Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Saw the following post by @tante where they talk about how voice commands have been embedded in our consciousness for years as a really advanced user interface but practically speaking they would be a terrible interface.

“Voice commands” have been embedded into our vision of computing for a long time: Star Trek did it and it does the whole anthropomorphization thing that tech loves.

But from a practical standpoint it’s a bad interface: Think of a handful of people sitting in an office yelling at their computers, it would be like working next to people having loud phone calls all day.

And who exactly wants every thing they do with their computer broadcasted around them?

This is something that has bothered me pretty much since I first watched Star Trek (and how they interfaced with computers) and started working on computers myself. So it was good to see someone else share my point of view on this topic.

From usability perspective, a voice interface is one of the worst ways to interact with the computer, as it is imprecise. The caveat being that it is a good interface from an accessibility perspective but from a general purpose, everyday use I don’t think I would use voice to interact with a computer as it is a very limiting and insecure way to interact with a computer in my opinion.

The way Star Trek thinks about it is that the computer is advanced enough to understand what you are trying to do based on a single line command and then do it for you but we are nowhere near close to achieving that right now and even if the tech existed, imagine sitting in an open office setup where already it is annoying to work because you get to listen into random zoom calls & discussions happening around you. Now think about how bad it would be if we also had to listen to every command that people around you are issuing to their computer (followed by the numerous corrections), I would go mad if I had to listen to it for any period of time.

Another issue to think about when multiple people are working in a small area and trying to interact with their computer: How do you ensure that you are commands don’t accidentally run on your neighbor’s computer? Imagine sitting next to someone logged into a production database while you are connected to a dev database and you tell the computer to wipe all the data in the database. But in addition to the command running on your machine the machine next to you also heard the command and wipes out the entire production database.

In addition there is the whole security aspect of the technology to think about. Do you really want everyone around you to hear what you are working on? (Especially if it is something confidential). Plus authenticating verbally like how they do it on Star Trek is really insecure. In Star Trek when they are issuing a command that requires authentication the person actually just states their authentication code loudly for everyone around them to hear. That is absolutely insecure and easy to bypass. We already have technology that can imitate anyone’s voice really well, so this authentication code could easily be bypassed using similar tech. For example, they could create a Hologram version of the person and have that issue the command or use any of the other similar technology to achieve the same thing. In the non-fiction world, voice modifiers are already good enough to fool most if not all voice verification systems so having a verbal authentication code is not really a very secure way of doing things.

So, while it is cool and looks really futuristic I wouldn’t recommend a voice interface as the only way to work with a computer.

– Suramya

A quote that all of us have heard multiple times is If You Build It, They Will Come. This has launched countless applications/websites/solutions over the past few decades and very few of them actually had people come and use it. But due to confirmational bias people only remember the successes and thus this quote is still used actively in Business schools and by the Startup community. The latest example of this was shared by @nixCraft earlier, where a person spent $300k on an app no one uses.

I’m about to lose my mind and my investor’s money.Developer swears it’s ‘technically perfect’ but I can’t get a single doctor to adopt it. Two years ago we raised a seed round to build a patient management app for primary care doctors. Hired this boutique dev shop, spent 18 months and $300k building what they call a “technically superior solution.” The app works flawlessly. Zero bugs, clean UI, integrates with major EHRs, HIPAA compliant, the whole nine yards. Our developers are genuinely proud of it. But here’s the problem: doctors hate it. We’ve demoed it to 50+ practices. Same feedback every time. “It’s nice but it doesn’t fit our workflow.” “Too many clicks.” “We already have a system that works.” Meanwhile I see these basic-looking apps with terrible UIs getting massive adoption because they solve one specific pain point really well. Starting to think we built the app WE wanted to build instead of what doctors actually needed. Like we got so caught up in making it technically impressive that we forgot to make it useful.

I am awestuck that they managed to spend 300k over 18 months without realizing that no one wanted their solution and then instead of trying to figure out why people don’t want their solution they stuck to their guns and lost even more money.

One of the first things I learnt when I started programming was that your job is to solve problems for the customer, not showcase amazing technology. (If you can do both then that’s awesome). If you look at the quote above, the part in Italics pretty much explains why this app failed. In short the creator was so busy creating a “technically superior solution” that they forgot to create an app that the user actually wanted.

Earlier in my carrier I had the opportunity to work with a NGO that was working with various startups to create technology to help blind people and something they said really stuck with me. He told me that most companies try to create a system that mimic’s how a person would see the world and then translate that into something that a blind person could use and most of these attempts failed miserably because that is not what blind users wanted. They wanted technology that allowed them to interact with the world using their way. We are so used to having the ability to see that we think that if a person can’t see then we need to create something that allows them to see. But that is not what the users are looking for so the tech failed. The one company that had a promising solution spent a good amount of time talking to the prospective users of their technology and then built a solution that addressed specific pain points. Unfortunately, I didn’t stay in touch with the team but I am sure they are doing well because they are solving user problems.

