
Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web - sagargv
http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/05/05-10-15-did-i-ever-mention-that-i.html
======
edem
I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example
when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view?
Seriously?

Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard
way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just
vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this.

Anyway back to your issue with picture downloads: I had the same problem and
after 20 minues of searching I managed to find where can I download my FUCKING
pictures:

\- go to Google Drive

\- Click "Apps"

\- Click "More"

\- Click "Photos"

\- Click "All photos"

And here comes the tricky part:

\- At the top left corner hold your left mouse button and drag a box around
all your photos

\- Unselect the ones you dont't want to download

\- Click "More"

\- Click "Download"

That's it just 9 easy steps.......no comment

~~~
cliveowen
Lollipop is just a bad, bad update. Tap the square button and close two apps
at the same time. If you did everything right, now your phone says that
Android UI failed. This has been going on since day one. Day one. Which was
sometime in November.

Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here
people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard
to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if
you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good,
right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get
a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the
app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it
again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused,
taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make
two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why
not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too
empty anyway...

There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this
word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I
better leave it for another day.

~~~
grkvlt
Am I just desensetized to quality or, do I put up with a lot more issues than
I should, or do I not have the same high standards as everyone else? As far as
I can tell, Lollipop (aka Android 5.0) works brilliantly, and everyone thatI
recall speaking to who has it is also similarly pleased. To call it a failure
seems to be vastly overstating the viewpoints of a minority of customers. My
Sony Z3 Compact and LG G Watch R work great, and that seems to be the general
experience of other with modern devices. I get that it's fun to hate and rage,
but this seems nitpicky - nothing is perfect, and Googla has great track
record for pushing bugfixes and updates for Android and Chrome. #satisfied

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Am I just desensetized to quality or, do I put up with a lot more issues
> than I should, or do I not have the same high standards as everyone else?_

Hard to say. My best guess is that you put up with a lot more issues than you
should. The mobile is so utterly broken that we all have to get used to it to
stay sane.

But from my personal experience, and I'm not saying that it applies to you
personally, I've noticed that many people just don't give a fuck about the
looks. Go and look at how majority of people write letters, or even how they
write on the Internet. The amount of typos and overall lack of style is so big
that 60 years ago a typical reader would get a heart attack.

Looking at the world as it is today, I start to feel that it's me who has
insanely high standards because I want things to look and feel nice, not just
barely work.

\----

Oh, and about Lollipop - I've seen so many cases where something utterly
broken on my device worked fine on everyone elses and reverse, that I learned
to appreciate that things just really don't work the same even on the same
brand of hardware. It's entirely possible that you and your friends have a
good experience while for some reason, GPs device-software combination is
broken. Hell, I personally never had any issues with Windows Vista, and almost
no one believes me it's possible.

------
RankingMember
This reminds me of Bill Gates' email documenting his experiencing trying to
install and run Windows MovieMaker (read from the bottom):
[http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangat...](http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf)

~~~
andrewstuart2
I really appreciate how even-keeled he is despite being utterly frustrated
with the experience. I think the worst he said was "crap," which I find
refreshing.

That's something I hope I bring to every team I'm on.

~~~
fsck--off
Bill mellowed out as he got older. He used to be infamous for cursing during
meetings. Joel Spolsky has an amusing story about it:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html)

~~~
peterwaller
Fantastic read. I needed that, thanks for sharing.

------
snarfy
The space at the end of the password entry was found in QA testing. Since we
are an agile shop and run two week sprints that bug was left in and put on the
backlog to be prioritized later. Gotta release every two weeks, even if it's
utter crap. As long as the PBIs are completed, who cares about the users?

It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free
time, but this seems to be the norm in an agile driven software world, at
least my experience with it for the last ten years.

~~~
eridal
well .. that bugfix have associated a few risks..

1\. let's suppose a user have a password: (note the space)

    
    
        " 123"
    

2\. also you store the password using some hashing function, which prevents
you from knowing the password.

