I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...
Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.
It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.
My phone sometimes hangs hard and reboots when I plug it into my car. It's too many taps to navigate to the single digit number of locations I have saved. I'll be mid-playlist, and Spotify will forget and switch to random songs based on the last one it played. People can't hear me on a whatsapp call even after granting it every permission it asks for. The album I had on last week won't play anymore because licensing.
And at the end of the drive it asks me if the fucking sound quality was okay.
That 168-hours-and-a-bit slowly cycles later and later into each passing week, and you fucking dread when it reaches late Friday afternoon, because it means Monday morning will be written off by logging in, rebooting, and patting multiple Microsoft applications on the head, and you're useless to your busy colleagues until you do.
This program with no icon or name is preventing you from restarting. You click Cancel. It restarts anyway.
Also, how likely are you to recommend Teams to a friend?
Your cheap home PC doesn't have the physical space for another hard drive inside, so you buy an external one and your wireless keybbbbbbbbboard starts acting up when you're backing up.
Seriously, USB 3 devices put out a bunch of 2.4GHz interference and it fucks up wireless gear. Put your dongles on cheap USB extension cables and blutack them to the underside of your desk, I promise you'll stop hating Bluetooth quite so much if you do this.
Bluetooth is still shit, but this one's USB's fault.
You buy a second-hand but still quite new wireless gamepad. It dies unexpectedly at the approximate age of 16 months. There's a listing for a replacement battery on Amazon and a disassembly guide on iFixit, so you take a punt on a new battery and swap it in.
The gamepad's still dead, so you email its manufacturer for A) a repair, or B) spare parts, or C) to offer them even more money to fix it, but they don't provide any of those for a device still sold new today.
Get fucked, Steelseries.
And here's the thing: None of this stuff makes me angry. Annoyed, sure, but I've been around computers since I was a toddler, and I have to solve shit problems like these for myself every day.
What makes me angry is: What about all the folks who aren't computer people? How the absolute fuck do they survive in a world where you can no longer function as an employee, a family member, any sort of citizen without encountering this stuff?
Those people are fucking heroes, and I'm angry for them.
This shit is why, when banks announced they were going to stop processing physical checks and a whole wave of elderly folks protested, I understood. It's one of the last fleeting vestiges of anything in their lives that still makes sense, and arguing about the cost of supporting obsolete systems is an absolute red herring.
It's not about the money. It's not about the tech. It's about kindness, and being fucking human to each other.
Do you work in IT? Do you support a system? Do you work on a helpdesk? Do you take calls, answer emails?
Congratulations. That's no longer your job title. From the moment you read this, you're a user advocate.
Process issue holding something up? Bug in the app? Is a particular system always down? Advocate for your users. Go to bat for them with the teams responsible for their struggles.
Folks will say "oh thank christ, it's you" when they hear your voice on the phone if you advocate for them.
tl;dr: In a world where companies will fleece you, scammers will steal your grandmother's savings, your chat program algorithmically charts your gender, and your car's manufacturer sells analytics about the way you drive without a second thought:
The only thing that matters is kindness, and we could all do with a lot more of it.
Also, I'm going to go have a drink or two now. Holy hell, that little rant has been building up for a while now.
Surprise! You're logged out of this website you were using ten minutes ago. Surprise! You're also logged out of LastPass, so first you have to pull down the notification shade, tap the LastPass icon, wait for some boxes to appear and move about, then you can log into LastPass. Then you can pull the shade back down, tap on LastPass again, tap the one matching site in your vault, and finally log back into that website.
Surprise! Would you like to save your login for this website to LastPass?
Dominos Australia's website having a totally normal one today. I appreciate the camelCase in the second screenshot here.
Not even going to address the derangement required to categorise "butter chicken" as a "traditional pizza" - you work with the system you've got, and they probably have decades of marketing research telling them "Traditional" is an incredibly valuable category name.
My wireless keyboard gives me so many varied and wonderful settings to handle what it does when I haven't touched it in a little while. I can make it dim the lights, or pulse them; I can set the brightness of them; I can tell it how long to wait after I stop typing to dim, and whether or not to turn the lights off entirely.
What I actually want it to do is use a $1 sensor to know if I'm sitting at my desk, and light up if I am, and be dark if I'm not. That's it. Where's that option, Logitech?
