31–40 of 103 posts
This is like the interface version of Hyrum's law: With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People using notepad to subtitle screen-captured tutorials on Youtube.
As cringey as that looks, what are other options there? Windows' desktop (and neither Linux's IIRC) doesn't have a built-in "stick-it note" functionality — which is kind of a shame if you really think about it.
Some random folk practices I've come across: * Blocking, stacking and pulling creep camps in DOTA. Unintended behaviours that became core game mechanics. * Comments in the tag section of Tumblr posts, to avoid the comments appearing in a reblog ("Why do people use tags on tumblr instead of comments?" [1]) * The appropriation of switching MOSFETs such as the IRF510, designed for low frequencies, in homebrew amateur ra…
The former two tend to use the imperfection of diodes leaking to create varying degrees of fuzz (really clipping) based on placement. It fakes pushing an amp past it’s thresholds.
The latter abused chips that failed QA as the source of noise. They can’t make “real” ones anymore, since the chip is out of production. This one’s from my memory and the description may be flawed.
In both cases, abusing electronics’ imperfections is the goal.
Now with pedals, you get magical beliefs about “original” parts, but that’s another story.
So many guitar effects are based on accidents and replication/reduction of them. It’s both technically and historically fascinating to me. “This sucks, but sounds cool. How can I make a smaller box that does it?”
On the etymology of "folk", saying that it the word comes from Old English folc is true, although a vast over-simplification. A lot of languages share this word. This is actually an ancient word, you can trace it back to proto-Germanic "fulka", and further to Proto-Indo-European "plh-gos" (presumably pronounced something like phulgos or pholgos, close enough to folk).
> chairs as doorstoppers, Wait, there are actual things, called "doorstoppers", that are designed to work exactly as door stoppers and have no other discernible function? Do they by any chance look anything like paperweights?
[0] https://www.scienceopen.com/document_file/cbe110a4-c761-4afe...
The biggest issue that I come across, is users of my software, developing mental models of the software that I would never, in a million years, have developed, myself. They often work with the software, based on their "strange" mental model, and can have very weird workflows. In some cases, this is excellent, and it is worth it for me to learn the new model, and maybe add affordances for it.
Could you talk about some concrete examples?
Customer: "Could you make the 'name' field of this entity longer? We need to add longer names."
Me: "Why?"
Customer: "Well, we want to name the entity '2022 - Spring - $500k - Contoso Inc. - Presale stage' so we can find it more easily."
Me: "So what you actually want is to be able to filter/search for entities by all those values, and you're just using the name as a workaround because it's all you have."
Customer: "Well that's how we do it in Excel."
> chairs as doorstoppers, Wait, there are actual things, called "doorstoppers", that are designed to work exactly as door stoppers and have no other discernible function? Do they by any chance look anything like paperweights?
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-Heavy-Duty-Walnut-Brown...
> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities. Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce. I've been searching for other examples of end-user…
https://zork.net/~st/jottings/kakoune-a-punk-rock-text-edito...
> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities. Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce. I've been searching for other examples of end-user…
Minecraft comes to mind, if you want to think out of the box.
These examples seem to show that there's a kind of wisdom and creativity of the crowd, the folk, collective behavior.