Things i Hate (Or: Rants by an Old Man)

I am an old man and i find modern times not so much confusing but outright - to use the correct word - "smart". Frankly, many things looked better back then - but especially the future. So today, instead of taking my medication, i will take a more "wholesome" approach and vent off some steam by sharing with you the things that i hate:

Intelligent Search Engines
Back in the good old days we had the mother of all search engines - Altavista. Altavista had a simple interface:

• you typed "foo" and searched for web sites containing "foo";
• you typed "foo AND bar" and searched for websites containing both "foo" and "bar"
• you typed "foo AND NOT bar" and searched for websites containing "foo" but not "bar"

and so on. Very complicated, no? Today, everything is much better: today i use the successor of IXQUICK, Startpage. When i enter "foo bar" there i used to get websites that contained "foo" as well as "bar" but some time ago they made the "experience" (as using something is called nowadays) even better. Now i get all websites containing either "foo" OR "bar" PLUS all websites containing neither but something startpage thinks is related to either "foo" or "bar".

Chances are that if i enter "bugs fooware" i am not interested in the bugs of fooware but rather in advice whom to call for fighting bugs (i.e. the website "GetRidOfAntsInYourHome.com") and places where to buy fooware at the lowest possible price. Many thanks for doing that, only now my life is complete. I might have gotten zero hits if i used unwisely selected keywords in the past, now i get some millions of hits i can't use at all. Isn't that phantastic?

It gets even more phantastic because the search itself is now "smart": i search for "A" and, by the seat of its pants, the search engine concludes that in fact i might be interested in "B". So i get listed all the results for "B", because "B" is somehow related (in the opinion of the search engine) to "A". And not only that, i get these mixed with the results that indeed contain "A" so i may myself enjoy sifting through all those "hits" only to find out that the first 20 hits do not contain my search string at all.

You might think that Startpage is just a bad search engine and i should use Google, yes? Well, the difference to Google is - apart from the fact that they claim they do not log my searches - that with Startpage i can at least go to "advanced" settings and with a finite effort make my search as dumb ("unsmart"?) as it previously was. Google works the same as Startpage but without me being able to configure it unless i create an account there and "log in". Huh?? Why should i "log in" to a web indexer??

Smart Phones
Nowadays "smart" is creeping up everywhere: yesterday i had a phone. I could use it to make or receive phone calls (for the younger: that is like Twitter, but without needing to type and not limited to 140 characters). Now i am told i need a "smart phone" which can do everything my laptop can do, but on a screen as small as a stamp (for the younger: ah, why bother....) and a locked root account which i am forbidden to unlock by law. What?? It even gets smarter because i cannot install the OS i want on this micro-laptop. On the other hand the "smart" phone can buy things without my consent, send my data to who knows, tell the NSA what the KGB wants to know about me and since it is built by Huawei i am being spied upon by the Chinese - says the US.

Smart Homes
Back in the days, i lived in something i called "home". But that was pretty dumb. Nowadays i am told to live in a "smart home", but alas, my "smart phone" got infected with something (i have no idea what, because i'd need root access to find out) and now the door won't open for me. I asked the person i see enter and leave my smart home on a daily basis but he claims he has no idea what i am talking about.

Smart Assists
Speaking about home: all this housing and searching and using phones is so awfully complicated for old people like me because we have no idea about technics.

But then "smart" hit pretty close to home where i thought i had some knowledge - systems administration - when IBM launched the new version of their high-availability software (i still call it HACMP, but its name has changed from that to SystemMirror to Spectre Something to PowerHA to ... well, whatever). The versions before a system administrator designed a HA-cluster for SAP that way: a ressource group for the DB, a ressource group for the application, one service IP for each of these ressource groups - done. You need to write a start script and a stop script for each of these ressource groups and that was that. But of course, system administrators being the persons they are they cannot be trusted with writing a simple shell script, let alone four!

IBM told us it is now considered "bad practice" to write start-/stop-scripts or design a cluster. Instead we have to use "smart assists": programs that figure out themselves what is best for your cluster. OK, so somebody from IBM came and told us lowlifes how to set up a cluster the modern way. At first it didn't work but he got a few not-yet-released patched from some lab and then it did work but not reliably but after some weeks of waiting and patching and "ohh"-ing and "ahh, damn"-ing he was finally able to automatically configure the test cluster: 47 resource groups, 20 configured IP addresses, close to 100 dependencies between the different configuration items and start-/stop-scripts that were close to 60k in size each. A switchover of the application took 25 minutes instead of 1-2. I think about the smart assists that their last syllable were an overstatement.

