6 ms·

You describe cheaping out for vastly inferior solution compared to what we had for centuries. Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages

by jajko 2y ago

You describe cheaping out for vastly inferior solution compared to what we had for centuries. Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on. Every one of us has slightly different memorization / comprehension techniques to grok foreign text and concepts within, and this crappy cheap new tech diminishes most of them. For quick overview why not, but for deeper studies this is bad, very bad. Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently and even here on HN many celebrated is as some sort of progress, so manufacturers aligned and are happy to save on better quality controls to keep their margins fat and juicy. Who cares about some focus or safety or long term reliability studies, look at that shiny glaring screen!

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently Do they? Why are physical controls back? It seems like car manufacturers just mindlessly jumped on what they thought was a fad, without ever bothering to test out their own cars.
- mannykannot 2y ago
  I think you are right, together with the opportunities for cost-saving and cheaply-implemented upselling. And it is not as if physical controls are ipso facto better. I have driven a number of cars with physical controls that are hard to find and distinguish between, and which function modally.
  - groby_b 2y ago
    Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that. Especially in situations where you need to use touch to maintain visual focus elsewhere.
    - mannykannot 2y ago
      > Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better... I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the 'just' there - if they were ipso facto better, that would be about as strong an affirmation of their superiority as one could make. Nothing I wrote contradicts the claim that a well-designed manual control is better than a touch control, and that is, in fact, a view that I agree with. The fact, however, that I have increasingly come across manual controls having the very vice that you seem to be alluding to - one needs to visually find them, operate them, or check their status, taking one's eyes off the road - shows that they are not ipso facto better. Are you perhaps mistaking ipso facto for prima facie?
      - thaumasiotes 2y ago
        > I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the 'just' there It's a very common pattern in English. "Not just X, Y" means that X is true, Y is true, and Y is a stronger claim than X. He's saying that not only is it the case that physical controls are superior by virtue of being physical controls, it's also the case that that fact is amply documented by "decades of studies".
        mannykannot 2y ago
        I am well aware of that, but, as I pointed out in my previous post, when X is ipso facto true, X is already affirmed as strongly and as unconditionally as is possible. What groby_p wrote is this: "Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that." In the first (independent) clause, groby_p asserts that physical controls are superior as a direct consequence of being physical controls (when one says something is 'not just' true, one is saying (ipso facto!) that it is true.) This, however, is empirically false - a badly-designed physical control can be at least as bad as a touch control (and for an example of how it could be dangerously worse than a touch control, take the fuel selector valve in the airplane John Denver crashed, which was difficult to operate in flight without accidentally applying full rudder.) [1] The dependent clause claims that decades of studies justify the ipso facto claim, but they do not: they strongly support the somewhat lesser (but highly significant) claim that well-designed physical controls are superior (at least in most cases.) This is something I agree with, and nothing I have written suggests otherwise. As I have pointed out ways in which some physical controls on today's cars are so poorly designed as to have the same significant problems as touch controls, I don't think this is a pedantic point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Denver#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Denver#Death
mmooss 2y ago
> Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on. Whatever the other trade-offs, you can do all that even more easily with a good PDF application. You also can open multiple instances of the same book, to have multiple pages open simultaneously.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  And the magic of Ctrl+F, highlights, and comments.
- ralphc 2y ago
  But none of that mitigates the problem of screen real estate. Maybe I'm just an old but I like to see more of the page. The Chromebooks, do they have a jack for a second monitor? A good sized monitor could take care of a lot of these problems. Even better would be if they can also put books, pdfs etc. on an iPad for reading.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    If I'm going to stay at a particular place for working, I want at least 24" in screen areas. 4K if I'm going to stare at text. An iPad works great if you're reading only or working on the document itself (annotation). Not so great for quick browsing.
