Jeff Johnson in November 2023:

When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a “Snow Leopard update”, they’re wishing for the wrong thing. No major update will solve Apple’s quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues. The solution would be a long string of minor bug fix updates. What people should be wishing for are the two years of stability and bug fixes that occurred after the release of Snow Leopard. But I fear we’ll never see that again with Tim Cook in charge.

I read an article today from yet another person pining for a mythical Snow Leopard-style MacOS release. While I sympathize with the intent of their argument, it is largely fictional and, as Johnson writes, it took until about two years into Snow Leopard’s release cycle for it to be the release we want to remember:

It’s an iron law of software development that major updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was no exception, of course. The next major update, Mac OS X 10.7.0, was no exception either, and it was much buggier than 10.6.8 v1.1, even though both versions were released in the same week.

What I desperately miss is that period of stability after a few rounds of bug fixes. As I have previously complained about, my iMac cannot run any version of MacOS newer than Ventura, released in 2022. It is still getting bug and security fixes. In theory, this should mean I am running a solid operating system despite missing some features.

It is not. Apple’s engineering efforts quickly moved toward shipping MacOS Sonoma in 2023, and then Sequoia last year. It seems as though any bug fixes were folded into these new major versions and, even worse, new bugs were introduced late in the Ventura release cycle that have no hope of being fixed. My iMac seizes up when I try to view HDR media; because this Extended Dynamic Range is an undocumented enhancement, there is no preference to turn it off. Recent Safari releases have contained several bugs related to page rendering and scrolling. Weather sometimes does not display for my current location.

Ventura was by no means bug-free when it shipped, and I am disappointed even its final form remains a mess. My MacBook Pro is running the latest public release of MacOS Sequoia and it, too, has new problems late in its development cycle; I reported a Safari page crashing bug earlier this week. These are on top of existing problems, like how there is no way to change the size of search results’ thumbnails in Photos.

Alas, I am not expecting many bugs to be fixed. It is, after all, nearly April, which means there are just two months until WWDC and the first semi-public builds of another new MacOS version. I am hesitant every year to upgrade. But it does not appear much effort is being put into the maintenance of any previous version. We all get the choice of many familiar bugs, or a blend of hopefully fewer old bugs plus some new ones.

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Enron is not really back. Someone managed to grab the Enron.com URL and put up an inspirational faux corporate video and a Shopify merch store. It is all very funny.

What is more amusing to me is stumbling across a preserved-in-amber Enron website. There is an earnings press release from July 2001, mere months before the whole thing went to hell in public. There are descriptions of the company’s vast products.

But this, too, is unofficial. It was created by Facundo Pignanelli to preserve this noteworthy chapter in corporate fraud. There is even an Instagram account. This is all very strange.

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Brendan Nystedt, reporting for Wired on a new generation of admirers of crappy digital cameras from the early 2000s:

For those seeking to experiment with their photography, there’s an appeal to using a cheap, old digital model they can shoot with until it stops working. The results are often imperfect, but since the camera is digital, a photographer can mess around and get instant gratification. And for everyone in the vintage digital movement, the fact that the images from these old digicams are worse than those from a smartphone is a feature, not a bug.

Om Malik attributes it to wabi-sabi:

Retromania? Not really. It feels more like a backlash against the excessive perfection of modern cameras, algorithms, and homogenized modern image-making. I don’t disagree — you don’t have to do much to come up with a great-looking photo these days. It seems we all want to rebel against the artistic choices of algorithms and machines — whether it is photos or Spotify’s algorithmic playlists versus manually crafted mixtapes.

I agree, though I do not see why we need to find just one cause — an artistic decision, a retro quality, an aesthetic trend, a rejection of perfection — when it could be driven by any number of these factors. Nailing down exactly which of these is the most important factor is not of particular interest to me; certainly, not nearly as much as understanding that people, as a general rule, value feeling.

I have written about this before and it is something I wish to emphasize repeatedly: efficiency and clarity are necessary elements, but are not the goal. There needs to be space for how things feel. I wrote this as it relates to cooking and cars and onscreen buttons, and it is still something worth pursuing each and every time we create anything.

I thought about this with these two articles, but first last week when Wil Shipley announced the end of Delicious Library:

Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users already have (or enter manually).