3\. two weeks later the bugfix goes live, the user cannot longer access the
service.

Also, you cannot easily estimate how much benefit/annoyed users your _fix_
will endup having .. which makes it a _higly risk change_.

~~~
epochwolf
This is going to sound a bit horrible...

Fixing the space issue will help more people than it hurts. People that have
spaces at the beginning or end of their password can simply reset their
password or call customer support. Users forget or mistype passwords all the
time.

------
jdg1
"You can fucking strip the leading $ and commas you piece of shit mother
fucking asshole terrible programmers."

That sounds sensible, but now you've just broken it for every country that
uses comma as a decimal mark.

~~~
intrasight
But they know you locale and could do the right thing. Is not at all hard.

~~~
protomyth
Even without knowing the locale, it pretty easy to know which are NoOps and
which mean something.

~~~
taejo
How?

~~~
protomyth
Number of digits, positioning of the , and .'s - its money which gives some
nice constraints.

------
dheera
Sometimes I use the classic version of Gmail just because it loads the whole
page in less than 1 second and I can read my e-mail in another 0.5 seconds.
With the "modern" version I have to stare at a blank screen with a stupid
progress bar for about 2-3 seconds before seeing anything.

~~~
ZoFreX
I don't understand why this is OK. I don't understand why people listen to
Google's advice on making fast websites when one of their main websites _has a
fucking loading bar_.

------
harel
Phone -> USB Cable -> Computer. Transfer images via said cable. Select images,
put in email and send to mum.

Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to
get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.

~~~
avian
Does this actually work for you with a recent Android phone?

On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the
computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot
to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2
minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait
10 minutes while the computer is copying the files. See it fail with a cryptic
error.

Utterly useless. From what I hear, this is a normal experience since Android
switched from using USB mass storage to MTP.

~~~
loudmax
I use an app called AirDroid
([https://www.airdroid.com/](https://www.airdroid.com/)) to copy files to/from
my Moto G. It works reasonably well in my experience.

I have no idea what the benefit of MTP over USB mass storage was imagined to
be.

~~~
tfigment
I looked at that but have you seen the permissions required. Wow. Change my
contact list? I'm sure they have good reasons but I'm struggling with that for
something I'm going to use for copying files.

While I've gotten MTP to work ok its not a first class experience. Folders
with many files (like photos) can take a long time to even start copying. I
assumed that MTP was done due avoid patents over FAT32 with Microsoft or
something.

~~~
cecilpl
The reason they need permission to change your contact list is because
Airdroid can change your contact list from your phone.

~~~
obsurveyor
But isn't Android software and the APIs designed to be extremely modular? This
could be solved through a separate app that enables the functionality. Maybe
if Google's app store supported this idea more extensively, we could _choose_
the options that an app has access to instead of just trusting they're not
going to abuse the privilege.

------
Aoyagi
Yes please! I'm so tired of all the annoying bloat all over the web that makes
(not only) older browsers die just thinking about visiting the sites. It looks
like the "progress" nowadays is going for "more complex and resource-demanding
with less features and control".

~~~
Goladus
> less features and control

Oh there is more control. Just not for you, the user.

~~~
Goladus
ps for the downvoter: My comment is entirely serious.

Breaking the web for fun and profit, 101:

The simplest example I can think of is the fact that in a standard google web
search, "copy link address" does not give you the actual destination address,
rather a google tracking link.

Another: Image attachments in gmail. Now there's this overlay that asks you
whether to download, open in google drive, or view in the gmail image viewer
(which conveniently has interfaces with a bunch of other google apps I don't
care about). Now you might think the google image viewer is nice, but
personally I liked my once-upon-a-time ability to just look at images directly
in my browser with a single click.

So I gain nothing, google gains everything. They are wresting control of how I
access my files, every step of the way.

~~~
derf_
Greasemonkey script to restore direct links:
[https://gist.github.com/astanin/3782408](https://gist.github.com/astanin/3782408)

It was worth it to me to install Greasemonkey for this script alone.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm increasingly seeing Greasemonkey as a tool for unfucking the web. I've
already started writing simple tweaks to the banking UI I use.

