It isn't only that everything sucks. It is also that the interaction of everything massively sucks even more - if only because there's not one single neck to wring in those cases.

(For example, any recent car infotainment system, from what I have read.)

A small example: Ubuntu 14.04 desktop, running 2 Firefox profiles thus 2 windows, and I am trying to switch windows. Sometimes when I go into the 'expose' mode for those 2 windows and click on the one I want (the other one, that doesn't show up when Alt-Tabbing, at least not w/out a long pause on the Firefox entry in the Alt-Tab list) then it doesn't actually work and I end up on the same window again. Who is to blame? Firefox? Ubuntu? Both?

hm. I wish Firefox had a default global zoom level / page scale setting. Sure, I have some little sympathy for how complex it can all get, but still it seems like a little bit of a ux train wreck here.

If your web site does all sorts of insane javascript and webgl stuff even while it is not visible and in a different tab, then I kind of hate it. A lot.

I have worked both with and on various purportedly "cross-platform" systems, and it is pretty much a complete lie to claim that there is such a thing - at least when it comes to good interactive apps. It isn't so much that it is trying to fit a round pet into a square hole, more that it is trying to fix an n-dimensional pristine design into a 40 foot tall block of swiss cheese excrement. From start to finish it is a freaking joke. A complete, obvious, bare-faced, indefensible, pathetic, blatant, embarrassing, silly, resounding fart of a joke. Package managers, programming languages, ecosystems, bugs: all just a freaking i-cry-myself-to-sleep type of a joke.

(Be sure to check back in with me once I've won my $250mm off of Safeway's Monopoly game and I've thus got the resources to 'put up' by actually solving this giant problem in studly gordian knot style!)

Over the years I've tried many a thing: Phonegap/Cordova, Haxe, Unity, Appcelerator Titanium, React-Native, Weex, Fable, Scala.js, et. al. and for each and every one of them the only time I actually feel really, really good using them is when I say, "eff this noise" and "cd ..; rm -rf test". Because they are all just horrible, horrible lies and damnation.

I "grew up" on Emacs and you'd have to take it from my cold dead fingers vs. things like vim. But - god hell it is such a piece of ux crap!

If you want to see where abstraction kills, just look at any of the hoops and hurdles and land mines and just outright insane things one has to do in order to get any software system set up. The complexity of supporting things is a complete indictment of the whole industry. But, it is all we've got.

While I appreciate the faster cycle time of working with "web" technologies, I have to say I mostly utterly despair for humanity given that "web" technologies are "winning".

So Google Sheets' search language is not the same (or at least similar to) that of Google Search? I see two docs 'a' and 'b' in the list of sheets, so I search for "a OR b" and it says nothing matches!?

https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Software-Windows-System-Builder/product-reviews/B00ZSI7Y3U

nothing suspicious about amazon being any kind of technology competitor to microsoft, nah. i don't understand why msft hasn't sued amazon to hell and back if these reviews are accurate.

of course, anything that is locked down like windows os purchasing or steam or itunes movies or old yahoo music or any number of things, anything that is locked down will inevitably be a complete ux nightmare train wreck of hell, screwing the regular user who just wanted to buy it and use it. whereas the pirates are circumventing all that anyway. at least when i experience some horrible train wreck ux disaster with open source stuff i likely am not suffering the double insult and stress of having already forked out $100 for it.

Hah. DLNA is such a perfect example of technology being used for evil capitalist centralized overcomplicated purposes. What a complete train wreck. And then I go and try stuff like PLEX and it is a fuster cluck of epic proportions with the UX from hell and the upsell upsell upsell modal dialogs in the face.

Basically the world of technology follows Sturgeon's Law recursively: 90% of everything is crap, and then 90% of the remaining 10% is also crap, and then 90% of the 10% of the 10% is crap...

(It is really very super extremely depressing to me when I actually think about it or emote about it. I mean, the friendly aliens aren't going to make contact with us when this is how we run a planet. "Dood," they say to each other, "Did you see that iOS app CompanyX put out? What a tub! And how about that media server protocol? Ha ha ha I laughed so hard I just pissed my seven legs! I mean who are the marketing geniuses who came up with that one?!")

Just sayin', if I were making something like the DD-WRT docs, I would try to offer a compressed archive for users to download. For what I should hope are obvious reasons.