If you ever want to experience what the worst of tech has to offer, try renting a UHaul vehicle in a rush over the weekend using their virtual check-in feature. It's SO BAD that it makes one immediately want to quit tech and live in the woods.
I'm so curious about this; it is nearly universal that software engineers threaten this. I constantly tell my colleagues that I am quitting to start woodworking in a cabin in British Columbia.
My theory is that we are comprised of people who love building and making things, yet at the end of the day we don't have anything tangible to show. Like, my parents (nearing 80 years old) barely understand what I do or how software engineering works, though they are computer-literate. Going back 2 generations and it is incomprehensible magic. But, if I built a cabin or a cabinet or a wooden spoon, I could have a meaningful conversation about it with someone from the last Ice Age (language barriers aside). Maybe it is just staring at a screen 8 hours+ per day leaves the ancient part of the brain wanting.
The "leave tech and find some pastoral life" is a very tempting dream.
I know a lot of technologists who do something physical with their hobby time. Woodworking is top of the list... I know a blacksmith. There are quite a few who do painting (and the entire subset of spending that excess disposable income on plastic to paint).
Its to have something that has permanence when the lights are turned off.
I make this very same joke; I think a lot of it is that the bearded old man hermit in the rugged forests idea has a lot of precedence in fiction and expresses a bunch of concepts very succinctly. Not just the rejection of modern technology, but also the bitterness felt toward it, the distance to be sought from fellow humans and their artifice, the peace found in the new life, independence, and so on. There's also an appealing masculinity to it, for those of us of that persuasion.
One of these days I'll do it! I'll never open another JIRA ticket again!
Man I couldn't even log in to my Amtrak account for like a week. Not during a rush period, just the basic login flow did not work. I don't understand how websites can be this broken.
> I don't understand how websites can be this broken.
Wait. What? There are dozens of threads posted here daily about the new AI model, laying off huge swaths of junior engineering roles, and vibe coding as engineering, dev-ops, and quality control.
Amtrak is a perfect example too. An American monopoly, an established near-ancient technology, and tech bolted on that make something simple worse and complicated. Trains have been figured out for 150 years, welcome to the age of AI.
I have been trying to register the warranty on a vacuum cleaner for over a week now. Every day I fill out the long-ass form and submit, but the “service is unavailable; try back later”.
I had fun with one warranty system. Including stupid steps of like taking photo of it not being on when reason I send it for warranty was it not turning on... And then weird login system that needed postcode or something else. Just that customer rep had not put my postcode in originally...
Oh not to mention UPS and inability to enter entry code to their system as they did not pass my phone number or email to them. I did have tracking number, but that clearly is not enough when you can no clearly contact customer. So only option to give the code to them that was to call them...
Like utterly broken flows. Often it feels that no one considers the extremely common corner cases.
If you're in the US, you can skip the registration. The warranty applies even if you don't register it. They try to convince you to "register" so they can fill out their marketing database.
Yeah, I finally came around to this yesterday, and the page says as much in the fine print. Just took down my details so that I can find them later and will leave it at that.
I recently spent 10 days trying to move my WhatsApp chats from Android to iOS. Tried probably 40 different times, dozens of different ways. Even down to having Claude pull the encrypted chat backups via ADB, decrypt them and go through the database row-by-row looking for issues.
Gave up. Just left the old phone plugged in and added the iPhone as a companion device.
40 years of software development, this is the worst piece of dogshit software I've ever encountered.
Sounds like it worked by design to me. I feel certain that they didn't want you to be able to do that transition. Was that a well thought out decision, probably not. Think about the training most product managers have. My last product manager had a degree in Chem E. She wasn't dumb, but she didn't know the first thing about UI design or what influenced user response rates. She did know what her KPI was and number go up. Company now out of business. We are both out of a job :(
I tried renting a uhaul very last second a couple years back at the rental location. I was standing in the office, just me and the one single employee working that day.