------
elliott34
"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic or something
very stable and non-computer related, so I could just work away in my shop and
not have to ever touch this fucking demon box."

What was nice about working in scientific research back in undergrad in that
whenever you got tired of coding the demon box, you could do some good
physical labor in the lab.

~~~
VLM
"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic"

I read the same and interpreted it somewhat different. Although your take was
correct on its parallel path.

Web designers and SaaS architects ONLY design to impress other web designers
and SaaS architects yet never eat their own dog food and don't care about the
users. Its widely believed by non google employees that nobody ever got a job
at Google (or whatever their personal definition of "win" is) by putting
something into their portfolio that is simple, maintainable, easy to use,
straightforward, clear, that they'd use themselves or the end users would
like. This is a MAJOR systemic cultural malfunction in the business. Sooner or
later some MBA will "discover" this and write a famous book about how
shortsighted the internet techies were in the second or so decade of the
widespread public internet. I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail
fins" or something. Basically we're building 70s American muscle cars... we
can impress each other, but they fall apart in two years if that and the
public hates them.

The car analogy would be a bunch of mechanics standing around trying to
impress each other "Yeah man I had one of those cars that needed the engine to
be pulled from the car just to get access to replace the rearmost spark plugs"
"Oh thats nothing, I had to do over 50 labor hours to replace the heater core,
practically had to disassemble the entire car to fix that coolant leak" "well
I don't have as impressive of a story but I worked on a car once that could
only have its oil changed on a hyd lift with the passenger front wheel
removed, impossible to do it otherwise". Now the mechanics are VERY impressed
with the quantity and quality of work they had to do to accomplish what are
fundamentally, normally, very simple tasks, and they're very impressed with
the engineers that created those systems that guarantee them such amazing
labor hours of wonderment. It must have taken petacycles of CAD/CAM work to
make something that messed up that none the less technically kinda somehow
works. HOWEVER, and this is critical, the general public just sees a lemon of
an overpriced hard to fix car, and just wants a simple reliable toyota
commuter car (which the mechanics mercilessly make fun of and insist no one
wants despite actual sales figures). "So what, because teenagers, a group
widely renowned for good taste and excellent judgment (LOL), love our
products"

~~~
drzaiusapelord
> I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail fins"

This is my feeling as well. The norms on mobile and the web are so far out
from anything I'd call common sense or proper usability that it must be cargo
cultism at work here. Its just so. friggin. bad.

I also think this is why Apple is doing so well now. They're guilty of these
sins, but their ultra-minimalist approach means they're able to sin less than
others. Google's "anything goes" mentality allows these bad habits and this
broken culture to thrive.

I'm not too pessimistic about it. We're still in some growing pains here.
Mobile is a kind of a mess. Memory unsafe languages rule. Privacy is non-
existant, Security is in the toilet, etc. I think there will be a shakedown of
these things and we'll look back at this time as being needlessly reckless.

------
tomphoolery
"I don't keep any cookies or browse history"

Why not?

"I get the numeric code sent to me. I go to Google Voice on my computer"

This seems like it defeats the purpose of 2FA. Am I wrong? Isn't 2FA supposed
to work by proving that you own a device for which it was set up on?

"always download all the images made by Google Charts because that service
will die at some point"

Probably. If it matters to you, learn some JavaScript and build stuff in
highcharts. And next time, never rely on a service that you don't pay for.

