Funny they should mention power drills, as it calls to mind Neal Stephenson's diversion about the Hole Hawg in In the Beginning Was the Command Line. The Hole H

Funny they should mention power drills, as it calls to mind Neal Stephenson's diversion about the Hole Hawg in In the Beginning Was the Command Line. The Hole Hawg is as intuitive as a power drill gets: pull the trigger, spinny end spins. You just have to be careful that it doesn't snag on anything or it will spin you instead of the drillbit. There's a joke that goes "Unix is a very user friendly OS; it's just picky about its friends." And the truth behind that is that Unix -- what Stephenson called the Hole Hawg of operating systems -- works in a way that's fairly straightforward and understandable -- or it was for a 70s/80s OS. But like the industrial-strength drill it is very powerful and will do exactly as instructed -- even if that will harm you or your work if sufficient care is not exercised in its use. So a lot of what we call "ease of use" comes in the form of guardrails that protect the ignorant from themselves -- like the torque setting on the drill -- or features which were designed for particular use cases and don't make much sense in the general case. My favorite example is the percent key on a calculator, which works in a way that completely violates my mathematician's intuition for percentages. Like I'd expect to be able to express 30% by typing 3, 0, % and getting 0.3. And on a scientific calculator that's exactly what you might get. But on a normie's calculator, the percent key works completely differently: it serves as a substitute for the = key, except it takes the second operand as a percentage of the first operand. It's good for calculating tax, tips, and discounts -- and almost nothing else. Like 6% sales tax on an item costing $15.87 would be 15.87 + 6 % . And a 15% discount on a $23.44 item would be 23.44 - 15 %. If you want to be the next Apple, stop to think about the tasks you envision normies doing with your thing and build around those tasks, making them stupidly easy, at the expense of a cohesive general system design. Of course you may miss and become the next Rabbit, but big risks yield big rewards. I dunno where I'm going with this. It seems I've become as rambly and incoherent as the original article.