Yup. Powerful features are removed to "streamline experience". Sometimes in bulk, because product migrated from e.g. bespoke native app to multiplatform webshit in an embedded browser, which automatically halved the performance and removed most ergonomics.
And then new features are released as MVPs - meaning, they do the absolute minimum to check the box (almost a literal box: close the feature ticket internally), and inefficiently so. Whether it'll be iterated on afterwards, depends. Pretty unlikely in the immediate term. They need to "collect usage data to know what to do" first, which means it gets deprioritized relative to moar features.
But that's fine for me. As long as copy-paste works, I can make do with other software, perhaps competing software, or worst case, have Claude find and use some powerful-but-janky OSS CLI tool to do the stuff for me.
I'm less angry at it than I used to. Mostly because I don't have time to be annoyed anymore, but it's true that I've learned to like updates from few companies. That's because after years - years - I've noticed things gradually improving on average. True of Android & Samsung OneUI, except when it's not. True of UniFi stuff. If I see some new feature behaving badly, I now mostly trust they'll eventually fix it. It'll take a year or three, they'll overhaul it entirely twice, and I may need to buy a new phone to get it, but it will happen one day. But most software doesn't even clear that bar.
> (...) and a lot of very good things from a sustainability and general optimisation perspective. The flip side is it also has the potential to be an absolute dystopian privacy nightmare.
Privacy is an illusion for most people, and in office spaces, it's also a red herring. Wifi trilateration doesn't make things worse when you have a CCTV camera on every corner, badge reader at every other door, and presence sensing in conference rooms. Dystopia does not materialize without a severe regime shift.
Nah, my main worry is precisely sustainability and optimization, i.e. cost-cutting, because the more tools you give a business to optimize, and the more bullshit excuses ("sustainability! saving the planet!") you give a business, the worse the outcome is for users (here: employees). And a lot of that is doubly annoying, because it's counter-productive.
So what you have smart sensors in every room, and combine it with badge readers and wifi trilat and what not, and have smart auto-routing/rebooking algorithm: half the week, all conference rooms are always booked full, and yet somehow when you physically go and check, a good half sits empty, and it's apparently an impossible problem to solve.
So what the bathroom wall says, "with water-saving fixtures, we're using much less water in this building", and "we're now saving 2L water per flush". It's all bullshit, because those eco inventions mean I need to flush 3 times instead of once, and it means that I spend a minute washing my hands instead of 10 seconds - especially because both the soap and the dispenser are also optimized, so it takes 20 seconds to get enough soap on your hands, and then extra 20 seconds to get it off afterwards, because unlike normal people soap, it leaves your hands slippery for some reason.
And then they say "scientists said you can dry your hands with just 2 paper towels". At that point I'm getting red, because yes, I saw that TED talk 15 years ago too, and yes, it's total bullshit. Maybe it was true then, but the industry and the beancounters have value-optimized paper towels 15 times since that.
The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.
> The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.
Yeah there's a certain type of engineer mindset that loves the idea of optimizing things. But if you want to really optimize something, you have to carefully account for every single possible factor, situation, and use-case. Miss anything, and it's a much bigger disaster than saving 2% of whatever resource. It's rarely worth it.
Much better to treat the presumptions as a vague heuristic, make generous assumptions and add some slack, and call that good enough. Now there's probably enough slack to cover most of the edge cases you didn't think of, other things you based your original assumptions on changing under you, etc.
> The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.
Indeed, the Boimler Effect, amongst other things.
I see an analogy, Food : Malthusian catastrophe :: Money : No room for profit in an economy.
Elevators are, in a way, a heap of social and psychological problems stuffed into a box that moves up and down a lot. The article briefly acknowledges it, but like ~all such articles I read over the years, it's primarily interested in wait time and focuses on which quantile to minimize and how. But I'd love to know if and how the soft, squishy thing is being accounted for.
The core problem: elevators are frustrating for many reasons, and that frustration often manifests as hidden blame and hate towards other fellow passengers. Like, IDK, I'm sitting there with a stroller and a kid on floor -1, trying to get to the train platform at floor 0, but the elevator isn't coming because it's going back and forth between 0 and 2 and 3, as people who came by cars shuttle their luggage to and from the parking lot. As a city dweller and non-car person, I can feel my hatred towards cars and drivers bubbling up right there.
I imagine the same is felt by them if I manage to snatch the lift and go from 0 to -1, when they'd really love to already be on +2.
There's many other cases. Mall problems are different than train station problem, different than tall residential building problems, different than office building problems. Destination Dispatch is its own special thing, with its own special psychological twists. But two things I observed in general are:
- If there is a control element available, you will blame people for using it (even internally). Like, "I'd be there a minute ago if not for this damn XYZ who just had to press the button at exactly this time, and they weren't even going in this direction!"
- If there is an indicator element available, people will optimize around whatever it shows.
Like, someone gets at floor N, sees most of the buttons between there and their destination M lit up, immediately presses N+1 to get off there and call another elevator. But if the buttons are visible enough from outside the lift, they may just not get in in the first place, saving themselves and the others time and trouble, etc.
The more I think about it, the more I see that placement of buttons and indicators in the lift is in itself an UX engineering problem with unusually high impact of every decision on well-being of the users.
