Personal Note #3 — Worse than a bug: Once upon a time, an update.

Few  weeks ago, my android phone got updated, it obviously changed many  things like the home screen UI, the way I can manage notifications, some  icons and probably many internal changes for security and stuff.

In  my opinion (and mine only) some of these changes are quite good, some  are quite useless (for my personal use) and for most of them I don’t  really care. Well actually, that’s what I thought.

One  of the changes was the sound manager + the “Do not disturb” feature  which I use a lot. First I felt like I had lost some precise control  over it, I could still manage the sound of my phone but not as easily  and accurately than before.

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought the same back then:

Who  cares ? It’s done anyway and you need to adapt yourself. Plus you are a  computer science engineer, you should not act as an old guy who want to  keep everything as they were before, not because they were better, but  just because you were used to it !

After  a few days of getting used to put my alarm clock the new way every  night, I thought I was okay with it, I manage to not become this old guy  whining about this new update which changed the habits he had before  going to bed. It felt good to be 25 again, end of the story!

Not really…

Here  is the real end of the story: A few days ago at night, it was bed time  and I was setting my alarm clock earlier than usual, as I had to attend  an event for one of my client, I needed to get up at 6am. And guess  what… I woke up every hour between 11pm and 6am because my subconscious  couldn’t make its mind wether my alarm would actually ring or not in the  morning, and being late was not an option.

It never happened to me before, my consciousness and my subconscious couldn’t agree on something.

The question now is : Am I that old guy OR are we taking software updates impacts not seriously enough ?

The answer is probably right in the middle of this two possibilities.

As I am writing this post, I’m thinking back about something which happened in 2010 : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8101945/Apple-iPhone-4-alarm-clock-bug-makes-scores-late-for-work.html

An  iOS buggy update which caused thousands of people to woke up an hour  late across the world ! I know, the difference is that one was a real  software bug and what I experienced was a biological bug induced by a  software update, but the result could actually be the same.

When  I think about the number of people (including myself) who use Google,  Facebook, Apple (and more) services on a daily basis, I realize that  something as simple as a minor software update could eventually have way  bigger consequences on our society if it messes up with our biological  system than a good’ol virus, bug or hack.

Maybe  you already realized this a long time ago, but I completely realized it  a few days ago and I wanted to share this thought with all the people  who could be interested in this !

Until next time…

Nicolas.

PS: My wife experienced the exact same thing a few days ago, maybe I’m not that old guy after all.