Modern Technology: Please stop trying to be helpful

The other variant of this is GUIs trying to be "helpful" in the least helpful way possible: unpredictable, inconsistent, and counterproductive.

There is honest scientific research going back decades -- possibly over a century -- about how people learn rote tasks, such as assembling widgets in a factory. Muscle memory, repetitive behaviours, all of these have been studied. We know how this all works! People can get very fast at repeated tasks, such as using keyboard shortcuts to navigate a GUI[1], enter numbers into a calculator, or ring up a product on a till.

So what do computer geniuses in Silicon Valley making half a million in cold hard cash do to ensure this essential element of human nature is enhanced to the maximum extent possible?

They program menus to rearrange items.

They hide the keyboard shortcuts.

They helpfully press extra keys for you, assuming that you are too retarded to close the bracket you just opened... that was closing an existing bracket, but that context would take general-purpose AI to properly understand... or just human intelligence.

I know when I want to open a single bracket or a create an entire bracket pair. I don't need my hand held.

I also don't need G Mail to insert extra spaces around text that I paste... sometimes... randomly. For no discernible reason, other than some overpaid Google "engineer" thinking that that's an essential feature without which alltextwillbeblendedtogetherapparently.

[1] Fast! Faster than you can believe! Don't even blink, or you'll miss it! I've seen near-retirement age public school educators navigate a green-screen terminal UI so fast that it was literally a blur. The keyboard sounded like a Starcraft champion trying to crack 600 actions-per-minute. THIS is why performance matters, and why inputs must be buffered so that they can be applied to outputs that are not yet generated. So-called "modern" apps are an abysmal failure at all of this, and are an enormous step backwards in the man-machine interface.

I wholeheartedly agree with the author. Modern tech 'convenience' should be labeled as false advertising and treated as such.

I honestly feel like suing these companies for their blatant dark patterns, false promises, political subterfuge, and consistently poor performance, accuracy and frankly....every metric by which they think to measure is piss poor