This description of a wireless gamepad on eBay is AI-generated, right? No human would describe it as weighing "only 1.5kg", that it is "compatible with games and controllers" and "has an unknown cable length" (I repeat: wireless gamepad), and that it "comes with an unknown manufacturer warranty".
This is worse than just leaving the description blank. I can't wait for the day I have to force a seller into processing a return and refund because the automatic lying machine misrepresented an item.
Windows 95: here's the new start menu! It lists all your installed programs.
Windows XP: here's your improved start menu! It also now lists your most recent files and applications.
Windows 7: we've done it again! Now you can hit the windows button and *just start typing* to find your stuff.
Windows 10: we fucked up and filled your start menu with so much shit there's now a delay before anything you type matters. Tepad? Never heard of it, but here's a list of famous filming locations in Africa
@jpm Windows 8: the start menu, now with METRO and ✨touch✨!*
*(Compatible hardware required)
Windows 11: hey look, we got rid of it. But here's some advertising space and a list of apps you don't have installed but Copilot likes.
@timixretroplays oh this one was enraging, I am so happy they fixed it in the latest 11
(it gets even faster if you disable web search, which no one ever needed in the start menu anyway)
@krystman I guess someone trying to offload a crate of ancient electronics with zero interest in what they are, and who assumes people won't notice or won't care.
Cheap shit gamepad with zero redeeming or interesting features that was basically e-waste when brand new, being sold used on a site that's barely been updated in 20 years and described poorly by an LLM because it wasn't even worth the seller's time to investigate. Bask in the glory of capitalism, ye bargain-hunters!
@timixretroplays I’ve been struggling to get it to not show the number of matches on the icon in the browser toolbar. (Personal preference.)
But it keeps being re-enabled. It seems like every time the browser extension starts.
@timixretroplays This thread is gold.
I'd like to add gesture typing and autocorrect changing the words you tried to type (and saw briefly displayed correctly) only to have it come back at the end of the sentence and complain that the words that it decided you were typing are grammatically wrong or are spelled wrong.
Come on computer, you decided on the words and then decided the words you picked don't make sense. Of course they don't. And this problem seems to be getting worse.
Maybe only Android does this but in the old days, I could turn off autocorrect. This is what we need AI doing.
@timixretroplays With me, I have to right click, Manage Extensions, then disable and reenable LastPass to get it to even give me the login.
(I know I shouldn't even be using LastPass, but fuck if I can keep on top of what's known to be compromised or not.)
@giltay it's also constantly forgetting that I repeatedly told it not to prompt me to let it save my credit card details. That's probably just a bug in the plugin, but it feels just seedy enough that it makes me not want to trust it.
I'll switch to using a different service at some point, but for something so utterly critical and interwoven with my online and personal lives, I really need to set aside an entire spare afternoon to do it - and who even has those anymore?
@timixretroplays I was talking about this to my (non-techie) other half today. Her iPhone is doing weird (related to not having enough RAM/ROM/swapfile/memory) shit. She didn't like what I told her. She has two options. 1. accept the phone as obsolete and broken. 2. Learn how to manage space manually on an iPhone.
This *is* madness.
@timixretroplays you fuckin' preach it mate.
pretty much everything I do is tech related. I touch everything from electronics design to systems architecture and everything in between, at a deep technical level. I engineer stuff, I reverse engineer stuff. even I am exhausted by this shit. it's an onslaught. nothing is reliable, everything causes problems and hiccups and frustrations. I can't remember the last time I bought a consumer electronic device that didn't feel like a constant hindrance.
I strongly dislike Morrissey as a person, but love the lyric "it takes strength to be gentle and kind."
The man is quite a poet, but I'm not sure my day would be affected if a double decker bus did its worst. Like with many artists where I like their work they are often NOT people I would suffer gladly if we were to hang out.
@xinit @ariaflame @timixretroplays
That's probably the best Smiths song, so nice reference you made there.
And yes, I consider Morrissey to be one of the finest lyricists humanity has ever produced. But being so talented has never required being a nice person.
@voltagex not really, that would depend a lot on length and placement. Also signal coupling into the USB cable's shield won't necessarily make it into the RF frontend.
The trick here is that by putting the dongle physically closer to the device, you gain a lot of signal, and improve signal to noise ratio a lot. A previously problematic amount of interference now might not be a problem anymore.
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