20h ago

Whatever happened to the days when shit just...worked?

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.

66 comments

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!
- 👈(❛ ᗜ ❛👈)

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.
- Those dark times before USB was a thing...
- 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.
  
  I agree that it’s harder to find tech that doesn’t require EULA acceptance, service subscription upsells, or other modern BS, but they’re out there. I just remember how difficult getting a lot of stuff working was 20-30 years ago.

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.

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.

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.

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.
- Thats what I keep saying about Windows 10.
  When it dropped it was fucking amazing. Every last thing just worked and they werent trying to milk us for every last cent or scrap of personal info just yet.
  
  Windows 10 was absolutely not a miracle on launch, it had its own host of problems that got fixed or ‘features’ removed over time. I distinctly remember the indexing and search being completely worthless for the first year. Forums were filled with posters declaring they’d hold onto Windows 7 until their PC crumbled to dust, and then they would finally switch to Linux. Such is the cycle of Windows releases.
  
  I remember the Windows 7 launch more vividly. IIRC they released a free public beta before launch. I immediately downloaded and installed it. Light as a feather and it ran like a top, everything worked.
  
  You did still have to install a third-party app to get the start menu not to take up the whole screen, though

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.
- We had a computer sitting for like 3 years in the mid 90s, totally unusable. It was assumed it had some sort of major virus because everything seemed to be working and making the right noises, but no interface. We didn’t have the money for repair services, and nobody knew how to fix stuff yet, so there it sat.
  Until one day, when someone hooked the tower up to the monitor for a newer computer, to see if they could figure out why it wasn’t working, or at least reformat the drives and stuff.
  Turns out, someone, or some program, messed with the resolution, and set it to something the original monitor couldn’t display, and this was before automatic rollback, so it just didn’t display it. That’s all it was. Unusable for 3 years because we didn’t have another monitor to use to roll back the changes.
  It never “just worked”.

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.

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.

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.
- I also remember the 1980s. A computer with 64k of memory cost $300, about $1,000 in today's money. In 1986 my company bought a 10 MB hard drive. I believe it was around $1,500, or roughly $5,000 today.
  My first modem in 1987 ran at 300 baud, slow enough that I could read incoming text as it arrived.
  When I went to Africa in 1988 as a volunteer, the only way to communicate with my family was by mail, and a letter typically took one month each way. Now that village in Africa has a cell phone tower.
  Moving to Japan in the early 1990s, telephone calls home cost $2.50/minute. I was using email, but almost no one I knew had it.
  Even cars, for all their faults, are tremendously safer, more efficient, more reliable, and longer lasting than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s.
- 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.

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.

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

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.

I say it every day: "Nothing works any more."
You pay for an item, and you get the absolutely least quality they can get away with. Customer service is disappearing quickly. Now it's like "Here's your thing, you got your thing, why are you still here, go away."
Like my son says: "America is getting dumber and meaner."

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*

Since iOS 26.2 was just released, I’m wondering the exact same thing. I don’t think they listened to any reported feedback.
- I wish android versions past 10 didn't exist. They keep making it worse for aesthetic purposes. Like why are the buttons so huge when phone screens are at their biggest point yet.
  
  I will never understand why they removed the bluetooth tap to toggle, and replaced it with an open to a separate screen. That's what long-press was for!
  
  Heck, my first smartphone ran Android 4.0. Compared to current Android 16 more than a decade later, the only practical change I could think of is granular permissions.
- They used to run on a model of "we know best" which is arrogant, but passable in a developing industry like earlier mobile where things needed work. Unfortunately, they still think they know best, and that closed-minded approach only works so long until you lose sync with the tolerance of the general public. Honestly surprised it took them this long. iOS and MacOS have both rotted terribly.
  Take the UI aspects alone. Samsung "leaked" hints about a glass UI, saw user feedback, and pivoted. Apple released a glass UI because they would have never checked what users actually wanted, nor even bothered to see the user feedback from Samsung users and realize it'd apply to them as well.
- You should send in a hand written note asking why they require your feedback if they won't listen to it.
  And the note should be written.....IN BLOOD!!!! But, like spirit halloween fake blood. I'm saying to send a message! Not commit murder.....unless you want to commit murder. Then go ahead. I won't stop you. I'm not your mother.
  
  Brb, obtaining blood

Once upon a time, wizards pondered their orbs and created technological solutions to satisfy their intellect and quest for progress.
Everything changed when the dollar nation attacked, seizing the orbs and enslaving them to profit.

My Samsung S9+ still works. Original battery, too.

My shit still works, alltho its a bit fluid ;)

It's crazy to me these days how much work I have to do to do such simple things on Windows now. I wanted to auto-hide the task bar the other day and instead of just right clicking on the taskbar like I used to I have to crawl through pages of poorly organized settings in the new ugly fucking block format.
I just buy old shit now. Old TVs, old stereos, old fridges. Anything that doesn't need modern features doesn't need to be modern.

Things never just worked all the time and I don't expect they ever will.
My preference is that I don't need perfection, but if something doesn't work, I'd like some kind of indication why and what I as a user or someone of advanced competence can do about it. (See Linux vs. Windows for example)
The issue you are facing about lagging and not responding tech is threefold:
Microprocessors can do so much more than electromechanical parts of old, for much cheaper and take up far less space. The downsides are that they are embedded on a board and can't be replaced without specialized tools, and second is that some companies (looking at you, Apple) bar the chip manufacturers from making replacement parts or put onerous software blocks so that independent technical experts cannot repair it themselves even with the skills and know-how.
Personal appliance device makers, to save money, use the cheapest processors they can get away with, which are slow compared to the software they are expected to run. So they lag, and they need multiple taps to respond.
Software makers tend to have high end hardware for developing and testing, though some product makers will have test devkits to emulate hardware. Like the makers of an app for Google TV don't have every specific model of TV. When they update they have to make assumptions about hardware performance, or they just don't care and ship something unoptimized.

There was a schism where all of a sudden profit became more important than quality. That's when capitalism started showing it's purely destructive roots. We rode that train for a while though but now it's time to get back to being the best we can be, not fucking our brothers and sister up for a token that represents some sort of vague value.

remember when shit not working was abnormal and would tank a product so they'd test shit and ensure it had basic functionality?
pre-software days.... they were a thing

Was looking for some wireless speakers and "the good ones", or in other words the more popular recommended brands, all require an app. Nah removed, use open standards, I just want to connect. Bluetooth exists for a reason.
- Bluetooth is not a good Standard for speakers. In fact, there ARE open standards for wireless speakers. For example DLNA

thinga can still work .... you just have to put a shit ton of effort
Host your own cloud, de-google your phone (Recommend /e/OS) run a piehole .... etc
It's basically a full time job

100% - so sick of trouble shooting shit and charging everything

Because software is cool so let's just add more stuff!!

I never experienced this in ~46 years of life. Not sure what you mean. Nothing ever worked, I learned how to be a systems administrator because computers have always sucked and don't just work.

66 comments