
Whoa, hold up there. Just hold up. There is NO way this is a photo of an actual Support rep. That man is smiling ffs, SMILING.
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Whoa, hold up there. Just hold up. There is NO way this is a photo of an actual Support rep. That man is smiling ffs, SMILING.
Twenty years ago this spring, I started my first “real” job at a local IT company. I was hired as Support, but it wasn’t the burger flipping, minimum wage earning, soul sucking Support of a monopolistic ISP help desk. This was Enterprise Support. I worked the same eight hours, at the same desk, Monday to Friday. I got to know the customers, their use cases, their workflows, and their work habits. I learned the difference between strategic customers and everyone else. I learned to work without a pre-written script.
In the three years I was there I learned a ton, and memories come and go, but the one thing I always remember was this:
At one point we had started receiving a lot of customer tickets around sluggish performance and Java out of memory errors.
With the customers grabbing pitchforks and lighting torches, we finally had a meeting with the VP of Development and one of the senior Developers. We explained that the issue which was plaguing the customers was a particular feature (if I recall, it was a report of some sort) was, once invoked, slowing down the entire app and as the day went on, the whole system would just start to error out with java.lang.OutOfMemoryError messages. Restarting the servers every night seemed to give relief, but the next day it would start all over again. This was true for both our hosted servers (which were now being restarted every night) and the servers of our on premise customers who had logged tickets with us (and who we had instructed to restart their servers every evening).
After some discussion, the senior Dev stated, quite confidently, that the issue was simple to solve. “It’s running out of memory, so just throw more hardware at it until the error stops.”
The VP looked at him and in a very level voice said: “No. That’s lazy. If it was coded properly in the first place, it wouldn’t be running out of memory.”
He then instructed the senior Dev to optimize the code until it ran on on the bare minimum server requirements that we stated it was supposed to be able to run on for any on premise customers, and that would more than suffice for our hosted servers now, and in the future, and any customers servers to boot.
The senior Dev, grumbling, went off and did just that. If I remember right, it took him the better part of a week, but he did it. We kept the customers at bay with promises of a fix, and when the new code was completed, tested, and pushed out, it was pretty glorious. The sluggishness vanished and the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError messages were nowhere to be seen.
After having witnessed this it burns my ass that, to this day – a time where even the cheapest of consumer computing hardware is so insanely more powerful than the servers were twenty years ago were, the experience for a huge percentage of the population is absolute garbage.
I’m not a Developer at all. I can write some mean HTML and am pretty okay at CSS, but that’s it. Code just does not click in my brain in the same way math doesn’t click for me, so I’m not gong to stand here and even pretend to know what’s going on with code. What I do know is that I’ve experienced, first hand, a major software performance issue fixed because a VP told a Dev to optimize lazy code rather than just throw more hardware at it until the problem went away. This proved to me that it could be done.
This is what DeepSeek showed the world this week: convincing everyone that all you need is more hardware and more money is lazy.
That’s us though. It’s all about releasing more new features. It’s about pushing code with an “acceptable number of bugs” and questionable performance out to paying customers. And if there is any kind of bottleneck, you can always just throw hardware at it until the issue goes away… but it never really goes away.
While you theoretically can to fix a clogged toilet by making making the bowl and pipes bigger, it will still just keep right on filling with shit.
Two things happened this week that caught my attention:
DeepSeek is, without saying, the BIG news right now. I don’t have much to say other than I’m really enjoying watching OpenAI and it’s ilk get absolutely pantsed.
For more info and a more eloquent rant, Ed Zitron has a great take on DeepSpeek and AI.
I will say that all of this hit home more when I logged into Outlook webmail today and saw this:
Can I turn off that gaudy Copilot button? Sure? Maybe? While trying to figure out how, I also found out that MS was going to increase our yearly subscription fee by quite a bit seemingly just for the privilege of having access to Copilot. After more digging, I found that we could switch our MS365 account to something they have branded “Classic” which is, you know, just MS365 without fucking Copilot and costs the same I’m paying now.
To do this you have to begin the process of cancelling your subscription and then choose Classic while you’re on the “boo-hoo, please don’t leave” screen. It’s a bit of a dark pattern, but at least you can forgo paying for Copilot. However, since I’m in the middle of my subscription period, I’m stuck with Copilot until the fall.
Of course, MS sent me an email regarding our account change:
You can see that, just below the subject, Copilot wanted to summarize this email. Since the family is stuck with this shit until the middle of September, let’s see what it does. Fuck it. Show me the magic! Improve my life!
I clicked on Summary and this is what I got:
I knew it was going to do exactly this, yet I was still irrationally angry. It took ten seconds or so for Microsoft’s AI to read my email and give me that summary. In that time I could have oh, I don’t know, just read the fucking email.
