[HN Gopher] When the push button was new, people were freaked ___________________________________________________________________ When the push button was new, people were freaked Author : SongofEarth Score : 234 points Date : 2022-09-28 13:08 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (daily.jstor.org) (TXT) w3m dump (daily.jstor.org) | BrainVirus wrote: | _> The mundane interface between human and machine caused social | anxiety in the late nineteenth century_ | | The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of | buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a | symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by | anticipation of things like: | | - Disconnect of people from nature an each other. | | - Replacement of real things with simulacra, which then begins to | be perceived as the real thing. | | - Mounting, yet fragile complexity of systems people interact | with (initially) and within (eventually). | | Looking at our society today, it's pretty clear that none of | these fears were irrational. | jdmdmdmdmd wrote: | My mind immediately went to Forster as well: | | > _They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of | technology into a black box: "effortless, opaque, and therefore | unquestioned by consumers."_ | | rings true to me. I think this was and still is a valid | concern. At the very least it's a real trade-off. I almost get | the feeling that the author in the OP looks down on the | knowledge needed to understand machines/technology since it can | be replaced by a button. That misses the point entirely though. | Taking technology for granted makes you a mindless consumer in | my opinion. That's why we're so instinctively disgusted by the | population in The Machine Stops. They don't exist in any real | sense; they're just the exit nodes of the machine's functions. | skydove wrote: | It'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. | legulere wrote: | 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? | eternityforest wrote: | I can't write or read assembler, but I can program modern | languages. | | We're talking about a whole different level, people who don't | even know how to effectively use what they have, troubleshoot | basic issues, etc. | | It's not "This is a magic box" so much as "I don't even know | how to use the controls on this box and even if I could | there's no button to do that thing anymore". | | "I can't type or use a calculator" not just "I don't know how | to divide numbers on paper" | hulitu wrote: | As a HW developer I cannot write correct code but at least I | can read it. /s | | As a french I cannot write correct english but at least I can | read it. /s | eternityforest wrote: | Apple is a unique case. The CAD app might make you forget math, | but it lets you make stuff with CAD. | | Apple hides the filesystem and such but it doesn't really | replace it with anything. It's not like they have some super | ultra abstraction on top of it, they just straight up reduce | the functionality a bit. | | I don't see much critical value in understanding the things | only specialists can or want to do, like how a CPU actually | works or how to make an OS, but before Apple every generation | had a level of abstraction they could work at that had the full | power of previous levels(So long as you accept having to buy | all the underlying stuff off the shelf). | | Now it seems that the very newest computer users actually have | less capability, because the abstraction doesn't expose the | full power of the machine. | granshaw wrote: | > 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 | whimsicalism wrote: | > 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. | | "Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th | century children. | tiagod wrote: | Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's way more children today with | electronics/electricity skills than back in the day... | DonHopkins wrote: | Now it's Redstone in Minecraft. | mikewarot wrote: | I'm pretty sure there were way more children back then who | had practical skills, now everyone is pushed into "college | prep" and discouraged from having practical skills, as they | are associated with the lower class workers. | | The people who keep us all alive are viewed as less worthy... | that's our problem in a nutshell. | noirbot wrote: | Is that true? I feel like the drumbeat I constantly have | heard for the last 10 years is that the trades pay really | well and are easier to get into. Most of the electricians I | know are definitely not "lower class". That said, they're | harder jobs physically. They're not particularly good for | your body a lot of the time. | veltas wrote: | Class isn't all about money. | B1FF_PSUVM wrote: | And being a clerk instead of a workman isn't a ticket to | the aristocracy either ... | lisper wrote: | Yeah, this. | | Two days ago we returned home from a short trip and when we | turned on the tap for the first time the water pressure | seemed unusually high for 5-10 seconds before returning to | normal. I would have thought nothing of it except that | about fifteen years ago I had experienced the same | phenomenon after installing a water pressure booster pump | in our house and so I learned the hard way about the need | for thermal expansion tanks in modern domestic plumbing [1] | and so I knew right away that our tank had failed and | needed to be replaced. It's a pretty trivial DIY project, | but only if you do it _before_ your pipes burst. I suspect | most people have never even heard of a thermal expansion | tank. | | [1] https://homeinspectioninsider.com/thermal-expansion- | tanks-in... | whimsicalism wrote: | > I suspect most people have never even heard of a | thermal expansion tank. | | I suspect that if you did surveys every year going back | to the 19th century, in every single one of them the | majority of people would have never heard of a thermal | expansion