Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans."
Lmao, yeah.... You can make a can so secured a bear definitely won't get in; but will people go to the effort to use it then?
Definitely some overlap there.
And I think that hits on the truth, which makes this less "iamverysmart". It's not that the tourists are dumb, it's that they're new and not willing to pay much attention to things like trash can design. 1% of a normal person's attention presents a lot like a really dumb person.
Is it 1%? Maybe when they first try to open it they're distracted But when doesn't open and now they're concentrating on the problem and still fail, then we have to kinda own up to the fact that a lot of people aren't smarter than a bear.
I'd be pretty distracted by the bear waiting behind me for his go.
I can’t believe this comment chain is this long and no one has pointed out that drunk and stoned humans are terrible at figuring stuff like this out.
You’re not planning for the dumbest human trying in earnest. You’re planning for humans who are tired, distracted and/or chemically altered. A 80 IQ person can figure out a weird trash can eventually if they are trying.
These comments (not just yours) feel misanthropic. I haven’t been to a campsite in ages so I don’t know what sort of trash can puzzlebox we’re talking about, but I work somewhere with alcohol so I can guess what the true issue is.
A bear has time and motivation to keep trying over and over again to get into the garbage. People are generally much less determined to figure it out.
I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
The monitor disappeared rather than the computer, but we can assume the tower somewhere under the desk did as well. But what of the keyboard? It's in the icon, yet remains after deletion!
I think you found a bug. Either the keyboard is not compatible with the bin or we have a immutable peripheral and we should consider containment.
One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was "it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it's spreading."
Turns out the rendering engine couldn't handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning "hair on fire" it broke things:
🔥
😬
Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays... because that's when this user actually used the application
Before we had mindblown emoji, we had this.
💥
😳
I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, that's not even good on paper. Those are a retarded pair of things to have next to one another regardless of any coloring on them. Especially with the same handles
I'm not a fighter pilot, but when I think "ejection", can't imagine anything but a high-stress situation where the pilot doesn't have time to figure out which is the ejection lever. Imagine a real emergency where the pilot grabs the wrong lever, gently slides back with the seat, and then fucking dies on impact.
"Gently slides back" 😂
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn't have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn't need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they'd just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn't estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that "pulling back" is slightly pulling towards the pilot's body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
The act of someone sitting at a brand new Mac, with a never-before-used interface, and immediately clicking the computer icon to drag it to the trash, is such a powerful image for me.
The statement of, "this is what I think of this computer" is so strong, because I have to believe that whomever did that must have been a tech person to be at the event; but perhaps they just thought it was a shortcut and didn't like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windows.... Because the computer object (in Explorer) is immutable, and any reference to it is simply a link to that object.
I prefer the thought of them just being like "this computer is trash" and doing that, and causing the system to crash.
The closest I ever got to this story was working help desk in 1996. A user called up saying they had deleted the Internet.
Took me a while to understand he dragged “the Internet” to the recycle bin on the desktop.
Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.
As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
I was a QA engineer. I think one of the guys on the team I was on developed a stress response from hearing me walk over to his desk.
Lots of "page crashes if the user doesn't have a last name"
"Why wouldn't they have a last name??"
"No idea, but 372 users in the DB don't, and 20 of them were created this month so it's not an old problem"
"incoherent muttering and cursing"
I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.
Game makers should hire me to test their maps, if there's a spot where I can get 100% stuck no matter what, you bet your shiny metal ass I'll find it.
Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.
It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.
I always remember that when I'm working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we're not thinking of...
I'm so glad you can automate QA jobs
I hadn’t heard the Mac story before. I wonder if it’s legit, as I don’t think the Mac, or the Lisa before it, ever had the equivalent of a My Computer icon. Disks appear directly on the desktop; dragging a disk to the trash can ejects it if its removable media, and the only type of disk the original Mac had was a 400KB single-sided 3.5” floppy drive.
I once deleted system32.....That's when I began calling the shots.
This story is a lie.
There's no "computer icon". Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can't be deleted.
You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac
I have to agree. The Macintosh 128k didn't even have an internal HDD. Everything was run on 3.5" floppies. Heck they may have invented the 3.5" floppy, idk. As you said, dragging the system dick icon to the trash on a 128k was literally the easiest way to eject the disk.
My father still owns one, that may actually work. He also got 2 extra external floppy drives for the thing. He also has an Apple ]|[
well id expect the computer to crash if i threw it in the trash can
no you're getting it confused with the crash can
That's a very funny anecdote about Apple that I can find no evidence of ever actually happening. Leaving aside the fact that Xerox had GUI, including the modern WIMP GUI we're all familiar with today, in 1974. The Apple Lisa was released at least a year before the Macintosh 128K came out in 1984. As much as I love the idea of Apple making such an amateur mistake, I'm going to need a reputable source before I believe that story actually happened.
Edit: I'm seeing a lot of "it's technically possible" but still no sources to confirm that it actually occurred. Until a a verifiable source emerges, I'm still going to assume this story never actually happened. Anyone have Woz's contact info? We could always just ask him.