The world’s most awesome and superior technology is of no use if no one actually uses it. We have been trained to think of users as ‘necessary evil’ and their are thousands of jokes around that make fun of users as being somehow clueless and stupid, some oldies call them lusers (a play on the word losers and users). But keep in mind without these users the systems we create are of no use. If you are not solving a business problem (or user pain point) with your solution then you might as well not build it in the first place.

There is one caveat here, you should always find out what problem the user is trying to solve and not just build what the user is asking for without digging into it. A lot of times people will come to you and say that I need XYZ, but when you dig into the problem they are trying to solve you realize that a different solution would be more effective in solving that problem instead.

This is why we need people from the product team to work with the engineering team together to understand what the user wants and how best to deliver that to the user.

– Suramya

Lesley made this ‘simple’ request on Mastadon “Guys,Please. Be better than the commenters.” while linking to the screenshot below. It is really sad that it’s 2025 and we still have idiots try to gatekeep people out of ‘their’ playhouse.

Idiot:Fucking tourists.
Jessica Weiland: Ah so you are a kind one. Thank you for the positive feedback and the willingness to make security accessible and easy to understand for all.
Idiot:Jessica Weiland this is our world. You had yours. You ruined it. Now
Jessica Weiland: What is your world, please do tell.
Idiot: the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We fled here when women like you laughed at us when we were 13. Now you’re here too. Fuck off.

What a sad life they must have to be so threatened by everyone and everything. The irony is that the quote he makes “the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.” is from the Hacker’s Manifesto aka The Conscience of a Hacker and was famously quoted in the movie Hackers and is considered a cornerstone of hacker culture (the original meaning not the folks breaking into systems). He just doesn’t quote the full text because it contradicts the nonsense he is sprouting. Below is the relevant section, and I have bolded the important part that he is ignoring:

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me

What is really relevant is the last line which is what this guy is most upset about. In his mind You can only be the best if you keep the riff-raff (meaning anyone not like them) out.

This is where we all come in, We all need to stand up to this nonsense and call it out when and where we see it. It’s not just a joke, it is extremely demoralizing for someone to be told that they don’t belong and are not good enough to be in Tech. It seems funny to us because we are not the butt of the joke, put the shoe on the other foot and you will realize how unfunny it is. If you are threatened by the girl (or anyone else) in the team because they are better then use that excuse to work towards improving your skill, learn from them. Remember it is not a zero sum game and a rising tide lifts all boats so if your team is strong it will help you as well.

The women in tech have been systematically whitewashed out of our history. For example did you know that a woman (Hedy Lamarr) pioneered the wireless & frequency hopping technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems? There are a million such examples and then there are the unknown geniuses whose husbands/bosses/coworkers take credit for their work leaving them in the dark while profiting from the work they did.

Remember it is not their world. It’s ours. The world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud where we exist without skin color,without nationality, without religious bias… Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.

– Suramya

The Tech industry has successfully convinced almost everyone that moving to the Cloud is the best option for them and in a lot of cases it is true. If you are a startup or trying out new idea’s or a small shot that doesn’t have a full time IT staff then it is more cost efficient and quicker to run everything on the cloud so that you don’t have to worry about it. However, remember what they say:

There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer

Once your data is on their computer you don’t really have full control of it anymore. If it is unencrypted then they can access it and depending on their terms of service use it for various purposes like training their AI models etc. If asked they can share your data with US law enforcement or others even if the server is physically not in the US. (Microsoft admitted under oath that it ‘cannot guarantee’ data sovereignty)

Another major risk is that if your account gets deleted or frozen for whatever reason then you loose all the data stored there with almost no recourse in most cases. Hacker News and Reddit are filled with threads where people have suddenly been locked out of their accounts and are desperate to get through to someone that can restore access. The latest instance of this is where Seuros who is a very prominent Open Source developer had their 10 year old account on AWS deleted without warning with no possibility of recovering the data. Then AWS tried to cover up their mistake and refused to give clear answers on the status of the data for over 20 days.

Seuros did almost everything correctly, they had a comprehensive backup strategy that:

• Multi-region replication across AWS Europe (completely separate from US infrastructure)
• Dead man’s switch implemented for disaster recovery
• Proper backup architecture following AWS’s own best practices
• Segregated encryption keys stored separately from data

But the only thing that they didn’t account for was the possibility that AWS itself would be the cause of the data loss across all the backups and redundancies. If you have data that you want to preserve you should ensure that you have a local copy of all the data no matter what service guaranty your cloud providers are giving. Nothing in the world is 100% secure/safe so if you don’t have a local copy then there is a possibility that you can loose the data permanently.

Some people will suggest instead of a local copy you can have copies on multiple cloud servers but that has a recurring cost implication to it. I would rather buy an external drive for a few hundred dollars and then periodically sync your data to it. This ensures that you have a copy of the data in your control no matter what happens to it on the server side.

If your cloud provider (Google Photos or Drive/AWS/Azure/Dropbox etc etc) is the only place you have copies of important data then you are risking complete loss of the data for something that isn’t in your control. Think about it before you put all your eggs in one basket.

– Suramya