Asklemmy

Have you tried Google keyboard (gboard) lately? It made me want to break my phone and just not have one at all. It corrects proper words to other words that make the sentences don't make sense. It corrects words that are already correct and it ignores the misspelled words. It wants to speak for me. They think they're making us type faster with their predictive text, but I was re-reading every thing I put on the internet. I became slower. Thankfully I found a worse keyboard, but it doesn't autocorrect~~s~~ as much and I'm ok with that. Fuck Google.

Sometimes it's a solution in search of a problem. Usually that'll be some startup that really wants Google (or somebody) to either buy them out or shovel millions of venture capital money at them. VC that would be better used for anything that housing homeless people, feeding the hungry, or hell just burning to stay warm.

The proliferation of competing mutually incompatible standards.

We tend to forget that all of that is to support people. Tech shouldn’t be an end goal, merely one of the ways to achieve it. And not always the best one at that.

I feel that best tech comes out when the economy is doing great, lots of development and creativity.

enshitification is based on the ease of moving profits from users to creators then from creators to shareholders in a digital service economy all the while degrading the service for the users and then the creators as the profit fulcrum.

so enshitification might be a different thing than the reality around manufacturing items in an international environment which requires design decisions that later require revising because not all materials are available from everyone in the way a design is called for. and finding people that can assemble things while receiving a wage that they can live so that a company can make a profit requires compromises. and that is just two tiny points in not including shipping and workspaces and insurance et cetera

it is hard, yo. in a not a one part is inconceivable hard but in a it gets complicated pretty quickly type of hard.

This is a topic that could be a novel for how much there is to consider, but in the end it comes down to resources and companies trying to choose what it best for the company overall. For a company to do anything, they are giving up many other things they could be doing instead. Whether it is limited budgets, limited personnel, or company priorities every decision made is always a tradeoff that means you aren't doing something else.

Most companies prioritize releasing new product so they can start getting revenue from it as soon as possible. A new product has the largest potential market, and thus makes shareholders happy to see revenue coming in. The sales from a new product are the easiest ones in most product's lifecycle. Additionally. releasing new products helps keep you ahead of competitors. So ongoing maintenance work is de-prioritized over working on new things.

The goal of testing is to simulate potential use cases of a product and ensure that it will work as expected when the customer has the product in their hands. It is impossible to fully test a product in a finite amount of time, so tests are created that expose flaws within a reasonable search space of the expected uses. If an issue is found then it needs to be evaluated about whether it is worth fixing and when. There are many factors that affect this, for example:

• How much would it cost to fix?
• How much time would it take to fix?
• Does it need to be fixed for launch or can it be a running change?
• How many customers are actually going to see the issue? Is it just a small annoyance for them or will it cause returns/RMAs?
• Is it within the expected use case of the product?
• Can we mitigate it in software/firmware instead of changing hardware?
• Is it a compliance/regulatory issue?
• Would this bring in new customers for the product?
• Was this done a specific way for a reason?

Unfortunately, after considering all this the result is often that it isn't worth the effort to fix something, but it is considered.

CEOs wanna cosplay Steve Jobs and unvail their crazy new features. They've already "trimmed the fat" to appease shareholders.

They just can't make fixing old issues sexy.

A bit like Motorola phones killing messenger e even if you tell them not to, or losing photos if you press home too soon after a night shot.

Leveraging technology is a lever of power. Whenever you use technology, you are acting in a submissive manner and that will be used to exploit you.