[HN Gopher] Backseat Software
___________________________________________________________________
Backseat Software
Author : zdw
Score : 189 points
Date : 2026-01-29 22:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mikeswanson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mikeswanson.com)
| kqr wrote:
| This was the reason I switched from Windows to using Linux full
| time back around 2006. Windows used to be somewhat peaceful bu
| around then it increasingly started interrupting me instead of me
| generating interrupts for it. I gather Windows hasn't gotten
| better since then.
|
| At least with Android it is mostly the apps that generate
| interruptions, so I can choose apps that do not, and control
| notification permissions for those I need.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| Windows is unusable. I kept a long time because of "family
| member will wanna use Excel" but that is not a thing anymore.
| Alternatives are good. Very little Windows specific software I
| need anymore. Really just Backblaze better pricing is all I
| care for.
| eru wrote:
| Even actual from-Microsoft Excel now runs in the browser, not
| even any need to find an alternative.
|
| And Wine has gotten really good, too.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > it increasingly started interrupting me instead of me
| generating interrupts for it.
|
| Yep, this is it right there. When human interface guidelines
| were being drawn up in the 70s and 80s, they didn't need to
| include anything like "computers must not speak unless spoken
| to" because it was so damn obvious.
|
| My software-dev persona brain "Oh, see, but these days, we now
| need to make sure users remember to patch to the latest
| security update", and I respond: REALLY? You shipped me broken
| software and are now interrupting me in the middle of work to
| make it my problem? When did this become acceptable?
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| In the old days, you'd take a survey on a McDonald's receipt and
| get a coupon for a free fry or something. These days, every
| product will sign you up for a newsletter without consent, ask
| for a review, or beg you to spend your time on a survey after the
| smallest interaction. Everything from the Art Institute of
| Chicago to Cava (a fast casual restaurant). And it's not just
| once, they'll send you reminders too. In-app, the prompts stack
| up on each other. I dread opening Jellyfish because I know I'll
| have to click through more than one pop up every time I want to
| check something quick. No, I still don't want to go to your
| conference, I'm trying to get work done.
|
| Why can't they at least offer something of small value, like 10%
| off your next food order, or some API credits, so it's a fairer
| exchange? I guess because everyone's doing it, no individual
| product gets penalized for annoying their users.
|
| There are exceptions of course, like Kagi. But they're far and
| few between.
| kranner wrote:
| When they send these 30-question surveys, surely they must be
| aware that the people who respond are not a random sample of
| the customer population but a sample of the subpopulation that
| is willing to take a 30-question survey for them?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Simple. Your mistake is assuming that these surveys used to
| gather actual information.
|
| The 30 questions satisfy all of the bikeshedding smoothbrains
| in the survey-design-committee. The survey itself isn't used
| to make informed decisions to improve the product, but
| entirely to justify the manager's impact and thus everybody's
| bonuses.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Oh, sometimes they are used to change things, and when
| implemented it seems like everyone is mad and they act
| shocked because all they see from surveys is people wanted
| a change.
| avhception wrote:
| Often, they'll ask for the review before I even had the time to
| really use the product. Like, I've just laid my hands on this
| thing, how am I supposed to know anything yet?!
| ozim wrote:
| I have trash mail box that I don't really open besides clicking
| confirmation links.
|
| I also use Firefox relay just to vary stuff a bit to throw
| wrench into tracking.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Kagi has the world's most pleasant engagement retention email
| life-hack, which is that if you don't use it for a whole month,
| they'll email you telling you that they refunded that month's
| price. I don't have a specific dollar cutoff where this is
| acceptable, but applying the categorical imperative, if every
| customer retention spam or nag I received came with $14 I could
| retire.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > ... ask for a review, or beg you to spend your time on a
| survey after the smallest interaction.
|
| This one is the most confusing to me. I go to Home Depot and
| buy some of the most mundane items: conduit hangers and toilet
| paper. I then get email spammed 2-3 times to review "toilet
| paper" and "conduit hangers" as if people are dying to read the
| reviews on a friggin conduit hanger or roll of TP. So I did
| just that. Conduit hangers: "Hang pipe like a porn star!"
| Toilet paper: "Lets you dig deep with confidence! No s*it
| finger for this guy!"
| bobbiechen wrote:
| As the joke goes,
|
| Do you think [big tech company] understands consent?
