21 ms·

Not Smart Is Not Stupid

158 points by tbirdz 11y ago

dclowd9901 11y ago
> They really double downed on making the list feature a pain by autoplaying every movie upon selection. Now I can’t add or remove a movie without playing the beginning. Fortunately, I don’t have a data cap at home, but it still causes my receiver to switch audio modes, leading to annoying clicks and pops as it settles in. Not appreciated. My thumb was already on the OK button. If I really did want to watch the movie, pressing it twice isn’t so hard. In exchange for convenience nobody could possibly need, I’m forced to deal with aggravation I can’t avoid. Boy isn't this annoying in Netflix too? I notice if you go to look at a show's information more closely (selecting it from the main screen), it automatically starts playing the first episode. I don't want that! I can manage that, really! Thank you! I think we're hitting a critical mass of UX, where we're trying to dumbly pre-suppose behavior. There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning), but blanketing behaviors for all users is just downright stupid.
- spdionis 11y ago
  On Netflix it depends on where you click. I think the info symbol is in the bottom right corner.
  - jacalata 11y ago
    I don't know what platform you're on, but on the Xbox app there's no info button, you select the show and it takes you to the info page and also begins playing the episode.
    - spdionis 11y ago
      I assumed usual browser. Sorry.
    - stcredzero 11y ago
      So then there was a gratuitous UI inconsistency across platforms? Management problem.
  - neogodless 11y ago
    The user should not need to learn that (on the internet) - it should be amazingly obvious. "Start Playing" and "More Information" are clear. "My Show" (it starts playing) is not obvious considering we have been using Netflix for years, clicking on a show or movie for more information.
- amelius 11y ago
  > There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning) Please no. The actual users using an account may change over time (and rather frequently), e.g. in a family situation. Also, in general, I like my systems to be predictable, and I prefer if they don't try to be smart.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    > > There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning) > Please no. Indeed, that's the second coming of Office 2000's "adaptive menus". It was an awful idea then, it's an awful idea now. Even if the account has a single unchanging user and the feature actually works correctly and it doesn't impair initial discoverability, changes in software behaviour will break muscle memory and at least annoy.
    - blakeyrat 11y ago
      Gmail does the Windows 2000 "adaptive menu" by hiding the folders you don't use often behind an expando. I hate it. Hate hate hate hate hate it. Naturally, there appears to be no way to override and say, "just show ALL my folders ALL the time! If I didn't want to see a folder, I'd delete it!" But I don't expect a lot from Google, which seemly has zero UX experts and I'm not even 100% sure its products are developed by human beings. (See: Buzz, Wave.)
      - asddubs 11y ago
        also for reasons I don't understand, when I search google, the links to "images, maps, shopping" etc. are in a completely random order. They will literally switch between searches. WHY?
      - oblio 11y ago
        There isn't 1 button for that, but you can either drag the separator or just set all folders to "Show".
  - dclowd9901 11y ago
    Fair enough. I'm not partial to anything, but UX designers gotta eat.
- bartwe 11y ago
  Microsoft tried that with Ribbon, turns out having the machine change behaviour/move stuff because it is used more/less is also a bad idea.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    Microsoft tried that before the ribbon (with adaptive menus dynamically showing/hiding items based on use). The ribbon is not fundamentally adaptive, IIRC the initial Office 2007 implementation was neither adaptive nor customisable, although it was partially contextual (some ribbon tabs would only appear when they made sense e.g. formatting when selecting text or cells)
- bartwe 11y ago
  Microsoft tried that with Ribbon, turns out having the machine change behaviour/move stuff because it is used more/less is also a bad idea.
- fizgig 11y ago
  > Boy isn't this annoying in Netflix too? I notice if you go to look at a show's information more closely (selecting it from the main screen), it automatically starts playing the first episode. I don't want that! I can manage that, really! Thank you! This is a horrible feature. I was a Netflix subscriber for years (an early adopter in the mail-order DVD days), and after weeks of fiddling and trying to disable this mis-feature, I finally unsubscribed because of it.
xiaopingguo 11y ago
I think one of the failures is that UX is designed by people who are comfortable with the abstract, we (usually) know about what is happening in the background, and can figure how action A leads to result B, but most people are just not good at this stuff. For them, the UX has to be way more concrete, since they just do not have a clear picture of what is going on. This also leads to some tech anxiety, an example of which was an acquaintance not long ago being unable to save a missed call into her contacts list on a Samsung/Android and worried that she was somehow too dumb to use the (very costly) "smartphone". Just a huge collective failure of the "smartest" people around to account for other people who are very different.
- Terr_ 11y ago