As part of the rental process I had to give my phone number. At some point the employee says something like "You should get a text message with a link in a couple seconds, click the link and fill out the form and you'll be good to go."
To which I responded 'I don't have a smartphone, I can't click a link. How else can I fill out the form?'
Apparently there was no other way. He thought about it for a minute, then just took a picture of my license and handed me the keys. It's been 3 years and I never heard anything about it, so I figure I got lucky. I just know that if I ever find myself in that situation again karma will catch up with me and it will be a big issue.
What happened to the days of signing some papers on a clipboard?
He filled out the form “on your behalf”. There might be questionable or comical information put on that form since it’s not like you would ever see it. He might have an account that he uses for this scenario to capture that data in a free email account and collect or sell any points/rewards. There is no way of telling at this point. Vehicle rentals isn’t the most honest or career rewarding industry.
I agree. The tech industry prides itself on "easy UX" but in reality they make it easy to do the actions they want you as the user to do, not the actions you really want to do. They optimize for revenue, not for user happiness.
It's actually not really difficult (in theory) to engineer good UX, you simply have to look at the decision tree representing the application's state space and re-balance it according to actual usage intents.
Meaning, you make the most frequent goals need fewest clicks.
I have a model year 2025 car and it's astounding to switch the media system over to FM and flip between the stations. Instantaneous. We never get that feeling any more.
A more apt analogy would be a world where virtually all restaurants serve food that tastes horrible and makes you sick, while grocery stores have essentially disappeared thus making home cooking impractical.
I'm embarrassed that every site is now AI generated and carries the same exact visuals/aesthetics/smells of vibe coding. Such a disgrace to creativity.
I’ve been writing code for 20 years. I’ve made websites, native apps, embedded, web services, IoT, agents, basically the lot.
People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech. I don’t want your app, I don’t want to scan your QR code, yes I really do just want to speak to a person and no I don’t want to automate or make “smart” anything in my home.
It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.
The promised land never came and I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.
I will however keep doing my best to improve the systems I work on and pushing product and engineering do better.
This has been my experience too. I think it’s because hacking something together for yourself takes orders of magnitude less effort than designing something for others, especially when you need help. It’s no wonder open-source software can be hard to work with; most projects started out to scratch a very specific itch.
I have a theory that people in tech tend to hate or not care about other people’s clever tech solutions/products, but love their own little custom projects. So AI era probably will make it better if everyone building their own stuff becomes the norm.
For a while now, "tech" has been solving problems that don't really exist. Having to scan a QRcode to read a restaurant menu, having to use a kiosk to order your fast food while the employee is standing right there but can't take your order, connecting your fridge to the cloud, etc. Why do I need an app on my phone to control my sprinklers instead of just a panel in my garage?
Of course it helps reduce costs and increase profit for corporations, but it solves nothing for end users. Every new "tech thing" also feels like a stupid charade for a manufactured "need".
I feel the same. I have, however, discovered joy in running my own personal cloud with Tailscale, some Raspberry Pi's, Mac desktops, Jellyfin / Plex, and lots of personal mini web apps.
While, to me this feels like edging towards IoT, it's not something the layman home automation enthusiast understands (their eyes gloss over when I talk about it).
Same. About 35 years for me. A recurring bad dream I have is trying to do something on my phone and it Just. Doesn't. Work. Ending with me smashing the phone on a rock or something.
With retirement nearing the horizon, I plan to minimize the amount of technology in my life after that to the greatest extent that I can. I sometimes wonder if people in other professions grow to hate the products they produce in the same way.
> People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech. I don’t want your app, I don’t want to scan your QR code, yes I really do just want to speak to a person and no I don’t want to automate or make “smart” anything in my home.
> It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.
I'm the same way. I think there a couple of different reasons for it:
1. Many "tech products" aren't there to serve you, the user. They're there to serve someone else (usually a group of investors). Customer support chatbots are a great example. You're "subjected" to this tech, and it exists deliberately to make your life worse.
