Making stuff good (fast, performant, non-addictive, etc) are directly opposite the KPIs that most businesses are going to measure.

IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.

That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.

Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".

I feel your pain. I'm one of those folks that read Don't Make Me Think, and took it to heart.

Usability and simplicity have been cornerstones of my work, since the early 1980s.

Simple is hard. Like, really hard. People think that it's just about removing UI elements. In my experience, it's about adding the right ones.

Same. About 35 years for me. A recurring bad dream I have is trying to do something on my phone and it Just. Doesn't. Work. Ending with me smashing the phone on a rock or something.

One common piece of advise for having a happy life is to eliminate things that don't delight you (or at least, eliminate things that constantly annoy you). Very little of modern computer/internet technology falls into the "delight" category.

With retirement nearing the horizon, I plan to minimize the amount of technology in my life after that to the greatest extent that I can. I sometimes wonder if people in other professions grow to hate the products they produce in the same way.

> It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most ~tech~ products are.

most products aren't made for every one of us; i think i've only ever truly made things for myself when i was not being paid

I feel the same. I have, however, discovered joy in running my own personal cloud with Tailscale, some Raspberry Pi's, Mac desktops, Jellyfin / Plex, and lots of personal mini web apps.

While, to me this feels like edging towards IoT, it's not something the layman home automation enthusiast understands (their eyes gloss over when I talk about it).

> People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech. I don’t want your app, I don’t want to scan your QR code, yes I really do just want to speak to a person and no I don’t want to automate or make “smart” anything in my home.

> It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.

I'm the same way. I think there a couple of different reasons for it:

1. Many "tech products" aren't there to serve you, the user. They're there to serve someone else (usually a group of investors). Customer support chatbots are a great example. You're "subjected" to this tech, and it exists deliberately to make your life worse.

2. The internet, specifically, is a technology that removed a lot of the constraints that held some lazy and malign aspects of human psychology in check. Constraints (aka friction) are not bad things. For instance:

The friction of shipping updates on floppy disks (or not at all), meant people actually needed to QA the heck out of their shit. Now you can cut that QA because you can "just push a patch later" (or some other buggy feature, or intentionally cripple the software, etc.).

The friction of two-way communication being expensive gave you privacy, now your computer, car, and TV can spy on you to provide monetization opportunities to the manufacturer.

And, in general, it's made it practically impossible for everyone, even really savvy consumers, to evaluate the products they're buying. Do I have any way to figure out if this car will spy on me? Do I know if it will have this feature I like next year, after the annual unnecessary UI redesign? No, I do not. It's all out of my control.

For a while now, "tech" has been solving problems that don't really exist. Having to scan a QRcode to read a restaurant menu, having to use a kiosk to order your fast food while the employee is standing right there but can't take your order, connecting your fridge to the cloud, etc. Why do I need an app on my phone to control my sprinklers instead of just a panel in my garage?

Of course it helps reduce costs and increase profit for corporations, but it solves nothing for end users. Every new "tech thing" also feels like a stupid charade for a manufactured "need".

I'm right there with you

Everyone I know thinks I'm weird when I get mad that a restaurant doesn't have a physical menu. I don't want to scan a QR code and scroll a menu on my phone, it's a worse experience than reading a paper menu in every single way

I have a theory that people in tech tend to hate or not care about other people’s clever tech solutions/products, but love their own little custom projects. So AI era probably will make it better if everyone building their own stuff becomes the norm.

> I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.

Yeah, handing control of the entire tech industry over to a couple of proprietary, black box products built & owned by like four hyper-capitalist sociopaths is definitely not going to go well.

> People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech.

Same. But it's not really that I hate tech: I hate that inferior, mediocre, device that the smartphone is. It's a spying device. It's got a minuscule pathetic screen (I rock an ultra-wide monitor at home).

I drive more than most: I was finding my way across Europe before smartphones and I can still find my way without constantly needing a smartphone. My car's navi system (from 2013) does the job totally fine: just a map and GPS receiver and that's it.

I very often don't take my phone with me: when I see people glued on their phone, endlessly doom-scrolling and taking selfies I just pitty them.

But I'm not luddite: I've got a "homelab" which I uses daily (it serves family pictures, movies, files/backups, it hosts VMs, I use it to isolate AI agents etc.).

A smartphone is not "tech": it's a mediocre piece of crap that spies on people. Worse: many have a smartphone but aren't comfortable speaking on the phone.

It'd be a tragedy if it wasn't pathetically funny.

And at home I keep hammering to my kid that smartphone are poison: opium for the unsuspecting masses.

And as she sees me doing just fine without my smartphone, the point is getting across.

Screw smartphones: just screw those mediocre turds.