We're seeing the same reaction today with AI image generators.
When the push button was new, people were freaked
41–50 of 189 posts
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#42A meh article, but this:
> They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”
was prescient.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#43> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. Where I live you are technically not allowed to install equipment on 120 or 240 if you are not a certified electrician. Insurance won't cover water damage if installation hasn't been done by a professional plumber. People still do it, but this is not going in the right di…
But it keeps work coming to the electricians' and plumbers' unions (motto: "If you didn't make any mistakes, you're not working fast enough"), and isn't that the important thing?
For the story, I used "professionals" to rebuild drywall after a flood. They managed to fuck up my ethernet network in the process, but they don't want to admit guilt, and they're telling me to "use wifi instead".
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the article points out.
Yes, but in my opinion, much of the mental exercise in the article and the book is based on how the electric push button was an entirely new concept.
I don't think the appehresion was so much of the button interface but of the 'black box' automation aspect of it. Where the button isn't physically triggering a function like a spring or lever, instead some 'magic' happens in the behind the scenes. The interface was no longer directly connected to a simple, easily understood sequence of actions.
> At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life.
> Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.”
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Unless, of course, your phone is one of the few where pushing harder will make it perform a different action, if used in the right place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch ). > On how touchscreens are ov…
Force Touch was discontinued in 2019 and replaced with a simple “long press” feature called Haptic Touch. iPhone 11 and later and Apple Watch 6 and onwards don’t have the pressure sensitive layer anymore.
MacBook touchpads still have it though.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#46> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. Where I live you are technically not allowed to install equipment on 120 or 240 if you are not a certified electrician. Insurance won't cover water damage if installation hasn't been done by a professional plumber. People still do it, but this is not going in the right di…
This is very much like this in Australia. I had friends warning me against setting up my own pendant light because of insurance and other blabla and was denied to buy some electrical cables at the local hardware shop as I wasn't certified even though I hold a bachelor in electronics .... Compared that to France where I spent time at uni building my own guitar amplifier for my bachelor thesis, manipulating 300V-500V a…
Wow the insurance is one thing but not even bring able to buy electrical cable is crazy to me. Australia's government truly is more dystopian than most people give it credit for being.
Every now and then I hear about another fundamental freedom I take for granted that they just don't have and it just reminds me how lucky I am not to live there.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#47It'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?
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#48It'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.
> Children are less computer-literate than ever.
Going back 20 years, I wouldve never guessed this would be the current state of affairs! As an industry we've succeeded in unlocking computing as a background enabler, but have utterly failed in making create-side computing friendly and accessible
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#49> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. Where I live you are technically not allowed to install equipment on 120 or 240 if you are not a certified electrician. Insurance won't cover water damage if installation hasn't been done by a professional plumber. People still do it, but this is not going in the right di…
But it keeps work coming to the electricians' and plumbers' unions (motto: "If you didn't make any mistakes, you're not working fast enough"), and isn't that the important thing?
Strange, my experiences with unionized labor have found the exact opposite - safety conscious to the nth degree, and much more likely to criticize each other for working too quickly than too slowly. They seem to be incentivized to 1) not get dinged for safety infractions and 2) get as many billable hours out of every work order as possible.
Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scroll down a little bit on that page, and you can see the alternate translation as "pimple".
While I agree that bouton can mean pimple or zit, it's the rest of the phrase that I don't understand. Bouton doesn't mean projection, and sure isn't a verb...
Projection can be a noun in English, and often is.
Related definition from Google: "A thing that extends outward from something else: 'the particle board covered all the sharp projections'"
Synonyms: protuberance, protrusion, sticking-out bit, overhang, prominence, spur, outcrop, outgrowth, jut, bulge, jag...
And obviously, projection can be a noun in its probably most common usage as in "an estimate or forecast of a future situation or trend based on study of present ones". In the phrase, "this is the projection of where the hurricane will go", "the projection" is a noun. The verb in this phrase is "is", a linking verb.
"Wall Street bankers crafted a projection of the market." The verb here is "crafted". What did they craft: a projection. A noun.
"I watch the projection on the screen." - The verb here is watch. What am I watching: the projection. A noun.