I must say this as clearly as possible: if you have, in the last ten years, thought "I just don't get tech" or that you're "getting old" or "you're not technical," you are the victim - so much of the tech industry is now oriented around making you do stuff rather than doing stuff for you.
Reposted from
Jenna Sais Quoi
I was seriously relieved when I started listening to your podcast and realized my increasing levels of frustration with modern tech are not because I'm getting older (I'm only 40 for gods's sake!) but because everything is actively getting worse. 🫠
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It did not last very long. This is a chemical plant; the schedule is a *big deal*.
Now if you'll excuse me, I seem to have mislaid my semaphore flags...
Heliograph or Daylight Signalling Lamp will provide more bandwidth though. 3:O)>
(I don't do carrier pigeon, too many hawks around.) 3:O(>
I’ve been testing some new 2fa stuff for work and there are so many better solutions and the whole complex dance of getting codes via email/phone needs to go away
Now I need to unlock my phone, try to open the email, unlock my phone, enter my full password (12+ digits with special requirements) get a number, enter it in an authenticator, and hope it doesn't time out
It's fucking atrocious.
That's maddening, but it's like that everywhere.
I may get back to you, but I've really been over and over this and don't understand most of it. I'm kind of exhausted and fed up with the whole process at this point.
Something malfunctions today? You better get those ritual sacrifices and Ouija board out cause tech ain't telling you shit voluntarily.
“Do more with less” is a plague.
*maybe
Ah I see the problem - you need to order your Microsoft Button! It's CTRL + SHIFT + MS + v , this is a special first 100 clicks free offer!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess
Like those microwaves that let you program everything *then* refuse to operate because you set power before time or vice versa.
You get what you pay for.
You'll never order pizza on Linux. You have to preinstall all the licensing agreements to make so much commercial software work.
You're better off with an Apple: then advertisers will market gourmet pizza to you.
Things don’t get easier to use they just get a simpler interface and often take away the features I was using before so that can make a new shitty ui
Why else are so many websites &apps are so infuriatingly awful to use???
Stoves are a good example, too, since the burners are on a grid, but the dials are not. You need to see the icons.
You never seen the world quite the same again after reading it...
Thanks, autocorrect, for changing things AFTER I’ve written another word and moved on so am not looking at what you charge; also another great “fix.”
I don't think that's good. Quite the opposite. We need more modest, more focused tech not everything-systems.
https://suckless.org/philosophy/
The HDHomeRun Prime is still available and one CableCARD is a lot less than renting boxes. Plex Pass is cheap and gives you guide data, and Plex is on every smart TV or device.
My Fios TV package is less than any streaming service, and I get access to streaming anyway.
If one of the big cable companies offered me a decent refunded experience + DVR I would jump on it
The fact that the feature existed, worked well, and became extinct can only be explained by malice, not incompetence.
Sometimes cable boxes get fucky about HDCP if the box is on and the TV is not, which is going to be the case every time you turn the TV off because the box is always on.
And it may actually be a loose/bad cable, if you see glitching it probably is.
As for making a better box…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-t21nbmXb0
Now everything is little pictures.
And if you struggle with semiotics (possibly because you're autistic like me) you end up paralyzed by indecision.
Let me put multiple labels on things!
Can you sense my frustration? 🫤
There's so much of it I want to purge.
I don't need more than half of what's on there.
Reactions? Really?
I wanted to make sure the problem wasn't me, so I spent an hour looking at documentation and videos on its UI. Every source waxed prolix about the dead simple menu items, without showing how to access the menu in the clickwheel UI.
I mean, it might try to burn your house down, my old one did, but that’s typical for a water heater.
"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes."
We're now in the era where I feel like tech is failing people by reinventing wheels that...
They build for the 1% of users in Silicon Valley, and fuck the rest of us who don't...
Look at Figma for a good example of "who the fuck are you making this for?" when all of us only use it for design approvals and intricate CSS/SVG stuff.
Who has budget to do anything else with it? lol
The first 2 days were me explaining to everyone over the phone that no, the standard script wasn't working because the prompts they expected were not there, and yes, I'd turned it off and on etc etc
It’s getting shorter all the time.
Nowadays it's all I do at tech, is cuss at it.
"(And consider yourself lucky if we don't make it worse first.)"
And right below that, on the little upvote sticker, 5321 people have indicated they also have this issue.
[post describing problem]
followed by
[this reply has been deleted]
and then thirty replies saying "omg thank you so much this totally fixed it!"
I miss AltaVista
this is a joke, right?
https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00233341
The kicker is if you search in the App Store for Microsoft Authenticator, it isn’t the first one that comes up. It’s one that tries to get you to pay for a service.
