Warning: this is mainly just grumbling about various minor technological woes I've encountered, but there is a meaning to the grumbling.
A while back I talked about the decay of help programs. The short version is that help in programs used to be more expansive, but now it is practically anything at all. You are lucky to get anything more than a wiki or a web search (not that that helps much, because searches suck.) This all raises the question of why help has vanished. The easy answer is that developers are lazy. Help is technically unnecessary, tricky to do well, and time consuming to maintain. Worse, if you have a good help file that becomes inaccurate through updates, customers will get more mad at you than if you had said nothing at all. So it is easier to do nothing.
In some of my interactions with modern technology I started to wonder if there is another possible explanation: maybe developers just hate their users. To explain, let's look at one example where I feel like I'm hated. For work I use the web version of Outlook. It's not something that I'm thrilled with, but IT puts restrictions on what can be installed on work computers, making it difficult to use another web client, and it's at least something that I can access from anywhere. Now there are many auto-correct features that are annoying and I would like to disable. For example, outlook will insist on capitalizing letters after periods and at the beginning of lines. This is annoying in a variety of circumstances, e.g. when I want to use Latin abbreviations. You see, that last bit would have been "e.g. When I want to use Latin abbreviations" in Outlook, even though that part of the phrase is part of the same sentence and so shouldn't receive a capital off of a proper noun. So I look like an idiot, when it is Outlook doing this. Or for another example, I use a lot of mathematical notation in e-mails where case matters. I write something at the beginning of a line like:
f(x) = x^2-3x+4
But Outlook insists on capitalizing letters at the beginning of lines, so it comes out as:
F(x) = x^2-3x+4
Very annoying, and if I am using a convention like having F be the anti-derivative of f, something that could easily lead to confusion. Outlook is very picky about this too. If I write f(x) at the beginning of a line and hit space, it will change f(x) to F(x). If I go back and manually replace F(x) with f(x) it will revert back to F(x) after a few more "words" (i.e. spaces hit later in the line) or after I hit enter to go to a new line. Some times it seems to rever compltely at random. Thus is not only an annoyance, but something where I have to change my complete writing style to deal with the problem. In more complicated messages I just save my message as a text-file, paste it, and hit send with daring to type in a single new character, lest autocorrect take over.
At first I thought this was a default setting that most people used but if you dug into things you could disable. Indeed, that is how it worked in previous versions of the client, but now there are barely any auto-correct options at all and none to disable this particular quirk. So maybe they just got lazy and decided not to update for what they thought was a niche feature? That's what I figured, until I started to look into Microsoft help.
I can't find the exact help topic again (see the early comment on web searches sucking), but I found one where a German author had a similar problem. You see, in German it is customer to consider the greeting as part of the first sentence even though there is a line break, so the second line does not usually start with a capital (unless it starts with a capitalized noun.) For example:
Sehr geehrte Frau Fuschin
ich schreibe Ihnen...
In particular "ich" rather than "Ich". But because it begins a line, autocorrect would change it to "Ich." What was notable was the response from the Microsoft tech employee. He argued with the author that it is never acceptable in any circumstance in any language to begin a line with an uncapitalized letter. So Outlook was really fixing his "errors." This is all of course ridiculous. And even if it somehow were true that no language on Earth allowed for an uncapitalized letter leading a line, there would still be good reason to want to be able to write an uncapitalized letter at the beginning of the line. I've already given the example of mathematical notation, but an even simpler application would be if I wanted to show an error to explain it is an error. For example, let's take capitlalization after a period. I very well may want to tell someone unskilled in English that you capitalize letters after a period. So I may say "You shouldn't write: 'Today is a class day. you should be in class' but rather 'Today is a class day. You should be in class." But if Outlook capitalizes both there is no way to show the error.
In short, the representative was acting like the program determined what was right and wrong, and the customer was a villain who was trying to destroy the truth that the program had already established. Rather than determine how to meet the customer's needs, the reaction was to say that the customers needs were wrong. (I've since learned that there is a setting hidden under the "editor" option, NOT the general settings, that allows for disabling this autocapitalizion. I'm not sure if this was present at the time of the conversation with the Microsoft employee or if it was added later. If it was there the whole time that makes the response even worse, since you can't even use the argument that the employee was trying to cover a fault of the program.)
Now this is just one example, but it's not an isolated event. Here's another one: Microsoft recently overhauled notepad for Windows 11, adding a bunch of features while also make it much less efficient. To the point where it can crash when opening a text file that's many megabytes in size. If you look around for discussions about this they almost start by people asking why you would be opening a large file in notepad to begin with. Of course, there are legitimate reasons to do this (ex. log files) but it could also just be done accidentally, and this causes problems when the new version of notepad tries to reopen all the files from the last session when it is opened again, potentially leading ot a crash loop where the program crashes, but when it is restarted it tries to load the same file and crashes again. It doesn't make sense to address this problem by lecturing the user for using notepad "wrong"... unless you see the user as the enemy who is trying to subvert your software.
Speaking of notepad, you may want to use the old version of notepad on Windows 11. This is technically possible, but very difficult. The program is there, right in the Windows directory. But Windows 11 has been set up in such a way that it uses a program alias of the new notepad for the old one. That is, if you try to open the old file, Windows "helpfully" replaces this with a call to the new file, which may make you think that the program is gone entirely. You can disable this in the settings, but even then I have trouble making it work normally. For example, if I pin the old notepad to the start menu, Windows will eventually override it with the new one. So I have to go directly to the Windows directory to use it. Now it would be one thing if they decided that they weren't going to suppor the old version at all and removed it from Windows entirely. That would be annoying, but at least an actual decision. It's something else when they leave it there and do everything they can to actively prevent you from using it, even after you've made clear repeatedly that this is what you want to do. It's not like the old version of notepad is going to break the system. At worst this is going to hurt the feelings of the developer of the new version. But if you view it as your job to prevent the user from doing what he wants and instead force him to do what you want, well, then this makes perfect sense.
Now this sort of behavior is rife in the modern Micrsoft. The refusal to allow users to move the task bar without any explanation beyond "you can't move it, that's how it is, fuck you" is another example. But you see this sort of thing all across the board in modern tech. For example, take TVs. I have a decade plus old TV that has a handy feature to change the aspect ratio on the fly. When I watch old enough DVDs, they will not properly display on a widescreen and instead will be stretched out. However, I can just adjust the aspect ratio so that it works. On most modern TVs this is impossible. But what is frustrating is that many allow you to change the aspect ratio but only if the signal has information in it saying that it is meant to be in a different aspect ratio. Unfortunately old DVDs do not have that information, since they expected to be played on a 4:3 TV. This is particularly frustrating when you have a widescreen version of a widescreen movie, but it has been hard encoded in a 4:3 box with bars. If you can't adjust the aspect ratio you are forced to watch it stretched out and with bars blocking the top and bottom. If you can adjust the aspect ratio you can at least get in a box that isn't stretched, and if you are lucky enough to have zoom with pan and scan then you can get it to properly fill your screen. These features were not uncommon in the past, but even high tech "smart" TVs tend to lack them, even though they do allow you to adjust aspect ratios some of the time. Just not the times you actualy need to. Of course, if you bring this up online (and actually get through to anyone at the company) the first quetion will be "why are you watching that old of DVDs in the first place?" Rather than fix the product or find a workaround, attack the customer, because the customer is the enemy.