> a situation that's only gotten worse over time (for whatever reason)
The answer is ever-increasing complexity, no?
The answer is ever-increasing complexity, no?
I don't want to over-state this, but it's a hell of a lot more important than people think, mostly because it attacks you in little bits here and there. It's never a direct assault. We are creating a consumer society in which we're becoming slaves to the tech. It entertains us, it connects us, it remembers for us, it guides us. All of that might be fine if that's your thing. But there are dark sides too. These kinds of hidden bullshit annoyances are one of the dark sides.
The root of the darkness is this: if you steal just a few minutes per day here or there with hung-up text editors and such, how many man-years of productivity are you stealing from mankind?
I really think we need to go back to the metal and start designing systems with separate fault-tolerant systems dedicated to being humane to the users by invisibly handling the kinds of things that keep wasting huge parts of our collective lives.
Or, as you said, we could just keep adding complexity. That's always the answer, right? sigh
That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £2500 to fix, and even then they'd be guessing.
It would be better if car engines were simpler, like they used to be before they had to start passing artificial emissions tests that don't measure the impact for the whole life-cycle of the vehicle.
When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about.
These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of living hell is it where everything we touch is complex like this?
Modern cars are FAR more reliable than anything made in 1978, this is a simple fact proven by mountains of data. Cars last far longer than they used to; you can easily go 200k or 300k miles with basic maintenance, and I'm sorry, but despite what you might want to believe, that was just not the case in 1978.
And BMWs are terrible examples; those cars seem to be designed for expensive and necessary maintenance, so they can extract more profit from their owners. Japanese and American cars aren't like this.
I think that we got to where we are now exactly because of the addition "but only if you have to deal with it". Software consumes many useless cycles exactly because developers on all layers shift their responsibility to deal with complexity to other layers (either the CPU, or the downstream developer). Sometimes it's because they have to, but most of the time it's simply because there's too much distance between producing and consuming developers.
being humane to the users
"users" all too easily implies end-users only. I'd add that developers also need to be humane to downstream developers (circle of influence and all that), including better API design and better instrumentation hooks. But that latter would be adding complexity :(
I wonder if there is a chance we could take another try at that.