"I'm Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry"

Everyone I know thinks I'm weird when I get mad that a restaurant doesn't have a physical menu. I don't want to scan a QR code and scroll a menu on my phone, it's a worse experience than reading a paper menu in every single way

Yeah, handing control of the entire tech industry over to a couple of proprietary, black box products built & owned by like four hyper-capitalist sociopaths is definitely not going to go well.

IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.

That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.

Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".

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".

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).

One common piece of advise for having a happy life is to eliminate things that don't delight you (or at least, eliminate things that constantly annoy you). Very little of modern computer/internet technology falls into the "delight" category.

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.

The whole thing reeked of a financial extraction scheme presumably assented to by people who don't want to deal with their family members and just wanted to forget about them while telling themselves "they were in good hands". So if that's not your position, get adversarial, like yesterday.

Remember if he's already admitted (presumably inpatient rehab), there isn't much they can do whether you sign or not. The paperwork and administrative extraction machine has grown without overhead because (unfortunately) people think that blindly signing legal documents is just how things are, but the basic reality is that they are still bound to provide a duty of care (however thin) without any of that.

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?

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.

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?

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 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

Exactly how much of what has been billed as "innovation" couldn't simply have been done on a mainframe with 3270 terminals? I'd say the entirely of the "web 2.0" and "mobile app" trends could have fit into that. CRUD transactions with fancy window dressing.

The actual hard tech problems that have been solved consist of like virtual machines, miniaturized computers, search engines, and LLMs. Which are great, for sure. But the majority of the user-facing software on top has been noise, outright trash even.

While command prompts and programming languages have always been generally poor (ie obtusely machine focused), I'd say they were at least honest. As if you put in the effort to learn something, you would actually get something out of it - not just the ground shifting under your feet. Or alternatively you could just not engage, not put in the effort, and that was fine, too

Now you're basically forced to engage, and when you do end up engaging it's always the lowest common denominator surveillance industry entitled-to-your-data tripe. And while you can engage a little harder to run up the hill of self-actualization, the industry is even working on plugging that "hole" with captchas, remote attestation, and their ilk.

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).

  > do the best you can and be proud of that