Also, it's clear by this post you hate Google, especially its suite of
exceptionally shitty products, and not the Web.

~~~
VLM
"This seems like it defeats the purpose of 2FA. Am I wrong? Isn't 2FA supposed
to work by proving that you own a device for which it was set up on?"

The bug is in the design of 2FA. Sooner or later Google will get rid of GV and
I'll just move to another provider to front-end my SMS spam instead of sending
it to my phone. The other failure mode is best displayed by my bank not
realizing their site is accessible via mobile, so my two factors when
customers log in on their phones are the phone people log in with and the code
they're sending to the customer's phone, oh wait that's only one factor.
Although in the second example the bank wins by security theater.

The bank does offer a phone app that demands access to pretty much everything
on my phone presumably for marketing / spam purposes or just being weirdo
creeps, so needless to say I won't leave it installed, although I did try it
for a short period of time. However the bank phone app sucks so I didn't lose
much by uninstalling that creep-app. Also the creep-app doesn't do 2FA and
seems to be permanently logged in, so I've downgraded my account access to
merely the phone lock screen level of security, which isn't very good.

~~~
obsurveyor
Bank security theater is positively hilarious.

"Pick a security picture, now write a security phrase. Please choose three
security questions. Now enter a password. Would you like to enable 2FA on your
phone?"

~~~
1_player
I'm not sure on the positive hilariousness.

My bank's mobile app does not work on rooted phones, because they are
concerned for my safety, afraid that some rogue app will get my banking info
and steal my money. Well, that's my problem, isn't it?

Do you know how most people with custom ROMs bypass this? They go on XDA and
download a patched version from some stranger on the internet, stored on some
malware-ridden file hosting service.

------
userbinator
In the same spirit and tone:
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

------
theandrewbailey
About 2 months ago, I went to my grandma's funeral, and snapped some pics of
family and friends with my new DSLR.

After two weeks, I realized that I wanted to share all these photos. I
discovered OneDrive has a ridiculously easy interface for photos: upload
folders of jpegs. I thought the web interface for looking at them was sexy
too, with the photos featured prominently (not much text, no comments). It
even has a "Download All" button! I sent a public view link to everyone. Damn,
Microsoft is getting things right these days.

------
Lancey
There's tons of problems with Google's services. They make radical changes
that bloat them and slow them down. They cut services that people find useful
because they're not as big as something like Maps or Gmail, or even for no
reason at all. But no matter how much you complain, either on a blog post or
to Google themselves, if you just come back to them at the end of the day
you've changed nothing at all.

Not liking Google Photos? Get Dropbox on your phone and upload your pictures
there! Blogger doesn't give you enough control? Use Wordpress or Medium
instead, or run your own blog! Google has too many users on their services to
care about you. If you want change, go out and make the change yourself.

~~~
junto
Photo provider switching is hard these days because many people have 100's of
GB of photos and video.

~~~
ascagnel_
Dropbox offers 1TB of storage for $10/mo (or $100/yr), and their "Carousel"
app isn't terrible. And you get direct access to the damn files on all your
devices (regardless of platform). It's a much better service than what Apple
or Google offers for these reasons alone.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yes, but for many, moving around hundreds of gigabytes of data is something
that will take a day or two on their connection, which is enough of a barrier
that they'll deal with crap instead.

------
eCa
> Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking Google

Fixed it.

(But I agree with regards to Maps Classic, it is superior to the new maps in
almost all ways (for me, at least).)

~~~
basicallydan
Heh, I see your point but he does move on a little bit to other things :)

------
discordianfish
As much as I hate almost everything, I always ask myself what's the baseline
for those assumptions? How easy _should_ it be to do the mentioned tasks?

Back in the days, we needed a camera and film, took pictures and get them
developed, got a envelope and a stamp and finally sent the pictures to Mom.
Obviously this is way more work than using the web, even if it's shitty.

I think we assume we could do things better and are used to things that work
better without realizing the differences in their details which causes some
tasks to be much more laborious than others.

~~~
TeMPOraL
There's this, and then there's purposeful degradation. A lot of the problem
TFA describes were already solved properly years ago. There was a much better
experience getting photos from your phone in pre-smartphone era, where you
could just hook it up to your computer via the USB-to-some-propertiary-port
cable and it would register as mass storage device. Web used to be much
cleaner and better to use than it is now.

------
profinger
Oh my god I hear this, so much! I am so SICK of the horrid usability in favor
of stupid fancy shit on the web! I'm so glad I'm not the only one!

------
hudo
One of the best blogs ever! Quote: "I have a pretty strict rule about not
using computers in the evening time. (because computers inevitably make me
furious and want to smash things and then I can't sleep)." Can't stop reading
posts ...

