Just give me the answer, ChatGPT

Last week, I tinkered with developing a Shopify App. Shopify’s developer guides are… eh – a mixed bag. What I wanted to do just wouldn’t work. So, when I can’t find an answer in their guides and it’s also not easily googled, I turn to ChatGPT. I don’t often use ChatGPT for this kind of stuff – I still mostly use Google because it’s faster – but I’ve found that searching for Shopify’s subscription guides often leads to forum posts with no clear answers.

The issue with ChatGPT is that it can be so annoying. It’s like talking to that one coworker who never responds directly to your questions, trying to hide that they secretly have no idea what they’re doing. Just give me an answer, Chatty!

There’s a new bug in the YouTube TV app for Google TV that is so utterly stupid that I need to rant about it.

When you play a video and press back on the remote, it should jump back 10 seconds. Well, now it now jumps back 10 seconds… and then immediately skips forwards 10 seconds to where you were before. So pressing back is basically doing nothing anymore, other than glitching a bit. You have to press back multiple times, or pause first and then press back.

The same thing also happens when you press forwards: It skips forwards 10 seconds, and then jumps back to where you were before.

This is already pretty annoying. But now comes the best part:

There’s this “Jump ahead” YouTube Premium feature that entirely skips a commonly skipped segment. You press forwards once, it knows that many people skipped this segment as well, and then jumps ahead to where other people usually jumped to. It basically allows you to skip sponsor segments quickly. So you press forwards once on the remote, it skips to the end of the sponsor segment, and you can immediately continue. That’s a really great feature! The UX is a bit meh but in theory it’s a great idea.

But now, with this freaking new bug, it skips the sponsor segment, then glitches back, and then thinks that you didn’t want to skip the whole segment (because it looks like you jumped back), so it removes this skipping point so moving forwards won’t skip the whole segment again. Which means you can’t skip the segment again. So this whole freaking feature is now not working anymore.

There are some UX lessons here about these “magic features” that sometimes appear and disappear that I might want to write about in the future, but for now I only care about how the actual fuck it’s possible that the YOUTUBE APP—the official app for THE SECOND MOST VISITED WEBSITE ON THE WORLD—developed by FREAKING GOOGLE is constantly shipping broken crap that’s noticeable within seconds of using a core feature. When did software turn so shit?

Just give me the answer, ChatGPT

Last week, I tinkered with developing a Shopify App. Shopify’s developer guides are… eh – a mixed bag. What I wanted to do just wouldn’t work. So, when I can’t find an answer in their guides and it’s also not easily googled, I turn to ChatGPT. I don’t often use ChatGPT for this kind of stuff – I still mostly use Google because it’s faster – but I’ve found that searching for Shopify’s subscription guides often leads to forum posts with no clear answers.

The issue with ChatGPT is that it can be so annoying. It’s like talking to that one coworker who never responds directly to your questions, trying to hide that they secretly have no idea what they’re doing. Just give me an answer, Chatty!

There’s a new bug in the YouTube TV app for Google TV that is so utterly stupid that I need to rant about it.

When you play a video and press back on the remote, it should jump back 10 seconds. Well, now it now jumps back 10 seconds… and then immediately skips forwards 10 seconds to where you were before. So pressing back is basically doing nothing anymore, other than glitching a bit. You have to press back multiple times, or pause first and then press back.

The same thing also happens when you press forwards: It skips forwards 10 seconds, and then jumps back to where you were before.

This is already pretty annoying. But now comes the best part:

There’s this “Jump ahead” YouTube Premium feature that entirely skips a commonly skipped segment. You press forwards once, it knows that many people skipped this segment as well, and then jumps ahead to where other people usually jumped to. It basically allows you to skip sponsor segments quickly. So you press forwards once on the remote, it skips to the end of the sponsor segment, and you can immediately continue. That’s a really great feature! The UX is a bit meh but in theory it’s a great idea.

But now, with this freaking new bug, it skips the sponsor segment, then glitches back, and then thinks that you didn’t want to skip the whole segment (because it looks like you jumped back), so it removes this skipping point so moving forwards won’t skip the whole segment again. Which means you can’t skip the segment again. So this whole freaking feature is now not working anymore.

There are some UX lessons here about these “magic features” that sometimes appear and disappear that I might want to write about in the future, but for now I only care about how the actual fuck it’s possible that the YOUTUBE APP—the official app for THE SECOND MOST VISITED WEBSITE ON THE WORLD—developed by FREAKING GOOGLE is constantly shipping broken crap that’s noticeable within seconds of using a core feature. When did software turn so shit?

Reading less short message social media

I stopped scrolling through Bluesky for a month, and I really enjoyed that month.

Even though Bluesky and Mastodon are much nicer places than Twitter, I realized that I don’t enjoy the experience of scrolling through short message social media. There are a few posts here and there that are nice or funny or interesting, but if there’s just a one post that I don’t want to read or think about, the whole experience is ruined for me.

It’s not about keeping your feed clean of extremism and other bullshit. It was easy to keep my feeds clean on Bluesky and Mastodon. But people think and post about a lot of different things, and I’m just not interested in all of them, nor do I want to spend any amount of mental capacity thinking about them. Scrolling past them is difficult. I have to force myself not to read something I’m not interested in. And that just makes it not a great experience.

I subscribe to a YouTube channel because I’m interested in the kind of content they make, and I assume that future content will be similar. And I follow people on Instagram because I like the pictures they post. But short message services just give me too much variety in what to expect.

So, I will continue what I did for a month. I deleted the Bluesky app from my phone and removed it from my browser bookmarks. I’ll still cross-post my posts there, because of course I want to reach an audience. And maybe I’ll post the occasional meme there. (Why not post them here?) But for now, I don’t want to consume text feeds.

I’m using em dashes—but I’m not an AI

Please don’t make the em dash—the long hyphen I’m using here—an indicator of AI-written text. I recently saw a post on LinkedIn (it pains me to admit it) where someone wrote a script to hide all comments containing an em dash because they’re highly likely to be AI-generated. I think there’s truth to it. But I also hate the fact that I think there’s truth to it.

Reading less short message social media

I stopped scrolling through Bluesky for a month, and I really enjoyed that month.

Even though Bluesky and Mastodon are much nicer places than Twitter, I realized that I don’t enjoy the experience of scrolling through short message social media. There are a few posts here and there that are nice or funny or interesting, but if there’s just a one post that I don’t want to read or think about, the whole experience is ruined for me.

It’s not about keeping your feed clean of extremism and other bullshit. It was easy to keep my feeds clean on Bluesky and Mastodon. But people think and post about a lot of different things, and I’m just not interested in all of them, nor do I want to spend any amount of mental capacity thinking about them. Scrolling past them is difficult. I have to force myself not to read something I’m not interested in. And that just makes it not a great experience.

I subscribe to a YouTube channel because I’m interested in the kind of content they make, and I assume that future content will be similar. And I follow people on Instagram because I like the pictures they post. But short message services just give me too much variety in what to expect.

So, I will continue what I did for a month. I deleted the Bluesky app from my phone and removed it from my browser bookmarks. I’ll still cross-post my posts there, because of course I want to reach an audience. And maybe I’ll post the occasional meme there. (Why not post them here?) But for now, I don’t want to consume text feeds.

I’m using em dashes—but I’m not an AI

Please don’t make the em dash—the long hyphen I’m using here—an indicator of AI-written text. I recently saw a post on LinkedIn (it pains me to admit it) where someone wrote a script to hide all comments containing an em dash because they’re highly likely to be AI-generated. I think there’s truth to it. But I also hate the fact that I think there’s truth to it.