tank. | lisper wrote: | That's because they didn't exist back then. | | But I'll bet most people could tell you why they had | separate hot and cold water taps. (These things are | related BTW.) | [deleted] | ajsnigrutin wrote: | I know it's a joke, but "some" children in the developed world | give their parents stuff they made themselves... like macaroni | "images", clay pots and ashtrays, painted rocks, etc. | | In china, those children can give their parents smartphones and | other electronics :) | osrec wrote: | And is probably as applicable to a geeky subset of 21st century | children. | bee_rider wrote: | It seems like basically the same problem, really. The "some" | is a small chunk of the population maybe, but it is the chunk | that is interested in this sort of stuff and would normally | use this as a stepping stone on the path to designing the | next thing. | | The hope is that our abstractions are not too good, and the | clever kids manage to bash them into something that does what | their imagination wants. | amelius wrote: | And the "normal" children just visit YouTube and search for | "how to fix a doorbell". | rasz wrote: | MIT graduates cannot power a light bulb with a battery. | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIhk9eKOLzQ | sarchertech wrote: | I'm always skeptical of those man on the street interviews. | How many students did they interview to find the handful who | couldn't do it? And how many of those were just flustered by | the situation. | hilbert42 wrote: | Well, I'm of 20th C. origin--not 19th--and the first electrical | things I played with as a young kid were electric bells, | buzzers, batteries, flashlight globes and reels of bell wire-- | lots and lots of it. (Experimenting with such items wasn't an | unfashionable activity when I was a kid.) | | Bell wire, which usually came in the form of two single- | stranded copper wires twisted loosely together and insulated in | red and white PVC plastic, was installed under the house, in | ceilings, in wall cavities and elsewhere by yours truly to | enable us perform all sorts of electrical tasks--door bells, | for mother to signal us to come to dinner, etc. | | Isn't that standard kids' stuff anymore? The thought of an | electrician being called to fix these Rube Goldberg/Heath | Robinson-type installations would have been preposterous. If | No.-1 son wasn't about say to change a battery then my parents | would do it themselves. | namrog84 wrote: | I was born in 84. And in the 90s I knew this 1 kid who told | me on his 11th birthday his dad would raise his bicycle seat. | | I was super confused as that an easy thing to do(loosen a | bolt, adjust height and tighten the bolt). Turns out lots of | parents don't allow their kids to touch their tools or tinker | or do anything like that. | | I was very fortunate that my parents encouraged me to do such | things. E.g. take apart things to put them together but it | doesn't surprise me why lots of people have all the | creativity and curiosity purged from them from an early age. | eastbound wrote: | Living in Europe, I'm one of the rare millionaires so I have | a house, 150m2 (on the Cote d'Azur, I admit it's expensive), | but even for me, thinking of "a bell for mother to signal us | to come to dinner" is the thing that belong to the times when | energy was unlimited, and therefore house sizes and taxes on | inhabitable square meters. It's not that we do have bells | here, but we don't have the square meters anymore. | hilbert42 wrote: | _"...but we don't have the square meters anymore. "_ | | I well understand what you say having lived in a crowded | part of Europe for a time. It made me all the more | appreciative of the fact that I grew up in a big home with | a large front and back yard and that our house was only a | few hundred metres from bushland. | | Nevertheless, in some ways I envy you living in the Cote | d'Azur. That is one of my most favorite parts of Europe. | whimsicalism wrote: | > Well, I'm of 20th C. origin--not 19th | | This already is a massive difference. Large majority of | children in the 19th century did not have any access to | electricity, let alone knowing how to fashion an electric | bell. | hilbert42 wrote: | Yes, there's a huge difference between the amount of | information that 19th C. and 20th C. kids had access to, | but then this is a broad generalization and it requires | qualification. In fact I'd argue that some 19th C. kids | (albeit few in relative numbers) would have had access to | more information than many of their 20th C. counterparts. | | Broadly, the reason for why some 20th C. kids would have | had access to less information is that they were more | protected from dangers than those in 19th C. (and in some | ways that's problematic when it comes to learning). Also, | clearly, the types of information available in each era | would have been different--and this difference would have | been accentuated depending on which part of each century | we're referring to. | | The 19th C.--being the height of the Industrial Revolution | --change came thick and fast, so it's almost superfluous to | say kids' knowledge of electricity at the turn of the 20th | C. would have been much greater than at the beginning of | the 19th however this difference wasn't anywhere near as | stark at other times throughout the 19th C. | | This is best illustrated by example and for that I'll use a | book published in 1858 by Elisha Noyce titled _The Boys | Book of Industrial Information._ | https://archive.org/details/boysbookofindust00noyc | | So by 1858 enough information was known about electricity | to include technical aspects about it including its | industrial applications such as electroplating, p129, and | the telegraph, pp273-280 in a kids' book. I'd also posit | that some 20 years later (by say 1880) with the coming | together of electrical engineering--telephone, electric | motors, generators, transatlantic