Can somebody tell me how i make all these smart things get dumb again?

bakunin

Hi bakunin...

Oh boy, I reckon I am gonna love this thread. ;oD
And I thought I was alone. Now you have set me off. I agree with everything you have written.
(Apologies for any typos.)

I have been into electronics all my life until retirement, getting my degree as a student apprentice from Marconi Radar Systems from 1968 - 76.
Went through life changes to eventually become a major shareholder in a company that designed, installed, repaired and maintained medium to high power RF equipment, transmitters, receivers and associated gear from around 1 Watt to several KiloWatts, 1980 - 2015, when I retired.

Oh those days of valve/tubes when you could see the components, and fondle them with such affection. Repairs and maintenance were difficult but very easy.
Then came the transistorised stuff and the units sizes collapsed considerably. You could still feel those components but their sizes had also collapsed. Repairs and maintenance were also difficult and easy.

Now we hit the DIP 7400 and 4000 series ICs and still that air of component size but the units are an order of magnitude more complex and require a database as to what these DIPs do, so I was forced to understand pure logic and be able to design stuff around them. Repairs and maintenance were much the same as the transistorised stuff.

Oh boy, we now hit surface mount microprocessors and peripheral ICs but still with standard type passive components. These things are an order of magnitude more complex too. Oh dear, we can't reliably replace faulty chips manually the old way, we need a proper workstation. So several grand UK pounds later we are now able to do repairs and maintenance.

Surface mount. UGH! This has evolved into anything but repairable, at first you could at least see the passives but these reduced in size by orders of 2 magnitude without degrading reliability until they just looked like tiny pieces for grit, forget about repairs and maintenance, just pull the board and chuck.

And finally everything in the super-surface mount IC itself. Scrap if it has failed and get a new unit complete, the IC [s]can't be removed by our now ancient workstation and there is no means of tracing a fault inside a black slab containing near unlimited components.

And everything is for the better.

There is much more but I want to read others rants too... ;oD

"Smart search" is nothing more or less than google's means for unobtrusively jamming unwanted, paid results into searches.

Google doesn't get paid for correct results, after all. So they're under continuous pressure to degrade accuracy in favor of advertisers.

Remember when google was popular because it was honest and lacked ads? I'm no longer sure that was ever true. It took me this long to notice, but they're playing the same game as the bad old ones. Just way better at hiding it.

The worst for me is Google's (and other tech giants) targeting and recommendation engine algorithms; and the very worst for me is YouTube's targeting and recommendations.

For example, if you have a YouTube account you are constantly targeted. Look at one cat video and you will see cat videos in your recommendations forever. The only way to stop the constant barrage of 'cat videos' is to then go into each video and click "Not Interested", then click on "Tell Us Why" and you must click on a reason. Watch one video on "boxing" and you will be bombarded with boxing videos constantly and the ONLY WAY to stop this is to constantly do the terrible time-wasting YouTube three click dance:

• NOT INTERESTED => TELL US WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "WHATEVER" VIDEOS
• NOT INTERESTED => TELL US WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "WHATEVER" VIDEOS
• NOT INTERESTED => TELL US WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "WHATEVER" VIDEOS
• NOT INTERESTED => TELL USE WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "WHATEVER" VIDEOS
• NOT INTERESTED => TELL US WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "WHATEVER" VIDEOS

It's totally disgusting. Google's YouTube engineers should be fired and they should hire people who actual care about others and care about the world we live in.

Also, just as bad or even worse is when you look at some political video on CNN or your favorite legitimate news channel. YouTube will then constantly bombard you with copyright violations who screen capture CNN's (all legitimate news channels) programming and write fake headlines over the videos. It's horrible. YouTube and Google actively push copyright violations and fake news headlines / bylines out to me every day. This, I really HATE. Google (YouTube) forces us to do this horrible three click dance constantly because of the illegal and offensive content they push out to us:

• NOT INTERESTED => TELL US WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "THIS COPYRIGHT VIOLATORS" CHANNEL
• NOT INTERESTED => TELL US WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "ANOTHER COPYRIGHT VIOLATORS" CHANNEL
• NOT INTERESTED => TELL US WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "THIS FAKE NEWS COPYRIGHT VIOLATORS" CHANNEL
• NOT INTERESTED => TELL US WHY => NOT INTERESTED IN "THIS FAKE NEWS, OFFENSIVE, COPYRIGHT VIOLATORS" CHANNEL

This is never ending! Really, Google's engineers should be fired and replaced with people who understand how to insure that fake news, copyright violations and the constant stream of offensive, fake, stolen video content is not forced upon us. Google's is supposed to have all this great "AI" technology and they cannot even stop basic copyright theft and fake news on YouTube. In fact, Google / YouTube promotes this criminal activity and forces this offensive material into my YouTube "recommedations" channel.

