Category: Dark musings

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Apple atrocities Dark musings

All ten-digit numbers are phone numbers

According to Apple ten-digit numbers are phone numbers.

For that reason, whenever I select a ten-digit number on my iPad, it helpfully insists that I do one of two things: 1) dial that ten-digit number on my iPad, or 2) cancel that call.

If I want to do something strange — for instance, copy that number in order to paste it somewhere — this iPad Pro is at a complete loss. Apparently, that is a use case nobody in that big glass doughnut anticipated.

More and more I am noting the hard-coding of anticipations into our lives.

When I select some text, my device tries to anticipate what I might want to do with that text and tries to anticipate what someone like me with probable intentions they would have would probably want to do next, and it makes it effortless to do it, but also forces me to work harder to do anything else.

When I’m writing AI tries to anticipate the next word someone saying a sentence like the one I am saying will say next, and it basically feeds me the most likely and least unexpected next word. It is already hard enough to think against the grain of one’s time, but now we are electronically prodded toward conventionality word-by-word in real time as we try to express the thoughts we are trying to have. Gently, but incessantly, we are bent toward rethought.

And recommendation engines have replaced serendipity with engineered epiphany. Where pure chance juxtapositions sparked originality in the minds of imaginative interpreters, now most juxtapositions are algorithmically-generated merchandising, designed to fabricate a spark of inspiration that will compel the desired purchase behavior.

And news stories, of course, are fed to us according to our ideological taste, which is the same taste as those like us. And by “those like us” I mean those who have been subjected to the same ideological molding process we have, who now not only believe the same facts we have, but have been intellectually pattered to reason along the same lines by the same sociological and psychological theories, and emotionally conditioned to feel the same responses to the same moral categories. And if something does not match the fact-set, reason-process and emotion-response patterns, “I can’t understand why.” “It does not make sense.” This auto-argument-by-incredulity is the error handling routine encoded into this populace.

The more we go along with what is suggested and accept the conveniences offered to us, the more our minds are intricately patterned for conformity. We automatically notice (and ignore) the things everyone else notices (snd ignores), think them through using the same logic, and come to the same conclusions everyone around us has reached.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that users should always have the option to copy a string of characters, even a ten-digit string of numbers that looks like a phone number.

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Apple atrocities Dark musings Fuck you, Adobe TurdPress

Software on fire

I’m having a tough morning.

Last night I realized that a bunch of the contacts on my iPad that I thought had been added to iCloud were actually living in my Google contacts. I wanted all my contacts to live in one place.

So I dragged each of contact over into iCloud. After confirming each contact was, in fact, now living in iCloud, I deleting it from Google. Then I disabled the Google account. I had to do this because whenever you add a contact to Apple Contacts, the app gives no indication of where it is going. Nor does the contact view indicate where the contact is stored. Apple’s designers apparently believed this was irrelevant information, and decided to reduce cognitive load by not showing it. Back when “it just works” was a true marketing slogan, this kind of opacity was welcome simplicity. But now that things often do not work, it provokes anxiety. It is impossible to relax and trust that no news is good news. So even though I took pains to avoid mistakes, I was apprehensive.

And sure enough, this morning I discovered that the contacts I moved are all gone. They did not stay in iCloud, where they appeared to be last night.

I don’t know what happened.

I rarely know, anymore. I just know this is typical and that there is nothing I can do to make things better. It used to not be this way. These things used to work and now they don’t.

I have the same kind of problem with WordPress. I used to love using it. Now every single day, without fail, I’m trying to write something and something just idiotic happens, and trying to resolve the idiocy makes me forget what I was writing.

Today, for instance, I was trying to make one word in a block quote italic. I selected the word and tried to italicize it. When I hit the little italic I button, the entire text block selected itself and became italicized. Another problem is cursor placement. You place the cursor where you want to type. When you start typing, however, the letters appear on the line above. It is distracting and infuriating. And these are just a few of innumerable problems.

In all these cases, I just want to tell the company how frustrating it is that their entire design system is broken. The problem is not just isolated to that one usability issue, but rather, someone has treated the design system as a massive bundle of use cases instead of a design system.

The help desk is not trained for these kinds of complaints. They are trained to walk users through features they do not understand. They cannot take interaction design feedback. Least of are they equipped to take general UI design system feedback.

If 911 operators were trained like software help desk agents, here is how a “my house is on fire” call would go.

Agent: “This 911 emergency services. Thank you for your call. How can I help you today?”

Caller: “Help! My house is on fire!”

Agent: “Ok, I understand. Your house is on fire. Can you help me understand specifically what in your house is on fire?”

Caller: “The whole house is in flames! Help!”

Agent: “It sounds like many things in your house are on fire. Let’s walk through the specific items that are burning. When did you first notice flames in your home?”

Caller: “It isn’t just things inside my house that are on fire. I’m telling you, the entire house is burning to the ground. Can you send a fire engine, please?”