~~~
hudo
[http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/02-01-15-fucking-f...](http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/02-01-15-fucking-
fuck-fucking-web.html)

~~~
mring33621
I think cbloom's "finishing team" idea is great.

------
josephpmay
It's funny. He seems to hate all Google products yet is fully absorbed in the
Google universe.

~~~
rmk2
Why is that funny, really? Some of his grievances can really only materialise
_because_ he uses the products. I have never had many of these problems,
because I use none of these products. The point is that he _wants_ to use "all
Google products", yet they are in such a state as to make that impossible, at
least for him. Somebody who would use them if they could use them is a much
worse case for Google (or any other company, for that matter) than somebody
who rejects them without an actual will to use them.

------
RankingMember
I think a lot of us have had thoughts like these, but damn man, reading that
was like watching Lewis Black - you think you're witnessing someone having a
stroke/heart attack.

------
andybak
I just managed to bulk select and download 100 photos from Google Photos
within 15 seconds of trying.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And just recently, I couldn't. The presence of the option to download pictures
is random and seems to depend on whether this is your album or it was created
by someone else and shared with you. Most of the time I need to download
something it's the latter, and the option to download doesn't show up there.

------
profinger
To make things worse, people half ass the "mobile web" even harder! This is to
the point where, when you click through a search engine result to a website
and DON'T get forwarded to their garbage mobile site you are impressed!

Also, don't forget the zip code or phone number boxes that have the format as
a "placeholder" type text in the textboxes on mobile that repeatedly force
your keyboard to reset so that they can format you phone number for you.

------
Synergyse
Google+ Photos now sync to Google Drive. Install the Drive Sync client, take a
photo, it shows up on your computer as a file.

~~~
tdkl
OP didn't say if he uses Linux, Google Drive is particularly awesome there.

------
rwallace
User-facing software in general tends to hit a quality ceiling pretty early on
based on the unwillingness of the developers to make further improvements.
Contrary to the commenter who talked about NASA and the space shuttle
software, this is actually a matter of willingness, not ability. I've filed
half a dozen reports on bugs that would have been trivial to fix, and been
refused every time. I've seen developers go out of their way to reduce the
quality of their software and break things that used to work.

On the bright side, this means most domains of user-facing software still have
open opportunities even when they should be thoroughly mature. If only there
were more hours in a human lifespan, I'd love to fork Chromium or Firefox and
just start fixing things at the browser end.

------
d23
From the comments:

> It's so much worse than that though. It's not for no reason, they actually
> call this is a best practice. Everyone's browser already has jQuery cached
> if you load it from jQuery's site, right? So yeah, just load all seventeen
> of your random javascript things from their original sites. Now your site is
> fast because all those pages are already in everyone's cache!

Uh, what "best practice" site did that come from? W3Schools? I'm not a web dev
anymore, but the best practice recommendation as far as I know has always been
to combine and minify assets into as few requests as possible. Unfortunately
most of the web still sucks and doesn't do this.

------
z3t4
I think it's important for every company that the CEO answer support mail from
regular customers at least a few hours every day. Then he/she will get a
better understanding about the product(s).

About sharing images, I find setting up a FTP-server is the simplest solution.
Most file-browsers have FTP built in and allows features like drag 'n drop.

The problem with usability in free services like Google, is that they earn
more money the more time you spend on the site. So if it takes ten minutes to
do something that should take five seconds. Their metrics will show one
hundred times more earning from the slow and tedious version. Guess what
version they want you to use!?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I think it 's important for every company that the CEO answer support mail
> from regular customers at least a few hours every day. Then he/she will get
> a better understanding about the product(s)._

I have my pet theory - the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good men to be separated from it by enough layers of abstraction. Your CEO has
a marketing team that probably outsources some of its work to marketing
companies, which come up with asinine ideas of promoting your product. The CEO
gets reports with (probably a little fudged) numbers saying the sales are
going up, and he has little idea that your company is now shitting on its
users in order to get more money from them.

------
matt_morgan
I have to save this for my wife, and my coworkers, so they know I'm not the
only one.

------
dash2
Guys.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E)

"You are sitting in a chair, IN THE SKY."