How in the hell does Google and YouTube get away with permitting people to steal other's content, write fake / offensive headlines and bylines over the videos, and push this garbage out to us constantly!!!

This should be illegal and probably is, but Google / YouTube does is a matter of standard business practice.

This is my rant!

Agaaaahhhhhhh!!

In the news this morning:
"Popular iPhone apps are recording their users' every tap and swipe, according to a TechCrunch report."
Certain iPhone apps are reportedly tracking their users' every swipe and tap - Business Insider

Google used to be quite vigilant in updating their algorithms to foil whatever latest method anyone discovered to use their own mechanisms to push false results. They clearly no longer care, or perhaps have found their true employers at last. Spam can be lucrative, if you're not the one silly enough to send it, the same way junk mail is lucrative, to the post office.

I think it was just golden time for the development of computers. and it passed. A kind of "Cambrian explosion" of systems development. When one independent developer decided everything and was a god. It is clear that people who've caught this time will miss him. Life unfortunately is constantly becoming more complicated, but it is not inevitable

Google subverted the 1998 rules of website survival: Beg, plead, trick, force your users into clicking ads. Make your downloads not work unless ads are clicked. Generate fake clicks. Clicks, clicks, clicks or die. Google survived without selling our clicks to anyone else. They looked like a beacon of light in a web of 99% pure sleaze.

Looked at in that light, they're as pure-as-snow as they were in 1998. They're still chugging along "for free", and if their search isn't what it's was, it's still on the "good" side of okay. We just finally understand the implications of what they've been selling, and to whom, all along.

Well, this is simply capitalism in action: a capitalist company has one (and only one) purpose and that is generating revenue for its owner(s). Everything else is just a means to that end. A supermarket doesn't want to get fresh vegetables for you, but selling them is their way of getting to your money. The same with Google. They are not a "search-engine", they are a company looking for profit and the search engine is just their means of making it. That means, as long as people use it in large enough quantities they couldn't care less about how successful these people are in finding what they search for.

Google is nothing like "pure-as-snow" at all. It is just that the profit rates in this specific kind of industry was big enough for them to feel no pressure to "optimize" (say: enlarge the amount of revenue per transaction) their business and still make a lot of money. Once that changed and competitors were there they did exactly that and did like any other company. Like the insurance company that advertises "we want you to feel safe" while minimising their expenditures and maximising your rates. After all, the difference between what you pay them and what they pay you back is what they make.

So, bottom line: if you don't like how football is played you cannot ask teams to use suboptimal strategies, you have to change the rules. These rules are responsible for some strategy being optimal and if you change them some other strategy will become optimal. If you don't like how capitalism works you cannot rely on companies discovering their "heart" but you have to change the rules of how production and consumption in our society works.

Be prepared, though, that this will not work peacefully at all. Our society is based on rules which guarantee that with much money also comes much power. To undertake to wrestle power from the hands of those who have it has always been a violent episode in history. The ones with power usually cling to it and don't want to give it to others.

bakunin

That was the whole point, sorry if it was unclear.

I just don't think google's changed as much, goals and service wise, as we think it has, we've just wised up to the game.

Actually, I had a long conversation with a world famous neuroscientist on this topic last year (or maybe it was the year before) working on my favorite cybersecurity project.

We both agreed that the core problem is the move and continued trend by commercial companies, driven-by-profit motives, to debase humans in favor of machines.

The entire push for "AI" is a debasement of humans in a favor or machines, in fact, because machines are cheaper to employ and easier to manage that humans. Humans require more care than machines. Humans are expensive compared to machines. I'm not talking about robotics assembling products like cars and electronics. That is a job well suited for a machine. I'm talking about tasks which require the human mind and the human experience, like editing news, writing reports, creating content, and all the other arts and sciences humans are so good at doing.

This is why Google, Facebook and most of the high-flying tech giants have such high stock prices and are so wealthy and at the same time push fake news, copyright violations, and offensive content to all of us; because they are using machines to do things that machines cannot do well. They do this to increase profit. They hire engineers to write AI which does not work well because they do not want to hire the legions of humans it would take to do the job correctly.

