Hammocks4All

Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.

These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?

Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?

Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!

Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?

I like seeing a group evolve and form good friendships. I also like sci fi and weirdness. For these reasons, two of my favorite shows are The Expanse and Severance. In both, by the end, I felt like I was “part of the team” in some way.

What are a couple of your favorites? What kind of itch do they scratch?

And by should have I mean "should have" because this kind of thing can be subjective.

I'll start. Senior year of high school I would often skip class to go to the park and smoke weed with my partner (at the time). This park had a lot of birds. The sometimes silly, sometimes strategic, sometimes social and cooperative behavior of the birds blew my 17 year old stoned mind. I remember my partner and I would theorize about what they were doing and thinking. I thought it was super cool. I still think birds are super cool.

Now, many years later, I have a PhD in a behavior adjacent field. I don't study birds specifically or anything like that, but those experiences and curiosities pushed me in this direction.

Maybe it was all inevitable: these are deep interests that would have been pulled out of me in one way or another. The tinder was inside of me and if it wasn't getting stoned at the park as a teenager and watching birds that sparked the flame, something else would have. Who knows.

I know the meme format is kinda wrong. It's also kinda right.