2. The internet, specifically, is a technology that removed a lot of the constraints that held some lazy and malign aspects of human psychology in check. Constraints (aka friction) are not bad things. For instance:
The friction of shipping updates on floppy disks (or not at all), meant people actually needed to QA the heck out of their shit. Now you can cut that QA because you can "just push a patch later" (or some other buggy feature, or intentionally cripple the software, etc.).
The friction of two-way communication being expensive gave you privacy, now your computer, car, and TV can spy on you to provide monetization opportunities to the manufacturer.
And, in general, it's made it practically impossible for everyone, even really savvy consumers, to evaluate the products they're buying. Do I have any way to figure out if this car will spy on me? Do I know if it will have this feature I like next year, after the annual unnecessary UI redesign? No, I do not. It's all out of my control.
> People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech.
Same. But it's not really that I hate tech: I hate that inferior, mediocre, device that the smartphone is. It's a spying device. It's got a minuscule pathetic screen (I rock an ultra-wide monitor at home).
I drive more than most: I was finding my way across Europe before smartphones and I can still find my way without constantly needing a smartphone. My car's navi system (from 2013) does the job totally fine: just a map and GPS receiver and that's it.
I very often don't take my phone with me: when I see people glued on their phone, endlessly doom-scrolling and taking selfies I just pitty them.
But I'm not luddite: I've got a "homelab" which I uses daily (it serves family pictures, movies, files/backups, it hosts VMs, I use it to isolate AI agents etc.).
A smartphone is not "tech": it's a mediocre piece of crap that spies on people. Worse: many have a smartphone but aren't comfortable speaking on the phone.
It'd be a tragedy if it wasn't pathetically funny.
And at home I keep hammering to my kid that smartphone are poison: opium for the unsuspecting masses.
And as she sees me doing just fine without my smartphone, the point is getting across.
Screw smartphones: just screw those mediocre turds.
My mental list of things like VLC, uBlock Origins, and Kagi are what keep computers usable for me, while also detaching me from the typical experience of non-savvy tech users. We live in software elysium.
I can't stand VLC. The only options are skip ahead 10 seconds and back 10 seconds. I prefer SMPlayer. I can skip ahead or back 10 seconds, 1 minute or 10 minutes.
I have not recently got lost when navigating (mobile maps), had to wait for my bank to open the following day to move money (online banking), or had to phone or visit a travel agent to arrange an international trip (OTA).
I feel the klunkiness of bad design as much as the next grumpy gen-Xer, but you don't really notice all the rough edges that disappeared in the last 30 years.
Now, why the hell can I not conveniently disable autoplay video in Firefox or Chrome here a quarter of the way into the 21st Century!? (Sound of angry muttering fades away...)
> why the hell can I not conveniently disable autoplay video in Firefox or Chrome
Because Google doesn't want you to since they make money from autoplay, and they control both Chrome and Firefox (the former directly, the latter indirectly).
I agree, but also to be fair, I think it's always been like this. Was there ever a time when technology "just worked" for non-technical people (or technical people!)? Bad coding, bad platforms, predatory platforms, whacked out design, crappy hardware...
There may have been pockets of quality, but in general I'd say that the tech industry has produced pretty low quality user experiences if viewed holistically. I think the main causes are speed of innovation (on the positive) and unrelenting capitalistic need for profit (on the negative), maybe a lot of hubris and incompetency thrown in too.
> Was there ever a time when technology "just worked" for non-technical people (or technical people!)?
I know you weren’t being quite so literal but it is worth mentioning Google until 2019 or so did, even as SEO and ad considerations nibbled at it for years. Eventually it broke though so here we are
Early consoles (except Nintendo cartridges), cassette players, VCRs, CD players, cable TV boxes, fax machines, photocopier, computer-controlled telescopes... While sometimes figuring out how to get them to do something in the pre-internet era was difficult, they would pretty reliably do it. The only glitches or crashes I remember on my C64 were from disk corruption (or my own coding errors).
