151–160 of 278 posts
https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM
> According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home).
(If you're interested, you can google for "answering machine paradox" for more takes on it.)
Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious consideration.
> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently de…
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this is the only correct answer. "a non-technical user has no idea what a server or cache is" sure, but they can learn. The average person is much smarter than you think they are (when it comes to matters that actually affect their day to day life). If they don't get your explanation, it's almost always because (1) they don't care, they don't see why it matters to them (it often doesn't) (2) you're not explaining it…
The problem is that people's brains just fucking shut down once it's computer related. "What was the error message?" "Idk I didn't read it." "Well here it is, it's asking for your password." "Ok what should I do?" This type of shit is more common than it should be. So many people just give up on computer related things that isn't the happy path.
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Only for a while until someone changes it to "Something went wrong"
Don’t forget “Oops!” — the element of surprise. The developer doesn’t know what went wrong and things definitely don’t go wrong all the time at Microsoft! This is as surprising to the developer as it is to you! It’s also pleasantly humane, not like “ERROR:”, meaning it’s more of a silly and fun oopsie doopsie than a systems engineering failure. Don’t you just feel better as the user seeing that? It’s not the systems…
I find it as infuriating as you.
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> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently de…
A typical person's head will explode at the mention of the words "cache" and "server". They will then go into a blind panic that their data is going to be "permanently deleted".
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You don't. Explaining what happened is not going to help the user at all. You can only explain what options are available to the user. Something like the following "Sorry, this message can no longer be saved. Copy this message before discarding it if you will need access to it later."
Sorry but hard disagree on this one. This increasingly popular assumption that users are clueless cavemen is very condescending. Help the user self diagnose instead. WHY can’t it be saved? Is the internet not connected? Check your WiFi. Is the server full? Talk to admin. Is the message deleted by another user? Talk to your team about ways of working? Is it an internal application error? Tough luck, maybe the error co…
Sorry, but no. And this idea that everyone else is condescending is offensive nonsense.
I understand where you're coming from, but the people who understand how actual users behave and what actual users want, in the real world, are not condescending - they're empathic. They recognize that the majority of people in the world are not like us, in terms of technical abilities, yes, but more importantly, in terms of desires.
The average user doesn't care. They don't have time to do things like "talk to admin", nor do they even know what "check your wifi" means. "Talk to your team about ways of working"? I'm sure most employees would just love to go and have awkward conversations with others, that's exactly what they want to do this minute.
This is even on the off-chance that the user has even read the message, which is incredibly unlikely. I can't count the number of times I've had developers tell me they had an error message and don't know what to do, and my solution was "let's read it, it says this is the error" and that being revelatory for them.
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Yeah, the story is a bit incomplete. The full chain was application->transaction master -> 20 or so slave databases. It was a weekly batch dispatching data to the 20 slaves, starting with a full delete of each slave. Someone decided to literally pull the plug and replace the master database server node from the rack, while the batch was still running. He assumed the other server nodes would pick up where this one lef…
How did you discover the dangling transaction?
"This message cannot be saved because it no longer exists on the server.", and then it's all solved.
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The problem is that people's brains just fucking shut down once it's computer related. "What was the error message?" "Idk I didn't read it." "Well here it is, it's asking for your password." "Ok what should I do?" This type of shit is more common than it should be. So many people just give up on computer related things that isn't the happy path.
If those users aren't reading the error dialogs anyways, why do the error dialogs need to pander to those users? I wonder if the "make it dumb enough for every user to understand" approach leads to user comprehension plateauing prematurely.
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this is the only correct answer. "a non-technical user has no idea what a server or cache is" sure, but they can learn. The average person is much smarter than you think they are (when it comes to matters that actually affect their day to day life). If they don't get your explanation, it's almost always because (1) they don't care, they don't see why it matters to them (it often doesn't) (2) you're not explaining it…
> but they can learn. though do they want to? If they can learn, they would've. And then cease being a non-technical user.