  Right, it's up to the designers to communicate a useful mental-model for the user, and to provide whatever conventions/affordances help them find the controls to manipulate that model.
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  I'm a colourblind, left-handed and hard of hearing interaction designer. Oddly enough, this is almost a benefit in this context, because I have a much easier time noticing "intuitive" redesigns that fuck up accessibility in favour of the latest graphic design fad. More generally, any UX design that does not involve user testing (ideally with both new and experienced users) inevitably leads to the designers missing things. If there's one field where co-design is crucial to decent results, it's IxD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design
  - csours 11y ago
    I bring up these issues in every design session I'm involved in, but people just don't seem to get it. How can you make people care about colorblindness, etc?
    - cbd1984 11y ago
      Law or strong corporate policy tantamount to a law. They're too small a market otherwise.
gpvos 11y ago
This tendency to show suggestions more prominently than other, more useful, UI is most likely because this enables Netflix, Amazon, et al. to make more money, i.e., payola.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  It's not payola if you're paying yourself for placement. That's just a placement decision. On a tangential note, I've never understood why payola was supposed to be a bad thing.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    Um because its corruption and in the USA's case Organized crime was involved
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      The same argument proves that labor unions should be illegal too. Grocery stores accept money from food producers for placement within the store. As far as I can see, this is precisely equivalent to payola. Nobody thinks there's a problem there.
      - Ensorceled 11y ago
        Actually, lots of people do think that's a problem. Especially since the food producers playing for placement are usually placing unhealthy things.
        spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
        And bullying their suppliers this is well known problem.
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    Because the airwaves are public and regulated by the FCC.
awalGarg 11y ago
Excuse my ignorance, but is the second "not" in the title left associative or right?
- shiift 11y ago
  Now that you mention it, I don't know. I originally read it as left associative because otherwise it becomes somewhat of a blanket statement.
- bcook 11y ago
  What caused you to see that; concerns for other English dialects, international/translatation, or something else? I'm pretty ignorant, but I enjoy trying to misinterpret my own text, which is often easy. It was either Kernighan or Ritchie that mentioned that every few years they read Strunk & White's Elements of Style to increase their ability to be understood and understand others.
  - awalGarg 11y ago
    I didn't want to, but I'd admit: I have been spotting ambiguities a lot more since taking NLP classes :) This one actually bothered me enough to ask.
- biot 11y ago
  I read it as "(not smart) is (not stupid)" and thought the article was going to be about how intelligence is overrated.
  - Anthony-G 11y ago
    I found the title to be difficult and unintuitive to interpret. After starting to read it, I figured this was the intended meaning.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    I agree with that premise as well.
- 11y ago
epalmer 11y ago
>If we naively squish the curve, as if by pressing down with a finger, we end up with a bimodal distribution, where the task is now easy for one group of users and impossible for another. This is not an improvement. This resonates with me. Sadly I think this happens more often.
- jacobush 11y ago
  Darn, I feel this way often - I guess this makes me an old curmudgeon but I find Spotify on mobile, and Snapchat, and many other apps, very confusing and hard to use.
  - mkane848 11y ago
    In your defense, the Spotify app is a mess and it seems like they're adjusting their own UI enough to suggest that they don't quite have usability down quite yet. Don't get me started on how often it hangs or crashes, or how the timing is eerily close to when it tries to transition into/out of ads... Snapchat just has a bad habit of introducing a feature you need to perform a gesture for and only telling you once and nowhere else. I wouldn't blame your age on it, I just don't think a lot of these popular apps have particularly good design but get by because the service is solid and hits "good enough" for your average (usually non-technical) user.
vog 11y ago
> A minor time saving feature designed to spare users the indignity of [...] now meant they were unable to browse the web at all. That’s some serious time savings! Although this is was meant ironically, there's a lot of truth in it.
shkesar 11y ago
The arising bugs in most softwares I use daily seem like a result of features bloating. I post some idiosyncrasies i stumble on my twitter @shkesar feed as a reminder that I won't follow the same misdirected belief.
- jimmaswell 11y ago
  Features and bugs is a much better situation than no features and no bugs, which seems to have been the unfortunate trend in recent years. Post-minimalism can't come soon enough.
SeanDav 11y ago
