I miss technology that was meant to be used as a tool
Both sw and hw.
SW is usually hard to use, offering no meaningful settings or making them hard to get to with meaningful QoL features simply absent. Search in any kind of mainstream product is an absolutely excellent example.
If someone does need something other than the default workflow or encounters any error then that is too bad for them.
For a lot of hw products there is little to no meaningful choice alongside absent repair options. The best example is probably smartphones which are excessively thin bricks with a charging port, camera bump, sealed in battery and hard to impossible to change os.
Features decreasing longevity and contributing to waste(plug in for global warming) are simply accepted and even welcomed by end users for bizzare reasons.
For now there are still workarounds depending on how much effort you want to expend with that effort sometimes being truly excessive.
The problem is that most people could not care less (to your point about user acceptance), and so you are actively punished by your competitors and audience if you spend extra money on making something better.
The cream does not tend to rise to the top. There is also the other aspect which is that when you make something user serviceable then users try to service it. Unless you spend significant effort on making this foolproof then they will screw it up and then you are in a warranty fight potentially. AI has made this all worse. Service teams are being overwhelmed with AI slop on every communication citing non -applicable law, and it costs the author nothing, but is a huge distraction away from customers with actual problems.
It's even worse when you have to interoperate with something else. For instance the standard for AC charging your EV at home is really simple, but car OEM firmware is largely full of bugs that I have spent way too long working around. They don't answer the phone, we do. We supply telematics and detailed diagnostics, they typically don't. Who is punished? Whose CS reps get yelled at? Customers on the whole have no sense of taste or smell or technical ability and are ruled by black boxes they don't understand and the current market is a direct consequence of that.
(Work in manufacturing a b2c hardware product with a significant software component)
Pretty much any time I post something adjacent to this I get response along these lines which is highly upvoted.
The questions really are
They are busy caring about paying bills, and figuring out how to continue to put food on the table, and trying to figure out what they will do if they are part of the next round of layoffs, and driving their kids to school and extracurriculars, and everything else that they have to do.
Caring about your tools is a luxury. It requires time, if nothing else.
No idea.
Sure, but I don't really know of any examples where population-wide anyone has turned around and tried removing the abstraction that a tool provides to see an example of how we might make that happen.
Now? No.
A decade from now? Maybe? But I will pose that getting people to step back and look at their technology in a different way would be a terrible use of the one wish that you got to make this happen. You would get much higher societal impacts by getting people to dedicate that time to other causes that protect workers and support communities and trying to give people the time that they need.
And how did we get here? We live, presumably depending on location, in a democracy, that means doing your part and caring about wide reaching issues.
Politics is first then we have technology, education, health as issues that anyone should have minimal interest in.
I am as busy as anyone and I can care, why others cannot?
I am absolutely certain that we could find things in your life that you don’t/can’t care about, or don’t care about “enough” for whatever threshold we hold, and write similar rants.
That's actually a reasonable response. It doesn't mean we should not try, more.
There's a difference between "should" and "can realistically expect". Like, okay, you care about the options the software and hardware you use give you, most people don't though.
Do you also care enough about where your food supply chain comes from? Do you spend hours researching and visiting farms where the stuff from your grocery store is grown/harvested? Because some people do that too. Most don't, but some do.
Do you care about how your power is being generated, or do you just flip a switch and expect it to be on? There are people who research their local power plants and utility energy mix and lobby to get it changed.
Do you care about how police enforce laws in your city? Do you map out crime statistics, and review recent cases and abuse complaints by pulling public records requests? There are people that do that too.
Same for healthcare, or fire rescue, or water supplies, or... I don't know, elevator safety. There are literally hundreds of thousands of little aspects of modern life that a handful of people care extremely deeply about and spend a lot of time being concerned with. Some of them are inheritely dangerous and kill people regularly if they're not being taken care of adequately.
I personally don't do any of this, because while i recognize they're important, I don't have the time, energy, expertise, or interest to devote the significant amount of my life it would take to be overly concerned with even one of them.
No one has the time, energy, or interest to focus on all of them, so the idea that everyone should focus on software configurability is absolutely arbitrary. There are thousands of things that you, in theory, should focus on deeply, but the standard of living we currently enjoy would be impossible if we were all generalists.
I said it a few times but the main areas anyone should focus on and have at least a minimal inderstanding in are politics, technology, health and education.
This does not have to be a deep understanding but the equivalent of looking up candidates, parties and agendas and going to the election.
I do not argue for caring about sw configurability but a minimal interest in the massively important aspect underlying modern society.
I hope my response didn't come across as thought-terminating, I was trying to be empathetic :)
It's something I think about a lot. There does seem to be a big paradox. Everyone has their gripes about technology, but I know basically no one that will cede an ounce of convenience for anything!
For instance, many gamers hate the way gaming is, but they do nothing but feed the industries worst excesses. Why tf is anyone spending even one penny on cs or valorant skins? People complain about the endless treadmill of modern warfare games, but buy them nevertheless. EVERYONE, complains endlessly about windows, but will not consider for a second that the fact that they will not countenance running Linux at all (because then they won't be able to run some live service dollar extraction machine with kernel level anti cheat) is the very reason Microsoft continues to treat them like rubes.
