Rick's b.log - entry 2025/08/21

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Self-inflicted psychosomatic suffering

That's probably not how you expected this article to begin given that alliteration-heavy title. Bear with me. There's a point in here somewhere. Let's try to find it together...

This wasn't a conscious choice on my part. I didn't tap on a button marked "Yes, mess things up for me". No, the update just happened, silently, in the background, like a burglar that rearranges all your furniture and then has the audacity to leave a note saying "We hope you enjoy your refreshed Living Room Experience!".

Now, to be fair to me, I do turn off all automatic updates that I can find. The OS, apps, the lot. Since Google has a woeful lack of ability to roll-back to an earlier app or whatever, plus I've been bitten by the automatic update "improvements" in the past. More advertising? Yes! Switching a pop-up graphic for an unskippable full-screen advert for goddamned motherforking Temu and that crazy chick breaking stuff? Yes. Removing functionality to make a paid "pro" release? Yes. Or the app just got bought out by some random no-name Chinese autofit as a bait-and-switch for malware? Yes!

No, this wasn't any of that. This was Google Play Services which is a law unto itself. If Google, in their wisdom, decide that You Require A Security Update, then they'll push it to your device. Don't auto-update? Ignored. Only download updates over WiFi? Ignored. Because Google knows best, and more importantly, Google doesn't have to pay for your connectivity.

I unlocked my phone expecting to look up something in the browser, more specifically to ask an chatbot who it thought would win in a battle royale between a Canada Goose and a Cassowary, but I noticed that my button bar icons were ever so slightly not the same. Thinking maybe it was the display settings, I went to look at my settings to see some of them had been rearranged and there were now notifications for things that I could have sworn I muted. Sensing that something was amiss, I did a round of checking my privacy. The automatic sending of usage statistics had not been turned back on, but the "Send URLs of everything I visit to Google" had been magically turned back on. Because some programmer/manager in California had decided I would benefit from sharing this information with them "because security".

A screenshot of a data slurp option that ticked itself.

Please explain these auto-enabling options in a way that makes sense.

Back in the 1980s - yes, another nostalgia trip - an "update" was an actual physical thing. It had weight, well, a few grams plus the anti-static wrapping and the envelope. Yup, envelope, because you got your update in the post, in the form of a new (EP)ROM chip. EPROMs were better for low-volume updates as they could be programmed on demand. You could tell because they had this little quartz window, often with a thick sticker over top, and a part number 27 followed by three numbers giving the size in kilobits (27064 = 64Kbits or 8KiB; 27128 = 128Kbits or 16KiB). Posher companies would send a mask-programmed ROM, but these are read only (as the name implies), there's no way to erase and rewrite them if something is wrong.
For my younger readers, this was an era before the invention of FlashROM.

A picture of an EPROM on a circuit board.

An EPROM on a circuit board (big thing bottom-left, it's a 27C256).

Performing the update meant finding a screwdriver, removing the screws to take the machine apart, locating the old ROM and delicately easing out the chip with rows of pins that thanks to time and oxidation, clung on tighter than the lid of an unopened jam jar. Whatever you did, you had to line up the new ROM very carefully and ease it into place with microagressions. If you laid it in place and gave it a hefty poke, you would risk bending a pin and while this can sometimes be salvaged, it's fiddly and complicated and very liable to risk the pin breaking off completely. This is a Not Good outcome.

But when you got it right? Oh, the joy! Suddenly your word processor no longer wet itself if you had word wrapping on and typed a single line of text with no spaces to break at (an "Aaaaaaargh!" appropriately long to cover your feelings on this decade would do it). Suddenly your printer understood that pounds and hashes were not the same character. Or you could *. a double-sided disc with the wrong track setting and it would throw an error instead of locking up.
Meaningful and hard-earned improvements. Updates you could point to and say, "Yup, that fixes a problem".

Compare that to now where you're looking at hideously bloated downloads that take fractions of hours to install, after which your phone or computer behaves exactly the same except all your notification sounds have to the default annoying chime and multiple icons have randomly changed so if you used to go to your photos and screenshots by looking for the thing that looks like a framed picture, it's now the moon rising over some mountains like something from a Hanafuda card.

And don't even try to delay. Assuming you are even given an option, choosing "Remind me later" will cause your device to sulk like a like a disappointed parent: Really? You're still living in 2024? You know we've moved on now, right? And it'll then helpfully download the update anyway.