cables, theory by | Maxwell, Wheatstone et al, that much more information about | the subject would have been available to kids. | | Noyce's book was a true eye-opener to me when I came across | it some two to three decades ago, so much so that I now | truly regret not having a copy of it as a kid. I know I | would have gained a great amount of useful knowledge from | it despite the fact that it was published a century before | my time. | | Whilst I had access to more modern texts they didn't | provide the information in such a useful and meaningful | way. Moreover, much of that information is still very | relevant and valuable today. For instance, I refer you to | pp57-58 on the dangers of lead and lead poisoning, therein | Noyce issues a stark warning especially so with respect to | white lead as used in paint. | | _(This advice would have been invaluable to boys who would | have gone into industries where they 'd be exposed to such | dangers. It also infomes us that knowledge of and concerns | about bad and dangerous working conditions of the era may | have been better understood at the time than some modern | history books would have us believe.)_ | | Keep in mind this warning was in a book for boys written to | provide them with practical and useful information--not | published in some erudite scientific publication. The fact | that by 1858 the dangers of lead had filtered down not only | to ordinary people but also to their kids makes the failure | of governments and those knowledgeable of the facts to act | in a decisive way over the forthcoming century all the more | tragic (when I first read Noyce's warning I was quite | horrified that so little action had been taken until recent | decades). | | As you see, with actual information to hand things seem a | little more nuanced. | karaterobot wrote: | I also strongly suspect the number of people who were freaked | out by buttons in the 19th century is approximately in that | "some" range. | | Mistrusting electricity is a different story, but that's not | the title of the article. | corytheboyd wrote: | An inspector refused to come look at our house because there is | a power line near it. People are still afraid of electricity. | It's funny because he probably uses a cell phone, drives a car, | lives in his own house, uses a microwave, owns a computer, all | situations in which _ghasp_ electricity is close to his body! | We 're just glad we didn't actually hire him. | pitaj wrote: | I assume he was talking about a high voltage line? | Aboveground power lines are quite common. | contextfree wrote: | It would be interesting to see articles like this for various | common elements of UI widget toolkits, which I guess kind of mix | metaphors in that some of them (buttons, sliders) evoke | electromechanical devices while others (checkboxes, text boxes) | evoke paper forms. | NonNefarious wrote: | I'm going to write one about the idiocy of the "flat" design | fad. I wonder how people of 1900 would have felt about having | to experimentally poke at things that looked like plain labels | or placards, or decorative swatches of paint, to operate a | machine. | Eleison23 wrote: | "Every time you try to operate on of these weird black | controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a | little black light lights up black to let you know you've | done it." | | https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7405023-it-s-the-wild- | colou... | contextfree wrote: | I guess flat design can be tied back into that tension/mixed | metaphor between electromechanical and print analogs - it's | based on a decision to lean towards the print side of things. | Actually the designers of early-ish influential "flat" | designed systems such as Windows Phone 7 were quite self- | conscious about this, e.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20120 | 322023540/http://mkruzenisk... (from 2011) | NonNefarious wrote: | Thanks for the reply and that link. That article is replete | with pretty bogus assertions, even for its time. Print is | not all that informative for interactive presentations, | aside from general principles of good layout with | whitespace and appropriate visual emphasis. The article | does indeed mention those, but goes on and on about print | without saying what it has to do with buttons you need to | press or values you need to adjust. | | The article also treats all physical-control analogies as | bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent | into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather" | textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you | could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two- | pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons | that instantly told you | | A. This is a button. B. The button is "pressed." | | At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the | real world. In the real world (even one full of | touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you | press on something malleable it will deform, and the light | and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave | where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can | come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been | pressed. | | This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be) | learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with | minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some | new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize | and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means | ON! Brown means OFF! | | There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out" | unavailable functions is the best example I can think of. | But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and | making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's | ineffective (or less effective). | | Conclusion: Windows 95 nailed it. | h2odragon wrote: | Tangental, but