Nest door neighbor did this when he just decided on a whim to put in a new driveway and started digging with a bobcat. 10 mins in and BLAM severed the main Comcast coax serving the entire neighborhood that was running under his driveway.
Luckily we were on Century Link so weren't affected by his stupidity. lol
I had better success with earlier versions. For me Siri has regressed so much and had become so unreliable, that having to constantly repeat or rephrase or delete whatever nonsense it was doing was so frustrating, I stopped using it years ago.
Its quite the paradox when Apple is pushing Apple Intelligence so hard, yet their assistant that's been around for 15 years can't do even basic things now.
>> Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.
The new liquid glass ui also fails a lot of basic accessibility checkpoints like contrast, readability, and increases cognitive load.
The rounded corners you speak of also hamper tap and touch targets for users with motor disabilities. The rounded corners make icons and other elements less distinct, increasing the possibility of touch or tap errors.
>> In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly,
A lot of my peers who have been in tech for more than a decade are all doing this. They're effectively backing out of the industry. Their attitude now is they're ready for retirement in their 40's. They're only building and working on side projects and only sharing with people they know, nobody else.
One thing I'm seeing right now is the amount of institutional and domain knowledge being lost is a on a massive scale. The more startling fact is nobody seems to care - as if vibe coding and LLM's are going to fill this gap.
It's interesting to me that the actual motivations for releasing code open-source were very different than I had assumed for the past ~30 years. I always liked to give stuff away so folks could play with and try stuff. As far as I can tell, the only reason not to still give away code is the desire for credit, which was never all that interesting to me.
But then again, I haven't devoted my life to developing and releasing a huge open source project used by millions, so perhaps my opinion should be discounted accordingly.
No, I don't think your opinion should be discounted. It just turns out that a bulk of open-source movement had ulterior motives, and were actually in this for credit or downstream opportunities, not to actually give things away in a pay-it-forward fashion.
The reaction to LLMs pretty clearly revealed who was giving things away, and who was indirectly selling them and using "giving away" for unfair advantage.
Wow you're really "irked" by the existence of people writing software for reasons you apparently cannot comprehend, aren't you?
BTW, you mentioned "pay it forward" -- please explain me how an LLM user no longer interacting with other humans, is going to "pay it forward".
I dunno what "irks" you, what's your problem, who mistreated you so badly that you have to be so condescending and attributing malice to people whose motivations you have absolutely no clue about.
>> Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional
I'm not sure where you live. I know almost all colleges in the US have walk in free mental health counseling, along with free telesupport. My company has onsite mental health professionals who you can talk to or call at any time. There are free mental health clinics all over my city. There's mental health professionals who did daily outreach with the homeless and addicts in our city.
This doesn't even start to list all of the available apps you can download from your health care provider for free resources that are available to you.
This might have been true 30-40 years ago, but even over the last decade during and after covid, healthcare providers have put a huge emphasis on mental health and counseling to give people an abundance of resources to help them - when they need help, not in four days when someone is available.
> I know almost all colleges in the US have walk in free mental health counseling
I've been to two universities and this was not the case from the university itself, especially outside of normal business hours. If you didn't have an emergency, you had to wait months, if you had an emergency (I was explicitly told the only way to see someone anytime soon was if I said I'd kill myself if I didn't get an appointment and then they'd see if there was someone available) you might be able to talk to someone sooner. After hours emergencies maybe the psych ward at the hospital would see you? There's free resources, but universities aren't really providing much.
> Then you end up with shit performance or broken sites in Firefox
I work for a large corporation. A few years ago, they removed FF as a browser people could use at the company and removed it from the internal app store. Then, if you had a version, they forcibly uninstalled it.
As someone who's a developer, I needed access to be able to test on. Never forget going into the tech support office and saying I need this installed to be able to test my code. Support guy says, "Yeah sure mate, let's get that reinstalled for you." Tech guy downloaded it, started the install, and suddenly got a pop-up warning him it was against company policy to have this installed on your machine. It then auto-removed the app files he just downloaded. We sat there dumbfounded. "I guess we're going to have to escalate this mate." he said with a confused look on his face.
Almost four months later, support finally relented, but put in so many barriers to get installed that only a handful of devs have it on their machines now. I get emails almost daily, "Mate, I need you to test this in FF." or "Is this breaking in FF?"
I guess the reason given was FF lags in updating their certs, making a prime target for malware attacks so they just killed it so they wouldn't have to deal with it.
Just kind of strange that my entire career I was constantly told I needed to test this on any and all browsers available because they all have their nuances and you never know what might break something. To moving to a time where I'm testing on a single browser and calling it good? Man, times they are a changing.
> Just kind of strange that my entire career I was constantly told I needed to test this on any and all browsers available because they all have their nuances and you never know what might break something. To moving to a time where I'm testing on a single browser and calling it good? Man, times they are a changing.
Interoperability is hard. Plus there are network effects — and so that's why lots of ecosystems tend to see adoption of a single implementation as the de-facto standard. Remember when we had to be aware of character encodings that are not UTF-8?
>> I think that over-reliance on analytics has had a similar effect
I lost track of how many times the directors would tell us, "Since the analytics say A, we should do B." then the research person says, "Sure Jim, great idea, lets get a few rounds of useability research and confirm it first."
Then the always predictable thing happens: Users never align with your analytics. Seeing data and seeing someone struggling to do something basic with your interface is totally different. When directors see these videos, it really makes them see how important research is and not just relying on data to make decisions. Right now, anything the research team wants, they usually get - its had that profound of an impact on our leadership team.
My problem is I can skip all those steps and 8 separate meetings by applying a little common sense to software design.
Unfortunately, orgs often treat devs like this as indulgent or wasting time. They need it to be done the inefficient way because that's the only way they have visibility and control.
Yes. And in most of those meetings where the researcher invalidated the leaders, the leaders have left the meeting saying (and thinking? I’m not sure) they were validated. So because of the leaders we have we should skip the meetings and research in both cases.
Eg, if you have a bunch of airplanes returning from a war, you might be tempted to armor the areas where they were hit. But you want to armor planes where the holes arent because those are the critical areas.
If you can read literal bullet holes backwards, hundred dimensional preference vectors say something, but we generally have no clue.
Analytics don’t capture the “why” of what they measure, on the user side. Indicators may move in the seemingly right direction for the wrong reasons. Analytics typically can’t tell you what the user wanted to achieve. Knowing the “why” gives a better basis to decide on what changes to try, or to realize what’s actually wrong with the user-facing side of things. Another reason is that they tend to measure an average where in reality there is no average user.
I think it's because a lot of analytics are data points oriented instead of being workflow oriented. So you can see that feature A is not being used a lot, but it's very important in a particular flow. Feature B may be used a lot, but it can be only important for a particular class of users while very detrimental mentally for another class.
People use software for a needs, but rarely I've seen a need being highlighted when interpreting analytics data.
I think the answer to this is roughly ... the content of an applied statistics degree, or a research methodology practicum. There are so, so many ways that quantitative measurement of human phenomena can mislead, from measurement error to conflation between trends/sample sizes/effect sizes, to p-hacking, to good old bias (in interpretation or in deciding what tools to use to smooth or normalize data), and thousands more.
I can't think of an application outside of travel or long commutes on a train where I would use this. For a daily driver its too big to fit into a pants pocket and the price tag is TGH.
Luckily we were on Century Link so weren't affected by his stupidity. lol
reply