Computers

Why I don’t like computers


10 February, 2022

Not computers themselves, of course, but systems that pretend to be smarter than the user, but don't work as expected. And since applications are written by living people, they very rarely work in the expected way.

Mazda decided not to switch radios. Tesla can be hacked over wifi. Samsung's smart TV seems to be so smart that it can lock itself out for your attempt to get into the system menu, hidden but accessible to the user. Single-player games require a mandatory internet connection. Windows unexpectedly updating for 30-40 minutes, locking up the entire PC. Apple arbitrarily deletes apps you bought from your phone. I know: I lost a great audio player that way. And another couple of apps whose developers decided not to pay a hundred bucks for their presence in the store — but what does that have to do with the user who already bought and installed them?

And I haven't mentioned a bunch of annoying problems in application software that can't be fixed for 20 years, legacy code in Windows 11 with dozens of interfaces from win95 to win11, and many other things. Every day these problems take up millions of people's time. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of man-hours.

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All in all, it's hard to love it all.