Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.
These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?
Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?
Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!
Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?
The difficulty of keeping something working scales exponentially as its complexity grows. Something of 1x complexity take 1y effort, but 2x complex is 10y effort, 3x complex is 100y, on and on.
Phones/computers/apps are at hilarious levels of complex now, and even 100k people running flat out can barely maintain the illusion that they “just work.” Add enshittification heaping its intentionally garbage experience onto the unintentional garbage experience that is modern computing, and it’s just gotten stupid.
Seriously. Millions of things have to go right for your consumer electronics or software experience work seemingly flawlessly. Think about the compounding probabilities of it. It’s a monument to human achievement that they work as well as they do.
FTFY.
It doesn’t help that every new generation adds a new blackbox abstraction layer with little to no end-user benefit, the possibility of duplicated functionality and poor implementation, security concerns, poor support, and requiring a flashy new CPU with system crashing speed tricks to maintain a responsive environment through 12 levels of interpreters.
Is this a complaint about the OSI model?
No, the OSI model is fine.
I’m talking more about sandboxing an interpreted app that runs a container that runs another sandboxed interpreted app, both running their own instances of their interpreter with their own dependencies and accessible through a web interface that is accessible through yet another container running a web server that is running in Python with a virtual environment despite being the only Python app on the container, which is then connected to from another sandboxed tab on a sandboxed browser on your machine.
But hey, at least it isn’t, god forbid, a MONOLITH. That would require someone to take the time to understand how the application works.
Ah, yeah I get that. Java interpreter so you can virtual machine your way into having someone else making sure the thing works with all hardware it can live in.
Blind scalability and flexibility are neat tho, gives access to a lot less knowledgeable people to do stuff and theoretically frees up those who know for more complicated tasks.
Been saying that about the internet for 30 years. It’s a damned miracle it works at all and people whine and cry about every little hitch.
Yes, people often want things that work. If there are good reasons why there is clunkiness, then, if these reasons are commonly understood, more people will be more patient. Knowledge is power. That’s the point of this entire thread.