There’s a ton of tech that doesn’t do this (LED bulbs, solar power, memory foam, you name it).
Automation has always been about shifting labour from producers to consumers even when the tech is low (drive-thrus, ATMs, phone menus).
if i wanted to use it on tablet i'd buy a tablet.
Yet, somehow so many websites fail at being phone friendly -_-
Like 90% (idk how much) of the gaming income is from mobile games. Not computer games (crazy, I know). It's the candy crush moms fueling the industry. This translates to websites pretty well, too.
I'm typing on a phone xD
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-design-of-everyday-things-don-norman/12398830?ean=9780465050659
Great, right?
I see this every day and it angers me to no end.
It’s about 25 years old.
Both of them still work.
like, bro, i am calling you because that stuff Did Not Work 😭
Windows was never great but it was a damn sight better 15 years ago.
Hardware has gotten worse too, Nvidia going all-in on AI and I don't much care for it.
Me: “users are having problems with X”
Product: “oh that’s okay they can just do Y to fix it”
Me: “if they knew how to do Y they wouldn’t be talking to me! X needs to just work for them”
Ad Infinitum
“Please select a valid pick up date (DD/MM/YYYY) greater than today.”
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=276
(Though yes sometimes someone’s dipshit cousin got the contract and that’s all there is to it)
Then again, he windows tree model itself has become incredibly shitty as well.
Those filetree layouts are calculated to give users the sense of a tree.
But they're not.
Because their driving goal is to be *just ungood enough* to hold you hostage in a subscription model. Lure/coerce you in somehow, make things confusing enough you don't see a clear war out, collect their rent.
I wanted to throw many bricks.
I spent an hour the other day trying to deenshittify the new version of the iPhone photos app so I could mostly do what I could already do before they changed it.
Just accept it. You'll thank me later.
Why did they get rid of the sidebar menu? Why do I have to scroll to the bottom of my photos and exit out of a date range to find what used to live in a menu? It makes no sense!
If your really stuck the apple user forums are worth searching.
The whole thing is so dumb. I don’t even want to look at my pictures app because it’s so… like that. Give me back my normal menuuuu 😭
Then I opened my photos and saw they were very different and realized my phone update had eaten the notes. Found them on icloud and downloaded them but damn that was a helluva way to wake up.
wtf
AI is going to turn on them in the form of a mass assault by grannies mad that they can’t find pictures of their grandchildren.
What did they do to it?
Innovations are sinking into the quicksand of forced obsolescence all designed to goose profits, nerfing of useful features, and the god-king arrogance of the players...
It is Irwin Mainways all the way down in tech today.
Thank you for understand (and making my day).
In my experience "Are you actively trying to increase the Gross Domestic Misery metrics?" is usually the result of optimizing something else, usually for an entity that is not human. The corporation must feed.
Had to change files in five different directories to add a dialog box.
Either way, it's absolutely heretically bad.
ESRI somehow did with ArcGIS and nobody uses it
no bullshit, just function
every day we stray further from God's wifi signal
@edzitron.com your replies are getting scraped, you may wanna block https://bsky.app/profile/subscriberverify.bsky.social
How many apps/portals/passwords/stop sign photos must one navigate?
#GrumpyOldWoman
I find so many user interfaces and modern tech confusing, and I hate it.
The modern internet makes me want to hurl myself into the sun
I told him I had written programs on punchcards before he was even a twinkle in his father's eye and that I did not need his help thank you very much.
The people who fell for Brexit are people least able to deal with complexity: older people, less educated people, and people who straightforwardly don’t like complexity (authoritarians).
Yeah, when *that* bubble finally bursts, it ain't gonna be pretty :P
I have to waste so much time to make anything work
Since they didn't have the products on the shelf for me to just pick up and buy.
-- 2FA is a nightmare
but i hope we figure it out before my mom gets permanently locked out of her bank account
Setting up a new iPad for her via WhatsApp video was also harrowing. The most futile thing you can ever have to ask a parent begins "what's your password for...."
‘Siri play artist x’ and then it plays a random
Artist on a random app I do not use instead of the artist I ask for whose music I own
OceanOptics makes desk-top spectrometers. Good, pretty cheap, fiber-optic based.
The program for running them when I was in grad school, on the older Win 95 and Win7 computers? Rock solid. Bare-bones, but simple and straightforward.
A similar experience is with Syntech, which makes equipment for monitoring insect neural activity. The old software, that I ported from a Win XP machine, works great. The new version is baffling
The new hardware was still the same stuff, they'd just. Made the software FRIGGEN TERRIBLE.
and oh my god, the Win10 version of the software felt borderline unuseable by comparison.