When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was people asking me for tech support help and me having to slowly, patiently explain to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.
But that's not true anymore.
User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.
My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.
@neuralex my partner recently had a problem where she thought Word was refusing to save her document
What had happened was that Word was saving directly to her OneDrive, and the OneDrive client wasn't running on her computer, so it wasn't syncing
When my partner tried to save the document it didn't appear to work because she couldn't see it in the Documents folder on her computer
It took me - a software engineer - about 30 minutes to figure it all out, unacceptable tbh
@RealGene @quirk @neuralex I hear you!! Literally the only solution I have found for that on Windows 11 was to use the OOBE hack to set up Windows without a Microsoft account. There seems to be no way to disentangle it if the damn thing knows the mothership exists.
(I tried the "unlink this PC" workaround that their forum recommends. It went about as well as you'd expect.)
@quirk @neuralex
I've been dealing with these since paper tape, and I still can't figure out how to not have Office default to OneDrive.