I don't know, cassettes, VHS tapes and CDs were all extremely delicate. I remember desperately trying to rewind cassette tapes with a pencil and messing with tracking on my VCR to get a semi-viewable picture. CDs would skip like crazy... The consoles are probably the best example of plug-in-play (except the Nintendo carts like you mention).
God I hate Uw Zorg Online. The app recently had a 500 issue with retrieving my medical history, and looking into the API it's because it can't retrieve my (completely unrelated) allergies history. Of which I have none.
Abstraction stacks hiding complexity all the way down. Maybe the kernel touch driver sometimes reports duplicate events due to a race condition, so the user mode library drops events it thinks are duplicates... Maybe the application changes some shadow DOM state when you touch and the framework ignores events while the real DOM is out of sync and thinks it's also being clever by deferring the DOM sync... Maybe it's just polling every 200ms for a current touch.
Once I tried writing an app in early windows style: inside the mouse down handler redraw the button as pressed, etc. Not setting the button state to pressed and triggering a redraw, but actually changing the pixels inside the handler. It's a huge layering violation but it's actually refreshing to cut through all the BS and make the computer just do the right thing, and it actually worked better most of the time than a modern framework app.
Like Digi-D, the authentication app for all government services. It’s a confusing Byzantine mess for elderly people. For a first-world country with gazillions of rules to protect every minority you can think of, they should be deeply ashamed of the barely beta quality turd they’ve unleashed on the elderly. You’d think some kind of geriatric/cognitive/UX specialist could have been consulted.
Not that is the only issue here, but every single time I have become proficient on a UI and/or enjoyed the provided UX, they come back with another version, one that is supposed to be all the rave, and make everything better, and it's always worse... You want an example macOS. Another one? Affinity software which was perfectly fine as individual products.
I get that someone has to justify their wage, but design people are absolutely guilty of turning perfectly functional software into unusable, convoluted, Rube-Goldbergesque abominations.
You ad that to all the dark patterns we keep allowing airlines and social media companies and you have an internet that is barely functional to the normal human being.
We can talk to computers now, and they can both understand is and take actions. I expected things to move much faster to the point where 99% of what people use tech for is handled by speaking natural language to pretty much any device and an agent does what you want. Maybe it's coming but it's very slow, or maybe I am way off.
Man, I’ve felt this way for decades now. It’s a constant fight just to accomplish basic utility without divulging everything short of your genetic code to hundreds of “partners” in the process. It’s at the point that I spend more time trying to get relatives off tech entirely instead of helping them utilize it to improve their lives, for the simple reason tech doesn’t improve life right now, at least not for a lot of folks in my circles.
We built tools of mass communication, art, creativity, passion, and sharing, and then allowed the pursuit of advertising revenue to pervert them all into toxic cesspools of vitriol and incomprehensible UI/UX rife with dark patterns for maximum extraction of resources and rent.
You know what I still love about tech? The IRC server daemon chugging along without complaint and enabling pseudonymous communication without signups. The Jellyfin server hosting media to friends and family on Docker. The Caddy container handling certificates and reverse proxies for everything.
I love the things I build that just work, frozen how I like them, patched only when vulnerabilities become an issue or new features are something I find value in. The way tech was meant to be, I believe.
IRC has a completely separate problem - it hasn't evolved to deal with the modern world. The online/offline model with persistent connection while online is a total anachronism. And you can't send a screenshot through it - even email can do that.
Those are fair critiques to be sure, but also precisely why my circles find utility in it.
Most of my IRC users hate the persistent records of modern chat systems and their persistent “always-online” functional designs. They want to be able to log off on their terms and not have a session follow them around, which IRC respects. For those who want rich rendering for media, they can choose a client that does that rather than have it forced upon them by default in Discord or Slack.
Same deal with sharing images: why shoehorn it into IRC when we have copyparty right there? It’s faster, easier, and entirely ephemeral - just like IRC is configured on the server side.
The point isn’t a “do everything” software or platform so much as a “do what we need so we can go live life doing what we want” setup.