|
| > Yes
|
| > Ask me later
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| > Yes
|
| > I am sinful and will go to hell
| skrebbel wrote:
| Related to this, does anyone here know how to stop my iPhone
| asking me to turn on iCloud?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Buy a different phone?
| skrebbel wrote:
| Yeah I probably will, when this one breaks. I had Android
| always before and I'm pretty unimpressed with Apple. HN'ers
| love to imagine that only Apple has their interests in mind
| unlike other BigCos, but no Android phone I had ever nudged
| me out of the blue, in the middle of other work, to "turn
| on Google Drive" with just "Ok" and "Ask me later" as the
| options.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| I have an android phone and it hates me almost as much as
| apple, but it has better hardware for a lower price, and
| I can technically use f-droid
| nine_k wrote:
| On Android, it is really easy to turn notifications off
| by default, and only selectively allow the ones you need,
| e.g. from the calendar.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Oh yeah, it's super easy to turn off notifications from
| any app _except the built-in adware_.
| garciansmith wrote:
| Until recently (moved to GrapheneOS) I ran stock Android
| for years and never had an issue with turning any
| notifications from default apps. Maybe this is different
| with other manufactures and custom OS version (e.g.,
| Samsung's)? I think the only thing that bugged me was
| Google Play pushing new features/ways to give them money,
| but that was only within the app itself when I opened it.
| Notifications of that sort were all easily blocked. The
| only notifications I got and get are ones I want (99% of
| it are messages from messaging apps, calendar reminders,
| and alarms).
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, I get AI enablement pop-ups all the time on android
| skrebbel wrote:
| Hah, thanks for the heads-up.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves.
|
| Not in my experience. Typically all of the "news" happens either
| during startup, or as part of some other flow. It doesn't happen
| in the middle of using software. Google Docs is not throwing up a
| blocking dialog in the middle of you typing a sentence.
|
| >The analytics didn't prove the feature was unwanted. The
| analytics proved that we buried it.
|
| If I actually wanted a feature I would go through 10 menus to
| flip the switch. If the analytics says no one is uses it that is
| proof that no one wants it. It is possible that the user is
| unaware of it though.
|
| >the product stops being a finished artifact
|
| When you are doing constant software updates it is not a finished
| artifact anyways.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| > Google Docs is not throwing up a blocking dialog in the
| middle of you typing a sentence.
|
| I rarely use the G Suite, but when I do I get bombarded with a
| queue of popups and alerts about this feature, this Gemini
| integration and whatever else gets someone promoted.
|
| > If I actually wanted a feature I would go through 10 menus to
| flip the switch.
|
| That is if you know of this feature or are predisposed to
| rummage around software to look for a solution. Neither is
| common amongst common people.
|
| > When you are doing constant software updates it is not a
| finished artefact anyways.
|
| That I mostly agree with. Then you have teams who are assigned
| a sliver of the software and continually fuck with it to
| justify their existence.
| zkmon wrote:
| Enshittification didn't start recently. It was always there. You
| just didn't notice it because of your age. Your youth and
| childhood days always have good memories, doesn't matter how
| shitty those days were.
|
| Selling is just as old as money. Every business that tried sell
| you soaps and cosmetics had to scare you about bacteria, making
| you forget that bacteria was always there with you for millennia.
| What you call enshittfication is the change accumulation that you
| witnessed over decades. Ask children who hasn't seen all that
| change. They see everything is just fine.
| avhception wrote:
| No company in the days of yore could pop up stuff on a screen
| that was always in my pocket.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Yes, nasty salesmen are as old as time and possibly predate
| humans, but that is not what enshittification means.
|
| From Wikipedia[0]:
|
| > _Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform
| decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and
| services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors
| create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they
| degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and
| finally degrade their services to users and business customers
| to maximize short-term profits for shareholders._
|
| Basically a middleman fucking over both sides of the deal,
| typically in the context of online services. The term was
| popularised in 2022 [1].
|
| Remove "online services" (anchoring the term firmly in the
| present) and I still can't think of wide ranging examples in
| the past. I will admit that this might be because I haven't
| been around for very long.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
|
| 1 - https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/
| pixl97 wrote:
| Large companies buying up smaller brands with high quality
| products is one that has become popular in the 21st century.
| People have a strong attraction to brand names and while the
| user will eventually leave the large corporation more than
| makes their money back on the purchase. With this increase in
| capital they move to the next high quality company and
| consume it. Companies like Coca-cola do this with countless
| products.