Now the bit that really rankles is that we don't really own our shiny-shiny anymore. Having paid for it, we're now paying more in renting our access to it, and often this is cheaper than one-off payments for things because mumble mumble racket mumble.

Remember when you bought a printer and that was it? You plugged it in, maybe installed the driver from a floppy disc with a naff clip-art logo on it, or maybe just told your software that you are using a whatever where "whatever" was what all of those printers pretended to be (usually fx80, lq, proprinter, lj, or esc/p...), and and off you went printing stuff. And you got a manual that was like a hundred and fifty pages thick that described the printer's operation in detail in case you felt inclined to write your own printer driver to take advantage of the two extra bitmap fonts built into the thing over the standard Elite and Pica, or maybe to engage the NLQ mode which was a lot slower but a lot better to look at.
Because back in the eighties that's just how we did things. Loads of people hacked their printer driver to stuff in extra escape sequences to do funky things (like Escp1 to set proportional spacing).

Now? Nowadays printers refuse to work, even to scan stuff, unless they can phone home to make sure you're using "genuine ink" sold at extortionate prices. Which is basically like your kettle refusing to boil water, for whatever reason you might want hot water, unless it knows you have PG Tips in stock.

It's the same with software. Features you actually like and make use of can vanish overnight because "our analytics show low engagement". Decent looking informative icons get replaced by some abstract blob that looks like it should have a show on CBeebies.
Speaking of icons, remember when they looked like the thing they represented? A floppy disc for "Save", a spanner for "Settings", and so on? Now it's abstract nonsense. Like calling up a menu. The icon doesn't look like a menu. Once upon a time it might have been a cog-wheel but that has been taken to imply settings. No, your menu might be three dots, an ellipses. Or maybe that equivalence sign of three lines stacked which for some reason is called a "hamburger". Or maybe both depending on the app and theme, because consistency is for the feeble-minded. Clearly your menu is over there, whatever the icon looks like, unless it isn't.

Technology should work like the A-Team's completely inconspicuous van. Insert the key and turn, the van goes vroooom, and they speed off to foil the villain of the week whilst leaving an impressive dust cloud. The van did not require a firmware update before the handbrake would work again. The van did not randomly decide to change all its dashboard controls because someone at General Motors wanted "a fresh user experience".
Just try to imagine B.A. wanting to chase the bad guys but gets stymied by his van saying "Installing update 1 of 94. Estimated time: 37 minutes - do not turn off ignition". He'd have ripped the ECU out with his bare hands and used it as a projectile weapon, then welded something to replace it.

Of course, the '80s weren't perfect. Sometimes your games wouldn't load. Sometimes your video ULA would toast itself. Michael Knight never had to deal with upgrades. You couldn't write a blog article much longer than this. We're already up to ten thousand characters and there's only so much memory in the machine.

But here's the thing, you were in control. If it worked, it worked because you made it work. You had the satisfaction of bending technology to your will, even if your will sometimes involved rewinding the cassette and swearing a lot, or hitting it with a copy of Gray's Anatomy (the 1,606 page book!) while swearing even more.

Now? Updates happen to you. Sometimes even if you turn them off. You're a passenger, or maybe a victim. A Euler diagram would have considerable overlap.

And then, the final insult. The patronisingly smug pop-up asking "Are you enjoying this update?".

No. I am not enjoying this update, I don't even know what this update updates because the totality of the description of what's new is usually, and I quote: "· Bug fixes and performance improvements" or "· Security enhancements".

Screenshot of What's New in Google Docs saying nothing useful.

Most of Google's apps are like this, it's pathetic.

So I endured the update. I tolerated it, not like I have much choice. And maybe I'm even going to suffer it in the same sense as people suffer for their chosen god by way of self-flagellation.

My only flicker of joy, since you ask, is in imagining throwing all of this rubbish away and going back to a Master 128 that only gets updated when I remove the lid and poke around inside. Only... I don't own a Master 128.
I do own a Beeb, a standard 32K model B, which may or may not still work (it's been nearly a quarter of a century). But I'm not sure that would be much good for me, you've seen how many words I can burn through when I'm on a roll. Plus, I never managed to find a PDF of a user guide for the EDWORD2 ROM. After all, where would I be without a healthy dose of italics for my now nearly twelve thousand characters?

Oh, and if you're wondering who would win that fight, it's an angry bird versus a feathered tank that has more in common with vicious dinosaurs than birds. You can read how that fight would go.

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