stevewa
Adrian HowardI swear there used to be a time when my reaction to new software features wasn't a resigned sigh followed by figuring out how to switch it off.
coldclimate@adrianh 2002ish
David Wheeler@adrianh get out of my head, Howard
Don Gray@adrianh And it’s not just us. I’ve never looked for how switch off a feature that didn’t already have a solution posted.
Most recent was iOS turning “icons” on again after the 18.4 upgrade and I wanted them off.
Ozzelot 
@donaldegray I'm letting my iPhone stay on 17.x because I want nothing to do with apple "intelligence" @adrianh
etsy
StreetDogg@donaldegray @adrianh Easter with the elders a few years ago: "I pressed some buttons on this tech thing and now it's broken, can you fix it for me?"
Easter now: "I swear I pressed nothing and all of this stuff here appeared out of nothing and now everything is different and I'm lost! Can you undo that for me?"
Actual true story...
NotBlackMagic@adrianh I'm pretty hyped about the new capabilities of ORCA 6, ngl :)
Maj - 🇨🇦@adrianh I misread a pop-up the other day and thought I could pay a little extra to NOT have an AI "enhancement" feature added to the product I use and I was 100% prepared to pay.
Turns out you cannot get out of the basic "enhancement" but can pay more have an "enhanced" "enhancement" experience.
🇺🇦🇪🇺 cweickhmann@adrianh In the open-source world it's only occasionally sighing, tbh. Mostly on Firefox.
esa@cweickhmann
Yeah, I think the users of e.g. neovim still react with "hey, neat" for new versions. Much the same with Rust too, I think.
Even Firefox got something good with vertical tabs recently.
@adrianh
Cadmus 🌲@adrianh Yeah, the shift from 'useful' to 'how can we get as much data $ out of each consumer' is ongoing. I feel like software is no longer the product, we are.
If it's my data... Does that mean I own it? 🤔
Stephen Elliott~Buckley
^[[200~Michael@adrianh "It's notepad! It's fcking notepad you sick fcks!"
Me, meeting Copilot in notepad.exe for the first time.
@Maxfieldripken In my case "almost" means one proprietary software for which there is no equivalent on Linux. It's frustrating to say the least.
@mnf wow 🏆🏆🏆
That's my destination!
So what's _is_ the "one proprietary software for which there is no equivalent on Linux"?
SamuelJohnson@rq4c @mnf @Maxfieldripken I'm in that boat. Mine is MLO (https://mylifeorganized.net) which I run on Linux using WINE. There's nothing half as good, imo. Don't need it as much now I'm retired but I keep up to support the developers working under fire in Ukraine.
Personal task organizing and time management software. Getting Things Done® (GTD®): project management software, project & personal information management (PIM). To do list & time management system.
Powerful personal task organizing, task management & to-do list software MyLifeOrganized designed to implement GTD (Getting Things Done) system. FREE trial!
@rq4c @Maxfieldripken I deliberately did not name it. You and I know the kind of "discussion" that would follow. The point was that I know a number of people who have moved to Linux, but still have to resort to using a VM, emulation or even a dedicated Windows installation for that ONE software.
Oliver Jensen@adrianh if anyone figures out how to turn off the Slack AI crap let me know.
Someone at work paid for it and now it pollutes every search with a stupid box that provides zero value other than repeatedly jiggling the ACTUAL results around as it "types" making it really difficult to click on or read anything.
Piteco
Damon L. Wakes@adrianh This is one of the things that stands out to me about #GDevelop. Updates tend to be at least inoffensive* and more often they add something genuinely useful. I'm always keen to see what's in the new release notes.
*They did add the inevitable useless AI feature, but it's easily ignored. A rare misstep.
Colin the Mathmo@adrianh I have a clear memory of my father going to his office one day to order his medical supplies for the next month.
"They've redesigned the web site!" ... he called to us.
"How does it look?" asked my mother.
"Really good" he replied.
She followed up ... "Can you find what you need?"
There was a long pause.
...
"No".
1000millimeter@ColinTheMathmo @adrianh Websites do only look good. Technical Data about technical products? Good luck finding those. Or, finding the products at all.
Andrew@ColinTheMathmo @adrianh all websites should be like digikey or McMaster Carr. Everything is parametrically searchable and the company logo is inexplicably a 64x100 jpeg
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.(xyz @adrianh actually the McMaster website looks *really good* IMO. Props to their web team)
Polychrome 
pivotman319 🦊 
@ColinTheMathmo @adrianh the old saying of "function over form" still applies nowadays
I'd rather have something that looks like it came straight from the early 2000s but works flawlessly
Eragon@ColinTheMathmo @adrianh Looks good but isn't intuitive.
catraxx 
@ColinTheMathmo @adrianh This describes 90% of all websites these days.