I wasn’t contacted about this.

I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.

Delicious Library was many things: physical and digital asset management software, a kind of personal library, and a wish list. But it was also — improbably — fun. Little about cataloguing your CDs and books sounds like it ought to be enjoyable, but Shipley and Mike Matas made it feel like something you wanted to do. You wanted to scan items with your Mac’s webcam just because it felt neat. You wanted to see all your media on a digital wooden shelf, if for no other reason than it made those items feel as real onscreen as they are in your hands.

Delicious Library became known as the progenitor of the “delicious generation” of applications, which prioritized visual appeal as much as utility. It was not enough for an app to be functional; it needed to look and feel special. The Human Interface Guidelines were just that: guidelines. One quality of this era was the apparently fastidious approach to every pixel. Another quality is that these applications often had limited features, but were so much fun to use that it was possible to overlook their restrictions.

I do not need to relitigate the subsequent years of visual interfaces going too far, then being reeled in, and then settling in an odd middle ground where I am now staring at an application window with monochrome line-based toolbar icons, deadpan typography, and glassy textures, throwing a heavy drop shadow. None of the specifics matter much. All I care about is how these things feel to look at and to use, something which can be achieved regardless of how attached you are to complex illustrations or simple line work. Like many people, I spend hours a day staring at pixels. Which parts of that are making my heart as happy as my brain? Which mundane tasks are made joyful?

This is not solely a question of software; it has relevance in our physical environment, too, especially as seemingly every little thing in our world is becoming a computer. But it can start with pixels on a screen. We can draw anything on them; why not draw something with feeling? I am not sure we achieve that through strict adherence to perfection in design systems and structures.

I am reluctant to place too much trust in my incomplete understanding of a foreign-to-me concept rooted in another country’s very particular culture, but perhaps the sabi is speaking loudest to me. Our digital interfaces never achieve a patina; in fact, the opposite is more often true: updates seem to erase the passage of time. It is all perpetually new. Is it any wonder so many of us ache for things which seem to freeze the passage of time in a slightly hazier form?

I am not sure how anyone would go about making software feel broken-in, like a well-worn pair of jeans or a lounge chair. Perhaps that is an unattainable goal for something on a screen; perhaps we never really get comfortable with even our most favourite applications. I hope not. It would be a shame if we lose that quality as software eats our world.

Tim Berners-Lee in 1998:

Keeping URIs so that they will still be around in 2, 20 or 200 or even 2000 years is clearly not as simple as it sounds. However, all over the Web, webmasters are making decisions which will make it really difficult for themselves in the future. Often, this is because they are using tools whose task is seen as to present the best site in the moment, and no one has evaluated what will happen to the links when things change. The message here is, however, that many, many things can change and your URIs can and should stay the same. They only can if you think about how you design them.

Jay Hoffmann:

Links give greater meaning to our webpages. Without the link, we would lose this significant grammatical tool native the web. And as links die out and rot on the vine, what’s at stake is our ability to communicate in the proper language of hypertext.

A dead link may not seem like it means very much, even in the aggregate. But they are. One-way links, the way they exist on the web where anyone can link to anything, is what makes the web universal. In fact, the first name for URL’s was URI’s, or Universal Resource Identifier. It’s right there in the name. And as Berners-Lee once pointed out, “its universality is essential.”

In 2018, Google announced it was deprecating its URL shortener, with no new links being created after March 2019. All existing shortened links would, however, remain active. It announced this in a developer blog post which — no joke — returns a 404 error at its original URL, which I found via 9to5Google. Google could not bother to redirect posts from just six years ago to their new valid URLs.

Google’s URL shortener was in the news again this month because the company has confirmed it will turn off these links in August 2025 except for those created via Google’s own apps. Google Maps, for example, still creates a goo.gl short link when sharing a location.

In principle, I support this deprecation because it is confusing and dangerous for Google’s own shortened URLs to have the same domain as ones created by third-party users. But this is a Google-created problem because it designed its URLs poorly. It should have never been possible for anyone else to create links with the same URL shortener used by Google itself. Yet, while it feels appropriate for a Google service to be unreliable over a long term, it also should not be ending access to links which may have been created just about five years ago.