Phones continue to be be massive persistent privacy violations, but suggesting to anyone that they take a hit on specs or battery life to get some of the spyware out of their pocket is met with derision.
I don't have an answer, because when I see something is bs, I don't buy it, especially if it is a luxury. I opted out of windows around windows 7 because even then it was too much. I really believe in voting with my wallet in favour of user choice / freedom and sadly it seems to be a bit of a rarity.
I miss when the internet was a place you could go, not a haze
insultinginserting itself in everything.Yesterday I spent a few hours trying to figure out what was wrong with an old pair of headphones. It took a few hours because the design is so hostile (to the point some screws are clockwise and some are anticlockwise for no justifiable reason?) that I needed several videos to walk me through each step. As you say, there was a workaround, but what I allotted an hour took three, just in teardown.
It was a long shot from fixing radios in my youth.
There is a special place in hell for these engineers.
I wonder if it was some kinda vibration protection? Like when the screws were all the same way and the headset would vibrate during use they’d all come loose, and by making some of them counter clockwise it mitigated this.
I know just enough physics to say something that sounds right but if anyone actually knows how sound wave physics works please chime in
Engineer here, vibration generally wouldn't cause differing effects on screws of alternate handedness. I am generally pretty good at thinking outside the box and coming up with ideas, and I can't think of a reason for some screws tighening anticlockwise in headphones apart from dickishness. The only exception I can think of would be haptic feedback that used something that generated rotational motion, but even then it's really reaching.
A lot of older bike parts, like the bolts that attach cranks to the bottom bracket, and pedals, are reverse threaded on the on-drive (left) side. I don't think it's to prevent serviceability, but I'm not 100% sure why... one sketchy but non-LLM online source claims it's to prevent the pedal from unscrewing?
Yeah, on bicycles it's because the motion the pedal crank makes when pedalling on the left side is the same motion you'd make to unscrew the bolt, and so if the bolt isn't incredibly secure (think red locktite), it would gradually unscrew from the motion of pedalling.
I'm not a physics person, but I'd imagine that the manufacturing engineer would specify some light locktite for that purpose -- several of the screws in my headphones were glued in for what I'd imagine was that reason.
I’m left handed so basically this is my entire life. Nothing is made for me. Every single new object I try to interact with is a whole experience.
I’m also a tiny human so any kinda tool, power tool, vehicle, etc etc is made for humans twice my size and most of them I’m just totally unable to operate, like a motorized hedge trimmer or literally any car that exists. Every single car will kill me if I get into a front end collision because I have to sit too close to the steering wheel to operate it.
I wonder if adaptive steering wheel mounted pedal-alternative controls would make cars safer for you if it's a pedal thing? Pretty extreme, but could be an option!
Devices for accessibility are generally pretty expensive, and I'm not disabled by definition of my healthcare provider.
I'm not even that small, pretty much any person shorter than about 5'5 runs the risk of dying in a front end collision in any American car. That airbag will deploy straight into your face and neck and it will mess you up.
Not that extreme though, given their proliferation as accessibility devices.
A left-handed wheel accellerator
@snake_case
u/bme really covers the main issue here, which is that average people could not care less about having control over their tech, they just want things that mostly work. The average consumer could not care less about tweaking things to make software/hardware work exactly how they want. The other issue here is that modern software is a business. There's a cost associated with offering meaningful settings, making them easier to get to, and even creating QoL features. The people complaining about things are a vocal minority and an even smaller minority of that group are actively willing to work with the software companies to fix things. QoL features and just features in general that may seem like a simple miss are often a deliberate choice by companies because they don't see enough potential revenue in said feature to offset the cost of development.
I actively work on a pretty popular piece of software with hundreds of millions of users around the world. People on the internet constantly complain about it. However, as a developer, the majority of complaints are useless. People will often just say "XYZ feature on ABC software sucks!" and move on with their lives. A small subset of these complainers do take action and file complaints which does give the company a signal like "Hey, we're seeing more and more reports on people not liking XYZ". An even smaller subset of these users will be willing to take time out of their day to then help us understand what they are unhappy with or want changed. To the company, if an insignificant amount of users complain or an insignificant amount of revenue exists to be made, there's no reason for them to actually address said issue.
Once you understand this, along with u/bme's point of users not actually understanding the tech they use, a lot of what you see today makes way more sense. Take for example Apple's 5GB iCloud default tier. If you spend any time on the internet, you'll see plenty of people complain about it and shame Apple for it. Now, this is pure conjecture on my part as I don't work at Apple, but I can imagine that Apple's own usage data shows that enough people convert their iCloud to higher tiers that it is just not worth to them to increase the base free storage to 15GB and increase their own costs, no matter how low that cost to them may be.
Yeah, you're right. Totally. But now it falls upon us, the people who are annoyed by the status quo, to build something new and better.
Like https://delphi.tools/, which I built because I echo this exact sentiment