, like they would believe into gods or magic words: they don't want to understand how it fits into the world they are part of: they just want it to make their problems go away.