It really is, but maybe not in the way you think. If you put the top Data Engineer who is an expert in making data processing large amounts of data really fast in charge of a UI, it will be terrible. But there are experts in how to design UIs. Ever met one in a PM role? Me neither.
"Civilians" don't care about our ultra-performant native app, ultra cached SPA, or minimalist UX. They just want something done and they have to (sometimes begrudgingly) use an electronic device to do it.
Maybe AI and voice interaction a la Star Trek's computer is the end for most computer interactions in the future.
Where does this idea that people don't care about performance come from? They don't care _why_ or _how_ it is important, but people very much care whether an app is slow or fast.
Seeing you mentioning "apps" makes me think I have not explained it well...
I'm not talking specifically about performance here, more about ease of use and not having to learn to interact with a machine via UIs, keyboards, mouses and weird things like these.
They just care about getting the result they want without having to learn our cute UIs.
If they could ask the machine to "machine do this now!" and it would be done (quickly, of course) they would be really happy (and pay you well for it).
I hosted a party for some friends and their families yesterday and this also came up, particularly in regards to Roblox. It is possible to tune Roblox and make it safe for your kid, but is is a lot of work.
Fundamentally, tech companies are user-hostile because their growth, revenue, stock price, (and for some of them now, political power) depend on a shitty experience. Every tech company wants to automate other companies's products, but will use every tool available (including legal ones) to stop you, the user, from automating and controlling their product.
The examples are endless: Roblox creates a kids casino, but if you as the parent want a safer, saner experience for your kid you have to navigate endless settings and there's still tons of shit that falls through the cracks, so you have to manually oversee what they do and manually ban bad games. However, if you try to use automate this process for yourself, there's no API, or you'll get banned for screen scraping or atypical behaviour that triggers some automated system. Facebook aggregates other websites, becomes a centre of social life, then they'll shove endless slop at you, but if you try to use your own app or agent to create your own experience so you're not exposed to that, you get banned.
A while back I vibe-coded a little parental control for my kid's YouTube because I wanted to give him autonomy to choose his own stuff, but also make sure he's not watching crap. I took his YouTube history then had Gemini automatically watch, rank, categorize and flag things for me (https://github.com/drashkov/slopstopper), and the analysis was pretty great. But taking actual action (banning channels, automated runs) is a major pain, because YouTube fundamentally does not want me to be in control of my kids's experience, they guard their turf jealously.
IMHO, the tech arms race is doomed, things will keep getting worse until enough people are pissed off to demand political changes.
Modern tech needs to stop changing user interfaces every 2-3 years.
Imagine if every few months when go to your faucet, someone decides to switch which side cold and hot are. Or perhaps the acceleration and brake pedals in a car get swapped because "our testing showed x".
Software is a tool for people and they build up muscle and spatial memory, so changing the interface can be a user hostile act.
That's not to say there shouldn't be improvements, but we should be scrutinizing these changes instead of frivolously treating the interface as this year's latest fashion.
Tech has always been like this. On the building side, it has been Cargo Culting for years. If it's not AI, it was microservices, or NoSQL, or the newest front-end framework. The nature of tech meant that we always had to keep up with this stuff, because it helped you land another potential future job.
On the business side it has always been a series of perverse incentives that go counter to needs of the customer.
I get it. But there is a lot of nuance. The other day I was helping someone pay their cellphone bill but needed to do it through their bank. Credit and debit cards were locked on the bank side, but needed to follow a process of unlocking them, waiting for 2FA with delays, special codes, lockouts, etc.
That's the nuance.
We can't just one click do something anymore in a simple easy way, because bad humans ruined it for the rest of us. Every time something comes along as a disruptor to do things without friction, bad actors find a way to exploit it. Soon, it becomes this multi step flow to accomplish your task. So then of course, blog posts like this pop up and hit the front page about how it all sucks. Nah, it doesn't suck, what sucks is bad humans ruining things for the rest of us, and it's prevalent everywhere in society, not just tech.