the physical mechanisms of electronic controls are | often worth study. Ingenious mechanisms move little slivers of | metal around in carefully engineered enclosures. It's a more | accessible magic that's easy to disregard. | | The "channel dial" switch on old TV's was _awesome_. | cfraenkel wrote: | The engineering & tolerances to make a typical microswitch | (what makes the pushbutton actually do anything) would make | most peoples eyes water. (from boredom, perhaps...) | | Fun fact - if you engineer the people facing mechanism to keep | the switch pin from being depressed all the way flush to the | switch housing, the lifetime of the switch increases by roughly | a factor of 10. A 0.1 mm difference in pushbutton throw is the | difference between getting maybe a million cycles, say 3 ~ 4 | years of constant use, and the switch outlasting everything | else in the product. | eternityforest wrote: | Well, they must not actually be doing that on cheap switches, | they fail probably 10x as much as anything except maybe power | supply equipment and connectors. | | Mechanical keyswitches have some pretty amazing reliability | though. | | I actually like the touchscreen everything movement in most | applications, partly because of this. A screen may be | expensive, but good switches might be just as expensive. | gist wrote: | This sounds trivially correct but the short article doesn't do | enough to support it other than the few anecdotes that are | mentioned. This is similar to today when, as an example, the NYT | tries to get in front of a trend by highlighting and cherry | picking a few examples of people who are doing what one of their | articles purports in so many words is more widespread than it | really might be. | | Then take a statement like this: | | "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" | | What does 'many people' exactly mean? Nothing at all you wouldn't | say 'many people got sick from the pandemic' you'd back it up | with some type of figure or number. | teddyh wrote: | "Americans are being crushed by falling grand pianos" | | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347005#30350402) | buescher wrote: | I haven't heard it in a long time - I think it was mostly | confined to people born before 1930, and there aren't many of | them around anymore, but "what if I press the wrong button?" used | to be a major concern people had about new gadgets. A lot of it | came from the shift from appliances like old time wringer | washers, where every control has a visible mechanical function or | other affordance, to more automated "pushbutton" appliances with | internal sequence "programs". | [deleted] | anarbadalov wrote: | Rachel Plotnick's book (Power Button, referenced in the article) | is very good. Here's a much longer excerpt from it, on the button | as it relates to carrying out life-and-death decisions (e.g., | warfare and executions): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of- | war-and-electric-death... | | (Full disclosure: I work for the MIT Press, who published Power | Button. But it really is one of my favorite history of tech | titles we've published in the 10+ years i've been here) | trophycase wrote: | they weren't wrong | NonNefarious wrote: | Fluffy but pretty interesting post. Thanks! | hulitu wrote: | > When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked | | So that's why they dissapeared from "Modern" GUIs, UIs and UXs. | /s | tomcam wrote: | I used to spend ridiculous amounts of money on Halloween | displays. The thing that scared people the most was a big red | button I encouraged them to press. My plan was to give the first | person who pressed it all of our candy and a cash prize. No one | ever did. | daveslash wrote: | This is brilliant. tbh, I too, would probably be hesitant to | push the _History Eraser Button_ without a case of _Space | Madness_. | tomcam wrote: | Not only that I answered all questions, things like "Will it | scare me?" No. "Will something jump out if I press it?" No. | "What's going to happen?" I can tell you that nothing bad | will happen and you'll probably like the result. And so on. | dhosek wrote: | It's worth noting that there are always the fears of losing touch | with the details of stuff that some along with various advances. | The same thing was the case when I was in junior high with | calculators, "how will you add and multiply if your batteries run | out?" but the fact of the matter is, not having to be able to | make your own push button switch freed people to advance to other | topics. Similarly, in mathematics education, when I was in high | school, there were classes entitled College Algebra and College | Trigonometry1 which had the implicit message that these were | materials traditionally taught in college2 and not in the third | year of high school. On the other hand, things like calculating | square roots by hand are no longer part of the curriculum, | although they may still be taught on occasion by the rare teacher | who has those skills as an enrichment topic to fill some class | time or as part of the math club's after-school explorations. | | We may be filled with nostalgia for our own learning and think | that it's the only way to learn, but as time goes on, some skills | just become less important. | | [?] | | 1. The backs of the textbooks included printed tables for log | (both base 10 and ln), sin, cos, tan, cot, sec and csc, with the | latter six tables to three thanks to the fact that sin _th_ =cos( | _th_ - _p_ /2).3 | | 2. The disjunction between practice and theory has led to this | sequence being renamed precalculus in most (if not all) high | schools now. | | 3. The skills to make those tables in the first place are yet | another thing that we no longer dedicate long classroom hours to, | although Charles Babbage would have thought that being unable to | verify the accuracy of your tables was a sign of intellectual | weakness. