Automating a bad process lets you do the wrong thing faster.
- Mark Patterson
Hey all - happy July 4th! May the end of the 4th see you and yours with all your fingers!
I have been on a bit of a hiatus for the last couple of weeks. I did some travel, I had a lot of work to do, and things that just needed to be done. And, I also ran into two topics that I needed to write about, but the approach and style were not clear. One of them is the polemic you will see below. Now, I want this newsletter to be positive with a minimum of rants. After all, there are so many negative things in the world, each of which can swallow us whole if we let it. However, sometimes a polemic is needed, especially when it is consuming my mind. For every word you read below, there are about four that didn’t make it in. It was not something that easily flowed from the proverbial pen.
But first, I realized that the link I sent out to the Étant donnés barn door piece by Marcel Duchamp in my last newsletter did not show the part of the piece that totally surprised and captivated me. I thought for sure the Philly Museum of Art showed the full piece, but I was wrong. And so, I provide it here. Please be aware, it is not safe for work, and I am sure it would be banned in Florida. The piece is a wooden door, and seems banal, but it invites curiosity - and certainly invited mine. I found a chink of light coming from a hole in the door, and looked in, and behold!
Also, I recommend watching “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+. Season 3 is supposed to start in September, and I wanted to watch it again because it has been a while. Here’s the thing: the casting is brilliant. Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Billy Crudup, Steve Carell, Martin Short - just brilliant, and their acting is phenomenal. The writing is brilliant. The writing elevates the entire show. It is divine writing. People seem to be afraid that AI will replace writers of movies and other entertainment. No. There is no way AI would ever be able to write anything like this. It is a phenomenal show, and joins with Apple TV’s other phenomenal shows like Ted Lasso and Severance, both of which I highly recommend.
I. Freaking Software
For as long as personal computing has been around, people have asked me computer-related questions. “What the hell is a mouse?” and “I’m afraid if I type the wrong thing I will break the computer. Why do I do?” and “Why this this thing blinking at me?” and “Which one is the ‘Any’ key?”
Half the time the thing is not plugged in, and the other half it’s not turned on. I jest, but many is the time I had to surreptitiously flick on a monitor. I’ve supported people using computers for 35 freaking years. It got to the point where my first blog was called “Ask Uncle Mark,” which was my way to head off these questions. I figured that if one person asked me a question, lots of other people had the same question, so I answered in the blog. That way, if someone with the same question came along, I’d say, “your answer is in Ask Uncle Mark. Now get off my lawn!”
Why am I writing about this? Because “Big Tech” has not made this easy, and I am tired of putting up with and being an apologist for their crap. What prompted writing this today is that I have been dealing with the current crop of Microsoft “products.” Microsoft’s products were designed by the pocket protector and slide-rule set, and so were clunky, but they worked most of the time. Hell, I built my career on a foundation of Microsoft software. Now, Microsoft Office and related products, such as Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint, which are now collectively called “Microsoft 365”, are broken, and instead of doing what software is supposed to do and increase my productivity, they annihilate it.
Spellcheck on Word does not work. Spellcheck has been available on Word since 1995, but now it regularly underlines words that I know are spelled correctly, only to clear the error when I point it out. Word has had autosave since 2003, but now, you can’t autosave documents that you are saving on your laptop. No, it has to be “in the cloud.”
Google Docs has its issues, but one thing it has down is letting multiple people simultaneously edit the same file, whether it be a spreadsheet, document, or presentation. Just try that with Word, or Excel, or PowerPoint. I did, and I lost hours of work, and so did the rest of my team. This is core stuff. If it does not work, don’t ship it.
I find it amazing that Microsoft’s flagship product is broken so badly.
I have friends who are technical, and I can hear some of them saying in response to this, “but look, Mark, all you need to do is…” No. What I need is for it to freaking work.
Software has one job: to help me do my job. Which, extended, means to help you do your job, whatever that job may be, whether it be at work or at play. Software needs to work.
Now, people have overheard me talking to (or swearing at) my computer. They find this kind of alarming, as if I am sort of crazy. Well, when I talk to my computer, I am not talking to my computer. Rather I am talking to the programmers and designers who built the thing. I consider a computer, or a smart phone, or any piece of tech, to be the result of the collective brilliance or idiocy of its designers. I love technology. I love brilliant design. And I loathe crap. So if I am crazy for talking to a computer, well, I’ve been crazy for over fifty years. I yam what I yam.
When I interact with ChatGPT or DALL-E, I am not interacting with AI, no, I am interacting with the people who designed and wrote the AI, and all the writers, authors, and artists whose work they appropriated to train the AI. When Microsoft’s Bing Chat Sydney tells me “she” loves me, I feel sorry for whoever’s words it calculated and twisted to get that response, and I feel rage at the designers who let this happen.
I am tired of crappy software. I am tired of fighting with BS. I am tired of bad design, and I am tired of irresponsible software designers and their companies that foist their crap on us.
