Tag Archives: frustration

Persistent and annoying

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Three Sundays ago, at the start of the March break, I felt a cough coming on. The timing was awful since I was hopping on a plane to visit my mom & sister the next day. I spent 10 days away and had the cough the entire time. I’ve been home for 5 nights now and the cough still persists. The good news is that I did see my doctor and it’s not in my lungs. The bad news is that I coughed a lot last night and this isn’t going away.

There are a couple things that I find extremely frustrating. First, I’ve really been taking care of myself, and yet I still catch this annoying cough. My stress at work has been low, I exercise and eat well, and I supplement with vitamins and minerals. I understand that you can be healthy and still get a cough or cold, but I don’t usually have them hold on for so long.

The other frustrating thing is that I’ve been dealing with sciatic pain in my leg since December. It was finally receding a couple days before this cough hit me, and is completely gone now. Don’t get me wrong, this is great news after months of annoying pain that altered my everyday living. The annoying part is that I’m finally pain free, and I’ve coughed every day since.

I feel like I haven’t had a healthy day yet this year… and it’s already April tomorrow! I’m trying to stay positive, but I’m tired of this. Tired of sleeping poorly, tired of coughing fits, tired of throat lozenges kept stuck in my cheek, tired of people looking at me like I’m going to get them sick. Feeling unhealthy has been both persistent and annoying, and I’m really looking forward to feeling healthy again.

Enshitification

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I asked Copilot to search my blog for, “posts where technology improves while systems (work, economy, institutions, structures) get worse.”

It shared the following summary:

 

The reason I asked for this is because I wanted to look back on posts that reminded me of this skit out of Norway. It is, as the Threads post suggests, “utterly brilliant”!

You can find the video and more information on the website at the end of the video.

We aren’t imagining this, things are getting intentionally worse. On social media we are not the customer, we are the product sold to advertisers. And even when we are the customer, we don’t buy anything outright anymore, no, we get locked into subscriptions.

Copilot didn’t find the one post I was looking for, but I found it to share here:

Sometime technology s(UX)

I’ll end here with a couple paragraphs from that post, no need to try writing something I already said,

“I want to use my credit card at a gas station, not only must I put in my pin, I need to say how much I want to spend as a maximum. Every instant teller I go to asks me what language I want to work in… how hard would it be for the machine to know my preference after asking once? And as for autocorrect… it’s getting worse, not better.

I love my tech, but it seems to me that technology is all about adding features, and not about user experience (UX). The user is forgotten as new bells and whistles are added. Or things are so locked down that I need Face ID, a confirmation text, and coming soon, a DNA scan. Between new features and new security measures, there seems little time spent thinking about what the experience is for the end user.”

AI image woes

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A few years ago I switched from looking for royalty free images to add to my Daily-Ink blog posts to using AI. The main reason for this is that I found myself spending almost as much time searching for images as I was spending writing my blog post. This was not efficient.

While I’ve had a few challenges along the way, for the most part, I got image creation consistently down around 3-5 minutes. This is great, and so much less stressful… except for when it isn’t. The past few days have been a struggle. I couldn’t get the AI to give me what I wanted. Even when I asked for clarification, and a description of my image was recited ack to me in incredible detail, the end product did not match what I hoped for.

Three of the last four days I was at the gym, walking on the treadmill and I was still trying to get my post published, delayed by failed attempts to get the image I hoped for. In all 3 cases I settled for something close. Actually 2 out of 3, for the other one I used a sample Wikipedia image the AI found for me. I can’t believe how hard it is to get AI to create the image of a clock showing the time 5 o’clock!?!

I was tempted to say that AI image creation is getting dummer, but I think what’s happening is that I’ve just started to expect a lot more. The clock is a bad example, but in many cases I’m expecting a level of sophistication I haven’t asked for previously. I want specific perspectives. I’m asking for complex scenarios, and I’m challenging the AI to create ‘unnatural’ situations, like a teacher in a circle of desks with the students all sitting looking out and away from the teacher.

