The feeling that tech's promise is to make everything easier yet its constant failures and inconsistencies and growing complexity are making everything much, much harder.

Or to put it another way, spending far more time trying to make things work than their working will ever save us.

@robpike I see this most reflected in my Dad. He's a smart guy, but at 85, is swimming in a world of needless complexity. We took away always-on phones that just take a sequence of digits, and replaced them with ones that need to be charged, muted, unmuted, and rebooted. We replaced TV channels with apps, all with different and constantly shifting UIs. We replaced software with SAAS portals that are never the same from one day to the next, and require separate passwords. *I* can barely keep up.

@nuxi @robpike I think allowing streaming apps on TVs was a big mistake. Imagine if the streaming services all had to fit in a general TV app. Life would be much better.

@juliank @nuxi @robpike
I think allowing e-commerce websites was a mistake.
Life would be better if every online shop had to implement a general e-commerce protocol that you could use with a general e-commerce program.

@tetrislife That protocol seems really really complicated, and its documentation misrepresents HTTP. I think it needs more work before serious adoption. However, it's a good start, and the hard work (identifying the real-world requirements) seems to have been done.

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