Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1343
Back to vinyl, lifting depression, archaic Seinfeld and Simpsons references, Rick’s theory of Enterprise SaaS Roadblocking, Civ VII, Jerome Powell rant, that AI social network has potential.
What’s up, hello fair GMHHAY readers, how’s tricks? Miss you guys. I hope your lives are swell. Guess what? I am listening to vinyl! Done with the 70+ hour “to investigate” playlist. Now I get to tackle my 30 or so new records. Oh also I should tackle my Release Radar for this week: new Hold Steady, Japandroids, Bright Eyes, some good stuff. I am curious about this Bright Eyes record.
My head hurts.
But you will be excited to know, I am sure, that my depression is lifting. I am in a pretty good mood today, excited to get some stuff done. It is a “recharge day” at Nimbus — we have one a month — and it is already working! I feel recharged! So recharged I will now work on pool/storage stuff all day! What fun!
Found another reasonably priced June oven on eBay today but fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, won’t get fooled again, I emailed the seller to ask if they have the original box. No more June Oven purchases on the internet without the original box, that is my new solemn vow.
Oh speaking of “Fool me once shame on you fool me twice won’t get fooled again,” I was in a meeting yesterday where someone (Hi Levi) made a Seinfeld reference and the youngest person in the room — not that young! A millennial! — didn’t get it. And I regret to inform my fellow Gen Xers that Seinfeld and Simpson references have, finally, after decades, fallen out of the cultural mainstream. They kinda lasted an insanely long time, if you think about it. They had a good run. But it is over. Alas.
Okay here is my new grand theory. It is half-baked, but it goes something like this: the increased amount of security requirements, along with enshittification, has given the enterprise SaaS market significant headwinds, because people are fucking sick of logging into apps. I am so tired of it. Especially the ones (ahem Justworks, ahem Carta, ahem Vanta) that think they are being secure by logging me out all the fucking time. Especially the ones (ahem every freakin bank in the world) who are still insisting on SMS-based 2-factor authentication.
(Side note, I installed iOS 18 and Mac OS 15 Sequoia this week, and the whole thing where you can now see your phone screen on your Mac is pretty amazing for precisely this reason. Because every day I have to log into like five stupid apps that are still texting codes to my phone rather than using any modern security approach like hardware keys or passkeys. Now at least I don’t have to dig out my phone to enter the code. It still sucks though).
In theory, it is super helpful when you say to someone “yes all of the information is here in this handy online tool we use, just click this link and you can read all the updates/see your task list/upload this thing/whatever.” But in actuality it fucking sucks, because what I see when I see those words now is “we now invite you to a five-minute exercise in inefficiency, UX cruelty, frustration, and bureaucratic incompetence logging into this tool.”
And yes, I said it: UX Cruelty. As far as I can tell not one site, not one UX designer ever has spent any time making the login process pleasant. In fact, it’s getting worse: whether for security or cloying trendiness (I will be generous and assume the former) nowadays you can’t even put your username and password in on the same screen.
SO:
I get a friendly link saying click here to do some work
I click it
I get to a login screen that only asks for an email. I enter the email. Click.
If I’m lucky, the next thing I see is a password field. But sometimes (Uber, Slack) you gotta tell it “no, don’t send me a fucking email link, I know my password, just let me enter it.” Extra clicks.
You enter the password. Click. We have now at least doubled the number of clicks from the good old days.
Rather than “just working” via a Passkey (which have been around for a while now! It is time!) or asking you to simply tap your hardware key, you get a stupid prompt asking you how you want your insecure, security-as-theater 2FA code: text or email. You choose. Click. You gotta wait. And wait. And copy and paste (maybe! Sometimes they turn that off). Click click click.
There might be a button that says “remember me” or “do not ask for a code next time.” They almost never work! Utterly useless clicks but will get me every time. This is, maybe, because of your (completely reasonable) Chrome or Safari security settings, but also because (ahem Justworks, Google) the people who make the software do not fucking care.
So, yes. We all experience this, common knowledge, it sucks. My new theory is that this whole stupid, miserable ecosystem is:
Presenting significant tailwinds to the adoption of new SaaS tools in the workplace not accounted for in business plans and investment cycles
Reinforcing monopolies because, odds are, you are already logged in.
Causing stress in the workplace because with any SaaS product in the workplace, there are cohorts of users:
Daily users, who are by and large constantly logged in and used to the quirks of this particular system
Casual users, for whom this whole ringomorale is more unpleasant than for everyone else. It does not help that the casual users are often management
Non-users, for whom all this is moot.
So basically someone identifies a need for a new SaaS tool at work, wants to use it, gets permission from their boss, starts using it, but the boss needs to log in every once in a while, and it absolutely sucks to log in, so the boss starts to hate the tool.
Or, like, a PM is trying to get the whole company to use a PM tool and it’s fine for the daily-users like designers, but everyone else fucking hates it because just getting logged in sucks.
Or, you know, Salesforce (bah duh bump, good one Rick).
So, you know, Rick’s theory of Enterprise SaaS Roadblocking. In some ways it’s just a corrolary of Enshittification, but not completely, because the web is getting more insecure, but also UX laziness, just fucking laziness.
I use nine banking sites across my personal life, day job, side job and HOA treasurer (now his watch has ended, thank god). ONE — one! — supports hardware keys. Zero support passkeys. This is not, exactly, enshittification in the Doctorowian (new word? Maybe someone coined that word 50 years ago about his non-relative) sense. It is laziness.
(May have over-complicated that paragraph with that linguistic and geneological aside, Apologies.)
It is laziness.