Fix the root cause of people behaving badly, and we fix these issues.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 58.0 ms ] threadI'm so curious about this; it is nearly universal that software engineers threaten this. I constantly tell my colleagues that I am quitting to start woodworking in a cabin in British Columbia.
My theory is that we are comprised of people who love building and making things, yet at the end of the day we don't have anything tangible to show. Like, my parents (nearing 80 years old) barely understand what I do or how software engineering works, though they are computer-literate. Going back 2 generations and it is incomprehensible magic. But, if I built a cabin or a cabinet or a wooden spoon, I could have a meaningful conversation about it with someone from the last Ice Age (language barriers aside). Maybe it is just staring at a screen 8 hours+ per day leaves the ancient part of the brain wanting.
The "leave tech and find some pastoral life" is a very tempting dream.
I know a lot of technologists who do something physical with their hobby time. Woodworking is top of the list... I know a blacksmith. There are quite a few who do painting (and the entire subset of spending that excess disposable income on plastic to paint).
Its to have something that has permanence when the lights are turned off.
One of these days I'll do it! I'll never open another JIRA ticket again!
Wait. What? There are dozens of threads posted here daily about the new AI model, laying off huge swaths of junior engineering roles, and vibe coding as engineering, dev-ops, and quality control.
Amtrak is a perfect example too. An American monopoly, an established near-ancient technology, and tech bolted on that make something simple worse and complicated. Trains have been figured out for 150 years, welcome to the age of AI.
Oh not to mention UPS and inability to enter entry code to their system as they did not pass my phone number or email to them. I did have tracking number, but that clearly is not enough when you can no clearly contact customer. So only option to give the code to them that was to call them...
Like utterly broken flows. Often it feels that no one considers the extremely common corner cases.
Gave up. Just left the old phone plugged in and added the iPhone as a companion device.
40 years of software development, this is the worst piece of dogshit software I've ever encountered.
As part of the rental process I had to give my phone number. At some point the employee says something like "You should get a text message with a link in a couple seconds, click the link and fill out the form and you'll be good to go."
To which I responded 'I don't have a smartphone, I can't click a link. How else can I fill out the form?'
Apparently there was no other way. He thought about it for a minute, then just took a picture of my license and handed me the keys. It's been 3 years and I never heard anything about it, so I figure I got lucky. I just know that if I ever find myself in that situation again karma will catch up with me and it will be a big issue.
What happened to the days of signing some papers on a clipboard?
It's actually not really difficult (in theory) to engineer good UX, you simply have to look at the decision tree representing the application's state space and re-balance it according to actual usage intents.
Meaning, you make the most frequent goals need fewest clicks.
Clearly, practically nobody does that. Why?
we all can only do so much. do the best you can and be proud of that. there's no need to take on the embarrassment or shame of a whole industry.
it is not good to feel embarrassment about things you cannot control, provide no input to, and do not benefit from.
People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech. I don’t want your app, I don’t want to scan your QR code, yes I really do just want to speak to a person and no I don’t want to automate or make “smart” anything in my home.
It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.
The promised land never came and I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.
I will however keep doing my best to improve the systems I work on and pushing product and engineering do better.
Usability and simplicity have been cornerstones of my work, since the early 1980s.
Simple is hard. Like, really hard. People think that it's just about removing UI elements. In my experience, it's about adding the right ones.
most products aren't made for every one of us; i think i've only ever truly made things for myself when i was not being paid
Of course it helps reduce costs and increase profit for corporations, but it solves nothing for end users. Every new "tech thing" also feels like a stupid charade for a manufactured "need".
It's not just that it solves nothing for end users. That would be tolerable. It's that it actively makes things worse for users.
While, to me this feels like edging towards IoT, it's not something the layman home automation enthusiast understands (their eyes gloss over when I talk about it).
With retirement nearing the horizon, I plan to minimize the amount of technology in my life after that to the greatest extent that I can. I sometimes wonder if people in other professions grow to hate the products they produce in the same way.
> It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.
