Fixing civilisation,
one small problem at a time.

You reset your password from inside your email. Chrome offers to save it, with the username field blank — the one thing it just watched you type.

You fill a giant browser form — say the 8-page IRS W-8BEN-E. One ⌘R, back-swipe, or tab close, and it's all erased. No warning. No draft. Start over.

Shut up and give me the cookie. Whether you want to accept or reject, you're forced to decide again on every site you've ever visited — a choice a browser could make once.

A big monitor above, a laptop below. Push the pointer down from the side and it stops dead — you can only cross where the two screens happen to line up.

The Save/Open dialog is a full file browser: navigate, search, New Folder. But it's crippled — no delete, no cleanup. Spot a file to bin while you're saving and you must remember to do it later in Finder. You won't.

You dictate an idea. To keep it you must hit confirm — but the default, resting-finger action is discard, and the button moved since you last looked. One reflex and the only copy is gone.

Sleep, a tunnel, a Wi-Fi blip — the connection drops and the app announces a Server Error and sends you to check the status page. The server was fine. Your device just went to sleep.

Print a page to PDF and your brain files it under "downloaded a file → it's in Downloads." It isn't, and it never shows in the download list. So you hunt.

You set the play boundary yesterday. And again today. Switch games and it asks you to confirm it once more — same room, same you, nothing changed. Every prompt yanks you out of the world you were in.

For 38 minutes, a whole state believed a ballistic missile was inbound — because a high-stakes, irreversible alert had no confirmation step and no way to take it back.

You download something, or save your edit, or create a new file. Thirty seconds later it's the most recent file you own. But Recents doesn't know that — it only counts files you've opened. So you go looking, and it isn't there.

You promote every item to your sidebar. The "More" expander stays anyway — a chevron promising things that no longer exist. You click it. Nothing.

GitHub's new-repo page tells you to run "git branch -M main". On most modern setups it does nothing at all. Six words would have said when you actually need it — instead you pause, or paste on faith.

The recogniser can't spell CrossFit. So you pause, type it by hand, and carry on — and the live transcript overwrites the field, taking your typed words with it. The workaround for the bug is destroyed by the bug.

Copy the image. Paste it into chat, into Miro, into a tweet. Nothing arrives. So you paste it into Notes, drag that to the Desktop, find the file, and upload it — four steps to move a picture two centimetres.

Type a domain into GitHub Pages settings and it writes a CNAME file to main, authored as you. Put that file there yourself and the settings field fills in. Neither side is labelled as the one that wins.

Drag an image out of an app and it lands with a timestamp of 1 Jan 1970, 01:00 — the Unix epoch. It isn't a date, it's "no value" wearing a costume. Sort by date and the whole pile is unsortable.

Blocked, deleted, privacy-changed, or removed by moderators: one identical message for all four. You can tell them apart by opening an incognito window — which means the vagueness only fools the people who weren't a threat.

Subscribing took one click. Cancelling is "Step 2 of 3", interrupted by a modal asking if you'd rather change plans — where the retention button is styled and "No thanks" is not. Adobe paid $150M over this exact flow.

A progress bar shows how close you are to a discount. It never shows the arithmetic: reaching the next tier costs far more than the tier is worth. And the moment you clear one threshold, a new one appears.

Fresh Ubuntu. No terminal on the desktop, none in the dock, no menu to browse. There's a keyboard shortcut — invisible — and a search box that only helps if you already know the word to type.

Twenty years of muscle memory says Ctrl+C copies. In a terminal it kills the running process. Copy is Ctrl+Shift+C — an exception you must learn by being burned, in the one app where the mistake is destructive.

During install you click your Wi-Fi. No password field appears — because clicking only highlighted it, and you must confirm the selection first. Nothing on screen says which step you're on.

Two prices, both marked with a single asterisk. Below them, two footnotes — one for the asterisk, and one for a double asterisk that appears nowhere in the dialog. You scan the screen twice looking for something that was never there.

You open OBS to record yourself. You get an empty black rectangle and no instructions. The thing you want is five steps away, filed under a name nobody searching for "camera" would ever type.

macOS quietly evicts your local files to iCloud when space runs low — on by default, no warning, no say in which ones. The fix exists in two places, and neither is where you'd look.

Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man share the UK's +44 code and even its 07 mobile format — while sitting outside UK call allowances. The number looks domestic, dials domestic, and charges international.

A task finishes in ChatGPT on the web. You click the notification and land in the Codex desktop app — not the tab you were working in. The notification knew where it came from and threw that away.

Preview, Photos, Safari, Maps, Quick Look — pinch zooms. Finder's icon view, a grid of thumbnails, ignores it. It used to work. Apple took it out.

eSIMs are in no iPhone backup — not iCloud, not Finder. Transferring one needs the old device working. So the single case where you most need it back, a lost or stolen phone, is the exact case where nothing has it.

You type a name, hit Save, and get a modal asking whether to overwrite. Meanwhile your browser has been silently saving file (1), file (2) for twenty years. Same computer, same problem, one of them asks.

The laptop is bottom-left, the second monitor is up and to the right. Your hand makes one diagonal flick. The pointer can't — it has to be walked up through a third display and back down, because those two screens share no edge.