There I was nodding along with all the stuff social media is telling me, when I was brought up short by an innocuous comment.
20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could.
Now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest.
Ha ha, yeah, people are so different now…hang on, wait a minute. None of that is true. I suspect that the person did NOT do a careful analysis of statistical trends. I remember 20 years ago — heck, I remember 40 years ago — and I don’t remember people avoiding technology.
Did you know the microwave oven was invented in 1946, and the first commercial consumer model was introduced in 1967? Now they’re ubiquitous. Who doesn’t have one in their home nowadays? They were readily adopted over the course of years.
I was first using the internet in the 1990s, when it was largely a university privilege, and then came AOL and the internet just exploded in the 2000s. Now everybody has to have WiFi so they can get Netflix.
In the 2010s, citizens were adopting hybrid cars, and now fully electric cars. Are “techies” rushing to buy piston-engine cars with carburetors now?
I believe there is a rejection of badly implemented technology — the enshittification of tech, for instance. But I think people are always ready to adopt tools that are cheaper, easier to use, novel and interesting.
It is that techies are avoiding “smart” (esp AI) things whenever possible.
Case in point – “smart” refrigerators. Yeah, it is one thing to have a simple chip running the compressors in order to balance the usage for energy-saving purposes, as well as having a more complicated algorithm for managing condensation on the compressor to re-route it to the heat exhaust for evaporation.
It is another thing to have an android screen on the door for setting temps, having “cloud” apps that manage the shopping list, watch netflix, and have a camera inside you can turn on and off supposedly to see what you need to buy (or look at it without wasting energy opening the door).
Why is this a problem? A fridge generally lasts at least 10 years (I’ve 2 that are now more than 20 and still going fine).
But the vendors stop maintaining the O/S for these things after about 2 years. Finito. That’s it.
This means that you stop getting security updates for a thing on the internet and you eventually stop getting app updates for the apps on the device, so those stop getting security updates.
Now you have a target, which when compromised is now behind your router’s firewall and able to look at everything on your network.
Aware techies avoid this kind of tech because we know, from experience, that the vendors don’t care about maintenance past the warranty, and while that’s fine for the physical mechanics that tend to last, that is not a good thing for software on the internet. The vendors don’t support the software past that warranty point because that support costs a LOT of money but doesn’t bring them another dime, and nobody pays for upgrades of generally ‘free’ software (except the vendors).
Cars are a bit different because while yes they have their own systems that are usually off the internet, when they do have internet connectivity it is through Car Play and Android Auto – these run on the phones (the screen is just a UI input/output device – akin to the old X-Server relationship from 35-40 years ago) and so are regularly upgraded.
Another example: Smart TVs – at some point the vendor stops caring, or at some point the needs of the apps keep increasing past the ability of the tv’s specs to handle it…and thus the apps stop working and your TV is a ‘brick’ for this sort of thing and you’re back to getting a fire stick (or similar set-top external thingy). My in-laws TV is a “smart” samsung and none of the apps they care about (D+, Plex) work at all anymore.
#1 acroyear. You spent a lot of paragraphs describing Enshittification. When the tech nerds have a word for bad tech company strategies they know how to thell good from bad tech.
I wonder how old “jelly” is.
If they’re my age (78) then the reason they might think this is because the “techies” they know are retiring…or dying. Personal computers became a thing in the 80s (the Mac was introduced with an ad at the 1984 Super Bowl), the Internet in the 90s. That was 40/50 years ago. All the “techies” who worked on those things are old people…like me…and no longer working, or they’re dead. Bud Tribble, the first Mac OS development manager, retired several years ago. Bill Atkinson (Hypercard among many other things) died last year.
The “techies” who developed the foundations for all that are long gone. Jef Raskin, who taught both of them at UCSD and wrote the first “Macintosh” proposal, died twenty years ago.
Tony Fidel who came to Apple with the idea of “iPod” is just a kid (57) and he’s still at it. As I heard Tony say in a talk once, when he, Jobs, et al began working on an MP3 player…aka the iPod…in 2001, they were intentionally working on what became iPhone.
But what might be driving away some young techies right now is layoffs due to genAI developing code. We’ll see how that goes, but one costly snafu…and as we know, genAI is famous for “halucinations”…could end that direction.
Hmm… many films are inspired by the science fiction of Philip K Dick, where the protagonist would quarrel with sapient AIs running machines and appliances everywhere. In ‘Total Recall’ this survives with the automated JohnnyCab that nearly gets Arnold Schwartzenegger killed by not accepting a poorly defined instructiin.