I am in favour of software that tries to make your life easier, but hate, with a passion, developers that are so in love with their helpful feature X, that they ram it down your throat (You WILL use this feature and LIKE it!) and give you no easy way, or often, no way at all, to bypass or disable said "helpful"/"smart" feature. Case in point: I recently bought an excellent large(ish) Dell monitor. Lovely bit of kit, but after a few days had me wanting to throw it out of the window. The reason was the power saving mode. The monitor is supposed to have the ability to "intelligently" understand you are not using it, switch the screen off and go into a sleep mode. All good and well until one discovers that the specific combination of graphics card, multiple monitor setup and video connectors one is using confuses the poor beast and it will happily shut your monitor down while you are actively using it. The kicker that was driving me crazy was, of course, there is no way to disable this particular functionality!
- tremon 11y ago
  So, you RMA'd the monitor I hope?
- brlewis 11y ago
  Welcome to pure data-driven product development. Data shows that more people use our feature if we make it hard for them not to use our feature.
- throwanem 11y ago
  Which model? I'm in the market for a couple of new displays, and if they've come out with a lemon, I'd like to avoid it.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I have a similar problem with a monitor right now. It's rare, only happens on startup, and is fixed by a 30 second reset with cables unplugged. So I still have the monitor for now.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    Dell screens all across our office do this sort of crap.
enriquto 11y ago
And, by transposition, Stupid is Smart!
bpicolo 11y ago
> Apple screwed up Universal Links something fierce One note that I'm not sure how many others hit - iPhones have been especially effective at DDoSing websites for apple-site-association.
danielweber 11y ago
That link to the Xerox copier that changed digits in your copy gave me chills. It's like the dark dystopian hacker future, brought to us today by incompetence.
- teh_klev 11y ago
  Have you seen Brazil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Overall a good article. I especially hate features that are aggravating and I can't turn off. The auto-play is somewhere high on my list. Although, I think it's to get more ads shown than for convenience. Fun part though is that similar arguments could've been made against the tech behind his "plastic circles" or logistics of receiving them in the mail. ;)
CaptSpify 11y ago
This is the new design paradigm that I've been seeing for a long time: Make a minimal UI, and take away the "advanced" features (/me glares angrily at chromium and FF). There should always be a way to revert settings you don't want. Sure, make the user type "I understand that I'm disabling $important_feature, and the developer thinks that's a really bad idea, but I need to anyway", but at least have the option.
oldmanjay 11y ago
Why do all the comments use language indicating that people are forced to use software features they don't like? Are people truly so weak willed that the mere existence of something causes enslavement to it? There is always the option to walk away. In light of that fact, all this whining is just unseemly.
- jimrandomh 11y ago
  Because in many of the examples people are, in fact, literally forced to use software features they don't like. The ability to turn off broken/misguided features only exists if the developer included a special option for that (rare) or if the software is open source (also rare).
- csours 11y ago
  A wise person would take the lesson and ignore the whining. You can just ignore whining, right?
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
> If we naively squish the curve, as if by pressing down with a finger, we end up with a bimodal distribution, where the task is now easy for one group of users and impossible for another. How do you convince people not to be naive though?
laur 11y ago
No, is lazy.
frik 11y ago
Many of these "smart" devices are actually very dump, are of bad quality and actually harm the end users privacy. Some negative examples from recent news: "smart meters", "smart thermostats", "smart refrigerators", "smart TVs". On the otherhand, devices and products that are not advertises as "smart" are often better and actually use very sophisticated algorithm.
fhood 11y ago
That mention of VMware sent little bubbles of rage burbling up through me. On a mbp VMware forces use of the discrete gpu if available. This destroys any hope of using the virtual machine without your computer plugged in, and worse, some programs I need (gazebo) don't play nice with nvidia cards (on Ubuntu at least). I could fix this with some hacky solution (you have to do some weird stuff involving gfxcardstatus) or I could just execute my script over and over and hope that the powers that be smile on me, and this won't be the time it decides to shit the bed permanently. Oh and also wtf gazebo? Is the idea of an nvidia card so shocking you suddenly have a stroke 5 out of 6 times? Sorry about the rant. I realized I'm going to have to work with gazebo again soon and preemptive frustration is already building.
kordless 11y ago
See Jevon'ss Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox, A.K.A. Wirth's Law, Gate's Law, Page's Law, or May's Law. Fun fact: there's a non-linear corollary between the growth of compute speed and the growth of network speed. Network speeds do increase, but they are not doing so as quickly as compute and storage. I have observed that interns at corporations are usually tasked with things nobody wants to do or thinks can't be done. I wonder if there is a correlation between Wirth's Law and interns (the process of learning).

