A Token In Life
title: “A token in life” tags: life, boredome, stagnation, world, purpose of life —
What’s it for you in your life?
Since beginning of August I got locked on a mechanical wrist watch. As a message of disgrace towards the smartwatches, smartphones and third-party apps running on my computers.
How so? Being a computer geek all my life I am loosing fate in them. But thinking deeper over that, I think better would be to say I’m loosing fate in people programming them. Not excluding myself.
I would not brag over the LLMs and all the “AI” things happenning in recent years. Talking in general about computer programms that are here to help people: are they?
You can say — “If it does the job, it’s good enough”. I disagree: consumerism is already leaving piles of crap at places of the “least concerned”. Places where beneficiars are not living. Places where their sellers are not living. Places where those who are living, will get that crap and nothing more.
So apps are everywhere now in our lives. And they are mostly crap. Name it.
Spotify — now playing, while I’m typing it. Just a few seconds ago it skipped a song midair like nothing happened. It’s discovery playlists are useless, I feel hopeless everytime I try them. “Best (something)” playlists are even worser: I hop-off after I exercise the “skip” button for almost a minute, not even being able to listen for some decent time for a song. Should it be matching my music taste or pumping me with some algorithmic one’s?
Proton Mail — (maybe you didn’t even hear of that one) — recent update changed the UX of the archive action, the most-used one, and it feels like a hiccup now when you slide email left.
Guardian App — with heir cursed limit of 30 topics you can follow: I’ve developed that number to almost 50 when suddenly it stopped working and asked me to decrease my choices until I can add new. It is very frustrating to try to find out what is the limit when you stay at 49 and, you remove more and it still says you are above the number, but what number it does not bother mentioning. Later they fixed that by mentioning the limit is 30. Still lame.
Calendar iOS — knows better how to add new event’s info than you: even when you’ve already added the date and time and then picked up a similar-called event from a drop-down list, it replaces you entries with the time of the event you selected for the f#cking name!
Oceanic dive app for iOS — these motherf#ckers managed to release a new version last year that crashed on iOS 17 while still being listed as min required in App Store. There is nothing more upsetting than a crashing dving app on your wrist, when you’re already in a wetsuite in a water set for the dive. Consumer smartwatch from the company with zero experience in diving and an app from the company with zero experience in a app development.
Quick (GoPro) — search the internet, it’s a PITA to use it, don’t want to talk about it more.
Instagram, Facebook — I deleted them at the very beginning of the year and do not miss at all. Could be the ones professionaly built, but you know what — they somehow decided they know better what their users need. Trivial things, they all “do the job” for them: feeding me with their POV of news and posts, algorithms and moderation rules.
Strava, Garmin, Suunto… all busy with their cash flow and not the customers. Check the recent Strava suite over Garmin. Poor Strava was asked to attribute the data uploaded from Garmin devices and they call it a “user’s data” but they did decide themselves what is better for the user when they restricted their API use a year ago.
I can continue the list. But if we go to the professional development, it’s the same: opinionated choices can be good. Can be bad. I meet the bad choices too often. Maybe I just notice the bad things…
So if you can program, do yourself a favor: write programs for yourself.
PS. I wear a mechanical watch on my wrist now and it reminds me that there are good things in life that run no shit and that are completely yours once you bought them. Good luck.