#4 it is a form of Enshittification, the one most relevant to this discussion. Enshittification is a class of issues of the commercial tech world, not a single one.
There are plenty of things that go through it but techies still deal with and accept as what it is (won’t stop us complaining about it, of course).
Enshittification is usually a result of “if you bought/leased A, that’s an opportunity for us to sell you B, C, D…” thinking. It’s the “only use Xerox™ paper, toner, and repair services purchased from Xerox™ on your Xerox™ photocopier” problem that got smashed by antitrust law… which is steadily being pruned back. It’s a non-vendor-specific tying arrangement that’s still a tying arrangement but judges (and lawyers more generally) are too intimidated by the technology and MBA/marketing-speak to see that it’s the same thing, the actual tied product being “advertising revenue.”
This was easily anticipatable long past — even by so socially oblivious a science-fiction writer as E.E. Smith three quarters of a century ago, and the more-perceptive Sinclair Lewis a century ago. The desperation to grab attention to potentially sell more is irresistable to managers/investors all convinced that they’re entitled to an above-market-rate return (very much like the kids of Lake Wobegon all being above average) and that this is the magic way they can do it.
It’s not the tech. It’s the mindset of the particular economic-oriented mindset of people far away from the tech itself.
So. There may be plenty of techies who are not retreating to the forest, but jely da beegol doesn’t know them.
I remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
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Also, ELO lyrics:
[Verse 1, Ticket To The Moon, 1981]
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Personally, I had to have a work mobile (the ‘brick’) when I was on-call in 1991-1995.
The first personal mobile I ever got was in 2020, and only because society has changed so much that lacking one becomes problematic and makes things harder. Reason? I hated being on-call, and only the money made it worth it.
acroyear @1: “Cars are a bit different”
Automakers excessively harvest personal data from cars and sell it or fail to secure their horde.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/01/03/infinite-thread-xxxiv/comment-page-1/#comment-2249762
Subaru and VW leaks.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/01/03/infinite-thread-xxxiv/comment-page-3/#comment-2251544
Annoying smart features in cars.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/01/03/infinite-thread-xxxiv/comment-page-3/#comment-2251602
* @10
hordehoard.I’ve been the tech guy/explainer for years for various older friends and family. Many times have I had those near and dear to me tell me they feel stupid for not being able to get a thing to work. Sometimes in tears. That pisses me off royally. You are never ever stupid, the tech is. If your phone won’t charge when you plug it into your stereo, with the correct USB plug and so on, it is because the stupid stereo only has the data wires hooked up, not because you are stupid.
So many things like this, so much stupid UI. Hello microwaves. Can I have 1 dial for time please? No? 20 buttons and the layout and function of every model different instead then? Fuck. Hello car stereos with endless menus with functions that only even a minority of people will use even once on buttons that make no sense at all in this context. With clocks that update time over bluetooth (good!) but not the date (Whut??) in a personal case of mine. Hope you don’t hit the wrong button while driving in the car that the stereo is anti designed for use for, That was some nice music that was slightly too loud for a few seconds there. Oh well, here’s a much hated and flat out dangerous distraction instead…
Most of these are not only immensely infuriating, but oughta be flat out illegal for mine.
Stupidity is relative, not absolute.
Tech cannot be stupid. It is tech. It does what it does.
So you mean to refer to technical aptitude, not to stupidity.
(It’s an emotional claim, not an intellectual one)
I see where it’s coming from.
There is a subculture of, well, not exactly “normal” people but very tech-clueless people who techies are forced to regularly interact with. They’re the ones who said cell phones gave you brain cancer, then they said Wi-Fi gave you brain cancer, then they said Bitcoin and blockchains are destroying the Earth, then they said 5G was Bill Gates rewriting your DNA, then they said social media is driving people mad and killing children, and now they are claiming AI and datacenters are destroying the Earth, and they are bravely going around trying to poison the AI and make it stop working.
Techies aren’t immune to getting ensnared in weird crap (the Singularity, anyone?), but they don’t get caught up in that particular kind of crap. It is not marketed to them.