158 points by tbirdz 11y ago

> They really double downed on making the list feature a pain by autoplaying every movie upon selection. Now I can’t add or remove a movie without playing the beginning. Fortunately, I don’t have a data cap at home, but it still causes my receiver to switch audio modes, leading to annoying clicks and pops as it settles in. Not appreciated. My thumb was already on the OK button. If I really did want to watch the movie, pressing it twice isn’t so hard. In exchange for convenience nobody could possibly need, I’m forced to deal with aggravation I can’t avoid. Boy isn't this annoying in Netflix too? I notice if you go to look at a show's information more closely (selecting it from the main screen), it automatically starts playing the first episode. I don't want that! I can manage that, really! Thank you! I think we're hitting a critical mass of UX, where we're trying to dumbly pre-suppose behavior. There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning), but blanketing behaviors for all users is just downright stupid.

spdionis 11y ago
On Netflix it depends on where you click. I think the info symbol is in the bottom right corner.
- jacalata 11y ago
  I don't know what platform you're on, but on the Xbox app there's no info button, you select the show and it takes you to the info page and also begins playing the episode.
  - spdionis 11y ago
    I assumed usual browser. Sorry.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    So then there was a gratuitous UI inconsistency across platforms? Management problem.
- neogodless 11y ago
  The user should not need to learn that (on the internet) - it should be amazingly obvious. "Start Playing" and "More Information" are clear. "My Show" (it starts playing) is not obvious considering we have been using Netflix for years, clicking on a show or movie for more information.
amelius 11y ago
> There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning) Please no. The actual users using an account may change over time (and rather frequently), e.g. in a family situation. Also, in general, I like my systems to be predictable, and I prefer if they don't try to be smart.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > > There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning) > Please no. Indeed, that's the second coming of Office 2000's "adaptive menus". It was an awful idea then, it's an awful idea now. Even if the account has a single unchanging user and the feature actually works correctly and it doesn't impair initial discoverability, changes in software behaviour will break muscle memory and at least annoy.
  - blakeyrat 11y ago
    Gmail does the Windows 2000 "adaptive menu" by hiding the folders you don't use often behind an expando. I hate it. Hate hate hate hate hate it. Naturally, there appears to be no way to override and say, "just show ALL my folders ALL the time! If I didn't want to see a folder, I'd delete it!" But I don't expect a lot from Google, which seemly has zero UX experts and I'm not even 100% sure its products are developed by human beings. (See: Buzz, Wave.)
    - asddubs 11y ago
      also for reasons I don't understand, when I search google, the links to "images, maps, shopping" etc. are in a completely random order. They will literally switch between searches. WHY?
    - oblio 11y ago
      There isn't 1 button for that, but you can either drag the separator or just set all folders to "Show".
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  Fair enough. I'm not partial to anything, but UX designers gotta eat.
bartwe 11y ago
Microsoft tried that with Ribbon, turns out having the machine change behaviour/move stuff because it is used more/less is also a bad idea.
- masklinn 11y ago
  Microsoft tried that before the ribbon (with adaptive menus dynamically showing/hiding items based on use). The ribbon is not fundamentally adaptive, IIRC the initial Office 2007 implementation was neither adaptive nor customisable, although it was partially contextual (some ribbon tabs would only appear when they made sense e.g. formatting when selecting text or cells)
bartwe 11y ago
Microsoft tried that with Ribbon, turns out having the machine change behaviour/move stuff because it is used more/less is also a bad idea.
fizgig 11y ago
> Boy isn't this annoying in Netflix too? I notice if you go to look at a show's information more closely (selecting it from the main screen), it automatically starts playing the first episode. I don't want that! I can manage that, really! Thank you! This is a horrible feature. I was a Netflix subscriber for years (an early adopter in the mail-order DVD days), and after weeks of fiddling and trying to disable this mis-feature, I finally unsubscribed because of it.

xiaopingguo 11y ago

I think one of the failures is that UX is designed by people who are comfortable with the abstract, we (usually) know about what is happening in the background, and can figure how action A leads to result B, but most people are just not good at this stuff. For them, the UX has to be way more concrete, since they just do not have a clear picture of what is going on. This also leads to some tech anxiety, an example of which was an acquaintance not long ago being unable to save a missed call into her contacts list on a Samsung/Android and worried that she was somehow too dumb to use the (very costly) "smartphone". Just a huge collective failure of the "smartest" people around to account for other people who are very different.