By the way, the Sophos link on the word “dangerous” in that last paragraph? I found it via a ZDNet article where the inline link is — you guessed it — broken. Sophos also could not bother to redirect this URL from 2018 to its current address. Six years ago! Link rot is a scourge.

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Mark Bergen and Dawn Chmielewski, reporting for Vox — or perhaps Recode — in June 2016:

The latest charge comes from SourceFed, a stray pop culture web and video site. It uploaded a short YouTube video on Thursday charging Google with deliberately altering search recommendations — through its function that automatically offers suggestions as a query is typed — to give positive treatment to Clinton.

Google vehemently denied the charges. “Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause,” a rep wrote. “Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how Autocomplete works.”

A spokesperson for Google explained the search engine’s autocomplete feature will “not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging”, which is understandable. Eight years later, that appears to be how Google continues to work. A search for donald trump cr offers just one autocompleted suggestion: crypto. Another, for donald trump fe, presents no autocompletion suggestions even though he is a convicted felon. One can see why Google would choose to err on the safe side.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt, after a series of similar claims spread over the past few weeks:

The key point here is that some of this stuff just happens. It’s part of how algorithms work. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes you disagree with why they do things. And people need to stop overreacting to it all. Most of the examples discussed in this article were just normal things that happen all the time, but which got a ton of extra attention because everyone’s on edge and amped up.

That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be on the lookout for stuff, but don’t immediately jump to conclusions and assume malfeasance.

It is reasonable to want to hold technology companies to a high standard and expect them to be more competent, especially when it comes to election-related topics. In some cases, systems are being triggered as they should, but they are poorly explained to users by generic error messages. Others are just broken. None of this should be surprising in an era where even the largest platforms seem to be so fragile as to be held together by the software equivalent of thumbtacks and glue sticks.

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Takeshi Narabe, the Asahi Shimbun:

SoftBank Corp. announced that it has developed voice-altering technology to protect employees from customer harassment.

The goal is to reduce the psychological burden on call center operators by changing the voices of complaining customers to calmer tones.

The company launched a study on “emotion canceling” three years ago, which uses AI voice-processing technology to change the voice of a person over a phone call.

Penny Crosman, the American Banker:

Call center agents who have to deal with angry or perplexed customers all day tend to have through-the-roof stress levels and a high turnover rate as a result. About 53% of U.S. contact center agents who describe their stress level at work as high say they will probably leave their organization within the next six months, according to CMP Research’s 2023-2024 Customer Contact Executive Benchmarking Report.

Some think this is a problem artificial intelligence can fix. A well-designed algorithm could detect the signs that a call center rep is losing it and do something about it, such as send the rep a relaxing video montage of photos of their family set to music.

Here we have examples from two sides of the same problem: working in a call centre sucks because dealing with usually angry, frustrated, and miserable customers sucks. The representative probably understands why some corporate decision made the customer angry, frustrated, and miserable, but cannot really do anything about it.

So there are two apparent solutions here — the first reconstructs a customer’s voice in an effort to make them sound less hostile, and the second shows call centre employees a “video montage” of good memories as an infantilizing calming measure.

Brian Merchant wrote about the latter specifically, but managed to explain why both illustrate the problems created by how call centres work today:

If this showed up in the b-plot of a Black Mirror episode, we’d consider it a bit much. But it’s not just the deeply insipid nature of the AI “solution” being touted here that gnaws at me, though it does, or even the fact that it’s a comically cynical effort to paper over a problem that could be solved by, you know, giving workers a little actual time off when they are stressed to the point of “losing it”, though that does too. It’s the fact that this high tech cost-saving solution is being used to try to fix a whole raft of problems created by automation in the first place.

A thoughtful exploration of how A.I. is really being used which, combined with the previously linked item, does not suggest a revolution for anyone involved. It looks more like cheap patch on society’s cracking dam.

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Based on what I can surmise from the upload dates, this collection of computer brochures has been around for years, but I was only recently made aware of it thanks to the latest issue of Web Curios. What a lovely collection of history in both technology and a very particular era in design.

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Matt Sephton:

At this point, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sharp PI-4000 in my hands was released in 1994, and it was chock full of recognisable emoji. Then down the rabbit hole I fell. 🕳️🐇

This article may start with this discovery from 1994, but it absolutely does not end there. What a fascinating piece of well-documented and deeply researched history.

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