I’m something of a Luddite, predisposed to smashing my keyboard every time some feature doesn’t work in spite of following the instructions. Especially after software updates where the update now hides a simple keystroke task behind some multi-level menu and you have to unlearn all the tricks that made it easy to use. Technology has its place but not in something as basic as a coffee mug or a toaster. I’ve lost count of the number of tasters I’ve had to throw out because of some glitch in controller. If I want to burn my toast i don’t need a microprocessor to help me do it. As for carburetted cars my son and I both like working on old cars. His current classic drove him crazy for two years because of a misfiring engine. It looked like he would have to replace the injectors. The only problem was the original parts were no longer available and aftermarket ones required spending $2000 on a new engine management computer. Checks showed the injectors were OK and the problem was a supplementary computer piggybacked on the main computer to get extra performance out of the engine. Removed that and problem solved. Technology will eventually kill us and it won’t be Skynet that does it.
Those are pre-technological items, of course. Before technology arose.
(Sorry, but the irony is apparent)
Someone once asked Eben Upton–the guy who is credited with inventing the Raspberry Pi–what sort of smart speaker he had at home. He replied that he didn’t have one and wasn’t going to get one. The interviewer–rather startled–asked him why. Eben pointed out that, since his wife also had a position in the company (Director of Communications), they tended to talk business over the breakfast table and the last thing he wanted was some other company in a position to eavesdrop on confidential business discussions.
As for the remarks about updates done by alarm clocks… My alarm clock is a Pi+7″ display+speakers and runs Linux. Not only does it reset the time, as needed, but the date as well. It even shifts between Standard and Daylight (Gag, spit…!) time on its own…at the correct time on the relevant Sunday mornings.
Fuck off Morales. Yr a disgrace and you know the rest. If the 3 examples of stupid I showed don;t qualify as stupid to you then you are, once again, wilfully, ignorantly, and irritatingly missing the pint. As per wilful usual and I am never ever addressing you.
Acroyear:
I was using the ATtiny series chips for electronics projects. For less than a buck, it was worth it to flash an LED. But there was so much spare power in there, I could have it pulse, strobe, blink in Morse Code, receive MIDI, respond to sensors, monitor its own battery levels…
That’s the thing. You have an overpowered general-purpose chip and screen and a squad of marketing people who really want to put Internet of Things or whatever the latest selling point is on their pop-up ads. So stuff gets added. Not even well thought out stuff.
And core functionality gets shorted — because that kind of stuff costs money.
Heh. A clear and self-evident outright lie, wherein you directly address me.
No. Your cowardice is evident. Piteous, but undeniable.
OT and might well be worth skipping.
Just in case anyone is unfamiliar. I am never ever addressing the time vampire UNLESS, and as has been made explicitly clear to and duly acknowledged by said, I make it explicitly clear that I am in fact addressing him. Most of the time on the minority of times I refer to him at all I am warning about him or predicting his behaviour. As I am here. But the technical faux pas of addressing him explicitly in my last post whlie claiming not to be and not making the caveat explicitly clear AGAIN (and it would be again and again and again), is just the kind of time wasting, point missing, irritating BS that has so often been highlighted by me and many others. Dear God, it’s juvenile.
My beef with this guy started after he accused me of being a stochastic terrorist, a fan of Kyle Rittenhouse, and after a thread when I spent a few days arguing with him about the ins and outs of the idiotic doctrine of constrained omnisience ala the Pope talking for God but only when he has his magic hat on. As opposed to the actual point I initially raised about what it would take for the RCC to be held accountable for it’s disgusting behaviours for the past few “gestures vaguely at any amount of time keeping things” . Missing the point in favour of pointless technicality bickering, his fucking specialty. Thank our host here for the ever increasing rules imposed upon the Time Vampire, 20% is the best yet.
He’ll have another one to use if this thread hits 24 comments and resets his count. Betcha my London ‘gainst your brick he uses it at comment 25. I’ll be happy if we don’t get there, I’m happy any rare time he STFU, but I know who is going to be 25th here.
The cowardice crack is a favourite of his. I have no idea what it is apropos of, and no interest in finding out. Sometimes he accuses me of being a fish. No idea, care even less. (Care less than zero, that’s unpossible!)
And I apologise for the OT longish rant. I do try to be good about not doing this. But I’ll admit it, not to justify it mind you, but by Jove and Neptune and Zeus and Mars, I get annoyed by this stuff sometimes and need to let it out…
I recommend the killfile extension. It’s made my Pharyngula experience much more pleasant.