Terr_ 11y ago
Right, it's up to the designers to communicate a useful mental-model for the user, and to provide whatever conventions/affordances help them find the controls to manipulate that model.
vanderZwan 11y ago
I'm a colourblind, left-handed and hard of hearing interaction designer. Oddly enough, this is almost a benefit in this context, because I have a much easier time noticing "intuitive" redesigns that fuck up accessibility in favour of the latest graphic design fad. More generally, any UX design that does not involve user testing (ideally with both new and experienced users) inevitably leads to the designers missing things. If there's one field where co-design is crucial to decent results, it's IxD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design
- csours 11y ago
  I bring up these issues in every design session I'm involved in, but people just don't seem to get it. How can you make people care about colorblindness, etc?
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    Law or strong corporate policy tantamount to a law. They're too small a market otherwise.

gpvos 11y ago

This tendency to show suggestions more prominently than other, more useful, UI is most likely because this enables Netflix, Amazon, et al. to make more money, i.e., payola.

thaumasiotes 11y ago
It's not payola if you're paying yourself for placement. That's just a placement decision. On a tangential note, I've never understood why payola was supposed to be a bad thing.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  Um because its corruption and in the USA's case Organized crime was involved
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    The same argument proves that labor unions should be illegal too. Grocery stores accept money from food producers for placement within the store. As far as I can see, this is precisely equivalent to payola. Nobody thinks there's a problem there.
    - Ensorceled 11y ago
      Actually, lots of people do think that's a problem. Especially since the food producers playing for placement are usually placing unhealthy things.
      - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
        And bullying their suppliers this is well known problem.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  Because the airwaves are public and regulated by the FCC.

awalGarg 11y ago

Excuse my ignorance, but is the second "not" in the title left associative or right?

shiift 11y ago
Now that you mention it, I don't know. I originally read it as left associative because otherwise it becomes somewhat of a blanket statement.
bcook 11y ago
What caused you to see that; concerns for other English dialects, international/translatation, or something else? I'm pretty ignorant, but I enjoy trying to misinterpret my own text, which is often easy. It was either Kernighan or Ritchie that mentioned that every few years they read Strunk & White's Elements of Style to increase their ability to be understood and understand others.
- awalGarg 11y ago
  I didn't want to, but I'd admit: I have been spotting ambiguities a lot more since taking NLP classes :) This one actually bothered me enough to ask.
biot 11y ago
I read it as "(not smart) is (not stupid)" and thought the article was going to be about how intelligence is overrated.
- Anthony-G 11y ago
  I found the title to be difficult and unintuitive to interpret. After starting to read it, I figured this was the intended meaning.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  I agree with that premise as well.
11y ago

epalmer 11y ago

>If we naively squish the curve, as if by pressing down with a finger, we end up with a bimodal distribution, where the task is now easy for one group of users and impossible for another. This is not an improvement. This resonates with me. Sadly I think this happens more often.

jacobush 11y ago
Darn, I feel this way often - I guess this makes me an old curmudgeon but I find Spotify on mobile, and Snapchat, and many other apps, very confusing and hard to use.
- mkane848 11y ago
  In your defense, the Spotify app is a mess and it seems like they're adjusting their own UI enough to suggest that they don't quite have usability down quite yet. Don't get me started on how often it hangs or crashes, or how the timing is eerily close to when it tries to transition into/out of ads... Snapchat just has a bad habit of introducing a feature you need to perform a gesture for and only telling you once and nowhere else. I wouldn't blame your age on it, I just don't think a lot of these popular apps have particularly good design but get by because the service is solid and hits "good enough" for your average (usually non-technical) user.

vog 11y ago

> A minor time saving feature designed to spare users the indignity of [...] now meant they were unable to browse the web at all. That’s some serious time savings! Although this is was meant ironically, there's a lot of truth in it.

shkesar 11y ago

The arising bugs in most softwares I use daily seem like a result of features bloating. I post some idiosyncrasies i stumble on my twitter @shkesar feed as a reminder that I won't follow the same misdirected belief.

jimmaswell 11y ago
Features and bugs is a much better situation than no features and no bugs, which seems to have been the unfortunate trend in recent years. Post-minimalism can't come soon enough.

