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Comment by gravislizard | Hacker News Reader

As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are entirely inaccurate - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned.

I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome and has long since given up on even imagining a better experience.

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That tendency to rathole and nitpick, while discarding the larger point, is increasingly frustrating.

It seems like a lot of this boils down to people getting stuck in a local maxima. If someone isn't used to zooming out to the big picture, are they more likely to solve problems in isolation and end up with layers of dependencies, npm installing all the things? Resulting in an unstable stack and less predictable ecosystem at large.

Yes, the ratholeing vs. generalizing is an interesting phenomenon. I get the sense that it's largely personality-based. Some people (most computer people) are wired up to get every detail exactly correct and if anything is out of place they break out the tweezers and start tweaking. That's exactly what's required in most engineering work. It can lead to perfecting something that's about to get thrown away.

The other personality deals with abstractions, analogies and top-down thinking. When faced with an issue they'll start by defining goals and values. And it's easy to be blind to the details when you're thinking of the big picture and ask for things counter to the laws of physics.

Even if you're a two-minded kind of person and can deal with both generalities and specifics, it's incredibly hard to deal with both at once and quite a task to switch from the one mindset to the other.

If you were a hammer manufacturer, wouldn't you nitpick if someone said "I feel hammers have gotten worse since the 80's, and handles aren't what they used to be"? To many people, computers are a tool;to many IT people, they are a way of life. Its not about big picture, its about proximity- some rant about some minor detail on something you value captures more attention than something you don't care about.

Local maxima are lower effort. You can more easily convince yourself and others that this is as good as it gets.

I appreciate your perspective a lot. And I agree that 90% of our use of computers is complete trash, and for those of us in the industry the addiction of being able to understand and maneuver through that trash can overpower the desire to remove the trash entirely.

Studying the history of CS and following it to its roots has been simultaneously invigorating because of the elegance of the fundamental ideas, but also disappointing, because of the line I can trace from the hopes and dreams of those pioneers to the current state of computing.

I'm hopeful that a new wave of software is just over the horizon. Perhaps I am naive, but I'm holding out against pessimism about the future for as long as I can.

I've been working on Google Maps for close to five years now. I somehow missed the previous postings of this thread, but a little hyperbole never hurt anyone :) Your larger point about the inability in our profession to take a step back and consider the overall situation is spot-on. The mindset I most commonly encounter among other engineers when discussing any kind of systemic problems in our practices is a kind of "it's $CURRENT_YEAR, of course things are the best they've ever been and we've solved all known problems. Also what is $KNOWN_SINCE_DECADES_TRIVIAL_SOLUTION_TO_MAJOR_PROBLEM?"

hey did you ever use the old Verizon map app that came with their pre-Android phones? That was really, really good.

Huh. I did, and thought it was atrocious. Its only benefit at the time was live re-routing: the competition at the time, short of buying an actual GPS, was printing out directions from mapquest and hoping you don’t make a wrong turn.

I recall a few times driving out of state where I’d miss an exit, be unable to figure out my way to where I needed, pull over at a phone booth or public business, and start calling to see who was home and could run mapquest for me to get me back on the road. Don’t miss that.

No, didn't know about it. Interesting!

> the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned.

FWIW, I don't care about the details, there are plenty individual examples of bad design today and slower software. I disagree completely with your larger thesis that things have gotten worse, and with the title in particular as a summary of your point. Why do you feel it's completely valid, and what does that mean exactly if you agree that many of the supporting examples are wrong?

And I also disagree with characterizing people who disagree with you as "Computer Person Thinking" and "Stockholm Syndrome". That charge seems doubly ironic, quite hypocritical, given the content of your tweet-storm, but I understand if you're feeling a bit attacked or defensive about this discussion. It's okay that it wasn't all true, and if this causes discussion that seems annoying, at least it's a discussion. We can continue to improve software and hardware and UX, and it's good to discuss it. It's just not true that it's gotten worse, and you don't really need to crap on today's software or the people who disagree with you to prove the point that we still have room for improvement. There's always room for improvement.

Anyway, computing is objectively faster today than in 1983 (I was there), and not by a little, by orders of magnitude, especially if you are fair and compare functionality apples to apples, but even if you only tally wait times for activities that seem similar on the surface but are completely different today (such as in-memory queries vs internet queries).

I don't see much objective data or measured results in your UX argument on the whole. Arguing that function keys are intuitive and that the mouse is useless is pure opinion based on what you like and being used to something, not something that can be shown by any large scale user studies to date, and history has already somewhat demonstrated the opposite, that many people prefer mice navigation to keyboards, and that function key workflows are for experts, not Twitter users, by and large.

A thesis cannot be "completely valid" when 50% of the reasoning behind it is "objectively wrong". Some people would rather point out in which ways your idea is misguided and naive than attempt to force sense out of an idea that's based on wrong information.

We still have a generation of programers who never learned the whole stack, because St.Moore would save them from the sin of sloppyness forever.

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