computers have gone wrong

Author:: feifan zhou Link:: https://feifan.blog/posts/computers-have-gone-wrong-(and-it’s-all-software’s-fault) Tags:#media/article personal data ownership Summary::

• notes::
  • problems with current software
    • History amnesia
      • User input, and state more generally, defaults to being discarded. Remembering and being able to restore state is ad-hoc and unreliable. For example:
        • Scroll state is almost never preserved, even though you might’ve spent a long time scrolling around to find something.
        • In web forms, it’s likely your input will be lost if you refresh the page (or if the page gets refreshed by some force outside your control). If there’s an error submitting your form, your input is often lost as well.
        • Clipboard history is lost by default unless you know that apps exist to preserve clipboard history and keep one running.
      • The history of actions is implemented differently by each application, and sometimes inconsistently within one application. A lot of actions are not recorded. For example:
        • Most modern web browsers have a way to undo closing a tab or window. Most other applications have no such undo when you close a window or document.
        • Google Docs ostensibly records a history of document content versions, but comment history is displayed in a completely separate interface. There’s no way (as far as I can tell) to unify the history in a way that shows how the document has evolved in response to comments. Similarly, there’s no way to temporally group comments to show which comments came before others (i.e. to represent “waves” of feedback)
        • Undo in Roam is broken in ways I can’t comprehend. It often swaps the order of characters in my input, and sometimes re-orders entire blocks in a way that doesn’t mirror the actions I’m trying to undo.
    • GUIs often aren’t composable.