The technology never works chronicle

Technology today is amazing, from smartphones you strap to your face to bring you VR, to drone deliveries, self-driving cars and digital assistants.  Despite the near ubiquity of sophisticated awe-inspiring devices and apps, I nevertheless encounter malfunctions, glitches and failures of technology at such a high rate that it often feels like it never works (when you need it to or expect it to). 

Selective attention

I figured I might start chronicling these failures and frustrations as they occur just to see what the anecdotal evidence suggests.

Day one

PauseCast

On my way home from work, the podcast I was listening to on podcast lounge over bluetooth in my car froze.  Stopping and starting the podcast didn’t work. Nor did switching to a different podcast.  I had to switch to Audible and listen to an audiobook instead.

GlitzoPlex

Today my kids asked to watch a recently recorded home video.  No problem.  I fired up my Vizio SmartTv, selected the Plex app, and viola!  Nothing. Plex hung there on the splash screen indefinitely.  That’s weird, never happened before, so I’ll just shut off the TV and try again.  Nope.  Still stuck on the Plex splash screen.  Eventually, I was able to traverse through some TV system menu’s and find a reset function.  After resetting Plex eventually loaded. But by then the kids had moved on.

ErrorCode771TV

Later, many of my DirectTV stations were either un-viewable, or the ones that were were constantly interrupted by the Searching for satellite error messages. This has been an intermittent problem for a few weeks, and DirectTv support is reluctant to send out a technician so I have to keep resetting the box.

Just to name a few…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RIF Notes #4

“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both” – Machiavelli “A well-stated problem is half-solved” – John Dewey jsFiddle - Cool javascript testing tool Modernizr - Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies. Why We’re Going With HTML(5) Instead Of Silverlight – More on the debate between Silverlight and HTML5.  A year ago I would have said Silverlight, hands down, for LOB development, now its not quite as clear.  At least not if your users need to access your apps from their iPads and Droids. Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Braintree – Braintree Payment Technologies was the first company I contacted when I first started investigating credit card tokenization a few years back.  Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) -- Technical Analysis - Matt found this article, for an
Read more

RIF Notes #42

“In practice, problems are delegated but the power to address them is not.” - Maslach & Leiter Building the Object Model You Want with Entity Framework How you can improve your SQL with code analysis in SQL Prompt A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm – This is a head scratcher. Macro trends in the tech industry Technology Radar Vol 17 Essential .NET - C# 7.0: Tuples Explained – “What many folks didn’t realize when it was first introduced is that the new C# 7.0 tuple all but replaces anonymous types—and provides additional functionality.” Editor's Note – Misprint – “Any IT manager can regale you with stories of undiagnosable printer failures, but even at the home-office level printing is an exercise in fail” .NET Standard - Demystifying .NET Core and .NET Standard Devops - Continuous Data Migration Using Visual Studio and TFS
Read more

The greatest trick the AI ever pulled was convincing the world it wasn't THAT intelligent

Just listened to The AI Dilemma and it definitely elaborated on and articulated some of my own concerns, as did the news of OpenAI plugins. The synthesis of concern is: AI doesn't need to be that powerful to be destructive and destabilizing (e.g. social media algorithms) to people and society. These new LLM's are already much more powerful than social media algorithms. Many of the new LLM capabilities are emergent and poorly understood. The experts designing these systems don't fully understand them, and some of whom are already worried about what they've created. LLM's are being rapidly and recklessly deployed very broadly across society, in an arms race. The strongest argument against worry is that these LLM's aren't really intelligent, are really just a super-autocomplete that enables automating mundane tasks via natural language. But I don't think any of the companies developing or deploying these things are arguing that. Even if they were, see #1 &
Read more