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When the push button was new, people were freaked

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Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#111

Post by fredrb »

SilasX wrote: post #106
yamtaddle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reference is cliché to the point that I usually hate to see it, but did understand the original post's intent in context (that is, the context provided by skimming the linked article to which the post is a reaction) without issue. It didn't even occur to me that it was anything other than plain.

It has a block of text, whose purpose isn't clear at the beginning [1], and requires you to read the entire comment, in its thick prose, and the article in order to understand, and even then you have to guess which point its referring, but could be wrong because cercatrova didn't actually own one. Here is how I would have done the comment: --- >people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atro…

That’s usually how human conversations go. It’s not always efficient. You should try it sometime.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#112

Post by eternityforest »

andirk wrote: post #22

Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding. On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the…

What we really need is more standardized swappable modules.

The odds of me replacing a BGA chip are low. By the time one fails, the device may be obsolete, the part may be expensive, my soldering skills probably could never be as good as a robot, etc.

But if my computer has an issue, I can totally replace a bad drive in full confidence that it's probably worth it.

The fact that there's no standards body for modular consumer goods really sucks.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#113

Post by [deleted] »

cercatrova wrote: post #60

From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…

[deleted]

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#114

Post by eternityforest »

cfraenkel wrote: post #110
h2odragon wrote: post #37

Tangental, but the physical mechanisms of electronic controls are often worth study. Ingenious mechanisms move little slivers of metal around in carefully engineered enclosures. It's a more accessible magic that's easy to disregard. The "channel dial" switch on old TV's was awesome .

The engineering & tolerances to make a typical microswitch (what makes the pushbutton actually do anything) would make most peoples eyes water. (from boredom, perhaps...) Fun fact - if you engineer the people facing mechanism to keep the switch pin from being depressed all the way flush to the switch housing, the lifetime of the switch increases by roughly a factor of 10. A 0.1 mm difference in pushbutton throw is th…

Well, they must not actually be doing that on cheap switches, they fail probably 10x as much as anything except maybe power supply equipment and connectors.

Mechanical keyswitches have some pretty amazing reliability though.

I actually like the touchscreen everything movement in most applications, partly because of this. A screen may be expensive, but good switches might be just as expensive.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#115

Post by eternityforest »

duxup wrote: post #13
burlesona wrote: post #3

Fascinating. There’s always a loss of lower-level knowledge when we introduce abstractions. Yet “we stand upon the shoulders of giants,” it’s the layers of abstractions underneath us that we don’t have to understand or even think about that free our minds to compose ever more amazing technology on top. Still, progression from the layer that you know and love to the next that paves over it is bittersweet.

>we don’t have to understand or even think about But also don't have to make all the same mistakes other folks did / toil our way through to the ... potentially same endpoint. At least as far as code goes I've gone through plenty of experiments that go: "Man I don't need this complex chunk of software, let me just try ..." "Ok now I understand why that chunk of software is the way it is... and it's better than mine..…

I don't do that at all these days. It's almost a guarantee that I'll eventually use the big complex thing, so I rarely even consider trying anything else if it's a project that actually matters.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#116

Post by eternityforest »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #59

Not much more magical than delivering a chicken to the butcher, and getting back pieces of meat. Or delivering a typed manuscript to your publisher, and getting a bound book. Or any trade essentially. Having a machine do it - that was new. But not the part about abdicating responsibility for function.

Almost every trade has people freaking out and trying to push us all to be generalists.

And I'll continue ignoring pretty much all of them, because division of labor is a lot of why society is so advanced.

I'll grant them the chickens though, mass produced meat is one case where the abstraction hides some horrors that should be exposed.

But simple loss of skill isn't enough to convince me. I don't need to be able to build a CPU from scratch, any more than the CPU designer needs to know all of CSS.

These things are cool and worth exploring, but most any tech one person can understand themselves is probably a historical curiosity more than a practical thing. The rare exceptions like rope and knots are incredibly fascinating.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#117

Post by eternityforest »

skydove wrote: post #36

It's interesting to see that what some companies like Apple are doing nowadays has such historic precedence. And it ties in with the current state of affairs - fewer and fewer people understand electronics. Children are less computer-literate than ever.

Apple is a unique case. The CAD app might make you forget math, but it lets you make stuff with CAD.

Apple hides the filesystem and such but it doesn't really replace it with anything. It's not like they have some super ultra abstraction on top of it, they just straight up reduce the functionality a bit.

I don't see much critical value in understanding the things only specialists can or want to do, like how a CPU actually works or how to make an OS, but before Apple every generation had a level of abstraction they could work at that had the full power of previous levels(So long as you accept having to buy all the underlying stuff off the shelf).

Now it seems that the very newest computer users actually have less capability, because the abstraction doesn't expose the full power of the machine.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#118

Post by eternityforest »

legulere wrote: post #47
skydove wrote: post #36

It's interesting to see that what some companies like Apple are doing nowadays has such historic precedence. And it ties in with the current state of affairs - fewer and fewer people understand electronics. Children are less computer-literate than ever.

The question is wether you really need to be literate. As a software developer I cannot write correct assembler code ( with aligning rules, red zone and what not), but at least I can read it. I would guess most programmers cannot do even that. But do they really need it? Isn’t that the advance?

I can't write or read assembler, but I can program modern languages.

We're talking about a whole different level, people who don't even know how to effectively use what they have, troubleshoot basic issues, etc.

It's not "This is a magic box" so much as "I don't even know how to use the controls on this box and even if I could there's no button to do that thing anymore".

"I can't type or use a calculator" not just "I don't know how to divide numbers on paper"

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#119

Post by jdmdmdmdmd »

BrainVirus wrote: post #99

>The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by anticipation of things like: - Disconnect of people from nature an each other. - Replacement of real things with simulacra, which…

My mind immediately went to Forster as well:

>They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”

rings true to me. I think this was and still is a valid concern. At the very least it's a real trade-off. I almost get the feeling that the author in the OP looks down on the knowledge needed to understand machines/technology since it can be replaced by a button. That misses the point entirely though. Taking technology for granted makes you a mindless consumer in my opinion. That's why we're so instinctively disgusted by the population in The Machine Stops. They don't exist in any real sense; they're just the exit nodes of the machine's functions.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#120

Post by jimjimjim »

SilasX wrote: post #78
cercatrova wrote: post #60

From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…

Did you have a point with this? That couldn't be placed at the top? I don't know how hating on writing is related to people being disoriented by pushbuttons, and maybe if you stated what you thought the parallel was, you could have saved everyone some time and effort in reading hard-to-parse prose.

nah, forget the point. I'm off to rabbit hole some dialogues
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