- Loic 2y ago
  In a pdf book, what I am really missing is the spacial position of a piece of knowledge. Particularly for reference books (I am an engineer, I still have a large amount of reference books) I look up on a regular basis, I know/remember where I need to search without the need to express it in words to run a search through a 1000+ page book. But, maybe I am just an old guy and this is just because I learnt this way. Maybe the new generation is learning directly "digital" with other knowledge access mechanisms. For example, I intuitively store a "position" in the book, maybe they intuitively remember a "keyword" to search for in the book.
  - 2y ago
delusional 2y ago
To the great of my then teachers, I used to scribble and write equations on my table while studying. I had paper, but for some reason I just loved doing math directly on the table. I was told off for it often, but I don't think I would have liked math as much as I did if I didn't have that option.
chinchilla2020 2y ago
can't wait for the javascript error when I try to switch gears on the touchscreen of my future car!
gosub100 2y ago
I've never driven a Tesla, but don't they have voice activation? Can't you say "hey Tesla, reduce AC to low"? I totally agree that tactile feedback is superior to tapping a screen, but if it had accurate voice activation that would be almost as good for me (once I got used to the weirdness of talking to the car like Knight Rider)
- CrimsonRain 2y ago
  They have and they are more than accurate enough even if you're not a native speaker. It's just unwilling to learn/change. Saw an Audi today which is same physical size and price range to a Tesla model 3. It was down right funny how much useless crap it has on the dashboard, how bad it looks and how claustrophobic it feels compared to model 3.
  - throw-the-towel 2y ago
    But why should they be willing to change? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you claiming the users should just meekly accept change for the sake of change, and never complain?
hilbert42 2y ago
"crappy tablet instead of physical knobs,…" What happened to the field of ergonomics? Why is the modern/digital world so disconnected from the human form and the way people actually work and use things? Modern electronics is rife with this shitty ergonomics, it's everywhere—from rotten screen GUIs (or GUIs that change with every release—witness Microsoft Windows) to pushbutton volume controls with little or no tactile feedback instead of proper rotary potentiometers, and so on. I know in many instances it's cheaper but a rotary potentiometer is cheaper than a screen. A rotary knob for a volume control is much easier to use—and much safer too when used in a vehicle. I've come to the conclusion that designers of digital electronics simply don't know enough about analog electronics and or analog interfaces to design the stuff, it seems the word 'analog' has been stricken from their vocabulary, and or they're too timid to attempt such designs. Perhaps they're frightened of being criticized by colleagues who are even more stupid than they are. What else can it be? The human hand is exquisitely designed to rotate a knob (evolution suggests we humans evolved thus to twist fruit off trees). Same issue with pushbutton switches, without decent tactile feedback one's never sure if the function has been completed. Gamers use proper mechanical switch keyboards because they can achieve much, much greater speed and precision than they can with this crappy 'lifeless' stuff. The modern electronic junk is just so much harder to use, product design has actually gone backwards. The ergonomics of old-fashioned radios and HiFis were perfect in this regard with their rotary potentiometers and clunky switchs. If you are a designer of this junk and reading this then shame on you! Ask yourself why the hell are you so incompetent that you cannot give users designs that they both want and are easy to use.
- delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
  > rotary potentiometers Purely analogue controls like potentiometers went out of fashion because controlling for things like judder, slight creep, dead-zones, and of course physical wear and tear were big enough problems. Case in point: even the cheapest new joysticks for flight simulators have moved to Hall effect sensors, and many knobs have moved to rotary detented encoders. This change happened in real jet airliners too. A press of the rudder pedal or a swing of the joystick/yoke no longer directly pulls on cables and pulleys to directly manipulate control surfaces. Instead, nearly all modern jet airliners use fly-by-wire where control deflections are encoded, and sent digitally to hydraulic actuators on control surfaces. Hence, UX designers and engineers could still make analogue-like controls with switches, knobs, physical push-buttons, etc and still have a digital back-end. In fact this is exactly what car manufacturers did in the mid-2000s to late 2010s, with the CAN bus and all. Controls were physical, but a shift of the knob to the previous or next detent would trigger an electromagnetic switch of some sort to send a digital signal instead of relying on the physical position of the knob. I'd say ~2020 and the W223 Mercedes-Benz S-class was the turning point for extravagantly and pointlessly large screens in cars.

