Cast your mind back to when you learned to drive, ride a bike, speak a foreign language, perform a tracheostomy, or acquire any other skill. Wasn’t confidence the key to your success? Whatever we do in life, confidence is always critical. If you run a business, one of the metrics that are likely to be collected is confidence in your business, as that’s such an important economic indicator. Confidence is every bit as important in computing.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS. From text files that simply won’t show up in Spotlight search, to Clock timers that are blank and don’t function, there’s one common feature: macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn’t report that to the user, instead just burying it deep in the log.
One reason for this is that macOS so seldom reports errors, and when it does, it’s uninformative if not downright misleading. Here’s a small gallery of examples I’ve encountered over the last few years, to bring back unhappy memories.
Silent failures like these are least likely to be reported to Apple. In most cases, we find ourselves a workaround, here to abandon Web Archives and switch to saving webpages as PDF instead. When someone else mentions they too have the same problem, we advise them that Web Archives are broken, and our loss of confidence spreads by contagion.
Honest and understandable error reporting is essential to confidence. It enables us to tackle problems rather than just giving up in frustration, assuming that it’s yet another feature we used to rely on that has succumbed in the rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door.
Eroding confidence is also a problem that the vendors of AI appear to have overlooked, or at least seriously underestimated. It’s all very well using the euphemism of hallucination to play down the severity of errors generated by LLMs. But those can only cause users to lose confidence, no matter how ‘intelligent’ you might think your AI is becoming. Go talk to the lawyers who have been caught out by courts submitting AI fabrications whether they still have full confidence in your product.
The Eclectic Light Company Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
The Eclectic Light Company Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.
Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.
Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.
You must be logged in to post a comment.