SeanDav 11y ago

I am in favour of software that tries to make your life easier, but hate, with a passion, developers that are so in love with their helpful feature X, that they ram it down your throat (You WILL use this feature and LIKE it!) and give you no easy way, or often, no way at all, to bypass or disable said "helpful"/"smart" feature. Case in point: I recently bought an excellent large(ish) Dell monitor. Lovely bit of kit, but after a few days had me wanting to throw it out of the window. The reason was the power saving mode. The monitor is supposed to have the ability to "intelligently" understand you are not using it, switch the screen off and go into a sleep mode. All good and well until one discovers that the specific combination of graphics card, multiple monitor setup and video connectors one is using confuses the poor beast and it will happily shut your monitor down while you are actively using it. The kicker that was driving me crazy was, of course, there is no way to disable this particular functionality!

tremon 11y ago
So, you RMA'd the monitor I hope?
brlewis 11y ago
Welcome to pure data-driven product development. Data shows that more people use our feature if we make it hard for them not to use our feature.
throwanem 11y ago
Which model? I'm in the market for a couple of new displays, and if they've come out with a lemon, I'd like to avoid it.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
I have a similar problem with a monitor right now. It's rare, only happens on startup, and is fixed by a 30 second reset with cables unplugged. So I still have the monitor for now.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  Dell screens all across our office do this sort of crap.

enriquto 11y ago

And, by transposition, Stupid is Smart!

bpicolo 11y ago

> Apple screwed up Universal Links something fierce One note that I'm not sure how many others hit - iPhones have been especially effective at DDoSing websites for apple-site-association.

danielweber 11y ago

That link to the Xerox copier that changed digits in your copy gave me chills. It's like the dark dystopian hacker future, brought to us today by incompetence.

teh_klev 11y ago
Have you seen Brazil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Overall a good article. I especially hate features that are aggravating and I can't turn off. The auto-play is somewhere high on my list. Although, I think it's to get more ads shown than for convenience. Fun part though is that similar arguments could've been made against the tech behind his "plastic circles" or logistics of receiving them in the mail. ;)

CaptSpify 11y ago

This is the new design paradigm that I've been seeing for a long time: Make a minimal UI, and take away the "advanced" features (/me glares angrily at chromium and FF). There should always be a way to revert settings you don't want. Sure, make the user type "I understand that I'm disabling $important_feature, and the developer thinks that's a really bad idea, but I need to anyway", but at least have the option.

oldmanjay 11y ago

Why do all the comments use language indicating that people are forced to use software features they don't like? Are people truly so weak willed that the mere existence of something causes enslavement to it? There is always the option to walk away. In light of that fact, all this whining is just unseemly.

jimrandomh 11y ago
Because in many of the examples people are, in fact, literally forced to use software features they don't like. The ability to turn off broken/misguided features only exists if the developer included a special option for that (rare) or if the software is open source (also rare).
csours 11y ago
A wise person would take the lesson and ignore the whining. You can just ignore whining, right?

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

> If we naively squish the curve, as if by pressing down with a finger, we end up with a bimodal distribution, where the task is now easy for one group of users and impossible for another. How do you convince people not to be naive though?

laur 11y ago

No, is lazy.

frik 11y ago

Many of these "smart" devices are actually very dump, are of bad quality and actually harm the end users privacy. Some negative examples from recent news: "smart meters", "smart thermostats", "smart refrigerators", "smart TVs". On the otherhand, devices and products that are not advertises as "smart" are often better and actually use very sophisticated algorithm.

fhood 11y ago

That mention of VMware sent little bubbles of rage burbling up through me. On a mbp VMware forces use of the discrete gpu if available. This destroys any hope of using the virtual machine without your computer plugged in, and worse, some programs I need (gazebo) don't play nice with nvidia cards (on Ubuntu at least). I could fix this with some hacky solution (you have to do some weird stuff involving gfxcardstatus) or I could just execute my script over and over and hope that the powers that be smile on me, and this won't be the time it decides to shit the bed permanently. Oh and also wtf gazebo? Is the idea of an nvidia card so shocking you suddenly have a stroke 5 out of 6 times? Sorry about the rant. I realized I'm going to have to work with gazebo again soon and preemptive frustration is already building.

kordless 11y ago

See Jevon'ss Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox, A.K.A. Wirth's Law, Gate's Law, Page's Law, or May's Law. Fun fact: there's a non-linear corollary between the growth of compute speed and the growth of network speed. Network speeds do increase, but they are not doing so as quickly as compute and storage. I have observed that interns at corporations are usually tasked with things nobody wants to do or thinks can't be done. I wonder if there is a correlation between Wirth's Law and interns (the process of learning).