The Bullshit Web, because pathological capitalism ruins everything

It’s almost as if I picked the title... This is a great article about how the internet is mostly a bunch of wasted bandwidth, because: marketing.

[...]At the time, a few of my friends were getting cable internet. It was remarkable seeing the same pages load in just a few seconds, and I remember thinking about the kinds of the possibilities that would open up as the web kept getting faster.  And faster it got, of course. When I moved into my own apartment several years ago, I got to pick my plan and chose a massive fifty megabit per second broadband connection, which I have since upgraded.  So, with an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web.

Read here: The Bullshit Web

Software Disenchantment

We need WAY MORE developers to scream these very same statements to the computer industry...

Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.  Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough.”

Another good bit:

Programs can’t work for years without reboots anymore. Sometimes even days are too much to ask. Random stuff happens and nobody knows why.  What’s worse, nobody has time to stop and figure out what happened. Why bother if you can always buy your way out of it. Spin another AWS instance. Restart process. Drop and restore the whole database. Write a watchdog that will restart your broken app every 20 minutes. Include same resources multiple times, zip and ship. Move fast, don’t fix.

Read the whole thing here: Software Disenchantment

Sci-fi: Stop with the damned holographs already

Just a brief note to every science fiction writer, director, producer, etc.: Holographs, as seen infuriatingly often in today's TV and film, are NOT POSSIBLE. Even the "hard science" series The Expanse has these damned things.

There is no basis in physics to suspend imagery (animated or still) in mid-air. None. Zero. Nada. All you're doing is making your "science fiction" into "techno-fantasy". It's magic, not science.

STOP IT.

Does anyone actually test their product any more?

The subject here could easily be Apple again, but what triggered my tech anger most recently was imdb this time (er... and WordPress' piece of shit iOS app). Has anyone at imdb ever bothered to try writing a review on their own website, via Safari on iOS? I'm pretty sure they haven't. Wouldn't it be nice if they had some kind of feedback system that didn't require users to create yet another internet account on yet another 3rd-party website just to make a comment (that will be ignored by imdb) on a user forum about site problems?

I keep seeing shit like that... utterly broken websites and software features (and countless mistakes and typos in "news" articles) that just beg the question "did anyone actually check this before publishing it??"

Then there are the walls that these entities build between themselves and the outside world. The walls of callous disregard and arrogant isolation between themselves and the human beings actually using their broken products, ensuring as little interaction with said users as possible.

Go ahead, try contacting a human being at Google, or imdb, of Facebook, or a dozen dozen other tech entities...

Expertise is dead, and QA has been murdered as a way to avoid it being pointed out.

Taking one step further: customer service is nonexistent, especially on "free services". These companies hate interacting with their product (that's you). Even the users of paid products are treated like non-entities by most of these companies.

Congratulations tech industry. You've made an art out of antisocial behavior and successfully convinced most of the world (and all of the USA) that you should be excused from the most basic of expectations about your product. The tech business is the ultimate demonstration of unregulated, unaccountable business. No wonder there are so many libertarians in tech news comment forums...