EDIT: Also ironically, and in line with my feeling that Star Trek got more things right than people give it credit for, a lot of elevator problems - both scheduling and social/psychological ones - would be solved if elevators just moved faster, like 2-4x faster than now, and also in some cases, also moved sideways. I.e. turbolifts.
(That, and if it didn't immediately led to the building owners putting less of them. So put another way: frustrating lifts is the sign of building owners/designers cheapening out.)
> Ideally a new elevator installation would have a trial period where they record usage
There's a tricky problem here: as a user, the first thing you do upon discovering a new elevator, especially if you expect to be using it regularly, is to observe how it behaves and adjust your own expectations/behavior to it.
Things are constantly changing. For example, a new building might have two or three tenants, so entire floors can be skipped. But then five years later, the whole building is full. I would bet that every new algorithm after LOOK is just differentiation in a competitive market.
That sounds nice and pleasantly confirms our biases, but it's blatantly false.
Existence of recruiters and recruitment companies as separate job entities is a proof positive that you do not, in fact, need a working recruitment pipeline.
If anything, recruitment in our industry was always broken. And yet here we are.
You aren’t wrong. That’s why recruiters and placement agencies exist. The statement is still true though. It’s just mostly deferred now onto another entity.
Weird analogy. Nonsensical from both physical standpoint (the only energy input when swinging is the person on the swing "pumping their legs"), and practical one (you usually sit down with the swing already at an angle and then kick off, so a good 50% of the arc/momentum is there from the setup).
Right, and remember how getting the rhythm right was the whole trick of it? Learning when to bend back and when to lean forward? When to pump your legs, so that your relatively small inputs were additive to the momentum of the swing, not fighting it? How when you kicked at the wrong time, you could feel the balance upset, you could feel the swing slow?
It's not bad I think. We must be open-minded and humble, like a child, and learn how the system actually works in order to be effective.
Often times our first instincts will not work, so we must observe, experiment, and try again. And not be afraid of looking foolish with our legs flailing around. Find the underlying rhythm and flow with it, not against it.
The original quote is a bit unclear, but it does refer to being on a playground:
"Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung."
I found it excerpted in Getting Things Done, where the author presented it as the ideal for how one should approach their life, both professionally and personally.
GTD is the opposite of being on a swing. It's the constant fear of the parents shouting your name from the balcony to tell you the playtime is over and you need to get back home for a Weekly Review.
Are employees usually liable for process-related issues? Like individual employees weren't liable for dispensing too-hot coffee but McDonalds was liable. Or how cops aren't liable in their individual capacity if it was a failure of training, etc.
For instance: give John the job of monitoring the HR AI so it isn't racist. To do that he needs to do impossible task of checking 10,000 automated resume evaluation decisions per day. No one can do that, so eventually he just approves them all.
Then if the system is determined to be super racist, you proceed to blame it on John, and fire him for being negligent and not doing his job. You put out a press release, and hire Steve into John's role. Your decisive actions show you're taking the problem seriously and the company isn't to blame.
As is so often the case SMBC has already got a comic for this. I sincerely regard Zach Weinersmith (and also separately Randall Munroe) as two of the most pertinent voices in modern philosophy.
The problem was that the science behind those fancy power plants of yours is so complicated, the rest of the galaxy found it easier to just oxidize biomass, and are now scouring every known sector for M-class planets they haven't yet strip-mined from all organic matter.
I say was, because the current problem is that those "environmentalists" you mentioned managed to scare remaining interstellar governments away from this technology, which made them double down on biomass extraction.
Interesting. It's probably why every single trampoline my wife and myself ever saw (and she previously worked in a place that, every May, pivoted from their furniture business to importing and selling trampolines for the May break seasons), had a label saying only one kid is allowed at a time.
Though obviously this is CYA, because same label exists on trampolines sized for 1 kid and those sized for 10 kids.
Also honestly jumping alone is not as fun as jumping in a group.
I find most of the CYA/liability things around childcare in modern west to be stupid (or amusing), but having nearly drowned in an abandoned pool as a young teenager, after wandering into it alone and getting stuck underwater for a moment throughout my own stupidity, I very much appreciate the idea described here, and think it's good.
And then new features are released as MVPs - meaning, they do the absolute minimum to check the box (almost a literal box: close the feature ticket internally), and inefficiently so. Whether it'll be iterated on afterwards, depends. Pretty unlikely in the immediate term. They need to "collect usage data to know what to do" first, which means it gets deprioritized relative to moar features.
But that's fine for me. As long as copy-paste works, I can make do with other software, perhaps competing software, or worst case, have Claude find and use some powerful-but-janky OSS CLI tool to do the stuff for me.
I'm less angry at it than I used to. Mostly because I don't have time to be annoyed anymore, but it's true that I've learned to like updates from few companies. That's because after years - years - I've noticed things gradually improving on average. True of Android & Samsung OneUI, except when it's not. True of UniFi stuff. If I see some new feature behaving badly, I now mostly trust they'll eventually fix it. It'll take a year or three, they'll overhaul it entirely twice, and I may need to buy a new phone to get it, but it will happen one day. But most software doesn't even clear that bar.
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