This polemic has been festering inside me for years. We as people and users of technology just want systems that help us. Help us to do our work. Help us to connect with friends. Help us to connect with the world and see what is going on. And what we get is software that is broken, and software that runs algorithms that, on purpose, attempts to addict us via rage and BS to continue to use their crap. On Facebook, I don’t see what I want to see, which is what is happening with my friends. No, what I see is a calculated subset of that, plus other crap the Facebook designers select for me based on whatever the hell they think will keep me scrolling. We know the algorithms of Instagram, specifically, adversely affect the mental health of teenagers and kids. We know that TikTok is addictive to kids. I’ve seen it first hand, and frankly, when I tried to use TikTok, the constant unending stream, ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa, of vid after vid after vid… pisses me off. And Twitter? My God
The CEOs of software companies go to the US congress and plead, “please regulate us!” as if they have no agency in doing the right thing. “Please stop us before we kill again!” say the titans of social media and artificial intelligence. How about this? Don’t kill people. Try that.
Try instead to make software that actually helps people. Make software that does what it is supposed to freaking do. Microsoft Office used to work. Now it doesn’t. I used to believe that social media would be an unalloyed good thing, that we would tighten our bonds of friendship because we would share more of our friends’ lives, but I was wrong. I was wrong because the designers of Facebook and Instagram and most other social media platforms did not design it for us. It was designed against us. To addict us so that we are better fodder for advertising dollars. I know: what do I want for nothing? Well, I sure as hell do not want teen depression, mass manipulation, and technology addiction. I don’t want bullshit.
So what do we do? Well first, we need to understand that free software is not free. Meta/Facebook is worth three quarters of a trillion dollars, and you are not paying anything to use it. How can that be? Well, you’re not paying dollars to use it, but you are paying with your soul. They suck the life out of you for a few lousy bucks. Realize that. Use Facebook and Instagram if you want, but realize that. Don’t use free software if you can avoid it. It is not worth it.
Second, pay for software that works. If you are using a free version of software that you use regularly, pony up the dough for a fully licensed version. Reward the designers for making good and helpful software. Hell, you spend more on breakfast that what most of these tools cost for their monthly rate. Buy them. In my case, I licensed Notion.so. I use it all the time to manage a good chunk of my life. I also license Adobe Creative Cloud because I use Lightroom and their cloud storage for my photos. I standardized on Apple products because they freaking work, and so I also license Apple One for iCloud storage and all the services they provide.
Third, avoid software that does not work. That is easy to do personally - just jettison the crap. Professionally it is more difficult. You have to use the tools provided, but you can also avoid them when you can, and work around them for the things that matter. In my case, I have been standardized on Apple since 2008. I will not work for a company that refuses to support the Mac and Mac-related software. My business is technology consulting. The firms that provide these services provide these services in a similar way, which means I am not locked in to any particular firm. If they standardize on Microsoft, they are behind the curve. People will argue with me, but they are wrong. This is a fact. Companies choose PCs because they are cheap, and familiar to old-timers. This is such a fact that Microsoft Office is now broken because the cheapness that it takes to choose cheap PC’s translates into not giving a crap if the software isn’t that great either. If it kinda works, let the worker-bees in our offices use it, but just keep the freaking price down. Now, I can add the disclaimer here that I know many professionals who use Windows PCs and development tools and software that do great work on the platform, and love it, but I’ll tell you what, the PCs they are using are not the ones cheap companies provide to their people who are supposed to be doing their jobs but are hamstrung time and time again by the freaking crap they are forced to use.
In short, don’t use crap software.
Fourth, understand that all hardware, including devices like smart phones and smart TVs and tablets and laptops and cameras and even cars, is a vehicle for software. Without software, hardware is a brick. TV sets and radios used to be devices that received a signal and displayed them on a screen, and/or pushed sound out of a speaker. Typewriters were devices that indented paper with inked hammers attached to levers pressed by human fingers. A telephone was a device that had two long wires that connected to another telephone where a microphone let your voice reach the speaker at the other end, and vice versa. There was no software. This is no longer the case: everything is software.
Software is all computers run, and it is designed and programmed by humans who are going after specific results. Software is not and has never been sentient, including and especially AI. Bing Chat Sydney spews out that its name is “Sydney” because the programmers said its name is Sydney. It is all software, and it is all based on human designed code, and there is no consciousness. It is a bunch of code being run on a bunch of servers located in a bunch of sterile data centers salted across the globe. These servers could just as easily be running Tetris and some of them do. Software is designed by humans and based on human knowledge. It has no knowledge of its own, and zero understanding.
And finally, and I will reiterate, software has one job, and that is to help us. If it does not do that, do not use it. We can force software designers and companies to do the right thing by only using and supporting software that helps us.
Thank you for reading Things to Realize! I apologize for the delay, and the rant, but seriously, bad design is literally killing us, and we need to stop participating.
Cheers!