@acroyear: Indeed. There was one streamer we signed up for, then discovered its app didn’t work on our 3yo smart TV. Attempted to stream through a computer, but it couldn’t keep up with the frame rate. Now trying to get our money back.
Anything IoT-ish: if we enable connectivity at all (and for most appliances, it’s of marginal usefulness at best) we keep it on a dedicated network (our router supports multiple internal networks).
A standing complaint: our car (2022 model) bluetooth is irritatingly stupid (though I think it’s partly built into the bluetooth protocol itself). Depending on what mode it was left in, sometimes it will start playing my audiobook as soon as I start the car. Audiobooks are for use on the treadmill; I don’t want to listen in the car, and I’m alarmed by the fact that the car can tell the phone to fire up an app that was not running at the time. Then there was the time I pulled in to the driveway and found myself listening to a phone call my wife (in the house) was on because the fucking car stole her headphone connection as soon as it got enough signal strength.
So yes, there’s stupidity — on the part of the people who design these things, who completely fail to think through the likely use cases.
@23 Ick. I’ve been using audio jacks for a while and only recently picked up some wireless headphones. At least they require a dongle plugged into my computer’s USB hub.
I do get annoying times when my phone asks me to log into my brother’s television. If I want a connection, I’ll use a USB cable.
stevewatson @23: “Depending on what mode it was left in, sometimes it will start playing my audiobook as soon as I start the car.”
I made VLC my phone’s media player and turned off VLC’s “playback history”. If the car starts in bluetooth audio mode and sees my phone, it will try but won’t find anything to resume—unless I have VLC running with something paused.
Separate from “playback history”, Android VLC situationally remembers the seek position upon stopping (longpress pause) or exiting for certain audio based on the file’s metadata. When the “genre” tag = [podcast|audiobook|audioboioks|speech|vocal] (case insensitive); or duration is at least 15 mins without an “album” tag; or duration is over an hour. When it’s on one of those and also the only item in the playlist, VLC’s notification will have subtly different playback controls (playback speed and bookmarking instead of track hopping).
/Yes, I had to read the source code to suss that out.
/I’ve not used Android Auto, so I don’t know how that affects things.
@ 13 John Morales
“Tech cannot be stupid. It is tech. It does what it does.”
Something like a Stafford Beer’s line ” A system’s purpose is what it does”. That does not mean it does what the users want it to do.
“So you mean to refer to technical aptitude, not to stupidity.”
I don’t think so. It seems amazingly easy to design something that “works” for some value of “work” but in so stupidly designed that it in almost impossible for anyone other than the designer or very specially trained people to use and even then the blasted thing may not work as intende.
See Donald Norman’s the “Design of Everyday Things”, originally published in 1988 with the title “The Psychology of Everyday Things”. It has some great examples of bad design.
Heh. That is directly in response to .
There is subtext there. You know? People can be stupid, but tech cannot.
Some people really are more stupid than others. Tech is tech.
(Next level down: only the intelligent can be stupid; stupid just means a low level of it)
Same quoted bit:
Get it? The intended claim by ‘the tech is [stupid]’ is that the tech requires a minimal degree of technical aptitude.
I was around when microwave ovens and VCRs became popular, and I well remember so many people taking perverse pride in being unable to set the clock on the VCR or the oven, so they got their children to do it. ‘Cuz kids just know this stuff, right?
Quite remarkable, which is why I remark on it.
FWIW, in the decades since, I am still the only person I know that uses the power settings, every other person just presses ‘go’ if they bother setting a time. So it is usable even for them; just press ‘Go’ as many times as required. They don’t need to use those features, or the timer, or the presets to use it. And it’s on them.
Same thing here. Plain lack of competence or interest in learning, blame the tech.
Sure, there’s the principle of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep and something like 90% of users use only 10% of the available features.
[Ooooo… too many options!]
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Good grief! Unused features aren’t bad design.
People who can’t fathom simple time-setting on, or are so clueless as to write ‘ If your phone won’t charge when you plug it into your stereo, with the correct USB plug and so on, it is because the stupid stereo only has the data wires hooked up, not because you are stupid.’ aren’t stymied by bad design, but by technical incompetence.
The psychology of everyday things (Lecture video) (1:01:52)
^ Consumer product cautionary tales at 25:39.
The psychology of everyday things (Book pdf)
CA7746, searching is easy. It is a silly book.
https://www.ovid.com/journals/psycc/abstract/10.1037/030650~the-cognitive-psychology-of-usable-artifacts