Yes, I know. I'm sorry. Grumpy old man here. But no, I'm not a luddite. No, I don't oppose technology for the sake of it. Quite the contrary. I have been using new digital technologies for a long time now. As a matter of fact, I even work in the field! But no, I don't like the way it's going. As far as I can see, it's becoming more and more fragile, buggy, unstable, and inconsistent. The building is full of cracks, and it wouldn't surprise me if it completely crumbles down one of these days. There are people wondering why new technology is not making us more productive. Well, sorry to say, but I'm not surprised. Here are a couple of examples I just ran into today in the span of about 2-3 hours, and this is a daily occurrence. If you work with technology, it's a constant experience.

First of all, my daughter has been playing soccer in a local league for a few years now. Before that, my other three kids did. We have been doing this since, at least, the early 2000s. For a very long time, they used their website and email to coordinate things, share the schedules, and announce any last minute changes. Obviously, that is not good enough anymore. They had to come up with a phone app now, of course! Who doesn't come up with a phone app these days? Soon we'll need one even to get water from the tap. So, I download the app and install it on my phone because it's the only way to get messages from the coach now. You know, using a mailing list is no longer fashionable. We have to do a phoen app. Oh, so cool! Next step? I have to create an account. Enter my email address, enter a password, and the app tells me that I should receive an email message that I can use to activate the new account. OK. So far, they are doing things by the playbook. So, I open the email message on my phone, click on the link to activate the account, and... well, it takes me back to Google's Play Store, and asks me to... install the application that is already installed! As a matter of fact, the very same application I had used to create the account! Obviously, since it's already installed, the "Install" button is just offering to install it on an additional device, which I don't need to do. Great! Let's wait until I can get back home, log into my laptop, and click on the link there. Hopefully, that shouldn't redirect me to the Play Store. And, sure enough, my guess was right: it doesn't redirect me to the Play Store on my laptop. Instead, it takes me to their website, which allows me to log in. Yet, after I log in, all I find is an empty app. I have no schedules, no contacts, no coaches, no... nothing! This part sort of makes sense. My wife is the one who signed up our daughter, so chances are everything is under her name. So, I contact the organizers via email (no, it wasn't easy to find their email address; you know, who cares about email these days, right?). Apparently, my wife has to log into their app (she never downloaded it), and add my email address to the account. That may or may not happen anytime soon. In the meantime, I have no access to any information whatsoever. No way to coordinate soccer practice with the coache. Nice. This is oh-so-much-more-convenient than the old, outdated, out of fashion method they used for two or three decades! I'm so glad they are now fashionable!

Next incident. This is about the car sharing service I use here in the Twin Cities. They also have a nifty new phone app. Prior to that, their mobile app was nothing but a thinly disguised front-end to their website. I need to extend a reservation I made for today. But, instead of adding time to the end of the reservation, I need to add it to the front. Guess what? The app doesn't let me do that. I can only add to the end, or cancel the whole thing. So, instead, I log into their website which, by now, has the same nifty, cool, modern look as the mobile app (i.e., it is using the same development framework). Well, surprise, surprise! I have the same problem there! In other words, I cannot do something that I could do just fine with the old, outdated tools based on traditional web technology. So, I call them on the phone, and the person I talk to informs me that this is "a well known problem", and she can manually extend the reservation for me. Nice, huh? Convenient and productive, indeed!

So, what's my problem? My problem is that these two incidents appear to be the norm these days. I come across issues like these all the time. On a daily basis. It is a very sad state of affairs, indeed. {link to this entry}

Yesterday, while checking the daily news feeds, I came across an article titled Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn’t Have that truly reflects my opinion not only on the topic in particular, but also on how we are applying technology these days. Although the author starts by blaming his own age for his opinions, I strongly disagree with that approach. He does offer a good amount of actual reasons. Those have nothing to do with age. On the other hand, what one often hears coming from the other side is just mocking comments about supposedly "outdated views" and "people who don't accept the new innovations". Sorry, but it doesn't have anything to do with a resistance to accept innovation. To accept new things for the sake of it is, I'm afraid, quite silly. Yet, it's what we see all around us. As the author explains, the fact that touch screens in cars are a cause of accidents is a fact, not an opinion. To counter that with the idea that we have to support something because it's "innovative" or "cool" strikes me as very childish. So, why do we see these changes being introduced? The author explains:

This process in which tech proliferates for no particularly good reason has been described, in part, by the writer Evgeny Morozov in his treatises on “solutionism,” which he defines as “an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.” Corporations, buoyed by competition, will sometimes even invent problems that don’t exist, in this case the lack of a giant screen that more or less mirrors your phone.

There is no justification for the switch from knobs, switches and buttons to touch screens. We have been conditioned, in part by Apple’s iPhone design aesthetics, to believe that every product will inevitably follow an evolution chart from what it is today to its eventual end as a flat, glowing screen that plays episodes of “Ted Lasso” on demand. Once the screen, itself, has become normalized and mostly runs out of ways to improve, the next move is just to make it bigger. The new Cadillac Lyriq, for example, comes with a 33-inch touch screen, which is significantly larger than the televisions most of us grew up watching.

The incentives of carmakers are pretty clear: Touch screens are cheaper than designing and installing a mechanical panel. And given that most cars today are reliable, come with lengthy warranties and an array of mostly uniform features, a big screen becomes a way for a car brand to distinguish itself from its competitors, especially on the showroom floor before potential buyers have a chance to really immerse themselves in just how annoying the screen will be.

Or, to put it a different way, we are being duped. We are just not applying our critical thinking. Instead, we prefer to join the wave of what's "in". Needless to say, there is an additional pressure on people who, like me, are already in their 40s or 50s. You are supposed to look "cool", "young", "in the know". Again, sorry. What doesn't make sense just doesn't make sense. No matter how much marketing and social pressure you add to it. {link to this entry}

It looks as if, starting with Firefox 95, the browser changed its default settings for the color scheme (or theme) to be used on the web. This means that, at least in my case, it started showing certain websites with a dark theme, even though I had not chosen to do so. In general, depending on the time of the day, I prefer to use a dark theme or not via an add-on. But, in the case, of Firefox, it was doing so consistently without me deciding on it. So, in case you run into the same issue, here is how to change it via Firefox settings. In my case, all I had to do was to change the default from 3 to 2, which is how it was set prior to version 95 of the browser. {link to this entry}

Here is a great summary of one of the main flaws of software engineering these days:

The user needs are, for the most part, simple. However, we tend to build overly complex solutions that fall apart easily, use a lot of resouces and, as a consequence, are quite expensive to write an maintain. Yes, I understand part of the problem is that applications are built for a very broad user base, which means that one user's simple usage may not exactly match a different user's simple usage. Perhaps an architecture based on plugins might help here? {link to this entry}