| account42 wrote:
| This is a trite thought terminating cliche that provides no
| value to any discussion.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Thank you for calling it out.
| josephg wrote:
| About 10 years ago I tried installed Little Snitch on my laptop.
| I set it up to check with me every time any native app tried to
| connect to the internet. "Here we go" I thought. "I'm going to
| actually see what apps are doing!".
|
| I think I naively thought I'd end up with 10 rules or something,
| blocking telemetry. Oh what a sweet naive child I was. Its
| constant. Everything on my computer seemed to use about 8
| different telemetry and update services. The sheer number of
| packets of environmental waste being produced every second by
| modern computers is breathtaking. It never stops.
|
| Reading this article, I wonder what would happen if you tried
| selling software the old way again. "Buy our software! Pay once.
| We'll mail you out a USB stick with the program on it. Our
| software does not access the internet." It would be terribly
| inefficient, but it'd probably be fun to try. It would definitely
| force a lot more rigour around releases & testing.
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| It's got to the point where I turn off my WiFi now to do
| performance-sensitive work, because of the boost that killing
| all this background rubbish gives. Anything I need online I can
| just offload to my phone while my computer is offline.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The problem with doing that, is that the standard TCP timeout
| is 60 seconds.
|
| All of a sudden, you are beset with 60-second hangs.
| xnorswap wrote:
| You just gave me flashbacks of mistyping a folder share
| name on windows and having the whole PC lock up for a
| minute or two.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| If the computer doesn't have any online network connection,
| shouldn't it outright error? I understand that the timeout
| sucks when your network is not connected to the internet
| but still alive, then that's an issue, but if there is no
| connection at all, why would the timeouts matter?
| moduspol wrote:
| It wouldn't be able to open a TCP connection without
| knowing what IP address / interface to use.
|
| You're right--it should outright error. You should only
| see timeouts like that if you were dropping the packets
| from some middleware or middlebox, but your client still
| had a valid IP address.
| lapcat wrote:
| > All of a sudden, you are beset with 60-second hangs.
|
| No, that's not how it works. Frankly, I'm astonished to see
| this claim here.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Depends.
|
| I have a couple of apps on my computer that do exactly
| that.
|
| I am looking forward to learning how it _does_ work...
| lapcat wrote:
| > I am looking forward to learning how it _does_ work...
|
| It's basic sockets. If you call connect() when the
| internet is disabled, the errno is ENETUNREACH.
|
| The higher-level API are built on sockets. If any apps
| are misbehaving, they're simply badly coded.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> It 's basic sockets._
|
| Yup. I've done a bit of that stuff, in my time.
|
| _> If any apps are misbehaving, they 're simply badly
| coded._
|
| Plenty of that stuff, going around.
|
| Might want to ease back on the "instant insult" thing.
| Not a good look.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Yup. I've done a bit of that stuff, in my time.
|
| So are you willing to admit now that "the standard TCP
| timeout" was a misdiagnosis of your problem?
|
| You appeared to be projecting a personal problem with
| some unnamed badly coded apps onto everyone, as if it
| were inevitable, but the original commenter who said they
| turned off WiFi obviously does not experience this
| problem, and neither do I for that matter.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Have a great day!
| direwolf20 wrote:
| I don't think you can get ENETUNREACH from recv though.
| If the request was sent, it'll time out.
| lapcat wrote:
| It can cause problems to flip off the internet when you
| already have open connections, though there are also API
| to detect changes in network availability. But I don't
| see that as a significant problem for "I turn off my WiFi
| now to do performance-sensitive work". First turn off
| WiFi, then launch the app you need, in that order.
| Problem solved.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You're not thinking like a systemd developer. The right
| thing to do is to ignore all anecdotes and direct
| evidence that a problem exists. I am talking about
| systemd renaming your network interfaces because you
| added or removed hardware.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| systemd should add and remove interfaces connected in the
| exact same hardware path with the same name they had
| before.
|
| Default literally insane legacy behaviour is just
| vomiting eth${RAND} where RAND depends on racing
| conditions.
|
| My educated guess is that people that insist on using the
| legacy eth${RAND} never had a surprise random firewall
| and routing rules suddenly apply to different interfaces
| at a inconvenient time, making production halt and catch
| on fire, yet.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The problem with this is some apps do incredibly stupid
| things. Now I'm not saying the operating system itself,
| but I had some ide screw off and go into long pause mode
| when my laptop was in airplane mode.
