Not everything is that bad. My instance just works, for instance ;)

Shit just working doesn't make money.

I would like google to work like it used to. Youtube search is freaking useless nowadays also.

When did shit ever work? Only reason I’m a programmer is because I had to figure out how to get janky drivers running or how port forwarding worked before I could play vidya as a kid.

to all the people saying it never worked: there was a period from about 2006-2016 when it worked a helluva lot better than before or after.

In the 90s and early 2000s I had to reboot my PC multiple times a day and reinstall the OS at least once a month. I remember freaking out when Windows 2000 went 30 days without a reboot. Computer's been a bit slow and wonky lately. Realized I had no idea how long it's been up, rebooted, fixed. No idea when I last rebooted my network stack.

Dead and dying hard drives were a constant hassle. My SSD has been through three PCs, without even reinstalling Windows. I just moved it, and it just worked. No idea how long I've been on this install, 8 years at least. I've got external USB drives in a faux-RAID array that have been cooking for 5 years, no problem. Everything burned electricity, got stupid hot, burned everything else out.

I was one of the original installers of cable internet. Couple of years later found me doing tech support. People were mystified at the concept of a website being down, yet their internet worked. Sites went down daily, even major ones.

We were constantly bombarded with viruses and malware. It was a nonstop fight to keep your machine clean. Now, I've only installed AV on company computers as a CYA thing since Windows Defender works great. (Also, as another security layer.)

I can pick up my phone and call anywhere in the US, free. Ever heard the words interlec or intralec? You needed a math degree to calculate long distance charges, so you'd just dial and pray it wasn't too bad. And pray the call went through. "We got a bad line! Call me back!"

A car with 100,000 miles was considered garbage. Power train warranties were 36K and that was astounding. Now they're 100K and more. My wife's car is a 2014 and my truck is a 2004. No one had 10-20 year old vehicles unless they were collectors or gear heads.

Shall I go on? :)

As far as I know those days have never arrived.

In the 1980's you'd buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..

In the 1990's the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!

It's the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn't going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It's the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?

It's 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we'll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing's gonna go wrong.

It's 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to "write" software and said AI's insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.

Nope, in fact I got good at IT shit because it seldom worked and I had to do the work of troubleshooting and figuring things out. And times were better because we had that ability.

There's been this stupid drive of "user friendliness" = removing useful power features from software.

Now everybody just expects things to work, and they don't care about having any ability to learn about it or fix it, and we're all paying for it. Things are likely getting shittier over time specifically because of people refusing to learn and accepting "If it doesn't work, I guess I need to buy a new thing". Fuck that line of thinking - if it's digital, it can be done eventually. It's just a case of figuring out how, or waiting a bit for hardware to get to the point where it can be done.

I'll dissent here: early technology didn't just work. Computers in the 80s and 90s (at least early 90s) required quite a bit of technical know-how to use competently.

I don't think there ever was such a time. I suspect that you (like me) just didn't need things to work as a child, so didn't notice when things didn't.

There are some very old complaints of things not working.

There is the aspect not many are talking here.

When previously people released software, there was no easy way to release patch. This means that the first release is the release most of people are going to use forever.

Nowadays you can very easily patch after release, which means that you can be quick to release, and fix later. This means that you can never install anything .0 version, because they are buggy as hell.

Nothing ever just works. You must make it work, and keep it working. If you aren't making it work yourself, then someone else is doing that for you.

We moved fast and broke things.

Nobody came back later and fixed things. We were too busy breaking other things.

"agile development", "AI generated code", "early release", "corporate greed".

Honestly, I think the difference is how much software is in these things now. Everything is a computer. And software is something that is very cheap to do half-assed, but expensive to do well (and reliably).

TVs are a perfect example of this. The TV of 40 years ago had an analog tuner directly attached to a CRT. It did only one thing, and did it well. Today's TVs are basically embedded computers with large screens. And the embedded software was probably written by the lowest bidder.

I'm an electrician. By and large, electromechanics has been fully solved for a hot minute now. But as long as people are involved in wiring up buildings (as they should be), errors will persist. And thats fine, because an occasional human-caused fault is preferable to clanker-caused faults - you can't take a clanker to court. So far, they can't wire up a building either.

Digital spaces are seeing problems because the humans can't properly future-proof themselves to a point. The vast majority of these issues would be nonexistent under a proper form of worker-led socialism. In other words, theyre due to weak regulatory forces within capitalist structures.

As systems grow more complex, the potential for failures increases exponentially. This will continue.

I say it every day: "Nothing works any more."

You pay for an item, and you get the absolutely least quality they can get away with. Customer service is disappearing quickly. Now it's like "Here's your thing, you got your thing, why are you still here, go away."

Like my son says: "America is getting dumber and meaner."

Once upon a time, wizards pondered their orbs and created technological solutions to satisfy their intellect and quest for progress.

Everything changed when the dollar nation attacked, seizing the orbs and enslaving them to profit.

On the commercial side, it's the curse of the pareto principle and the "good enough" approach that is the rational consequence of money-maximizing strategies.

For volunteer/free software/etc. it's both people being used to working in commercial settings on the one hand, and being ok with scratching one's own itches first and foremost on the other.

remember when shit not working was abnormal and would tank a product so they'd test shit and ensure it had basic functionality?

pre-software days.... they were a thing

This is nothing new, except “relatively new” in the last 100 years. Check out the Phoebus Cartel. It’s a crazy story about light bulb manufacturers getting together to agree to make light bulbs last less so they will guarantee repeat customers.

It’s why I always laugh when Sylvania shows an ad about their “long lasting bulbs”.

You’d be crazy to not think the other industries haven’t been doing this too.

Was looking for some wireless speakers and "the good ones", or in other words the more popular recommended brands, all require an app. Nah removed, use open standards, I just want to connect. Bluetooth exists for a reason.

thinga can still work .... you just have to put a shit ton of effort

Host your own cloud, de-google your phone (Recommend /e/OS) run a piehole .... etc

It's basically a full time job

My Samsung S9+ still works. Original battery, too.

Node and react. Giant frameworks that seem to be the standard nowadays. They're huge, bloated, and largely overkill for most things. I personally suspect they will be losing popularity soon due to the memory shortages.

Things never just worked all the time and I don't expect they ever will.

My preference is that I don't need perfection, but if something doesn't work, I'd like some kind of indication why and what I as a user or someone of advanced competence can do about it. (See Linux vs. Windows for example)

The issue you are facing about lagging and not responding tech is threefold:

1. Microprocessors can do so much more than electromechanical parts of old, for much cheaper and take up far less space. The downsides are that they are embedded on a board and can't be replaced without specialized tools, and second is that some companies (looking at you, Apple) bar the chip manufacturers from making replacement parts or put onerous software blocks so that independent technical experts cannot repair it themselves even with the skills and know-how.

2. Personal appliance device makers, to save money, use the cheapest processors they can get away with, which are slow compared to the software they are expected to run. So they lag, and they need multiple taps to respond.

3. Software makers tend to have high end hardware for developing and testing, though some product makers will have test devkits to emulate hardware. Like the makers of an app for Google TV don't have every specific model of TV. When they update they have to make assumptions about hardware performance, or they just don't care and ship something unoptimized.

My shit still works, alltho its a bit fluid ;)