[gumby]

Almost, yes. Certainly I advocate that the technology adapt much much much more to humans than the other way around! After all, who decides what "improvement" is?

The cry of "progress!" has resulted in plenty of destruction as well as benefit, not to mention mountains of premature optimization (think of those elevated freeways into cities that created dead zones and had to be dismantled only decades later, or for that matter the alphabet changes I mentioned).

We used to vary the length of the hour; now we have a second that is fixed and we vary the length of the human day in order to match the rotation of the earth. I happen to think that's a good optimization but I have friends who argue vociferously that those leap seconds are a bad idea. Who's right (hint: on all topics I am).

And there are no absolutes: some languages let their spelling fluctuate (e.g. English), some fix it somewhat rigidly (e.g. French) and some change it systolicly to re-align with perceived practice (e.g. German) -- who is right? I speak all three daily and frankly I consider the German practice the worst of the three. But enough people prefer it so why not?

Sure there's tons of stupid practice (e.g anti-vaxxers). But at the end of the day technology (τέχνη) is an art in service of humans, not the other way around. And to tie this back to HN: if a business doesn't think that way it will not survive.