| lapcat wrote:
| I'm sure there are stupid apps out there, but "the
| standard TCP timeout" was a misdiagnosis of the problem.
| eru wrote:
| Have you tried using Linux?
| lapcat wrote:
| > I wonder what would happen if you tried selling software the
| old way again. "Buy our software! Pay once. We'll mail you out
| a USB stick with the program on it. Our software does not
| access the internet."
|
| FWIW all of my Mac and iOS apps are upfront paid, with no
| telemetry or server-side component.
|
| Of course I don't distribute them via snail mail though.
|
| I'm doing pretty well. I'm certainly not rich, and probably not
| making as much money as corporate software engineers in the US,
| but I'm doing better financially than the majority of people.
| It's not impossible to follow the old business model.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| How do you know they don't have telemetry?
| lapcat wrote:
| I wrote them. I'm baffled by your question.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I (and presumably the commenter you're responding to)
| initially read "all of my Mac and iOS apps" as "all of
| the Mac and iOS apps I use" instead of "all of the Mac
| and iOS apps I've written".
| lapcat wrote:
| Did you and the other replier stop reading my comment
| after the first sentence? Because the second and
| following sentences make very clear--e.g., "distribute"--
| that I was talking about apps developed and sold by me.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| And then Minecraft writes to a log 18,000 times a second,
| moaning about being unable to contact the telemetry provider
| until your disk fills up.
|
| I don't know if they ever fix that bug, because I uninstalled
| the thing. The third-party launchers didn't have that problem.
| joelthelion wrote:
| It might not have a great impact, but I've started to fight back.
| Interrupt me in the middle of an important task? You get a 1-star
| rating. Ask me for some random information you shouldn't need?
| Get bogus answers. And so on.
| thedanbob wrote:
| > Ask me for some random information you shouldn't need? Get
| bogus answers.
|
| I've never understood software that's free but you have to fill
| out a form of personal information to download it. Even if I
| was willing to share, what possible use is my full mailing
| address to some random software company? It's data collection
| for the sake of data collection.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Oh, that's valuable, they definitely can sell that on.
| Especially if they have a big list.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| But what percentage of the physical bricks-and-mortar
| addresses are actually disused telephone exchanges or
| retired public toilets?
|
| (whistles innocently)
| pixl97 wrote:
| It's used to generate cold call lists
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| We can all play victims here of course but we also have our own
| responsibility when creating software. I've been on many projects
| where people got sucked into "this just is the way this ought to
| be done" kind of thinking without questioning any of it.
|
| I suspect many cookie consent dialogs come into existence this
| way. All the mindless onboarding nonsense, notifications, etc.
| come from a rather dogmatic application of growth hacking type
| advice. You get startups hiring people that specialize in that
| out of a belief that they have to do that that then start doing
| stuff. And once you have those people they start justifying their
| presence by imposing a lot of that stuff.
|
| If you ask a lawyer for advice on legalese, they'll give you
| plenty of terms and conditions, consent forms, etc. Mandatory
| scroll to the end thingies are a good example of an anti pattern
| here. The thing is that laws don't specify much in terms of
| UI/UX. Some lawyer once upon a time decided that "we have to
| twist user's nipples and make sure they read my 20 pages of
| legalese before they are allowed in the app". This is completely
| stupid if you think about it for more than 4 seconds. But it's
| being copied over and over again by world + dog. Convoluted
| cookie consent screens are another good example. Corporate
| lawyers invented those because they are being paid to justify
| their existence. They come up with implausible scenarios and then
| protect their clients from those. A lawyer will never tell you to
| skip an optional/redundant step but they'll come up with reasons
| to add more of those. Removing complexity is not their job.
|
| If nobody applies any critical thinking and fact checks these
| things you end up with a lot of ass coverage, legalese, "better
| safe than sorry" type features and shit that is not needed that
| adds up to a lot of user hostile behavior, onboarding friction,
| and application complexity.
|
| Authentication is a thing that many product owners just blindly
| imitate from others. Including all the negative patterns around
| it. I've had this discussion with more than a few product owners.
| "We have to 'own' the user relation ship and therefore we must
| have a email/password thing and can't do openid, sso, email
| links, etc.". This is nonsense but if nobody challenges that, you
| go down the path of repeating decades of mistakes on this front.
| But it's OK because everybody else does it too.
