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by gravislizard
2307 days ago
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As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are wrong - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned. I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome. |
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Oh believe me, as much as I love being on the computer for the sake of it, I don't enjoy having that screen time utterly wasted by shit software. There's only so many hours in a day after all.
I work w/ ERP software, so I see people still using text-mode UIs on a daily basis (hell I track my time w/ one), and I also support a "modern" ERP that is GUI based and can "run inside a browser." (Which nobody actually does, because it sucks, doesn't support all features, and swallows up tons of keyboard shortcuts.) One of these packages can be run comfortably from a $5 Linux VPS. The other package asks for two _very fast_ SAS storage arrays, 32GB of RAM, minimum of 6 CPU cores, etc. Of course you've gotta license Windows for all of that, which thankfully is not my job. (That or you spin it up in "the cloud" I guess, and pay thousands of dollars annually to rent somebody else's computer, since this software is not "cloud native" at all, no matter what their sales people say.)
I try to leave the software better/faster/more usable than I found it, but it's hard when the upstream vendor is just piling shit on the fire so they can pitch their half-implemented features on the sales brochure: with absolute no regard for the added operational overhead of the garbage code.