In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
That’s the thing that gets me as well. People just accept these horrible patterns in software as being completely normal.
Most don’t even have any memory of tech not trying to fuck them over at every chance it gets. Most have forgotten and the younger folks who grew up on Apple’s shit never got a chance to know what a file system is.
Indeed, I feel like technical illiteracy has paradoxically increased as computers have become more common place. Even among software developers, a lot of people don’t really understand how things work at a basic level, and just cargo cult solutions.
From a blog post that is popular at the moment:
🤣
Persist logs? What on earth could that option be for? My logs never disappear.
And here I was, when AJAX first released, I struggled to wrap my head around making it work. I didn’t last long in webdev, it just wasn’t my forte. At best I can shell script some tasks these days but I’m way too out of practice at this point.
What is AJAX exactly?
It’s using Javascript to retrieve and update information on the page without refreshing or moving to a different one. Example usage, on a sign up page, it can tell you a username is taken before you try to submit the form. The name is an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript And XML.
Thank you
I feel this, both with computers and with video games. "Smart"phones are possibly one of the worst developments in tech, when taking into account what capitalism can and has done with them. What could be a device that is centered around helpful things like GPS, is instead focused around being addicting and keeping you glued to the digital world at all times. And even GPS has a dark side, in the location tracking that is tied up in it.