Microsoft Copilot is the literal equivalent of Dethklok recording on water; destroying millions of acres of natural habitat and blacking out cities so Nathan can record himself blowing a raspberry and clapping his hands.
I can think of any number of problems in this world that need to be solved before I think, “Hey, I could really use a summary of an email!” Yet this is the exact shit all of these huge companies are trying to sell us. Google, Apple, Meta, all of them. They’re not in this to make your life easier. They’re in it to make money. They’re in it for power. They’re in it to say, “We’re number one!”
Don’t ever let their marketing tell you otherwise.
This is a quick story about a blithering idiot.
Sometime in November of last year, the screen on my phone started to come away from the body. I have no idea why, it just did. The screen still worked, it was just separating from the rest of the phone. I put my phone in the bulky case I have because it wraps over the screen and kinda holds everything in place and started looking at repair options. I quickly found that this was something I could fix myself thanks to iFixit who, I may add, has saved my ass a few times in the past. So I ordered one of their iOpener tool kits and a replacement screen adhesive. Cost = Not So Much compared to what a mobile shop would have charged.
The tools and the adhesive arrived and I spent about half an hour following the instructions and, in the end, it wasn’t difficult to replace the screen adhesive and put the phone back together. I mean, attaching the screen cable back to the phone was a little finicky but, past that, no sweat. I kept the phone in the bulky, cheap case as some added insurance.
Two weeks ago, I decided to get another cheap case that wasn’t as bulky (seriously the one I’d been using was just, ugh). And this new cheap case showed me one thing: the screen was coming off the body again.
I put the phone back into the old cheap, bulky case. The next morning I drove to the mall where there is a mobile store who does good repairs. After saying Good Afternoon, I told them I had what would probably be an easy repair. I took my phone out of the shitty, bulky case and showed the dude how the screen was coming off.
Dude called over his manager. Showed my phone to her. She took a close look at it. Wrinkled her brow, looked at me and asked: “Did someone repair this recently?”
I said, “Well, yeah. I tried to repair it.”
She nodded, put the phone on the counter and showed me that…
… I had forgotten to remove the final liner before putting the phone back together.
See this?
Yeah. For whatever reason, I didn’t do this step.
I muttered “son of a bitch” and she instructed me to grab the little blue tab and pull the liner off. She then placed the screen back on, picked up my phone and ran her fingers around its perimeter making sure it all stayed together.
She handed me the phone back. “You should be good. No charge.”
“Not even an idiot tax?” I asked.
“No idiot tax.”
Apparently my obvious embarrassment at my own stupidity was enough.
I thanked them both, picked up the liner and put it in my coat pocket, and walked out of the store.
I’m keeping this as a reminder to always follow all the instructions.
When writing yesterday’s post about Tech Rot, I was going to add a list of “rules” I have made for myself in order to enjoy being online in any way, shape, or form. It didn’t quite fit the flow or message of the piece, so I decided to post it separately. With the context out of the way, here is the list of “rules” I follow:
Finally, and most importantly:
DO NOT adopt a devotion of any kind to any company.
1: Don’t @ me about Brave. They’re shoving useless AI shit into their product, have a rewards program (opt in or not, rewards programs on software is lame and shifty), and have been trying to pull some shady shit over the years only to get caught and backpedal. So fuck that shit. Nothing in their business model tells me they’re to be trusted. Yes, Firefox does offer “Sponsored Shortcuts” on their Home page, but all it takes to turn this off is a single checkbox.
2: The best part is not only does Thunderbird give you an overall option like “Allow content from The Online Store”, it also shows you a list of individual options like:
– Allow content from tracker.shadyasfuck.com?
– Allow content from “api.wearealwayswatching.com?
3: I’m not getting paid to say this. They’re just that awesome.
Make yourself a nice, big cup of strong coffee, get comfortable, and take the time to read this: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
Take your time. It’s worth it. I’ll wait…
… you’re back. You look exhausted. Is it because it was a super long read and not a social media sized hot take? Or is it because it hits home in a super big fucking way? Both?
As I read that article, I remembered my own history with this thing called The Internet.
I first hopped online in early 1999. It was difficult for me in the beginning as my computer was a 386 Toshiba boat anchor running Windows 3.1 and it was so fucking slow that I had to access everything via a command line using gopher. I do remember once trying to load the homepage for a local ISP on that thing just to see if it was possible, and it took nearly twenty minutes. I went right back to gopher.
By mid year, with the help of some friends, I managed to get my hands on a computer that could run Windows 95 and all of a sudden, everything began opening up to me. I could just feel the potential. Here is what appeared to be nearly everything I was looking for when it came to creativity. Yes, yes, “real” art better and all, but here was something I could not only use to create art but advertise said art. Soon, I was introduced to Photoshop and Front Page and that was that. I was hooked.