~~~
mkawia
It's still frustrating ,because google did the hard part(storing 8 gb plus
data) and mess up the easy part it's angering.

~~~
Nemcue
It's because Google was and is still an engineering organisation. For the most
part they still don't understand UX or design, and when they do it's in some
incredibly maligned product that no one wants.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm willing to bet on the opposite. I think it's engineers who understand how
the product should work to be useful, but it's the sales and design people
which screw this up because "hey, it's cooler / more shiny / will attract new
people".

~~~
Nemcue
Ah, yes — because engineers left to their own devices make products that are
highly functional and polished.

Much like game studios left to their own devices by publishers make super
popular game classics.

------
allendoerfer
The requested magic with payment inputs is tricky. Commas and periods are both
used for thousands and decimals sometimes interchangeably within the same
country.

------
superbaconman
I was really happy with my nexus 4, but after the last update the phone
started acting up. I was really happy with my Toshiba CB2, but after the last
update the laptop started acting up. The only reason I haven't lost my mind is
that my Macbook Pro, after the last three updates, has been acting up. :(

------
lazyant
Try sharing photos you have in your iPhone while travelling to someone with a
PC (I wasn't able to do it).

~~~
Brakenshire
I'd really like a kind of local dropbox, to make the sending and syncing of
files directly from one computer/smartphone to another incredibly easy. I
suppose that's what bluetooth is supposed to do, but 90% of the time I try to
use it for that purpose it fails, either because of glitches or lack of speed.

------
dmak
I have similar frustrations with most of Google's products. I hate the maps
the most. Between the iOS and the web version, it can be so difficult to find
the same data.

------
andor
Is the new time picker widget in Android 5 more efficient for anybody? It
makes me angry every time I have to use it, _please_ just give me a numeric
keypad instead!

------
spapin
10 years ago, you would have to pay a photographer to develop the photos and
go to a fucking post office, then your mom would wait a week to receive them.

~~~
tlunter
And he should be able to just plug his phone into his computer and pull the
images right off with MTP. Don't know why that's so hard.

~~~
amyjess
MTP? The digital camera I got in 2005 was USB mass storage.

~~~
tlunter
Android uses MTP

------
Istof
I Still love the Web but we need at the very least something like a
distributed open search engine / cache engine...

------
SilvaR
Brilliant. Oh the irony... I had to receive a code via SMS just to be able to
sign in and leave a comment on that blog.

------
rnernento
Can Marissa Mayer fix Yahoo maps? Google maps have become unusable on most of
my devices, I thought I was alone...

~~~
kafei
bing is decent on mobile.

~~~
marssaxman
Bing maps is decent on non-mobile, too, somewhat to my surprise. I've stopped
using Google maps entirely. (I have never made much use of google maps on my
phone, actually, since it constantly nags me to log in to a google account,
which I refuse to do.)

------
talles
> login bullshit that DTA can't handle

Pardon my ignorance, but what's a _DTA_?

~~~
_asciiker_
The DownThemAll extension, pretty great.

~~~
Nemcue
It's honestly quite sad that it's been — what 10 years now? — and we still
can't properly pause and resume a download from a browser.

I remember using DTA for the first time back in the day and going "Oh wow,
nice!". It just such a basic facility to provide. Resumable downloads should
be available in all browsers.

But no, doing some user profile shit that no one wants: that's what they spend
time on.

------
aepearson
Dude, can we be friends? Because I feel like we'd get along - asshole.

