Also the product itself is likely to suck.

One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.

I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.

AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!

This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:

> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.

Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.

Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.

It drives me crazy that after every update the menu icons, like the browser, is in a completely different arbitrary place. And since Tesla doesn't want to allow Carplay I'm forced to use the slightly less than useful mobile web version of my favourite apps.

The touchscreen is the only thing that's kept me from leasing a Tesla the past 8 years.

can you blame them? nondeterministic products have resulted in some of the most successful businesses of All Time (tiktok, reels, google search, product recommendations)

> I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.

Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.