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Never trust a system that seems to be working

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Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#161

Post by knorker »

usrbinenv wrote: post #88

A bit of an off-topic: I only ever saw white traffic lights in the US and Canada (specifically, pedestrian traffic lights) and they confused me a lot at first - the rest of the world uses green. The icons displayed (hands) are confusing too: the rest of the world uses an icon of a man walking or standing.

And they call it "green", despite the fact that it's obviously white.

I agree with you. When I'm in the US I keep scanning for a green light, so it takes me a while to find "the white man" telling me it's OK to cross.

Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#162

Post by [deleted] »

usrbinenv wrote: post #147
malloci wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hand is to mimic that of a traffic cop. When they want you to stop, they hold up their hand to indicate that you need to stop. It used to be that you had to know english in order to understand them as well...many of the signs used to use the words "walk" and "don't walk"

I guess my point is that it was still confusing. It took me a day or two to acquire a reflex. It obviously doesn't matter in the long run - you just get used to it - but I wonder why would US & Canada go a different way with regards to so many small things (think turn signals on cars being red for american cars as another example)? What would be the rationale? It's as if the western hemisphere was completely cut off…

[deleted]

Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#164

Post by oasisbob »

phkahler wrote: post #80
janpot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or why we build a stop command with normal-closed contacts. a broken wire results in the same signal as a "stop" command.

Semantics are really important in these situations. We have a system with an E-stop (emergency stop) circuit. Any break in the loop and the system will shut off. It needed to work together with one particular vendors board that insisted on having a "hardware enable" signal that it could control. Rather than adding an additional circuit, someone decided to have "hardware enable" flip a normally open relay in the E-sto…

This reminds me of what I've seen happen with the internal health-check endpoint often added to APIs. Simple at first, but eventually there are endpoints to cause the health-check to synthetically fail for deployment purposes; the health-check is also monitoring downstream dependencies; the health-check becomes much more and much less than it was intended to be.

Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#165

Post by smolder »

wongarsu wrote: post #157
MBCook wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never seen a white traffic light, but pedestrian crossing lights are often white/red still.

Are you suggesting I'm doing worse on Google Captchas because I consider pedestrian crossing lights as a form of traffic lights but Americans don't?

Possibly. I think people in the US strongly associate "traffic" with cars and don't generally think of the crosswalk indicators as "traffic lights".

Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#166

Post by nostrademons »

lordnacho wrote: post #2

Same goes for work. If you join a well oiled machine that just seems to be working great, you may never understand how it works, since you won't be exposed to various people diagnosing issues. Join a place that used to work and is now creaking, or a place that never worked, and there's more pain but also more learning. Also when does a Factorio system ever work? There's permanently a pressure for it to do more, stuff…

If you use a calculator and then carefully design out the logistics & geometry of your factory, you can build stuff that basically "just works" once you iron out the missing inserters & power poles. You get bottlenecks when you focus on one product at a time instead of looking at how the system as a whole functions.

Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#167

Post by Chico75 »

Kiro wrote: post #49
elteto wrote: post #31

Wow, Factorio is approaching Full Time Job levels of detail and work required to keep everything running. Incredible game that I will never play, I feel I’m back at my job!

This is a mod that seems extremely boring and tedious. The base game is not like this.

That's very subjective. It also adds a ton of new gameplay components that push factorio players to better think about how to manage their logistics which is fun for some players (not all for sure)

Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#168

Post by atomicnumber3 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #122
macintux wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve lamented here before, but the number of technical people who absolutely freeze up at the sight of an error message is daunting. Being able to interpret errors correctly is a huge step up in this industry; to me it feels like table stakes, but clearly isn’t.

> I’ve lamented here before, but the number of technical people who absolutely freeze up at the sight of an error message is daunting. "freeze" is still a much better reaction than "quickly dismiss without paying attention". I can understand "freeze"; it's possible to learn and train from there to "good, well done, now read everything and think". I do not understand "quickly dismiss without reading and paying attenti…

Part of the problem is that we've trained everyone, especially nontechnical people, to ignore and dismiss stuff.

You're using a program. A thingy pops up or unexpectedly shows up that interrupts you.

80% chance it's some stupid ad or newsletter thing. Dismiss with prejudice.

19% chance it's a "oopsie poopsie we did and whoopsie, the server monkeys are working VERY HARD to fix this, sowwy!!" and then the app still works apparently just fine, or if it doesn't you just force close and re-open the app.

1% of the time it's an ad again.

In the remaining floating point error's worth of %, it's an actual actionable thing a user could action to fix the issue.

I don't really blame people for just predicting that a pop up will be useless because it probably will be.

Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#169

Post by andirk »

wongarsu wrote: post #157
MBCook wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never seen a white traffic light, but pedestrian crossing lights are often white/red still.

Are you suggesting I'm doing worse on Google Captchas because I consider pedestrian crossing lights as a form of traffic lights but Americans don't?

Best choices to pick on captcha are not what you think is pictured but what you think most people think is pictured.

Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working

#170

Post by romwell »

ianferrel wrote: post #159
usrbinenv wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my point is that it was still confusing. It took me a day or two to acquire a reflex. It obviously doesn't matter in the long run - you just get used to it - but I wonder why would US & Canada go a different way with regards to so many small things (think turn signals on cars being red for american cars as another example)? What would be the rationale? It's as if the western hemisphere was completely cut off…

>I wonder why would US & Canada go a different way with regards to so many small things (think turn signals on cars being red for american cars as another example)? In many cases the US were the first to mass-manufacture things to some kind of standard, so the question is really: why did the rest of the world choose a different standard. Often they have a good reason (better design, maybe), but the US also has a good…

The curse of innovation: you might end up being stuck with it while the rest of the world learns from your mistakes.

Case in point: Ma Bell. And things like signing the credit card receipt.

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