|
| People don't even question this any more. As soon as you go down
| this path it leads to a lot of fairly standard and boring stuff
| that you just have to do, apparently. Over and over again. If you
| have a password, you got to have a reset my password. Is "secret"
| an acceptable password? No, so we got to have a password
| complexity thingy. Do we add 2FA? Notification preference
| screens, Push notifications, and all the rest.
|
| Modern logins should be simple. "send me a login link" "login
| with X, Y, or Z", passkeys, etc. Make sure the process is
| password manager friendly if you have passwords (why?!). Bias
| towards enabling your users to getting started with your thing
| ASAP. Get them in and then consent; not the other way around.
|
| Get a good product person that understands these things rather
| than one that does things because he heard about a person that
| knows a person that is totally legit that told them that you
| gotta do X because reasons that are too complicated for you to
| worry your petty head about. Most bad decision making boils down
| to BS, urban myths, and bad advice like that. Ask the "why"
| questions. Make sure you understand and fact check the answers.
| Do what you actually have to do. But nothing more.
| nicoburns wrote:
| As someone who does use a password manager, there's nothing
| more annoying than a service that doesn't accept email/password
| logins. I don't want to cede my auth to a 3rd party, clutter up
| my inbox with magic links, or have to keep careful track of
| passkeys that are tied to a device and can be easily lost!
| kstrauser wrote:
| Sure there is! Websites that disable pasting into password
| fields "for your security" are even more annoying.
|
| (Pro tip: lapcat referred to his Stop The Madness software
| here. It fixes this and other dumb website anti-features.
| Don't leave your home page without it.)
| UomoNeroNero wrote:
| I love you.
| hnthrow0287345 wrote:
| A nice use of AI would be to learn what kind of interruptions I
| hate and suppress those as much as possible. The trick would be
| installing it to the level of authority to ignore stuff from the
| companies making the phones and OS too without having complicated
| jailbreak/hacking procedures.
|
| The reality is that we just have shit consumer protections for
| our time and attention, because it's revenue for the companies,
| which lawmakers don't want to infringe upon. They can't even go
| after the relatively small markets of phone call/mail spam.
| Y444 wrote:
| iOS has it to some extent, you can enable "Intelligent
| breakthrough and silencing" in Focus settings, and it should
| (supposedly) learn which notifications are important for you
| and which can be skipped.
|
| In practice it doesn't do it very well.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Phone spam would be so so easy. If you get a contact you don't
| like, SMS some magic short code and legally receive $1 from the
| sender. If the sender is foreign and cannot be held
| accountable, the entry point domestic carrier is liable for the
| $1.
|
| All it takes is a mild amount of accountability for the
| shitheads delivering these. It would be gone overnight.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| In Europe, every phone number is linked to someone's
| passport. This really cuts down on spam. It's hard to round
| up enough homeless guys to use their ID to buy SIM cards to
| make it worthwhile to spam from.
|
| If you received spam and you can prove in court, you can sue
| them, they look up whose number it is and they have to pay a
| fine.
| plagiarist wrote:
| It's really not complicated. All it takes is for the
| regulatory body to be merely grifting off of taxpayers
| instead of completely owned by billionaires.
| dzonga wrote:
| > The drill doesn't ask how you're enjoying your experience
| drilling. It doesn't upsell you on premium hole-making
|
| Damn you wonder how we as a Software Industry lost the plot -
| hell - I have a product in e-commerce analytics one of the
| features I never put in was 'Retention / Cohorts' etc - coz in
| the real world retailers don't speak in those terms
| andhuman wrote:
| One of the more annoying software that does this is the copilot
| Office 365 on the web. Every time (!) I open it, it shows a popup
| on how to add files to the context. That itself would be
| annoying, but it also steals focus! So you would be typing
| something and suddenly you're not typing anymore for M$ decided
| it's time for a popup. I finally learned to just wait for the pop
| up and then dismiss it with esc. Ugh!
| pixl97 wrote:
| MS has never learned to not interrupt the user. This has been a
| dark pattern for them since their very first window manager.
| noAnswer wrote:
| If you login to the exchange online admin center you first have
| to complete a short "on-rails-shooter" video game. They
| constantly shuffle shit around and want to give you a tour via
| popups about it.
|
| I have the admin accounts for multiple companies, so I have to
| play the game repeatedly.