by jajko 2y ago

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently Do they? Why are physical controls back? It seems like car manufacturers just mindlessly jumped on what they thought was a fad, without ever bothering to test out their own cars.

mannykannot 2y ago
I think you are right, together with the opportunities for cost-saving and cheaply-implemented upselling. And it is not as if physical controls are ipso facto better. I have driven a number of cars with physical controls that are hard to find and distinguish between, and which function modally.
- groby_b 2y ago
  Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that. Especially in situations where you need to use touch to maintain visual focus elsewhere.
  - mannykannot 2y ago
    > Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better... I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the 'just' there - if they were ipso facto better, that would be about as strong an affirmation of their superiority as one could make. Nothing I wrote contradicts the claim that a well-designed manual control is better than a touch control, and that is, in fact, a view that I agree with. The fact, however, that I have increasingly come across manual controls having the very vice that you seem to be alluding to - one needs to visually find them, operate them, or check their status, taking one's eyes off the road - shows that they are not ipso facto better. Are you perhaps mistaking ipso facto for prima facie?
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the 'just' there It's a very common pattern in English. "Not just X, Y" means that X is true, Y is true, and Y is a stronger claim than X. He's saying that not only is it the case that physical controls are superior by virtue of being physical controls, it's also the case that that fact is amply documented by "decades of studies".
      - mannykannot 2y ago
        I am well aware of that, but, as I pointed out in my previous post, when X is ipso facto true, X is already affirmed as strongly and as unconditionally as is possible. What groby_p wrote is this: "Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that." In the first (independent) clause, groby_p asserts that physical controls are superior as a direct consequence of being physical controls (when one says something is 'not just' true, one is saying (ipso facto!) that it is true.) This, however, is empirically false - a badly-designed physical control can be at least as bad as a touch control (and for an example of how it could be dangerously worse than a touch control, take the fuel selector valve in the airplane John Denver crashed, which was difficult to operate in flight without accidentally applying full rudder.) [1] The dependent clause claims that decades of studies justify the ipso facto claim, but they do not: they strongly support the somewhat lesser (but highly significant) claim that well-designed physical controls are superior (at least in most cases.) This is something I agree with, and nothing I have written suggests otherwise. As I have pointed out ways in which some physical controls on today's cars are so poorly designed as to have the same significant problems as touch controls, I don't think this is a pedantic point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Denver#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Denver#Death

mmooss 2y ago

> Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on. Whatever the other trade-offs, you can do all that even more easily with a good PDF application. You also can open multiple instances of the same book, to have multiple pages open simultaneously.

HPsquared 2y ago
And the magic of Ctrl+F, highlights, and comments.
ralphc 2y ago
But none of that mitigates the problem of screen real estate. Maybe I'm just an old but I like to see more of the page. The Chromebooks, do they have a jack for a second monitor? A good sized monitor could take care of a lot of these problems. Even better would be if they can also put books, pdfs etc. on an iPad for reading.
- skydhash 2y ago
  If I'm going to stay at a particular place for working, I want at least 24" in screen areas. 4K if I'm going to stare at text. An iPad works great if you're reading only or working on the document itself (annotation). Not so great for quick browsing.
Loic 2y ago
In a pdf book, what I am really missing is the spacial position of a piece of knowledge. Particularly for reference books (I am an engineer, I still have a large amount of reference books) I look up on a regular basis, I know/remember where I need to search without the need to express it in words to run a search through a 1000+ page book. But, maybe I am just an old guy and this is just because I learnt this way. Maybe the new generation is learning directly "digital" with other knowledge access mechanisms. For example, I intuitively store a "position" in the book, maybe they intuitively remember a "keyword" to search for in the book.
- 2y ago

delusional 2y ago

To the great of my then teachers, I used to scribble and write equations on my table while studying. I had paper, but for some reason I just loved doing math directly on the table. I was told off for it often, but I don't think I would have liked math as much as I did if I didn't have that option.