If these high tech, high flying companies would reduce their dependency on "Bad AI" and train and hire legions humans to view, review, edit and filter the content on their networks (like YouTube and Facebook for example) society would benefit because many more humans would have good jobs in tech who are not engineers and scientists; and users would benefit because the amount of "garbage and misinformation" we see flowing on the social and media networks would go down . However the downside is that the profits of these rich, high-flying high-tech giants would go down because they would have a large expense to pay humans to do the good work that humans do as content editors, content creators, reporters, content reviewers, content approvers, etc.

The core problem is this faux promise that "AI" is going to help. and the debasement of humans relative to machines. This is the false promise that all the high tech companies are trying to sell society.... "more AI will help"... but in fact, this is wrong. More AI will not help. More AI is the core problem and it is debasing to humans for high tech companies to tell us "well, we are not going to hire humans to fix the problems because that costs too much, but don't worry, we will get machines to fix the problem"... meanwhile, the world becomes more destabilized, white-color crime is on the rise, cyber disinformation and cybercrime is on the rise, political turmoil is on the rise, disinformation is on the rise.

The core problem is the debasement of humans in favor of machines, driven by profit.

These tech companies are not "bad" or "evil" per se, but there is no doubt that they are driven by profit (greed) and because they are driven by profit, and therefore greed, we are seeing the unintended consequences of that greed on human civilization, as a whole. It's as simple as "cause and effect" but because companies and people permit themselves to be controlled by greed (money, fame, power, material things, etc), this greed creates strong negative consequences on the planet.

In the past, heavy industry polluted the rivers, ocean, sky and the entire planet because of greed. Now, the new tech industries are polluting the information space, human consciousness, memetic spaces, social spaces and indeed, the very fabric of human society, because of greed.

It's really a sad state of human affairs when you think about it!

After 10 years at Sea I decided on a career switch and in 1979 is started work as an Electronic Engineer, I worked for a number of companies like Ferranti, Olivetti, Norsk Data, Motorola, Phillips, DEC and a number of others over the 40 intervening years.

Floppy drives were 8 inches in diameter, memory was made of ferrite and came in wooden boxes and a steel carrier - it weighed about 2 pounds per Kb. You could fix things, for some of the equipment I worked on you had to write your own diagnostics to do this - but you could fix things. Now systems are not repairable, all these things are just throwaway - and sad to say attitudes have followed. We went through the discrete components, to integrated circuits in Ceramic and Plastic encapsulations, then we went through the low power versions of it all. Now we have integrated circuits that have densities that were undreamt of just fifteen years ago.

But essentially all that has happened is that the skill set has been replaced by a courier, who will take a replacement unit to site and plug it in - possibly transferring a hard drive from one chassis to the other.

As to the commercialisation of the experience - in my opinion one of the worst decisions ever made, there was an earlier reference to "Altavista" - it was brilliant but it did cost a significant amount to run. Forgetting to renew the domain was also a problem in this particular case.

I watch the vendors (usually sales or value added resellers) repeatedly mislead customers, I could give you numerous quotes of things I have heard over the years - lead people into a place that they don't want to be. This isn't done maliciously, it's normally through ignorance - the job of a sales person is to sell and few of them undestand the technology.

It's usually left to some techie to make things work, even things that weren't meant to work together. Which is where the good old Google search really comes into it's own, a generic search for an item of equipment will bring you a couple of pages on how to buy one - followed by in most cases nothing of any use!

Arrrrrrgh!!!!!! Many thumps on the keyboard!

Well i do hate those words today, such as : AI, smart, tenant, stateless, cloud, various 'as a service' <buzzzzz>...
Those words today are prostituted to the extreme everywhere.
Almost everything today is 'smart' but actually annoying privacy invading money sucking lurking monster

Regards
Peasant.

No Windows!

I'm for 25 years on linux now. I began with both Linux/Unix and Windows. I went away from Windows since it was a dependency of some proprietary software vendor's will. I decided, not wanting to surrender to such. The choice was against easy-peasy administration GUIs. Against Click-and-Run Installers. Against unreasonable choices of vendors. If you dig deeper within the windows world, it will get hard too - harder than linux/unix.

Going the hard way

The choice also meant learning it the hard way. Read the documents. Search the web for troubleshooting hints. Various levels of debugging through anything that gets in the way. Mostly it has been a hard time and only little leaning back. Always a lot to learn because there is so much to learn here. Webservers, DNS-Servers, Mailservers, various types of Scripting languages, 1000 other types of servers and services. A little time of programming here and there.