One thing I can say was that my desktop beige box was also very slow, so doing anything past surfing was a lesson in patience. I remember a friend of mine, who has just purchased a top of the line PC, watching me work on a graphic for a show poster. It was taking up to two minutes to render an effect on a layer and he said “I don’t know how you sit there and wait for that to render. I’d go nuts.”
Thing is, I had no choice. At that time I didn’t have the money to just buy a new computer or faster hardware. Yes, people made fun of my slow computer but as I mentioned, I learned something that seems to be missing today: patience. For me slowness wasn’t due to the shittiness or bloat of the software per se, I just insisted on installing the latest, load heavy software on a computer that just met the bare minimum of requirements and then insisted on pushing said software to its limits. I’ll also note that the desktops I had were built from parts. I didn’t have a Dell or a Compaq or an HP so I didn’t discover what kind of bloated shit these companies installed on their branded computers until I helped someone figure out why theirs was running like garbage.
Luckily I had friends who taught me what to do and what to stay away from. Back then, besides having to be acutely aware of certain issues, namely spam and scams, and don’t reply to shifty looking emails because that Nigerian Prince is not going to send you money 1, I also found out very quickly that the big companies were shady as fuck and made money based on people’s ignorance. The most obvious example being AOL who mailed out hundreds of thousands of CDs knowing that people would put them in their computers and sign up without knowing what they were getting into 2.
I used to do tech support for a national cable ISP where they insisted you install their shitty software in order to “use the service to its full potential”. This software was nothing more than a scamware browser and chat app that hogged up system resources and served you ads for their other services (Home phone! More TV channels!). When I was going through my training, the first “instructor” was an obvious company shill who bestowed the value of this software on us. The instructor for week two, the actual nuts and bolts tech trainer, informed us that this software was complete, unnecessary bullshit. “You just have to plug the cable modem into the computer, go to the network settings, enable DHCP, and you’re good to go.” Thanks to him, I spent more time on calls getting people to uninstall that corporate shitware than I care to remember. In that second week of ISP Support Training I learned an important lesson:
A good portion of what any tech company is selling you is shit.
But at least you could, for the most part, uninstall/delete any and all cruft and go on with your life.
About halfway through Zitron’s article, he talks about his experience with “the bestselling laptop from Amazon”, and how these machines are so horrible not just due to the older hardware, but the absolute horrorshow of software clamouring for your attention (and bogging down your system resources). I read this bit thinking two things:
And, as he points out, not everyone (read: most people) has any real idea how to bend these products to their will. They buy what they can afford and put up with the bloat and cruft and ads and junk and shit performance and more than likely, accidentally make things worse by clicking on some shady link or dialog box.
On top of all this, on top of the ads that junk up everything, on top of the bloated apps and OS’s we’re pretty much forced to use, on top of constantly changing UI’s and algorithms that serve us up a whole lot of nothing useful, we fight and argue over which tech company is better. Every single one of these companies serves us shit of some kind and people fall over themselves to proclaim that the shit they eat is better than the shit someone else eats.
Look, just because one company serves their shit on a silver plate doesn’t make it taste any better than the shit that’s served on a paper napkin.
What people don’t realize is that at the end of the day, anything and everything any company tells you is just marketing. You are not a better person if you use Apple. You are not a lesser person if you use Android. We’re all just people trying to get on with getting on and these companies bank on us all throwing shit at each other over stupid things like brand preference.
Use whatever you want to get what you need done. It doesn’t matter, at all, if you prefer Apple or Google or Microsoft or whatever. They’re all the same. Computers, smartphones, tablets, and the software that’s on them are all just tools. Treat them and use them as such. Ignore most of whatever these companies tell you about enhancing the world, or security, or privacy, or sustainability because all these companies care about in the end is profitability and growth, and everything they say, every value they tell you they have, is all marketing in the name of making more money.
Yes there are teams out there that take things like security and privacy very, very seriously. Trust me, I know. I work with one such team. However, when it comes to the bottom line, the Company can and will make decisions that can and will undermine the work that these good people do. What you have to realize is that it’s mostly the actual workers who care about enhancing the world, or security, or privacy, or sustainability. The people at the very top? They’ll embrace it so long as it makes them money.
It’s these companies that are making our lives more difficult in every single way that Zitron talks about in his post, and some he doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s going to get any better any time soon. My guess is no. We have a lot more shit to eat before anything changes.
In the meantime, do what you can to introduce some semblance of normality into digital life. Remember: whatever these companies tell us is normal is definitely not normal; don’t fight for these companies, push back against them.
So turn on your ad blockers, crank your tracking protection up to Strict, and do your best to not fall for the con that is the Rot Economy, teach friends and family how to do the same, don’t belittle anyone for whatever tech they’re using and hopefully we’ll get there, wherever there is.