chinchilla2020 2y ago

can't wait for the javascript error when I try to switch gears on the touchscreen of my future car!

gosub100 2y ago

I've never driven a Tesla, but don't they have voice activation? Can't you say "hey Tesla, reduce AC to low"? I totally agree that tactile feedback is superior to tapping a screen, but if it had accurate voice activation that would be almost as good for me (once I got used to the weirdness of talking to the car like Knight Rider)

CrimsonRain 2y ago
They have and they are more than accurate enough even if you're not a native speaker. It's just unwilling to learn/change. Saw an Audi today which is same physical size and price range to a Tesla model 3. It was down right funny how much useless crap it has on the dashboard, how bad it looks and how claustrophobic it feels compared to model 3.
- throw-the-towel 2y ago
  But why should they be willing to change? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you claiming the users should just meekly accept change for the sake of change, and never complain?

hilbert42 2y ago

"crappy tablet instead of physical knobs,…" What happened to the field of ergonomics? Why is the modern/digital world so disconnected from the human form and the way people actually work and use things? Modern electronics is rife with this shitty ergonomics, it's everywhere—from rotten screen GUIs (or GUIs that change with every release—witness Microsoft Windows) to pushbutton volume controls with little or no tactile feedback instead of proper rotary potentiometers, and so on. I know in many instances it's cheaper but a rotary potentiometer is cheaper than a screen. A rotary knob for a volume control is much easier to use—and much safer too when used in a vehicle. I've come to the conclusion that designers of digital electronics simply don't know enough about analog electronics and or analog interfaces to design the stuff, it seems the word 'analog' has been stricken from their vocabulary, and or they're too timid to attempt such designs. Perhaps they're frightened of being criticized by colleagues who are even more stupid than they are. What else can it be? The human hand is exquisitely designed to rotate a knob (evolution suggests we humans evolved thus to twist fruit off trees). Same issue with pushbutton switches, without decent tactile feedback one's never sure if the function has been completed. Gamers use proper mechanical switch keyboards because they can achieve much, much greater speed and precision than they can with this crappy 'lifeless' stuff. The modern electronic junk is just so much harder to use, product design has actually gone backwards. The ergonomics of old-fashioned radios and HiFis were perfect in this regard with their rotary potentiometers and clunky switchs. If you are a designer of this junk and reading this then shame on you! Ask yourself why the hell are you so incompetent that you cannot give users designs that they both want and are easy to use.

delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
> rotary potentiometers Purely analogue controls like potentiometers went out of fashion because controlling for things like judder, slight creep, dead-zones, and of course physical wear and tear were big enough problems. Case in point: even the cheapest new joysticks for flight simulators have moved to Hall effect sensors, and many knobs have moved to rotary detented encoders. This change happened in real jet airliners too. A press of the rudder pedal or a swing of the joystick/yoke no longer directly pulls on cables and pulleys to directly manipulate control surfaces. Instead, nearly all modern jet airliners use fly-by-wire where control deflections are encoded, and sent digitally to hydraulic actuators on control surfaces. Hence, UX designers and engineers could still make analogue-like controls with switches, knobs, physical push-buttons, etc and still have a digital back-end. In fact this is exactly what car manufacturers did in the mid-2000s to late 2010s, with the CAN bus and all. Controls were physical, but a shift of the knob to the previous or next detent would trigger an electromagnetic switch of some sort to send a digital signal instead of relying on the physical position of the knob. I'd say ~2020 and the W223 Mercedes-Benz S-class was the turning point for extravagantly and pointlessly large screens in cars.