I'm the same way. I think there a couple of different reasons for it:
1. Many "tech products" aren't there to serve you, the user. They're there to serve someone else (usually a group of investors). Customer support chatbots are a great example. You're "subjected" to this tech, and it exists deliberately to make your life worse.
2. The internet, specifically, is a technology that removed a lot of the constraints that held some lazy and malign aspects of human psychology in check. Constraints (aka friction) are not bad things. For instance:
The friction of shipping updates on floppy disks (or not at all), meant people actually needed to QA the heck out of their shit. Now you can cut that QA because you can "just push a patch later" (or some other buggy feature, or intentionally cripple the software, etc.).
The friction of two-way communication being expensive gave you privacy, now your computer, car, and TV can spy on you to provide monetization opportunities to the manufacturer.
And, in general, it's made it practically impossible for everyone, even really savvy consumers, to evaluate the products they're buying. Do I have any way to figure out if this car will spy on me? Do I know if it will have this feature I like next year, after the annual unnecessary UI redesign? No, I do not. It's all out of my control.
Same. But it's not really that I hate tech: I hate that inferior, mediocre, device that the smartphone is. It's a spying device. It's got a minuscule pathetic screen (I rock an ultra-wide monitor at home).
I drive more than most: I was finding my way across Europe before smartphones and I can still find my way without constantly needing a smartphone. My car's navi system (from 2013) does the job totally fine: just a map and GPS receiver and that's it.
I very often don't take my phone with me: when I see people glued on their phone, endlessly doom-scrolling and taking selfies I just pitty them.
But I'm not luddite: I've got a "homelab" which I uses daily (it serves family pictures, movies, files/backups, it hosts VMs, I use it to isolate AI agents etc.).
A smartphone is not "tech": it's a mediocre piece of crap that spies on people. Worse: many have a smartphone but aren't comfortable speaking on the phone.
It'd be a tragedy if it wasn't pathetically funny.
And at home I keep hammering to my kid that smartphone are poison: opium for the unsuspecting masses.
And as she sees me doing just fine without my smartphone, the point is getting across.
Screw smartphones: just screw those mediocre turds.
I feel the klunkiness of bad design as much as the next grumpy gen-Xer, but you don't really notice all the rough edges that disappeared in the last 30 years.
Now, why the hell can I not conveniently disable autoplay video in Firefox or Chrome here a quarter of the way into the 21st Century!? (Sound of angry muttering fades away...)
Because Google doesn't want you to since they make money from autoplay, and they control both Chrome and Firefox (the former directly, the latter indirectly).
There may have been pockets of quality, but in general I'd say that the tech industry has produced pretty low quality user experiences if viewed holistically. I think the main causes are speed of innovation (on the positive) and unrelenting capitalistic need for profit (on the negative), maybe a lot of hubris and incompetency thrown in too.
I know you weren’t being quite so literal but it is worth mentioning Google until 2019 or so did, even as SEO and ad considerations nibbled at it for years. Eventually it broke though so here we are
it is hard to type in your pin code because it misses touch events, I always get my pin wrong
every time I use it I contemplate how did we end up here, how can we have software running on supercomputers in our hands missing touch events
the sad truth is vibe coded programs are better than most programs I use
Once I tried writing an app in early windows style: inside the mouse down handler redraw the button as pressed, etc. Not setting the button state to pressed and triggering a redraw, but actually changing the pixels inside the handler. It's a huge layering violation but it's actually refreshing to cut through all the BS and make the computer just do the right thing, and it actually worked better most of the time than a modern framework app.
Dislike of ai is because of societal reasons. we should embrace it in our products.
I get that someone has to justify their wage, but design people are absolutely guilty of turning perfectly functional software into unusable, convoluted, Rube-Goldbergesque abominations.
You ad that to all the dark patterns we keep allowing airlines and social media companies and you have an internet that is barely functional to the normal human being.
We built tools of mass communication, art, creativity, passion, and sharing, and then allowed the pursuit of advertising revenue to pervert them all into toxic cesspools of vitriol and incomprehensible UI/UX rife with dark patterns for maximum extraction of resources and rent.