Agent: “I am happy to transfer you to someone who can talk to you about your house, which I understand is on fire. Please hold.”

Robotic Voice: “Thank you for waiting. Your call is very important to us. This is why we understaff our call center to save money. Estimated wait time: 37 minutes.”

 

bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 

Caller: “Hello…? …HELLO???”

 

So much established software that won market dominance through its superior user experience — has now become complacent in its dominance and allowed itself to decay into profound brokenness. No competitors have emerged to compete with them on user experience, because users — whole industries — are locked in.

I really miss being able to just use my software and being absorbed in my work. Now, invariably, I am interrupted and distracted by bugs, usability issues, unexpected UX “improvements” that require me to relearn stuff, and just trying to get the software to do what I am trying to get it to do.

And there seems to be nothing to do or say about it. These companies are just big, blank, subscription-sucking machines with nobody at home but ambitious young product managers. It would be better nobody were home.

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Dark musings Fuck you, Adobe

Moron’s Law

I’ve been using Adobe’s products since the late 80s, back when they were good.

The products all started out pretty lean, by necessity. The hardware could only support so much, and Adobe had to use what resources they had judiciously.

For awhile, as hardware grew more capable, upgrades were real improvements. We all upgraded enthusiastically.

Somewhere in the mid-2000s, the hardware got good enough that Adobe was able to do everything useful that a user could want. In an ideal world, this is where Adobe would have stopped adding stuff.

But this is not an ideal world — so this is exactly when Adobe’s product managers went into manic overdrive. They used up every resource at their disposal, to do something new — anything — even things few people needed or wanted. At that point, upgrades became mixed-bags. The toolbars and menus and palettes grew numerous and cumbersome. They were all over the place. Basic interactions were dicked around with and changed arbitrarily, requiring relearning and inflicting needless usability friction. But there was usually something there that we couldn’t do without. We grudgingly upgraded.

But it went further downward from there. The tradeoffs began to neutralize the benefits. Upgrades became entirely worthless. Then they became worse-than-worthless. Tradeoffs dwarfed the benefits.

Finally they were just flat depressing. There was no benefit. Everything was just slower, more burdensome, more confusing, more crappy. You just had to do it to maintain compatibility with those asshats who cooperated with the scam, and forced the rest of us to go along. It was insulting to pay for these “upgrades”, and we tried to postpone it as long as we could.

That is when Adobe went to a subscription model.

So now each time a user opens an Adobe product, they get to wait while the software checks to ensure the user has paid the extortion fee — slowing the software launch-time to late-90s speeds.

Looking back there is a clear trajectory to this story. While hardware has maintained its Moore’s law pace of miraculously doubling its speed every two years, Adobe has always managed to neutralize all gains with its own uncontrollable urge to add new processor-hogging, memory-hogging, attention-hogging nonsense to its feature set.

It might be that Adobe itself changed. But I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t Moore’s Law-like law at work. Think about it: what software hasn’t grown like goldfish to whatever size their hardware fishbowl can contain?

This phenomenon needs a name. And you know, I’m sure someone has already observed and named this phenomenon. But I’m too lazy to check, and besides, everything’s better when I invent it. So here you go:

  • Moore’s Law is “the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years, though the cost of computers is halved.”
  • Moron’s Law is “the number of features in any software product doubles about every two years, and as the feature set bloats to ever more grotesque proportions, both the performance and the quality of the user experience is halved.”

I never claimed to be above venting my anger with the cheapest of cheap shots.

Anyway, this is partly why our digital lives get worse every year, not despite better hardware but because of it.

Categories
Dark musings

Covid

Well, I finally got Covid.

I haven’t gotten all the way through it, yet, but I’ve experienced enough of it that I think I have the basic idea and feel ready to write a review.

Covid is a totally slapdash, ill-conceived feature heap of an illness.

There is no cohesion to it. It is just a stupid, random sequence of torments.

“Let’s make his skin hurt. No, wait, how about body aches? Wait, wait, let’s make his ears ring. Throw some flaming headache in there. How about dulling his taste? Ok, let’s do that. But what about his guts? Shouldn’t we make things go horribly wrong there for at least an hour? Yeah, sure, why not? But don’t forget about exhaustion — he needs to be really, really tired. Let’s keep him tired. Oh crap. Almost forgot… Aren’t we known for being a respiratory condition? Don’t we need to make him cough, just to maintain brand consistency? Naw, make his nose run. And profuse sweat, how about that? And chills, probably. Yeah, chills. No wait, we’re sick of chills. Overheat him, now. Eh, I liked chills better. Add back the chills, and torque up the aches.”

Don’t get me wrong, Covid is doing a solid job of making me feel like total crap. But the disease experience is classic design-by-committee. There is no plan, no theme, no experience principles. Covid is just making it up as it goes along. It is an inelegant jumble of arbitrary miseries.

I hope this disease was produced by human beings in a lab, because if it wasn’t, nature totally jumped the shark on this one.

1.5 Stars