------
skizm
Note to self. Make app that easily downloads, zips, and sends photos.

------
eklavya
Calm the fuck down and get her fucking telegram :D

------
GnarfGnarf
And these people want to be driving our cars?

~~~
Istof
They would take detours to drive by stores that you might like... even if your
pregnant wife is having a baby on the back seat.

------
ddoolin
I couldn't even get past the first few paragraphs. This writing is just awful.

------
prottmann
Be glad that google is not the perfect company, all other would have no chance
;)

------
cycleash
You should hate your vocab too @sagargv. Seriously.

------
mikegerwitz
You, sir, have made my Monday morning.

------
agounaris
Amen!!

------
Kenji
He's right. What surprises me is the readiness of people to put up with that
shit. I'm not sure if their patience with horrible design is just a result of
their ignorance.

~~~
madaxe_again
You say "people" as though you don't put up with it too...

It's the same everywhere. Shit flows from the walls, up through the streets,
through and within everything we interact with, because we've managed to build
a civilisation on "that'll do" and "well, forever!" so far, and through some
unlikely sequence of sheer fluke we're here to talk about it.

The internet is a bodge job. The web is a bodge job. This finely made bit of
machinery I type this on is a bodge job - and so are my shoes, this chair, the
postman outside, the tarmac on the street and the governance of our societies.

We put up with it because we go through a phase of learning "the way things
are", and then go one of several ways:

\- Accept and/or support the status quo

\- Realise things could be better but realise that your task is so huge you
cannot begin to do anything about it, and revert to the above.

\- Try to work with others to change things for the better.

The third camp are the ones who make the bodge jobs, because they ultimately
realise that time is the one true constraint, and you don't know what
perfection is until you've seen it. We're solving a big old NP problem called
"humanity" one excruciating step at a time.

Anyway, it's up to us to go make some better bodge jobs, which'll do for now,
and not forever.

~~~
orbifold
If you are philosophically inclined, you realize that art is one of the few
exceptions to that. Artists are people that try to achieve perfection in a way
that ordinary society doesn't allow.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because art is done for it's own sake, not to sell it. As a painter you don't
get offers from third parties that are willing to pay you for including their
logo on your work.

~~~
nathan_long
That's because painting isn't popular enough. If your art happens to be
blockbuster movies, you'll get offers.

------
mahouse
Whoa, I'm reading through the entire blog. I'm in love with that guy. 😍

~~~
angersock
cbloom is too legit to quit. He has a pretty impressive resume.

------
DominikR
The one thing I hate most is setting up my Google or Apple account on a new
iOS/Android device.

I use a very long generated password with all kinds of special characters so
what does Google do after you successfully entered the username/password on
the device during the native setup flow? It opens a WebView where you have to
enter it AGAIN!

And why do I have to enter my Apple ID password after every single OS update
again? I can't imagine what security concern prompted them to do this to us.

------
cycleash
You should improve your vocabulary sagargv. Seriously.

------
basicallydan
He's just saying what we're all thinking, people!

------
lewispb
The new Apple Photos app + iPhone 6 = works, flawlessly

~~~
Fastidious
Could you elaborate on this? Before you reply, let us pretend you have
uploaded--from your computer--128 GB of photos and videos to iCloud. Let me
know.

------
M8
And the web is completely "open" and unlike "walled" proprietary platforms you
have no choice of a programming language whatsoever (PS: fuck your
transpilation).

------
vdaniuk
The fact that this post is currently #3 on HN homepage and has ~100 comments
in support is a strong indication to limit investment of time and effort in HN
as a source of knowledge and HN community as a source of rational discussion.

EDIT: 50 -> 100 comments. That rule about avoiding gratuitous negativity is
obviously not working.

~~~
faceplanter
Lighten up, everyone likes a good rant once in a while (especially as good as
this one). Not every link on HN can be to a white paper or similar.

~~~
vdaniuk
Banalities, myopia, lack of perspective, bad boring writing, pandering to
misconceptions does not make a good rant.