1: Seems downright cute compared to what’s out there today… <cough>crypto</cough>
2: AOL was the Columbia House of the early Internet age.
“Here’s the problem. We’re accelerating, at speed into a wall in a big, stupid car that cost too much money”
For as long as anyone remembers, email gets a ton of shit for a variety of reasons:
Spam. Bad organization. Spam. Search that can never really find what you’re looking for. Spam. Ridiculous unread counts (which led to this supremely weird need to achieve Inbox Zero). Spam.
People seem to dislike email. Like, really dislike it.
A lot of things have been blamed, most notably the email clients themselves, which, to be fair …
… email clients can be pretty horrendous. Whoever designed the Gmail interface needs a stern talking to 1. And who gave the green light to stupid shit like Focused Inbox and Conversation thread view? It’s email, not chat.
All of this spawns “articles” (which are really ads) for more email clients that do it better (they never do), and companies that claim they’ve re-imagined email (they haven’t, but will happily charge you for it) but, in the end, it’s still. just. email.
There are two very basic things you can do to make email easy:
That’s it. These two things take hardly any time at all and once you learn/do them, you’ll rarely have issues going forward.
The one thing that all the detractors fail to recognize is that while so very much has changed online in the past few decades, Email has been the one constant.
The dot com craze came and went. The MySpace and Napster generation had its time in the sun. Whatever the fuck Web 2.0 was had its moment. Then the iPhone showed up and now and now we have to do everything via apps. Don’t forget the Internet of Things and all the stupid smart devices. And there’s steaming and subscription plans. Right now, AI is the new shiny.
And yet, quietly in the background, one of the things keeping everything together is email. It still uses SMTP and the only real change I can think of was the move to IMAP from POP (allowing for full synchronization between clients/devices). As far as clients go, the only difference between then and now is that the message list in most email apps moved to the left of the preview pane as opposed to above it. Sure, companies have screwed around here and there by implementing pretty templates and other bits of fluff (like goddamned Conversation view!) but, at its core, email is still email.
Is email really making us miserable? It’s not making me miserable. What makes me miserable is having to navigate a phone tree menu that tells me there is all kinds of good information on the website even though I was just at the website and it has nothing but a half baked knowledge base and/or an AI Chatbot masquerading as “live support”. Oh, and I can’t find an email address anywhere on your site. And now I’m sitting on the phone because I managed to find your companies number on page four of a Reddit thread complaining about how hard it is to get a hold of anyone at this company.
What makes me miserable is the fact we have to install a mobile app and sign up if we want to do anything from travel to banking to rewards cards from coffee shops.
Apps will save us! Apps will make things easier! Oh, and they’ll provide you with a never ending barrage of notifications and, you guessed it, emails! All turned on by default! You’re welcome!
You need an email to sign up for an account on the app. You need an email to sign up for an account anywhere.
I really don’t understand how email sets people off. I’ve seen people share their screen where there is a red bubble on Outlook with a 20K unread badge and I wonder what the hell is the matter. Then again, these are the same people who have browsers that look like this:
And/or taskbars that look like this:
Look, email is not difficult. Like everything else in this world, people just make it difficult. Email is simply one more thing to be upset at and complain about.
Who knows what the online world will look like in another couple of decades. For some reason I feel AI will settle down within the next five years and become something pretty tame. I really hope that VR/AR/Spatial Computing2 will crash and burn. I don’t know what the next real 3 life altering tech will be or what it will look like, but I will bet cash money that you’ll need to sign up and sign in with your email address.
1: I mean. Googles “design” team isn’t what I’d call top notch. Most of Googles software products are perfect examples of what happens when you let engineers design interfaces: either overly cluttered or obtusely sparse.
2: “Spatial Computing” is fucking dumb. Yes yes, 360 degree videos are neat but the idea of looking at websites or watching movies with a giant thing on your face is just plain fucking stupid. The Internet and TV are two dimensional. No matter if your looking at a 6″ phone screen, a 24″ computer monitor, a 65″ TV or some giant, virtual browser that eye screens in the HelmetMask has hovering over your coffee table, the content is still two dimensional.
3: The idea of VR is neat and it always has been. Its problem is that it’s so limited no one really seems to know what to do with it. I don’t really see VR going anywhere fast.
AR is definitely cooler and will have its uses. For example, the idea of having instructions on how to fix an engine overlaid on your vision while you’re fixing an engine is a fantastic idea. The issue is that 1: this will take a huge amount of hardware shrunk down into something the size of reading glasses, and 2: people will need to get over the idea of computer glasses being awkward (which they are and will be for a long time yet).
Um, Outlook… I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but you do know the R key is literally right beside the E key, don’t you?