You know what I still love about tech? The IRC server daemon chugging along without complaint and enabling pseudonymous communication without signups. The Jellyfin server hosting media to friends and family on Docker. The Caddy container handling certificates and reverse proxies for everything.
I love the things I build that just work, frozen how I like them, patched only when vulnerabilities become an issue or new features are something I find value in. The way tech was meant to be, I believe.
Most of my IRC users hate the persistent records of modern chat systems and their persistent “always-online” functional designs. They want to be able to log off on their terms and not have a session follow them around, which IRC respects. For those who want rich rendering for media, they can choose a client that does that rather than have it forced upon them by default in Discord or Slack.
Same deal with sharing images: why shoehorn it into IRC when we have copyparty right there? It’s faster, easier, and entirely ephemeral - just like IRC is configured on the server side.
The point isn’t a “do everything” software or platform so much as a “do what we need so we can go live life doing what we want” setup.
Maybe AI and voice interaction a la Star Trek's computer is the end for most computer interactions in the future.
I'm not talking specifically about performance here, more about ease of use and not having to learn to interact with a machine via UIs, keyboards, mouses and weird things like these.
They just care about getting the result they want without having to learn our cute UIs.
If they could ask the machine to "machine do this now!" and it would be done (quickly, of course) they would be really happy (and pay you well for it).
Oh, I sure hope not. Voice is the worst user interface for most things.
Today I have a lot of options and things work well enough. I have Reddit where I post comments on my local things. I have LinkedIn, WhatsApp.
I can get almost anything I want and understand how to do anything.
Fundamentally, tech companies are user-hostile because their growth, revenue, stock price, (and for some of them now, political power) depend on a shitty experience. Every tech company wants to automate other companies's products, but will use every tool available (including legal ones) to stop you, the user, from automating and controlling their product.
The examples are endless: Roblox creates a kids casino, but if you as the parent want a safer, saner experience for your kid you have to navigate endless settings and there's still tons of shit that falls through the cracks, so you have to manually oversee what they do and manually ban bad games. However, if you try to use automate this process for yourself, there's no API, or you'll get banned for screen scraping or atypical behaviour that triggers some automated system. Facebook aggregates other websites, becomes a centre of social life, then they'll shove endless slop at you, but if you try to use your own app or agent to create your own experience so you're not exposed to that, you get banned.
A while back I vibe-coded a little parental control for my kid's YouTube because I wanted to give him autonomy to choose his own stuff, but also make sure he's not watching crap. I took his YouTube history then had Gemini automatically watch, rank, categorize and flag things for me (https://github.com/drashkov/slopstopper), and the analysis was pretty great. But taking actual action (banning channels, automated runs) is a major pain, because YouTube fundamentally does not want me to be in control of my kids's experience, they guard their turf jealously.
IMHO, the tech arms race is doomed, things will keep getting worse until enough people are pissed off to demand political changes.
Imagine if every few months when go to your faucet, someone decides to switch which side cold and hot are. Or perhaps the acceleration and brake pedals in a car get swapped because "our testing showed x".
Software is a tool for people and they build up muscle and spatial memory, so changing the interface can be a user hostile act.
That's not to say there shouldn't be improvements, but we should be scrutinizing these changes instead of frivolously treating the interface as this year's latest fashion.
On the business side it has always been a series of perverse incentives that go counter to needs of the customer.
That's the nuance.
We can't just one click do something anymore in a simple easy way, because bad humans ruined it for the rest of us. Every time something comes along as a disruptor to do things without friction, bad actors find a way to exploit it. Soon, it becomes this multi step flow to accomplish your task. So then of course, blog posts like this pop up and hit the front page about how it all sucks. Nah, it doesn't suck, what sucks is bad humans ruining things for the rest of us, and it's prevalent everywhere in society, not just tech.
Fix the root cause of people behaving badly, and we fix these issues.