AirPods, Duolingo, and Thunder and Lightning
Do Products Even Work Anymore? How do you clean the corners?
For a while, I had a robot vacuum cleaner.
I had always wanted one. No more hovering for me, just effortless, always-clean floors.
Then one year I was bought one. Christmas had come early. Or, rather, dead on time. The robot cleaner was, in fact, a Christmas present.
But when it came to cleaning floors, I was floored by how flawed it was. The robot hoover just didn’t work. It got tangled between chair legs or stuck on the smallest undulation on the floor. Sometimes it would go down the cul-de-sac between my bed and the wall and rigorously clean and re-clean the one-foot by five-foot alley, leaving the rest of the floor untouched by its robot brushes.
When it got stuck it would rotate a few times and make a plaintive sad beeping until I rescued it and set it on its way. It was like a mechanical, janitorial puppy.
Oh, did I mention it was round? On the occasions when it didn’t get stuck between the chair legs, it pushed gritty dunes of dust into corners. How had no one spotted that a round device could not clean corners in a square room? Did the designers live in lighthouses?
My robot was a “solid floor” cleaner for my laminate floors. This meant that in addition to brushing it also emptied a tank of water and then attempted, without success, to suck it up. After it had finished, I was left with pools of water to mop up. It was like a rising damp machine.
I had sort of always expected robot hoovers wouldn’t work. They seemed too good to be true. If it’s too good to be true, they say, it probably is. But I assumed they must more or less work for companies to justify selling them. And yet here I was, in the gap between reality and my dream of an effortlessly clean floor. Why wasn’t anyone doing anything about companies selling devices that didn’t work?
You might wonder if my robot was faulty. But many of the issues weren’t so much faults, as fundamental failures of design. Take, for example, cleaning the cleaner. Emptying the little guy, once he’d done his cursory wipe, was more work than cleaning the floor itself. There were joints and brushes and filters and pipes and tubes that all needed disconnecting and wiping. Hair tangled around the brush axels and clumps of soggy dust giblets caught in the twists. Not only was this harder than cleaning the floors, it was less pleasant. I’d stand there, my finger knuckle-deep in a rubber U-bend, picking out soggy nubbins of matted hair and floor gunk, and think to myself: is this definitely better than a mop?
In the end, I stopped using it. And when I built up the energy to try it again a few years later, the pump no longer worked. Frankly, I was relieved.
It’s not the only promising product I own that just doesn’t work. My left AirPod disconnects after 20 seconds of use. (Apple told me they could see why I’d be unhappy with that and they’d “definitely be able to help”. Their suggestion was I buy a new pair). I bought a wireless mechanical keyboard that had a satisfying clack, but would randomly repeat the same letter. It was as if it had a stutter. I had a keyboard with a speech impediment. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, it would go. The company apologised and sent me another one. It did the same thinggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg. I went back to my 20-year old wired keyboard.
Are things getting worse? Back in 2005, I was given one of those books-for-people-who-don’t-like-books: Is It Just Me or Is Everything Just Shit? At the time, it annoyed me. It was an overly negative, whiny rant with a quote from the Daily Mail on the cover. A couple of old men with their pseudo complaints about how much better it was during the Second World War. Now, I can’t work out if they had a point or if the inevitable flow of life is for us all to turn into them.
Some products are surely lower quality now due to cheap production and capitalism being capitalism: fast fashion, new-build houses, and so on. But my particular moans aren’t about falling standards, as much as a sort of product overreach. Engineers aspire to products they can’t quite make in practice. “Look what we have managed to create!” the companies proclaim. And in that moment, we really do believe them. And then we use them and see they don’t work. Are we just getting used to exaggerated claims? Is that why companies get away with shipping tech demos that only work in ideal conditions?
Maybe there’s something about the modern world. We’re not working with binaries where something either works or doesn’t. We’re working in probability and shades of grey. A wired cable is either connected or it isn’t. A wireless connection has to handle whatever else the air is filled with: solid objects, other waves, intermittent connectivity. A robot vacuum cleaner has to cope with chair legs, floor surfaces, room shapes and do the best it can. There is fuzziness.
Perhaps this is why giant language models that guess the next most likely word are having their moment even though so often they produce nonsense. We have become increasingly desensitized to products being more miss than hit. Douglas Adams’s witticism about technology springs to mind: “Technology is the name for stuff that doesn’t work properly yet”.
The older I get, the more I wonder if even that “yet” is wishful thinking.
Elsewhere
On the subject of AirPods, Casey Johnson’s article, Into Thin AirPods, covers the other side of them: what happens when they go missing? The new reality is that many of our possessions have trackers in them, which allows us to go on vigilante-esque chases after our Borrower-stolen possessions:
Which is not to say that I was committed to getting them back at any cost. Before I did anything, I made peace with the idea of pulling out of the dive for my own safety. I was prepared to settle for the Thrill of the Chase, and maybe just a glimpse of the perp. I’m explaining this to you because you look nervous; rest assured, I’m not the type of person to jump on the back of some menacing biker in a leather vest and demand my AirPods.
Are You Thunder or Lightning? by Sophie Haigney
Sophie Haigney’s writing is always fun. There’s something delightful about these silly distinctions that are both nonsense and immediately understandable.
I have always liked categorical statements that are obviously wrong. When someone says to me “This is the way the world works,” I get very excited, even though of course nobody knows how the world works. Or, even better: “There are only two types of people in the world.” This statement is usually followed by two binary qualities that could be used to define and divide all of humanity. Such a proposition is clearly ridiculous and, to me, deeply appealing.
Duolingo Turned Me Into a Monster by Mark Serrels
This is a story about Duolingo. That's obvious. But it's really a story about doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. It's a story about how gamification can rapidly transform one thing into another, completely different thing.
I’ve never gotten into Duolingo, but I’ve been fascinated by watching people who have. Both the addictive quality of it and the techniques people develop to game the game. And then there are the strangers in the diamond league. The ones who get 5,000 points on the first day. I am fascinated by their lives. Do they have a team working with them? Are they hacking or tricking it in some way? Do they do this every week? (This article doesn’t answer any of those questions, but it’s a fun read all the same.)
Until next time,
Simon