| elcapitan wrote:
| This is one of the main reasons why I have mostly given up on
| paid software or SaaS products. You would think that by paying
| someone for their product, that would give you the tool without
| constantly getting asked for more, like some shareware program
| from the 90s. But no, if you give them money, they will
| constantly nag you, track you, nag you again, and so on. Debian
| on my private laptop using mostly free software (I think Obsidian
| is the only odd one out currently) has completely killed that
| annoyance. My Macbook and iPad Pro for work still keep nagging me
| all the time about some stupid stuff I don't want to think about.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Late stage capitalism, the numbers must always go up.
|
| That's why everything is turning into rent seeking models and
| enshittification.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Capitalism has caused more economic growth than any other
| system, and without a high death toll.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Oxygen producing anaerobic bacteria gave us the atmosphere
| we breath but at the same time caused some of the largest,
| if not largest extinctions events on earth.
|
| When talking about capitalism it seems a great many people
| in the US and HN have a difficult time using nuance and are
| unable to separate the good parts of capitalism from the
| parts that will kill us in the long run. Infinite growth
| cannot exist in a finite world. If we keep demanding
| capitalism grow unbound it will literally consume us and
| our biosphere.
| eaglelamp wrote:
| Capitalism is the only economic system that has the
| privilege of being evaluated outside of the context of the
| society in which it exists. When socialism is criticized
| the political system is always, justly, included; so the
| purges of Stalin and the homophobia of Guevara are all
| taken into account. Apply the same thinking to capitalism
| and you have to count a lot more deaths and injustices: the
| Irish and Bengali famines, world war 1, climate change,
| etc.
| foxygen wrote:
| Add the East India Company's rule in India to the list,
| 40 million deaths on a conservative estimation.
| mhuffman wrote:
| Are you including the wars and operations that we supported
| in the shadows to shore up that capitalism?
| foxygen wrote:
| Check Logseq for an open source alternative to Obsidian:
| https://github.com/logseq/logseq
| elcapitan wrote:
| Hm, it looks nice too, but that's another "freemium open
| source" app with a pro version that will eventually be
| enshittified, I would bet.
| foxygen wrote:
| It has no Pro version, and I believe their plan is to
| monetize it through an optional Sync service, which is
| fair, since it actually costs money to keep it running.
| elcapitan wrote:
| > TLDR: Logseq is free but Logseq Pro (coming soon) is
| not. https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/faq
|
| My original point was that I don't want this kind of
| software that has an incentive to nag you into an upsell.
| zaggle wrote:
| Logseq raised a lot of VC money and has started turning the
| screws. They switched from Markdown files to and database,
| and their sync is paid and closed source.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Old joke:
|
| If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we
| would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
|
| For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
|
| Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have
| to buy a new car.
|
| Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You
| would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the
| windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows
| before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply
| accept this.
|
| Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would
| cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case
| you would have to reinstall the engine.
|
| Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was
| reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but
| would run on only five percent of the roads.
|
| The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would
| all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning
| light.
|
| The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
|
| Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you
| out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the
| door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio
| antenna.
|
| Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to
| learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would
| operate in the same manner as the old car.
|
| You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ya, I remember reading these decades ago.
|
| What is funny is how many of them are actually true now. Having
| your display panels crash while driving is good fun. Also I
| click the start/stop button to operate my vehicle. And teslas
| like locking people in on occasion.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The Tesla FSD subscription flip flop almost fits learning to
| drive all over again.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Half of these did happen to cars.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| i tend to uninstall/not use things that say "not right now" or
| "maybe later" instead of no. such a terrible and telling trend
| g8oz wrote:
| Another good article and discussion on this topic
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920307
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Recently I was playing a not-very-good video game that was pumped
| full of stop-what-you're-doing-and-read-this tutorial pop-ups.
| What percentage of the audience really needs the entire game to
| stop so we can read "use the left stick to move, press x to
| continue"? Even if this is literally first game you have ever
| played, I can't see how a flurry of messages _that are not even
| actionable until dismissed_ will do anything but cause anxiety.
|
| Thinking about other forms of media, the film industry just
| expects that its consumers will have some basic visual media
| literacy. Like, let's say you're watching your first ever movie,
| and there's a fade-out to represent a time jump. The movie does
| not stop with a dismissable pop-up explaining what it represents
| - the vast, vast majority of the audience already intuitively
| understands it, and the rest can probably figure it out from
| context. The only requirement to pull this off is an extremely
| minimal amount of respect for your audience / users!
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Even with all the telemetry, there are unsolved basic problems,
| like icons on the desktop, when switching from just notebook and
| to docking station. Power user move the mouse 10 times over the
| whole screen until the menu is animated and shown.
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