Ask HN: Why is everything sucking now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is everything sucking now?

9 pointsDamogran614 comments

Computers were supposed to make things better, make us smarter, allow us to do things we couldn't do without them.

Now when my wife wants to watch a show on Max (not HBO, or HBO Max), I have to context switch because the credentials are hung off my Cellphone tethering plan and memorized by my keychain and not hers.

I'll mis-type something on my phone's keyboard and it'll mis-recognize it so bad I can't back up to get what word it actually, successfully, recognized...then it'll typo it again, then misdetect the backspace and a mispelling ends up falling down several paragraph breaks and it takes you 8 times the effort to make a sentence that's error free...only to have it misspell something the hot second you hit send, making you sound like an idiot.

I'll hit the website for the Barber on my PC and none of the employee OR service panes load, just empty grey boxes.

I'll try to reserve parking at the airport, and I can't reset the password because my email isn't registered, but I can't create an account because someone (me) apparently already used my email.

We've moved to Windows Hello and smart MFA at work...which has the interesting effect of making me forget my password, now because I only use it a handful of times a week.

The office sandbox prevents you from cutting and pasting text to keep the office data safe....but you can screenshot it and then OCR the data....so it's still just security theatre.

And I'm a savvy guy with decades of experience in IT...what's it like for non-technical people?

I'm with you on this, and I'll add that entering passwords has objectively gotten worse.

1. Enter a password ca 1999 2. Enter a password, but all the characters are now dots, so enter it blind, ca 2010 3. Enter your new password blind, twice, ca 2010 4. Your new password has to be 8-20 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, numerals and a special character, and we'll tell you which special characters qualify after you've successfully entered it blind, twice, ca 2020 5. Your new password has to be as before, entered blind, twice, on a teeny weeny cell phone virtual keyboard, and it can't contain any english words.

A lot of this particular example is "best practices" accumulating without discarding any "best" practices from the past that really were little more than superstitions back then and are falsehoods now. Little dots instead of the actual password exist to prevent should surfing, which is lots harder in these days of "mobile first" on small screens held closer to the face which also have a narrower field of view.

But it illustrates your point.

Circa 1988, my boss, who had to have been 45 or 50, was bemoaning the fact that everything had a sequence or you had to key in numbers. I think he was commenting on vending machines that had a key pad instead of old school vending machines with a discrete button or knob for each selection. This isn't a new problem.

And sometimes, after changing the password, and subsequently trying to log in, the new password is not recognized even if copy/pasted.

There's too much there to unpack, it's not like there is one shared reason I don't think.

I do agree that phone keyboards are not as good as they used to be, I think a big part of this is that they're pushing for certain types of correction that is just not smart enough... so it's right on the edge. We expect it to learn better because we think it should. But it just doesn't. I think it might not really be a priority, but I hear the new iOS has put some work on keyboard autocorrect? Apple is a market driver, so if they get a really good autocorrect I imagine Google will do similarly with their own keyboard. We'll see though. Personally I am not too inconvenienced by phone-typing. I can type pretty quickly and accurately.

I also think that we are all relying on software so much but, in reality, not everyone is capable of producing software that is good enough. I think this is a problem that we haven't really thought of too seriously as societies, as customers we expect everything to be software ready but what happens when small businesses (like a parking lot) just can't afford to have proper software done? They end up with a kind of shoddy solution that is just not good enough. I believe the answer to this should be better open-source software that's free and accesible, and I don't think most governments really do a lot to push for open source software that anyone can access.

Other than that, you might want to consider if you're using the right tools. I mean, At work for example we've switched from Google to Microsoft (so gmail -> outlook, meet -> teams), I think the Google tools are much better and reliable than the Microsoft ones. It's not really something me or any of my coworkers had any say in. If workers had more decision power in the firm then maybe these changes wouldn't have been implemented. It's something to consider, I would like to work in a tech coop but I haven't seen many.

And finally, what's it like for non-tech people? They literally don't care. Why would they? When they face an error they just go "this is annoying" but they don't really know why or how things are happening so they just move on. It's people like you that have seen behind the curtain that actually get upset because you go "this is honestly not a difficult problem to solve!".

I think it’s a venn diagram where the overlap is between ungodly complex solutions and an inability to effectively QA software, maybe with a little tech debt added in for seasoning.

> They literally don't care. Why would they? When they face an error they just go "this is annoying" but they don't really know why or how things are happening so they just move on.

You are 100% correct. Family members look at me like I'm growing a 2nd face on my ass when I complain about how some utilities/phone companies/storage units have messed up HTML and you end up resetting your password every time you pay a bill with them. That's just the way it is, they say, you can just reset and get on with it.

I do think there's a limit to "just moving on". If enough annoyances and special cases build up, then there's no way to intuit what to do next. You're trapped in a forest of rote-memorized single purpose solutions and your brain just gets full.

Yes. There's a limit to how much people will take but usually people are wiling to put up with a lot.

One example is my ISP, they have an awful customer service portal... but honestly? It's rare when I see any service that has a good customer service portal. I have worked developing software for smaller companies, precisely this kind of software. Our stack was totally bloated and it was really annoying to work with. But there's certain... expectations? You need to justify the dev time.

Testing is a massive burden.

We have massively increased the productivity of programmers with cloud and frameworks, but testing didn’t come with equivalent increases in productivity and even those increases involve programmers, who can usually be used elsewhere.

The other is that humans are malicious, so we must increasingly fortify against malicious people.

I am no luddite but i even buy my airline tickets through a travel agent. It's so much better than buying online, plus you can do many things that are just impossible online (say breaking a journey to spend 1-2 days in a layover location instead of a few hours - no web system will let you do that).

Where are you located? I haven’t had any trouble with making such bookings online from Canada.

In my experience it depends on which airline's website you use. Some are just awful instead of being totally retarded.

> I'll try to reserve parking at the airport

this alone to me is ridiculous beyond words. So you not only take the plane, you also drive your own car to the airport. You drive a car. Now you have a problem. Here in Berlin it's 38€ per day to have your shit precious car wait for you at the airport. It's cheaper to take a taxi at that rate.

Anyway, solid first-world problems here.

Yeah, we're pushing it hard, and we try to lie to ourselves about convenience and whatnot, and we give a damn as for the fragility and complexity we create with our fancy systems. Way to go.

Our solution is to spend GOBS MORE money on an RV....at that point it's really not mentally healthy to keep track of the spending...but there's not security lines, no masses of people, the bathroom is clean...

I do think everyday behaviors have more single point of failures than they used to. The complexity has just gone up (with the example of needing to use the internet to get a parking spot) so almost by definition there are more ways it can go wrong.

That being said, I think you are just glorifying the past a bit. Watching on-demand television was impossible 15 years ago. People were still using tivo's you had to set ahead of time. I personally call my barber because its easier than the computer - and most places have both options.

The fact it was bad in the past doesn’t mean it isn’t weirdly, differently bad now.

Like navigation applications where you can see the instructions because every oddball application is notifying you and hops over the navigation, sometimes WHEN YOU REALLY NEED THAT INFORMATION.

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