Examples of brain dead software design

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#3466501 3-Mar-2026 16:41

MadEngineer:

Has anyone noticed that websites can randomly drop from your Edge or Chrome internet history, breaking your flow of how you came to a particular site? Seems to always be around Google searches. Like, I was searching for some sports gear last night and I wanted to go back to a specific page or search result but had it dropped from history altogether.

Yep, I've noticed this in Safari as well. Google doesn't link directly to the target site but rather redirects you, so it must have something to do with that.

Kookoo

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#3466574 3-Mar-2026 20:44

A shout out to Kiwibank dev team. It used to take me between 4-5 minutes to load a page on the new kiwibank online banking on Firefox with noscript and ublock enabled. They're using launchdarkly that ublock is having a filed day with. The console was looking pretty nightmarish. I sent them a feisty email last week. They must've done a release today because it now loads in under 3 seconds. Nice.

Hello, Ground!

SepticSceptic

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#3466879 4-Mar-2026 22:17

MS Outlook calendar Snooze feature. Before the appointed time, you can only choose 5 10 or 15 minutes before the event.

I'm sure there was at least 1hr and 2hr snooze before the event.

Ideal for when you need to travel to your appointment , and the 1hr before snooze was perfect for local Auckland travel.

Now I have mess around with the original appointment to change the Reminder period

My reminder period is set for 1hr, but almost every invitation is the default 15 minutes .

These minor irritations and frictions grind my gears. It shouldn't be this aggravating .

A smart AI or even a smart fuzzy logic version of Outlook would think "hmm, this user is frequently using a one hour snooze, or 1 hour reminder period, let's make the popup box show the 1hr selection first, and then the other time settings in a drop down"

Simple.

ANglEAUT

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#3466964 5-Mar-2026 11:43

SepticSceptic:

... A smart AI or even a smart fuzzy logic version of Outlook ...

Blame Microsoft & 30+ years of technical debt in the software code of Outlook. AI wasn't around then, so the appointment reminder is based on the setting of the sender, not your own preferences.

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ANglEAUT

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#3468759 11-Mar-2026 12:53

Apple & iOS: Top status bar & applications overlapping each other, making it difficult to tap the correct item on the screen.

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Behodar

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#3469497 12-Mar-2026 15:40

Not "brain dead", but rather "expects every user to understand".

Mum asked me for help with her phone. The gist of it was that Bob had set up a chat group in Teams. Mum had never used Teams before, so she installed it on her phone. It asked for her email address, and then for her password. Having never used Teams before, her immediate thought was "I don't have a password". She therefore went to "reset password" and changed it. Then she successfully logged into Teams... and then got an error from Outlook because the password no longer matches.

It's probably obvious to all of us what went wrong here, but "normal" people don't always think in terms of an overarching Microsoft account. This culminates in us geeks needing to provide tech support to confused users.

Quic Broadband

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Behodar

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#3470517 15-Mar-2026 16:13

I just tried to install something on my Raspberry Pi.

"Couldn't write file blah: no space left on drive"
"Couldn't write file blah2: no space left on drive"
"no space left on drive"
"no space left on drive"
"no space left on drive"
"no space left on drive"
"no space left on drive"
"no space left on drive"
"Installation completed successfully"

Obviously it did not, in fact, complete successfully. So I deleted some stuff and then ran the installer again.

"This software is already installed." (and then the installer quits).

SepticSceptic

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#3470695 15-Mar-2026 22:26

But did the new application run, successfully?

Behodar

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#3470714 16-Mar-2026 08:37

I didn't even try it. It likely would have started, then blown up when I tried to do something specific.

The bright side is that this episode forced me to locate my missing "big" SD card.

Edit: And now it's randomly freezing (mouse and keyboard both unresponsive). Apparently this might be due to a bad SD card. It never happened with the old card, but maybe I need to try reimaging it first...

SepticSceptic

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#3471012 16-Mar-2026 22:16

Could also be a dicky PSU. Running on the margins ..

jamesrt

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#3471045 17-Mar-2026 09:13

Behodar:

Edit: And now it's randomly freezing (mouse and keyboard both unresponsive). Apparently this might be due to a bad SD card. It never happened with the old card, but maybe I need to try reimaging it first...

Yes, I've had this happen with a card that I then tested in a Mac to find it had read/write errors.

Bin it and buy another - they're relatively inexpensive compared to the frustration and troubleshooting time effort!

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#3473146 24-Mar-2026 14:16

Got invited to a MS Planner board, trying to get to it in Teams throws up

but, but......I know that I have an M365 licence.....an E5 one in fact.

Turns out the board was created in Planner Premium. Not only do you need a M365 P1 licence to create a board in Planner Premium, you also need a P1 licence to access it in any way shape or form.

Sometimes I use big words I don't always fully understand in an effort to make myself sound more photosynthesis.

MadEngineer

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#3473420 25-Mar-2026 10:55

The Windows11 Photos app doesn’t have options to change colour printing, or the other print settings in fact. Instead, you need to set that from the Windows defaults

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

cddt

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#3473920 26-Mar-2026 10:34

Ok this one takes the cake...

The last few days the "snipping tool" in Windows has been snipping different areas to what I select!

Absolutely infuriating! I drag over the area I want to snip, it pauses for a couple of seconds, then shrinks the area in some random way! Cutting off some critical information I wanted to include! W T F!!!

Behodar

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#3473986 26-Mar-2026 12:32

That reminds me: the "handwriting" feature in Google Translate has been vertically offset by about 20 pixels for months now (in Safari). Given that it's Google, it wouldn't surprise me if they broke it deliberately to "force" use of Chrome.

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