Every waking day of every waking use of the devices I have, I find myself constantly fighting a lot with the shitty input and recognition of said input. Things I swore I clicked once but having to click twice or sometimes three times. Such lag input between the last time I clicked and to the time the function of whatever I had to click fucking functioned.
With phones it is obviously worse, with finger input being either too sensitive or too dulled to register, inquiring more touches just to get somewhere or to type something, along with the separated frustrations aside trying to type on awful keyboard interfaces.
to all the people saying it never worked: there was a period from about 2006-2016 when it worked a helluva lot better than before or after.
As far as I know those days have never arrived.
In the 1980’s you’d buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..
In the 1990’s the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!
It’s the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn’t going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It’s the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?
It’s 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we’ll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.
It’s 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to “write” software and said AI’s insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.
At the same time tho, our ability to shrink dies, to create displays of millions of pixels flipping perfectly day in, day out for decades - I recycled a Dell LCD monitor at work from 2003 yesterday, still working - to build cars that are more dependable than ever in history with actual moving parts - we take for granted the things that become dependable, even in ways that would have seemed miraculous a generation ago, because we’re always on the bleeding edge of tech where it isn’t working perfectly, because we’re shipping the minimum viable product, and now on a yearly schedule.
I think we could just chill with having smartphone wars for a few years, since there’s not a huge need to upgrade often, and people can’t afford to eat right now, but they’re releasing more and more foldable phones, making them standard as folks adopt. People will complain about how the hinges don’t work, how they fail a lot more. But that won’t stop them from buying them, from kids demanding them at Christmas, etc. And you know what? Aware of all this, and being chronically broke myself, I have still been subconsciously noting the intro prices for next year’s folding phones because part of me wants the cool little toy first.
I would like google to work like it used to. Youtube search is freaking useless nowadays also.
I find Duckduckgo, specially lite.duckduckgo looks like the old Google search.
Nope, in fact I got good at IT shit because it seldom worked and I had to do the work of troubleshooting and figuring things out. And times were better because we had that ability.
There’s been this stupid drive of “user friendliness” = removing useful power features from software.
Now everybody just expects things to work, and they don’t care about having any ability to learn about it or fix it, and we’re all paying for it. Things are likely getting shittier over time specifically because of people refusing to learn and accepting “If it doesn’t work, I guess I need to buy a new thing”. Fuck that line of thinking - if it’s digital, it can be done eventually. It’s just a case of figuring out how, or waiting a bit for hardware to get to the point where it can be done.
I’ll dissent here: early technology didn’t just work. Computers in the 80s and 90s (at least early 90s) required quite a bit of technical know-how to use competently.
In the 90s and early 2000s I had to reboot my PC multiple times a day and reinstall the OS at least once a month. I remember freaking out when Windows 2000 went 30 days without a reboot. Computer’s been a bit slow and wonky lately. Realized I had no idea how long it’s been up, rebooted, fixed. No idea when I last rebooted my network stack.
Dead and dying hard drives were a constant hassle. My SSD has been through three PCs, without even reinstalling Windows. I just moved it, and it just worked. No idea how long I’ve been on this install, 8 years at least. I’ve got external USB drives in a faux-RAID array that have been cooking for 5 years, no problem. Everything burned electricity, got stupid hot, burned everything else out.
I was one of the original installers of cable internet. Couple of years later found me doing tech support. People were mystified at the concept of a website being down, yet their internet worked. Sites went down daily, even major ones.
We were constantly bombarded with viruses and malware. It was a nonstop fight to keep your machine clean. Now, I’ve only installed AV on company computers as a CYA thing since Windows Defender works great. (Also, as another security layer.)
I can pick up my phone and call anywhere in the US, free. Ever heard the words interlec or intralec? You needed a math degree to calculate long distance charges, so you’d just dial and pray it wasn’t too bad. And pray the call went through. “We got a bad line! Call me back!”
A car with 100,000 miles was considered garbage. Power train warranties were 36K and that was astounding. Now they’re 100K and more. My wife’s car is a 2014 and my truck is a 2004. No one had 10-20 year old vehicles unless they were collectors or gear heads.
Shall I go on? :)
I think a large part of your experience is that you buy quality products. Shitty tablets from brandless Amazon sellers are absolute dog shit. Most tech, like everything else, is you get what you pay for. There are obvious exceptions for early adopters.
Nothing ever just works. You must make it work, and keep it working. If you aren’t making it work yourself, then someone else is doing that for you.
Hold on hold on, are you saying the Lemmy server we registered on is… A LIE? THERE ARE LIES ON THE INTERNET?? Oh noooooo
Honestly, I think the difference is how much software is in these things now. Everything is a computer. And software is something that is very cheap to do half-assed, but expensive to do well (and reliably).
TVs are a perfect example of this. The TV of 40 years ago had an analog tuner directly attached to a CRT. It did only one thing, and did it well. Today’s TVs are basically embedded computers with large screens. And the embedded software was probably written by the lowest bidder.
Not just software, online updates. Even things that were computerized used to have a lot more QA effort put into them when fixing a bug meant having to physically ship a new product revision, or at least a new disk.
Shit just working doesn’t make money.
*doesn’t make enough money.
Things that mostly work with occasional minor problems that are easily diagnosed and fixed are still profitable… they just don’t maximise profitability.
That’s the problem. Capitalism isn’t happy with making a decent profit. It needs to maximize the profit by cutting everything else.
An answer so simple that you’d think it’d be more obvious, but there it is.
Yep, good old planned obsolence
Not everything is that bad. My instance just works, for instance ;)
Absolutely brilliant!
Take my upvote and this crown: 👑
And a hot plate!
And my axe!
I don’t think there ever was such a time. I suspect that you (like me) just didn’t need things to work as a child, so didn’t notice when things didn’t.
There are some very old complaints of things not working.
When did shit ever work? Only reason I’m a programmer is because I had to figure out how to get janky drivers running or how port forwarding worked before I could play vidya as a kid.
Back then it was just buttons and they usually did what it said on the manual, but now devices have to connect to the internet and have unlimited privileges Then you have to deal with unintuitive UI, agree to multiple ToS and EULA, agree to give them access to your data, just to initialize.
Most people have no idea how to do that.
Those dark times before USB was a thing…
I’m an electrician. By and large, electromechanics has been fully solved for a hot minute now. But as long as people are involved in wiring up buildings (as they should be), errors will persist. And thats fine, because an occasional human-caused fault is preferable to clanker-caused faults - you can’t take a clanker to court. So far, they can’t wire up a building either.
Digital spaces are seeing problems because the humans can’t properly future-proof themselves to a point. The vast majority of these issues would be nonexistent under a proper form of worker-led socialism. In other words, theyre due to weak regulatory forces within capitalist structures.
As systems grow more complex, the potential for failures increases exponentially. This will continue.
This is nothing new, except “relatively new” in the last 100 years. Check out the Phoebus Cartel. It’s a crazy story about light bulb manufacturers getting together to agree to make light bulbs last less so they will guarantee repeat customers.
It’s why I always laugh when Sylvania shows an ad about their “long lasting bulbs”.
You’d be crazy to not think the other industries haven’t been doing this too.
We were taught about permanent lightbulbs and hosiery that wouldn’t run in the 1980s
Then they renamed it to "planned obselence*
On the commercial side, it’s the curse of the pareto principle and the “good enough” approach that is the rational consequence of money-maximizing strategies.
For volunteer/free software/etc. it’s both people being used to working in commercial settings on the one hand, and being ok with scratching one’s own itches first and foremost on the other.
