Shit just working doesn't make money.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
133 points (97.8% liked)
Mildly Infuriating
43196 readers
1355 users here now
Home to all things "Mildly Infuriating" Not infuriating, not enraging. Mildly Infuriating. All posts should reflect that. Please post actually infuriating posts to !actually_infuriating@lemmy.world
I want my day mildly ruined, not completely ruined. Please remember to refrain from reposting old content. If you post a post from reddit it is good practice to include a link and credit the OP. I'm not about stealing content!
It's just good to get something in this website for casual viewing whilst refreshing original content is added overtime.
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
7. Content should match the theme of this community.
-Content should be Mildly infuriating. If your post better fits !Actually_Infuriating put it there.
-The Community !actuallyinfuriating has been born so that's where you should post the big stuff.
...
8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.
-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.
...
...
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
*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!
And my axe!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
The mobile companies are slowly hiding all radio controls to guarantee the user is too inconvenienced to keep turning them off. Guarantees more enriched telemetry gathering.
Happens at the app level too, although it may be less malicious and more crappy coding. Watch Duty on Android, for example, is really a pain of an app in that regard. You can disable android's WiFi/Bluetooth scanning, but their app uses that Google service specifically instead of raw GPS, so you lose the ability to get location-based wildfire alerts. If you don't consent to Google stalking.
What a trade-off, if you don't give away your location Metadata, you can't be kept safe from fires?
My Pixel dis/enables it on a press. Long press for devices.
Works that way on my Samsung as well, you just have to hit the circle button instead of the larger bluetooth button that encompasses it.
It seems like regressing or breaking typical functionality is simply a tactic so companies can bring it back in 5 years and call it innovation.
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.
I started with 2.3, it was a bit daunting. 4.4 though was so fun. Even up until like 7 or 8 I remember rooting via a simple app and then the world was your oyster.
On the topic of practical changes, it took them until 11 to add an audio output switcher to currently playing media notifs and even then they made them far uglier and less functional.
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
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.
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.
My shit still works, alltho its a bit fluid ;)
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.
100% - so sick of trouble shooting shit and charging everything