the_snooze

I'm not a fan of the "something better" phrasing myself. It's very much anti-systems-thinking.

Engineers should be honest that everything is a tradeoff. For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets, you impose additional failure modes, dependency chains, and accessibility issues that simply weren't a problem with paper ticketing.

The "phone-ification" of everything will probably bite us in the behind in the future, just like the buildout of out car-centric environments does now.

A professional knows what they're worth and what they need to deliver. On-time payment according on an agreed-upon schedule is table stakes. That's the most fundamental requirement. Nothing happens without that.

The "what to do instead" section is basically DARPA's "Heilmeier Catechism," which is the framework they use to gauge high-risk high-reward ideas. It doesn't kill ideas, but it places the onus on the proposer to be clear-eyed and explicit about what they're putting forward:

What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.

How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?

What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?

Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?

What are the risks?

How much will it cost?

How long will it take?

What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?

https://www.darpa.mil/about/heilmeier-catechism

Social media feeds are designed to be slot machines. Each scroll is a pull. You may or may not get something you actually want. You can't predict what's coming up next, so you just keep mindlessly scrolling.

It's a matter of affordances. The path of least resistance with agents is to let it commit whatever it wants. That's a natural outcome of the design and implementation of agents.

Yes, humans are accountable for the ultimate output. But so are the people who design and build these automation tools. As the saying goes, the purpose of a system is what it does.

I'm a pretty busy person professionally. When I feel like I'm being pushed to "scale" my time and attention, I take that as a signal to do the opposite: do less, and do those remaining things more meaningfully.

Trying to do more is a losing game, and AI assistants just paper over that. We all have finite time and attention. I think a pragmatic engineering approach is the right one here: consider that as a non-negotiable constraint, a fact of the physical world, not something to magic away.

The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it. I don’t see how an AI can meaningfully accomplish that any better than simply just making yourself more difficult to reach.

We’ve had computing technology that clearly understands what the user wants to do. It’s called a command line interface. No guessing, no recommendations, no dark patterns, no bullshit.

It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall YOLO programming.

The 3.5mm audio jack is pretty close to engineering perfection on the important dimensions: cheap, fast, and good.

Getting rid of it in favor of Bluetooth-only audio connectivity is creating a problem to sell you a (more expensive, less reliable, less time-tested) solution.

AI powered toys are little more than techbros rushing to build Tom Riddle's diary.

>even if as little as 1% of the population

1% of 8 billion is 80 million. Coordinating that many people onto a particular platform or alternative is a gargantuan task. It's not "little."

You see it in how services have twisted the meaning of "saving" something. Very rarely does it mean actually putting a file on your computer for you to access on your own terms as long as you have possession of it. More often, it just means associating something to your account, which is ultimately subject to the whims of the service provider.

It's engineered dependency.

Exactly, my view is intellectually honest because it's falsifiable. I would love to live in a world where tech largely respects and empowers end-users instead of trapping them in engineered dependency. Tech companies just need to act humanely.

That's just not the world we live in currently.

Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and connected" or "don't be evil" is just a smokescreen for people who want to bring about modern feudalism.

It's hard to see AI as anything but the latest accelerant for that.

>If it connects it sends.

More broadly, if it connects, it will serve other masters besides you.

It's not just exclusive deals. It's piecemeal deals. Just look at what you have to do to stream all of Pokemon. https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

>Apps may change and often experience “enshittification.” Hardware can break but non-connected hardware is otherwise unlikely to change.

This is a huge part of it. Connected apps are never complete. They can't be. They must always evolve in pursuit of the marginal user, eventually betraying their core audience.

An unconnected single-purpose device doesn't need to make anyone happy other than the user who owns and operates it, which makes it more valuable for the user in the long-run.

It's the tools. Friction and barriers aren't bad things. When you have a CD player, there's a higher barrier to switching from "listening to music" to "doing something else."

It's something I noticed in myself when I switched from streaming services to a curated local library. I actually listen to entire albums and savor them instead of jumping around from one infinite content firehose to another. Streaming is convenient, but the friction of maintaining a local library makes it meaningful.

It's not a bad thing to make places more accessible to children and senior citizens who can't (or shouldn't) be driving.

College is wildly useful for motivated students: the ones who go out of their way to pursue opportunities uniquely available to them like serving as TAs, doing undergrad research, rising up the ranks in clubs and organizations, etc. They graduate not just with a credential but social capital. And it's that social capital that shields you from ChatGPT.

College for the "consumer" student isn't worth much in comparison.

Social affinity and reputation represent winning strategies that have served humans very well since the dawn of time. It shouldn't be surprising that they continue to be extremely effective even (or perhaps especially) in the age of AI.

Exactly this. These systems are supposed to have been built by some of the smartest scientific and engineering minds on the planet, yet they somehow failed (or chose not) to think about second-order effects and what steady-state outcomes their systems will have. That's engineering 101 right there.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If only our technology were advanced enough that we could have an OS that didn't constantly undermine the user's intentions.

Ukraine was never a nuclear power any real sense. The USSR's bombs were parked there, and Ukraine merely had physical (but not operational) custody over them after the USSR fell. Ukraine could have kept them to bootstrap a nuclear arms program, but they didn't, so they were never had a nuclear deterrent to give up in the first place.

It could be as simple as "wealthy areas get more county services." There are practical considerations when choosing polling places, like the availability of parking and enough space to accommodate a line, check-in tables, voting booths, and ideally separate entrance and exit doors. Public schools and county rec centers are go-to locations because the county (who administers the election) already owns them and they have the space needed. Churches are great too, but they require having an agreement with a private organization.

There are non-internet ways to do that. States are really the "laboratories of democracy" on that front, with different states having affordances like long early-voting periods and mail-in voting.

However, those are in the context of whatever political system they're in. No level of efficient election design is going to put a dent in the fact that California loves direct-elected downballot offices (e.g., treasurer, controller, insurance commissioner, state judges, local judges, etc.) and referenda, which all result in super long and complicated ballots with 50+ questions each.

My local issue of interest is how my county and state administer elections. I volunteer as a poll worker for nearly every election, with a preference for the "boring" low-turnout contests like state legislative and local board primaries. This experience has given me insight you would never get on national news but lots of people blindly argue about: voter ID requirements, how provisional ballots work, why higher-population counties take longer to report results on election night, what election night "calls" actually mean, entirely mundane failure modes that can slow down the line, etc.

You'd think that for such an important issue like elections you'd get more interest at the local level where regular citizens can actually get involved. But nope. We're always desperate to fill poll worker assigments on non-presidential years, even though those are the best and least stressful opportunities to experience first-hand what it's all about.

UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.