That’s sounds like an easy request but in millions of reference images of teachers, the AI has been trained to have students face the teacher. So despite continued attempts, with the AI actually describing in detail what I’m asking for before giving it to me, I still got an image of the students facing inward, towards the teacher. Again, and again, and again.

So I’m going to dumb it down. I’m going to ask for less complex images. I’m going to settle for an image that might not be perfect, and most importantly I’m going to spend less time on images and more time writing.

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Post script: My one and only image request for this post – ‘Create a stylized, abstract watercolour image that looks like an AI image gone wrong, with an uncanny valley styled mishmash of items.’

Sometime technology s(UX)

I used to have one remote for my TV, now I have 3. One of them is for my sound bar. When I turn the sound bar on, (on its own, it turns on automatically for the tv), in order to connect to my phone. Before I can click the input options, I need to wait 6 or 7 seconds while the sound bar scrolls ‘WELCOME’ across its small screen 3 or 4 times.

Just now I decided I want to have a song on repeat on my phone and it took me over a minute to figure out how to do this. Sure, I was given the choice to do many things with the song…

But the simple option to hit repeat was elusive on the main screen.

Yesterday I wanted to drag a song into GarageBand and it kept being added at 4 times the speed. I found out GarageBand needs the song to be a specific speed. I checked, same speed. Then I learned it had to be a specific format, so I had to duplicate the song in the new format. Now I’ve got two versions of the song in iTunes and need to delete one, but which one, they look identical in iTunes? 3 years ago this was a seamless activity that I never struggled with no matter what format I worked with.

Is it just me or is technology getting more confusing and less user-friendly. And no, my sound bar scrolling ‘WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME’ while being fully inoperative is NOT user friendly!

I want to use my credit card at a gas station, not only must I put in my pin, I need to say how much I want to spend as a maximum. Every instant teller I go to asks me what language I want to work in… how hard would it be for the machine to know my preference after asking once? And as for autocorrect… it’s getting worse, not better.

I love my tech, but it seems to me that technology is all about adding features, and not about user experience (UX). The user is forgotten as new bells and whistles are added. Or things are so locked down that I need Face ID, a confirmation text, and coming soon, a DNA scan. Between new features and new security measures, there seems little time spent thinking about what the experience is for the end user.

So for any tech designers out there, here is a little tip, we don’t need to be greeted by inanimate objects, and if we are, allow us to actually use the object while it’s welcoming us.

3 trips

On the weekend I spent some time putting water fed solar panels up on our roof. I thought 50 feet of flexible piping would be enough, but that only covered getting the water to and from the low garage roof, and not taking care of the piping also needed to get the water from the pool to the pump and filter.

Yesterday after work I bought more piping from a pool & hot tub store and then went to the hardware store to buy more connectors than I needed so that I wouldn’t have to make another trip.

Then I made another trip to the hardware store… and then another. I finally had all the proper connection pieces, but only after assembling 3 pieces together to replace one piece that was there previously. Without going into details, the small pump currently attached to the pool, which is too small to pump water up onto the garage roof, is attached by parts unique to the pump and so the transition from the pool to the new pump was not as simple as I thought it would be.

So, I continued my tradition of always having to go to the hardware store more than once whenever I do any kind of handy work. I’m glad it’s a short drive, but when I have to go a third time, it’s really frustrating. I ended up re-hooking up the old pump after dark, and will put everything together later this week, but probably not until the weekend, with a very busy after school schedule until then.

‘Measure twice cut once’ is a phrase you often here tradespeople say. Well, it seems mine should be ‘measure twice, visit the hardware store once’… but no matter how much I measure, how much I think I’ve prepared, I end up not realizing I needed another item, or buying the wrong item, or running into an unforeseen issue. Chalk up one each for those reasons last night.

The day I am able to visit a hardware store just once, and complete a full repair of project will be a day of celebration for me. But last night was not that night. Last night it took 3 trips to the hardware store. And now the task that I had hoped to be completed must wait longer to be done (again).