Richard Welty@adrianh i have two FB groups (Vintage Trek Bicycles and Alfa Romeo Tech) where FB keeps threatening to turn on the "AI Assistant". my co-admins and i are all agreed that we will turn it off the instant it shows up, because LLM fantasies about technical issues can be actively dangerous.
LisaH@adrianh Me too!
Lance Bachmeier@adrianh I just wish they'd have one person on the team that asks "Does this feature make sense?" Or even better, if they'd ask at least one person that actually uses the product if the feature makes sense.
Mike 
@adrianh man I feel this. Whenever I get a new phone or device, the first thing I do is try and figure out how to turn things off
Lance (Thank you for 11 Views)@adrianh I miss those days.
Colin@adrianh I remember GOING OUT OF MY WAY to try out brand new stuff. Beta? Who cares! I wanna see what's next!
That is now ... long gone.
Now I'm always afraid of what comes next. What terrible enshittification comes next. What's being made more difficult now? What feature am I losing? What new privacy violation / dark pattern am I being served next?
All the wonder and joy is gone. I just want a tool that works and I'm continually provided anything but. UX thrown completely out.
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE@adrianh Yeahbut see it from the supplier's POV. *Somebody* will find the new feature useful, but if the new feature isn't defaulted to "on" then the people who would find it useful will never discover that it exists.
[Mostly I agree with you. The above is just a little professional devil's advocacy.]
arjankroonen@adrianh By now I’m rooting for a massive solar storm to take out the Internet of Things and every bitcoin/AI farm.
ferricoxide@adrianh
Maybe in the 90s?
Maybe in the 90s?
DidekMaybe that won't be for everyone, but switching to free/FOSS software made me happy for software development again.
Greg Wilson@adrianh s/software features/people/g :-(
./nippysaurus@adrianh I’m occasionally excited, but most of the time agree with this.
Light Owl ☸️@adrianh My "discovery" of any new software has really shrunk a lot, and now pretty much only consists of occasionally watching "Explaining Computers", or @geerlingguy videos. For example, I recently learned of "nvme" and "s-tui" commands, which can show temperatures.
Jeff Geerling
OldScurvyPirate@adrianh omg… SAMMME.
Andrea Magnorsky 😹 🦙@adrianh maybe because it feels like the new "feature" is some new way in which you are the product
Daniel Luz@adrianh This is something that enters my mind every now and then. “Ugh, a new button/feature that doesn't interest me yet takes 20% of the navigation? They really should add an option to hide it! — Wait, historically, few apps had customization to the point of disabling/hiding entire features. Why am I only now thinking this is how things should be?”
My conclusion is that the features from 20+ years ago weren’t nearly as invasive — they weren’t flashy icons in otherwise monochrome toolbars, they didn’t pop up weekly prompts for me to use them with “maybe later” buttons, they didn’t involve subscriptions or uploading my data to servers that will use it for their own benefit, and they weren’t traps carefully designed to manipulate my emotions and ruin my productivity to maximize screen time.
David 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️NB they/them@adrianh Like when Apple pushed an iOS update and decided I didn’t need to see all my mail notifications and I went a month thinking I had no email. That was fun to figure out 😒
@adrianh - I can't remember that far back (except when there weren't any new features, because the software came burned on a ROM :D)
CONFIG.SYS: LOADHIGH@adrianh (Android) app updates are the worst. Apps often get worse over time, and there's no way to go back to an older version when they're installed via the Play Store.
I mostly don't update apps anymore unless they've stopped working.
Koopa512 
🚩🏴@adrianh there's still a gew rate pieces of software where it isn't like that
Hugo 雨果@adrianh Back when features were tested before shipping them.
The worst thing about Android/ChromeOS/Google Search/GMail is figuring out how to make "Gemini" go away.
Nobody actually wants this and Google puts billions of dollars to waste that could actually be improving the user experience instead, heading into a recession.
They need to go back to making their Search actually work. There's no particular reason to favor Google Search at this point because it's decayed to the point where Bing's index (used by DuckDuckGo) is about the same.
@adrianh everything went sideways when applications became able to self update online.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@Polychrome @adrianh reminds me of how many times I wished we could just package (and so mod) webapps locally and spawn them in the browser later.
Humbird0 Fandom@adrianh I remember when software upgrades were something you bought each year, so if the new version of a program didn't have a feature you cared about, you didn't have to buy it.