Tech Is Getting Worse Vol. 9 - The Internet Is Barely Usable Anymore

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There was this product that caught my interest. Problem is, I couldn’t watch the embedded preview video for it because it requires a sign in, in order to confirm I’m not a bot…

…even though I’m already signed in to YouTube and it suddenly works just fine when I open YouTube in a new tab….

I’m sold on the software, so I go to download it. Except I can’t, because my browser struggles to download a 3.2 GB file without having a meltdown and giving up either halfway through or at the very end over an extremely vague “network issue”.

I open up JDownloader 2 because it’s supposed to specialize in downloading things without this issue. Most of the time, it does. Except for the times it’s blocked by Cloudflare.

Rinse and repeat this headache with another big file I want to download. Now it requires a captcha! And for some reason, Jdownloader 2 doesn’t do captchas on this particular website anymore. Very cool!

I had a 4chan tab open so I figured I would spark a discussion, see if anyone has any alternatives. Emphasis on would, because 4chan now requires you solve advanced and inane captcha bullshit in order to post anything.

I’m not sure why 4chan is the only site that has felt the need to use the most pretentious captchas known to man. One symbol looks exactly like what it's asking for, but it still won't accept it 70% of the time. And you have to run this chance four times. If that fails, you have to wait another minute. What’s the timer for? What is it supposed to be stopping? Who knows. I doubt they know either.

Meanwhile, I try to download a YouTube video. JDownloader needs cookies to process the video information in order to download it. Even after importing the cookies, JDownloader can’t find the video.

Alright, maybe yt-dlp can do the job. Nope! That also needs cookies.

Well, can’t get that to work. I follow the on-screen instructions to import cookies from both Edge and Firefox. Error after error after error. Very cool.

You visit a website and it fails with an "ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR." Then you turn on your VPN and it works.

But on the other hand, you turn on your VPN and suddenly a bunch of other websites stop working.

It’s actually impressive, the level at which things just don’t work anymore. What are we doing? Where are we at right now?

Every click is a gauntlet to stop bots… and these gauntlets were probably made by bots. Actual humans are left crawling through the mud and barbed wire and it's still not enough. The labyrinth grows thornier by the day, and at some point, we might as well accept that we’re back to the growing pains of dial-up and Windows 98 instability.

I get out my phone to try to read lyrics for a song on Genius, and the site crashes about three times in a row because of the sheer number of popups and ads happening in the background.

Someone sends you a link to an Instagram reel… you need the Instagram app for it to function correctly. If not? 50% of the page is broken, and the other 50% is basically a fake button that takes you to the app download page. The whole mobile/app ecosystem has been a disaster for mankind. I feel like a boomer for asking this, but it is a legitimate question that deserves an answer: WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED TO BE A FUCKING APP!?

You go to Twitch.tv to watch a streamer and you’re forced (even with an adblocker) to watch two to four minutes of ads before you even get a preview.

Everything wants your proof of humanity, and then some. Everything wants your email, your ID, your subscription, your hand-holding, your babysitting.

And everything feels vibe coded…

Here’s a bit of a programming clusterfuck I ran into recently:

A program called “FanControl” needed to update. I’m one of the insane ones that likes to keep my software updated.

So, business as usual. Suddenly it demands that I update this… nightmare that is Microsoft’s “.NET”.

Why couldn’t FanControl do it itself? Who knows.

Why did it even need this? Who knows.

You’d think a program that only does a job as simple as managing your PC fans would be painfully simple, but alas.

So, I went and downloaded .NET from this page - every single version of it - to no avail. FanControl still complained about .NET needing an update. And now there’s now a bunch of useless junk installed on my PC. How convenient.

(And if you’ve used Windows long enough like I have – uninstalling something is almost never a simple operation. It leaves garbage in the background that takes up space for infinity until it’s manually deleted.)

A Google search brought me to a reddit thread. Turns out, I had to enter this highly specific command into the command prompt:

winget install Microsoft.DotNet.DesktopRuntime.10

Why couldn’t they just explain this in the update pop-up? Who knows.

As I opened LibreOffice to write about this, I was once again met with a request to update. “No problem”, I thought to myself. I'll just hit the update button and get to work.

Wrong. LibreOffice asks that I MANUALLY install this update… and then restart my whole PC just to apply said update.

Everything just feels vibe coded.

Everything feels like it wasn’t put together by humans that actually use the software they created. Everything feels hostile to the user.

And I’m sure much of these things that I’m talking about are made by real people.

For example, I doubt “The Document Foundation” has (yet) to use LLMs to upkeep this LibreOffice project. I’m sure the makers of FanControl have (yet) to use LLMs to upkeep a fan management program…

…but after the clusterfuck I dealt with, it certainly feels that way.

It’s strange. There’s blogs all over Hacker News that are all about the mumbo jumbo nuances of programming. Guides on maximizing the organization of your your code base… optimization… the BEST programming practices…

…and yet, you don’t actually see any of these practices being implemented in the actual scene. People are talking about clean and efficient code, but where are the results? It should be common place, but much like common sense… it’s talked about a lot yet nowhere to be found.

A website asks you to fill in a captcha, you do it 8 times, it still doesn’t let you in.

A website asks you to log in. You log in, and it still can’t register that you’re logged in.

How hard can it be!?

Every browser is either Chrome or Firefox at its core, yet the internet feels like it’s designed for dozens.

The internet is barely usable anymore.