The way keeps rocky

One or two times I got pleased with where I'd got to, but that did not last long. The path goes on and on. Nowadays with Infrastructure Management(Chef), Kubernetes and Docker, Ceph and who the hell knows what there will be coming next. Sometimes I'm frustrated about this crazy complexity everywhere and I'm not sure if everything of that is good.

At the moment I'm quite happy with kubernetes and docker as this seems - despite a whole lot of complexity - to make things easier to manage.

Vendors keep baiting you

And the trap of vendor dependency/lock in lures everywhere. You want a LoadBalancer-Service? Come to us(AWS,GKE,Azure,...). Just come to
us. We do it everything for you with some simple clicks(and a price tag). Oh? Your Disk speed is too low? Just buy an upgrade for more IOPS, you can always do that!

I decide to stay on the path of independence, even if that's harder than the other way round. If I do not, I may end up in the space of "I can do nothing, I'm trapped with the solution or the vendor, I/We bought."

A situation like the one bakunin mentioned with his starting post:

As often said here: Companies always want to make money. Complexity is good in terms of money-making. The more complexity, the more technical expertise can be sold. Complex products are very good products in terms of profit for the vendor.

At the moment Microsoft baits users into her Cloud(huge email storage for ridiculous prices). I'm curious where this leads to.

Choose your path! Either one won't be free of pain.

What I like about linux is that it's like a car and you are supposed to open the hood and a lot of it is carefully designed(ok - something is really bullshit too) and you get lots of great documentation. That's a lot of help on the hard way.

Regards,
Stomp

The rise of complexity is in many places:

Here in DNS: Growth of RFC Pages count for DNS is about 2 pages/week:
�The DNS Camel�, or, the rise in DNS complexity | PowerDNS Blog

Quote: The speed we are surrounding us with uncontrolled and uncontrollable technologies is from my point a view a precursor of the apocalypse.

Another one is Google's QUIC aka HTTP/3:

Very Complex. And since we are on the way to full dominance of google-chrome in the webbrowsers(microsoft gave up fully own developed browser not long ago and using chromium(=chrome-based) open source instead. So they are dependant to whatever google delivers), google just implements it in chrome and then it's there. Probably webserver projects will follow.

What I dislike about vendors is how the relationship defaults to dishonesty and imaginary money.

"Okay, you need more RAM? That's $XXX per month"
"And what if I bought 2 perfectly good sticks of RAM for $XX and gave them to you?"
"Then we'd thank you and rent them to someone else for $XXX per month."

I don't see point in the "rants" about issues with vendors related to computer parts and components. Vendors are vendors and they have always been vendors and will always behave like vendors. Selling is selling and is a professional as old as old can be.

What hardware and software vendors are doing, the same thing all sellers do everywhere, pales in comparison to what the information-based companies and networks like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and more are doing to pollute the very information-space and human conscious which rips at the core of human civilization's social fabric.

The major issue we all face is not how venders sell or market their goods and services (that's always been an issue, from the beginning of time), but the fact that high-tech, high-flying information-based companies and networks like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and more are building machine-based systems with the sole goal of world-domination (read number of users, profit margins, influence etc) with machine-based AI in all aspects of our information-based lives, disrupting countries, societies, seeding hate and social mistrust, partitioning humans into groups and pitting them against one another.

AI in the commercial space means "targeting" and "classification" and it is this "targeting" and "classification" of every aspect of our lives and using this information without our express permissions, selling our most intimate details to anyone willing to pay, and using machines to process this information in order to exploit all of us on the planet. Witness the rise of hate, populism, supremacy, and more which is getting worse, not better, year-over-year.

That is something to be worried about and to "rant" about, in my view.

Everything else is "noise" compared to what is happening to the very fabric of human society and is getting worse and worse because of the push by all major big tech players ..... their answer is always: "AI will solve all these problems", when in-fact it is "AI" (and these high tech companies goals and objectives) causing these problems (well, it's the companies pushing AI causing the problems).

It's evil. Pure evil. Really. Believe me.

Profit, greed, influence.... it's the cause. The cat is out of the bag and there is no going back. The future is not very bright because of this certain dystopian world we have created.

What the world really is in need of are ...

Software supported, self-tying Shoes!

Owners of the newly released $350 Nike app-connected Adapt BB self-tying shoes have taken to the Google Play store to complain that an update left their fancy kicks bricked.

Nike's new app-connected shoes reportedly fail after faulty update

Maybe you have to become an engineer and a systems administrator to get your shoes tied in future?

Perhaps Nike's engineers actually needed self-tying shoes.