Smoke break

Ever since publishing my three articles criticising Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign, I’ve been getting a lot of reaction and feedback emails. A lot. More than when I published my four-part series of articles criticising Mac OS 10.15 Catalina back in 2019–2020. In one of the most recent emails I’ve received, the sender wrote this about me: You’re the Rust Cohle of tech commentary. If you haven’t watched the first season of True Detective, you probably won’t get the reference. Reading the complete background on Rust Cohle in the dedicated Wikipedia entry, one would think that this comparison isn’t one of the most flattering. But I guess one doesn’t have to dig too deep. I assume the sender of that email wants to reference the character’s cynicism and the charismatic way he delivers his views. I take it as a compliment. I don’t have a tragic past and am not an alcoholic. I used to smoke. Now it’s just some occasional pipe smoking.

Time for a break. A break that breaks my one-month silence here, but still a break. Like when at work there’s mostly a somber and awkwardly quiet atmosphere, then someone says, Let’s talk outside.

But about what?

August, which in my corner of the world is usually considered the summer holidays month, has been mostly spent listlessly surviving being stewed either by the excess heat or, sometimes, excess humidity. I’ve worked but also had time to do a quick check-up of most of my vintage computers — at least those I still manage to routinely use. And most still work. The one glaring fatality was promptly replaced after a surgical strike on eBay. As it often happens, the replacement turned out to be twice better in specs, and almost half the investment compared to the replaced machine.

Ah, tech. What’s there to talk about now?

Not much, to be honest. One day, nothing feels wrong. The day after, nothing feels right. It’s a pendulum. There’s a growing disconnect between the games big tech and billionaires are playing in their Mount Olympus, and the street-level, home-level, studio-level everyday tech made of our little tools, our rants-in-a-box on social media, our debates and defence of such tools or ecosystems, whether it’s against a fanboy, or someone who isn’t enough of a fanboy, or even a company’s attempt at reshaping those tools in ways that fit more the company’s grand strategy than the end user’s needs.

In those days where nothing feels wrong, you’re just doing your things at your desk in front of your computer and you think about big tech and the billionaires and their games and you’re like, Just play your stupid games and leave me alone, I have real work to do. You’re feeling equally unfazed by all the ‘AI’ hype. Let them believe that an LLM ‘reasons’ and that ChatGPT ‘thinks’ and it’s a great companion that understands you. Let them allow their delusions to drive their cars until they inevitably crash and burn. You can’t do much against the overwhelming stupidity. You have just enough energy to carry on with your stuff, so if today stupidity loses a bit with an own goal, well, you can’t complain too much.

When nothing feels right, you feel friction — the bad friction — everywhere. At the personal level, you realise for instance that you can’t trust Apple anymore to keep providing the same quality software environment you’ve depended on for years, because the people who cared about providing that kind of software are gone, and the people who are present now simply throw their sandbox visual experiments at your face, and while they consider their work done, they don’t give a shit about your work. The user interface and user interaction experts are nowhere to be found — these are aspiring interior designers, and their idea of user interface is the back cover blurb of a book on feng shui.

So, no, you look at this Mac OS abomination and you sigh, realising that no, you can’t upgrade to it. You just can’t. The cost-benefit analysis is quickly over, you don’t even need pen and napkin. The cost is unnecessarily high, the benefits are non-existent. Where are the It’s just a beta! people? Time’s running out. This beta doesn’t look that much different from the first beta. The die is cast. You get back to your internal monologue. You think, This is another Yosemite moment, I can wait it out and hope history repeats itself and in late 2026 we get another El Capitan.

But this time nothing feels right. You look at those stupid transparency effects, at the thoughtless UI decisions and you wonder, What if they haven’t reached the bottom of the barrel yet? What if the spiral still moves downward for a while? What if they keep removing all the meat from Mac OS until there’s just bone? Meanwhile, people working with this operating system have to accept the spoon-feeding, otherwise sooner or later they’re going to be cut off via planned software obsolescence.

When nothing feels right, you remember that quote from the WarGames film — “The only winning move is not to play” — and actually you feel like you’re damned if you play, damned if you don’t.

And all this thinking about cost and benefits reminds you of the ‘artificial intelligence’ problem. Of the ‘AI’ tech industry games, of people like Sam Altman who wants to (and likely will) raise billions of dollars to develop some NothingBurger AI that will be marginally more capable of writing up a stupid summary for you while its data centres consume millions of litres of fresh water and gigawatts of electricity. All while the utter morons who endorse and spread the ‘AI’ credo keep spewing utter nonsense about ‘AI’ being the solution to problems that could be resolved with 1/100th of the resources burnt to maintain chatbots, and 100 times the common sense. People so invested in this shit that they truly believe in the ‘intelligence’ part of ‘artificial intelligence’ — and that’s because to a complete idiot, everything seems intelligent.

Will real intelligence prevail? It’s another good day, you still feel some hope for humanity. You’re a humanist after all. You’re back to work, you’re back to your plans for the rest of the week, you skim through your RSS feeds with the confidence of someone who has learnt the art of not giving a shit; in a good way, though — it isn’t ‘not caring’, it’s more like ‘letting this rain roll down my raincoat’; you like the rain but don’t like getting soaked, especially when the things you read online are acid rain and you don’t want it to dissolve your mental health.

(It’s a smoke break, bear with the mixed metaphors).

You feel again in control for a while. You understand that you have to find your particular thrill if you care about tech. You have to find it, not let a company tell you what it is and where to find it. You understand that the only entity having your interests at heart out there is yourself. And maybe a scrappy band of software developers and small tech companies. You understand that the best ecosystem is the one you take care of yourself. You see past all the convenience tech throws at you, and you feel that, at the end of the day, you’re not that busy to delegate everything to some tool or tools. You feel you prefer finding yourself, not losing yourself in all this. You look at the physical and digital stuff surrounding you in your home office and start mentally putting labels on everything — labels like I did choose this and This was a mistake and That was the result of peer pressure and I was fooled into believing I needed this and— you know.

– What did you want to talk about?

– Will we survive these dystopian times?

– As long as we keep this “I won’t act on [issue] until it affects me directly” mindset — at any level — nothing will change. The rich will keep getting away with it. The powerful will keep getting away with it while pushing their agendas. Individualism can be useful when growing up. You have to learn to be self-sufficient in many situations. But the sense of community, society, common good is an equally important value in our toolkit. We have to preserve it at all costs. We have to keep caring.

– Thanks for the chat.

– Anytime.

New email notification.

Hi Rick. Just a quick message to tell you I’ve read your pieces on Liquid Glass and it was an illuminating read. I didn’t agree on everything, but many points you made had me stop and ponder these matters more seriously…

Back to communicating. (Look up the etymology of communicate).