Like your writing with all these asides embedded into the middle of coherent grafs, Rick, har har har.
Well, yes, Rick, but I am not getting paid for this and expecting millions of people to use it for work.
Fair point, Rick.
Rick’s theory of Enterprise SaaS Roadblocking. Book it.
Someone will someday write a proper Manifesto about all this and claim it and it will spread far and wide on the internet because it’s not, you know, sandwiched between commentary about Angel Olsen and lazy Fed commentaries. That’s fine, they can have the glory. I have the catharsis of ranting and you can never take that away.
Civ VII is not going to have additional tile yields for trees and whatnot and I am not sure how I feel about that. The introduction of biomes sounds cool but I don’t love the idea of a “science biome.” Ed and Karl have been doing the rounds doing interviews with the biggest Civ streamers, Q&As and whatnot. Honestly, the Civ VII promo junket has been pretty sharp, lotta people could take notes. Their fandom isn’t completely fawning, either: they are facing a bit of hostility, as Civ designers often do for changing beloved mechanics. But they are doing just great. I am still mostly excited about its launch and have scheduled taking a week off of work when it launches in February because I am crazy.
Also Ed and Karl have these shirts that just have giant roman numbers VIIs on them and I kinda want one.
Huh I wonder if Jane remembers any of our Roman Numeral tutorials from when she was three. I should check. I suspect no.
And don’t blame me, man. She asked about them.
Did my Walmart run yesterday: I was hoping to stall till today like normal but we ran out of everything and if I didn’t go, there woulda been no breakfast for Jane today. Man, I gotta say: every product we love dies eventually. It’s like people engineer products for people like me, I’m the only one that says “yes!” and starts buying it, but that’s not enough, so it disappears. Emma’s cereal is gone. After six months I think we have to accept it’s not coming back. Our organic peanut butter is gone. Poof. You don’t get organic natural anymore, you only get natural. It is sad. I miss my Products. Products. I miss Caffeine-Free Diet Mountain Dew so much and yes, they still sell it in plastic bottles but fuck that, cans only. The cans are gone. And it’s just sitting there, in evil plastic bottles, on the shelves of the store, taunting me. Intolerable.
The fed lowered interest rates half a point, finally. Losers. One member was like “no, I want to keep the plebes suffering we shouldn’t go more than a quarter point down,” but honestly I think she was probably just a plant, so Jerome could look bold and beautiful doing the bare minimum. He even admitted that they probably should have done it back in June, but the jobs report came out after their meeting, so how could they have known? The answer is, of course: you could have known because you fucking scheduled the meeting and you should have been smart enough to schedule it after the jobs report.
Also it’s kind of amazing that the people who are responsible for the global economy think it’s right and proper that they should get to take a month or two off in the summer. No, dawg, you’re just like air traffic control workers and power plant staff: this shit has to always be working. You don’t get to turn off the power or close airports for a month in the summer. Ditto for the economy.
It continually astonishes me that the Fed just flat-out ignores one of the three explicit instructions that found the institution. And arguably the most important one! I am sympathetic to the three-way dilemma in project management: something has gotta give. But it is hella telling that the fed always thinks that “employment levels” are the one that should get sacrificed on the altar of inflation and interest rates. That is wrong! If you put it to a vote to all americans which of the three (three! not two!) mandates of the federal reserve should be primary, do you think “jobs” would win by 80 or 90 percent? Do we think “interest rates” would even crack double-digits in that vote? But so what! Who cares what congress mandated, who cares what the people want. Damn your eyes.
Also I have been informed that Jerome Powell is a Deadhead. Make of that what you will.
Finally, a confession. Lotta people very bent out of shape about this guy who made a social network where it’s just you and a bunch of AIs. But I gotta say: this is the first truly useful thing I have heard of emerging from this entire AI debacle. To whit:
I personally want this. Probably at a level of sophistication higher than it currently exists, but I would absolutely sign up for a social network that was just a bunch of pretty realistic people telling me awesome things about me and complimenting me, maybe flirting with me. I think we could all use the ego boost, and I think it would be a great pressure release for, like, 90% of humanity.
It would be amazing if you could gently steer trolls into one without them knowing and just shunt them off into their own little land of the lost where the bots act appalled and outraged at the trolls’ oh-so-scandalous behavior and the trolls feel smug. Sci fi book plot right there.
Yeah, anyway, I would sign up for that. Seems fun. No hate here.
OK well usually I end with a Jane story do I have any new Jane stories today? She is still saying poop a lot. She drew a nice heart this morning on the sketch app in the truck. She has been accessorizing lately and it is cute. She made a new friend on the playground yesterday. I detect her Rick bossiness in her, she was directing the new friend through speed trials across a (plastic) log obstacle course like a military drill Sergeant. She’s a girl so I’m gonna let this bossiness streak run unchecked, I will spare her the years of trying to not be a boss that I subjected myself to. Emma said she was asking about death at bedtime again, so we’ll see if she picks up that thread tonight. We had a conversation about teasing this morning, reminding her to be careful to not make people sad by calling them poopy butts. She seemed to get it.
Thank you, Bluey for the teasing episode.
Justa mix today. Little long but, as you may have noticed, I have been listening to a lot of music lately. Most everything here is pretty new, save for Mike Krol, whom we discussed recently. I am not as enamored with the Jack White album as others, but it is not terrible. I am keenly curious about this new Kim Deal seems like e real departure. Love love love the new Starflyer 59 and you will probably have to endure me ranting about it some more.
Have a lovely weekend. I’m Tom Bodett and we’ll leave the lights on for you.