Hacker News Reader

Comment by whitepoplar | Hacker News Reader

My beef with this type of technology is threefold:

1) Most of it is just not very useful.

2) I like opinionated software built by obsessive people. This isn't that. You can smell it.

3) Most importantly, these AI/chatbot/nudge/assistant/automation tools have a critical flaw--they're not predictable. Trying to manage them is like keeping a bunch of state in your head at the same time and it hurts. Which device is going to remind me? When? When will it remind me exactly? An hour before? 5 minutes before? Are my notification preferences saved from my last device that I recently replaced? Are my notifications turned on? Do I have sound turned on or only badge icons?

I think software works best when it has a bounded utility, not popping into your life unexpectedly 24x7, but being lightweight, simple, useful, and predictable for the 30 seconds you need it and that's it.

View on HN

I'll second that. A tool being simple and easy to reason about will beat one that tries to be fancy and do things for me any day.

Sadly, the tendency in tech people seems to be to make things as god-awful complicated as possible.

DOS: Install applications by copying a folder of files to your disk. They include their dependencies, and they can't really conflict. Can be "installed" to removable media.

Modern OSs: Install applications using a package manager that will automatically detect conflicts and grab dependencies for you, except when it screws up and hoses itself then it is time for a reinstall. Can only install applications from managed repositories. Can only install applications to hardcoded paths. Has no concept of installing applications to removable media so you can use them from any computer. Most don't even have the concept of downloading packages and their dependencies for installation on a different computer.

The modern tech solution to the problems caused by package managers? Containerization.

Sometimes I feel like it's a sport to see who can come up with the most convoluted pile of abstractions to solve the simplest problems.

Whoa there, you seem to have gotten your things_used_to_be_better metaphors mixed up:

DOS: install program by copying a bunch of files to a directory. Start program, won't work as it needs something in config.sys. Add that something, reboot PC, try again and the program now complains about not having enough low memory. Fiddle with expanded/extended/extruded/exploded memory to get those extra 15 KB which the program needs. Reboot PC, the program now works but that other program which used to work doesn't anymore as the special something in config.sys conflicts with its own very special something.

Modern OS: install portable application, problem solved.

.app on the Mac and .appx on windows implements self contained apps you can copy around as necessary. Appx is a bit newer on the windows side you see them called "universal", or "store apps" depending on the marketing era they were made in. On the mac .app is the universal way to distribute apps since Mac OS X took over (and before that on NextStep).

While App Bundles of NextStep/OSX fame are pretty much precisely the kind of simplicity I'm talking about, Appx on Windows is a clusterfuck. I've never seen them used outside of the package manager, you need crap like Move-AppxPackage to change their location, and from what I can tell you can't run them at all unless they're registered with the system.

Technically it is totally possible to make portable Windows applications and people do it all the time, but it isn't the way applications are typically built and that causes a bunch of problems. Linux has the same issue, really. Linux users will talk about how silly the registry is, but the file hierarchy full of hardcoded paths is pretty much the same damn thing. It is also technically possible to make portable Linux applications, it's just slightly harder than Windows due to a few factors caused by everyone always working within the distro+package manager paradigm. Where they do have some form of "portable" application, they've over-engineered the hell out of it and use containerization to make it happen. AppImage is ok, it's only slightly over-engineered, but sadly even that doesn't work everywhere because of how much of a mess Linux is.

Appx does have mini registries which makes them moveable at a technical level. The main restrictions come from registration with the sandbox - which I admit completely defeats that aspect of the design.

That's a common problem with Microsoft. One team makes an elegant design but another team doesn't fully understand it and thwarts the improvements made.

> I like opinionated software built by obsessive people. This isn't that. You can smell it.

Very interesting, and my initial reaction is that I agree. It's like art in that sense.

Now I'm trying to think of cases where it applies and where it doesn't, and maybe generalize that. A game? Of course. Applications? Yes, if the developer's vision embraces a variety of use cases and real world scenarios. Do I want that for my OS? It does give the OS a cohesive design, which is appealing, and predictability, but the dev's opinion better be that the OS should stay out of my way. A video driver? I guess anything could benefit from cohesive vision - it makes the software easier to reason about - but availability, compatibility and functionality seem paramount. ... I haven't yet left my laptop, so there are many more possibilities.

I definitely agree with you. It also just seems like such disingenuous crocodile tears from google.

Like don't act as if we don't see through this--you see how angry people are getting about facebook and all the other manipulative technologies tuned to be as addictive as possible for their advertiser's sake. You see the outrage and you know you've been doing the same thing so you're trying to get ahead of the PR disaster. All of a sudden google's all about disconnecting and not distracting you with AI-tailored bullshit and ads 24/7.

And yeah. Adding an AI assistant to your home and car isn't going in the right direction. Like how do they figure that's going to help you disconnect? I see the justifications but they feel really contrived. Just another way for them to soak up all your data and target you for more and more manipulative and addictive content.

I personally think that letting AI assistants into your life is yet another terrible idea. Why are we doing it? Is it really that great? Is a little bit of convenience really worth it? I think people will do literally anything for a slight increase in convenience, no matter how small. Anything. It's crazy.

Trying to manage them is like keeping a bunch of state in your head at the same time and it hurts.

So it seems better to have just one specialized system to manage all notifications.

A bit of a shameless plug, but if you want predictable, I've built a browser extension for the "nudge" part: https://www.nudgeti.com/

It shows a browser notification when you spend more than two minutes on certain websites.

add to 1) the economic and cultural fad about how awesome it is. Or stay ignorant and go with the flow. If you ever know history, the repetition is rapidly draining your mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com