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | Not much more magical than delivering a chicken to the butcher, | and getting back pieces of meat. Or delivering a typed manuscript | to your publisher, and getting a bound book. Or any trade | essentially. | | Having a machine do it - that was new. But not the part about | abdicating responsibility for function. | eternityforest wrote: | Almost every trade has people freaking out and trying to push | us all to be generalists. | | And I'll continue ignoring pretty much all of them, because | division of labor is a lot of why society is so advanced. | | I'll grant them the chickens though, mass produced meat is one | case where the abstraction hides some horrors that should be | exposed. | | But simple loss of skill isn't enough to convince me. I don't | need to be able to build a CPU from scratch, any more than the | CPU designer needs to know all of CSS. | | These things are cool and worth exploring, but most any tech | one person can understand themselves is probably a historical | curiosity more than a practical thing. The rare exceptions like | rope and knots are incredibly fascinating. | WaitWaitWha wrote: | Poppycock. | | The concept of mechanical push (and pull) buttons have been long | present in locks and alarm triggers long before electricity was | introduced to general public. | gumby wrote: | As the article points out. | WaitWaitWha wrote: | 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. | B1FF_PSUVM wrote: | > entirely new concept. | | The new concept was power amplification: a small effort | causing a larger than "natural" effect. | | E.g. you were always able to press a button to tinkle a | bell, but pressing a button and obtaining a sustained | electrical ringing was new. | | Valves and transistors took it to the present stage, by | cascading the effect of small inputs switching larger | amounts of power from an external supply. | | (Yes, power amplification could be done mechanically before | electricity with energy from water, weights, etc. but it | was too cumbersome.) | dmix wrote: | 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." | dmix wrote: | We're seeing the same reaction today with AI image generators. | snvzz wrote: | Behold... Abstraction! | cm2187 wrote: | Plus you were never sure you wouldn't receive an electric shock! | hulitu wrote: | > Plus you were never sure you wouldn't receive an electric | shock! | | But the electric shock will help you remember what not to touch | again. | yathaid wrote: | A 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. | BiteCode_dev wrote: | So I never used "bouton" for "to push forward", and while it is | used for a pimple, above all, today, a bouton is simply... a | button. | ajkjk wrote: | I have noticed an effect similar to Gell-Mann amnesia: | | Often you see news articles about new things freaking people out: | technology, social changes, products, apps. Sometimes people are | freaking out for good reason, and sometimes they're just silly, | and you think: there are smart people and dumb people in the | world, and the dumb people like to freak out about the wrong | stuff. | | And then you read about times in the past when people were | freaking out about something that we now know to benign, but you | easily forget that those might just be the dumb people from the | past. Did anyone who was, like, intelligent or wise worry about | push buttons? Presumably not. | eckza wrote: | Marshall McLuhan's _Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man_ | continues to provide critical insight. | trgn wrote: | The book itself is so much richer than the catchphrases. It's | just as important today as 60 years ago. | charles_f wrote: | > 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 direction. | acheron wrote: | 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? | Infernal wrote: | 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. | charles_f wrote: | 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". | JTbane wrote: | That's pretty ridiculous, so you can't change a socket without | calling a guy? | mickael-kerjean wrote: | 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 and blowing a couple | valve along the process, ha fun time | CodeSgt wrote: | 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. | throwie_wayward wrote: | I completely disagree... | | on the trend you back up, I see a future where you cannot cook | your own food unless you've become a professional specialist of | cooking (for food safety). | | going to cartoon levels of ridiculousness, a society in which | you cannot do anything other than consume unless you're doing a | job (which would involve safety, insurance, and other various | legal and bureaucratic requirements). | | what keeps things sane where you live is the 'technically' | aspect. which I read as "individuals often ignore those rules | for personal reasons (meaning when no businesses are | involved)"... | mellavora wrote: | Huh. Extending your distopian cartoon by reference to an | earlier (today) HN thread about sex workers, and thinking of | a society where ... | [deleted] | charles_f wrote: | Yeah I think that you mis-interpreted what I meant. Being | prevented to do stuff as simple as changing a switch, a plug | or a faucet is plain stupid, and I'm pretty sure it's not | even backed by data (or if it is, it's probably | overconservative). | burlesona wrote: | Fascinating. There's always a loss of lower-level knowledge when | we introduce abstractions. Yet "we stand upon the shoulders of | giants," it's the layers of abstractions underneath us that we | _don't_ have to understand or even think about that free our | minds to compose ever more amazing technology on top. Still, | progression from the layer that you know and love to the next | that paves over it is bittersweet. | falcolas wrote: | Philosophizing a little bit (and in agreement with one of the | quotes in the conclusion), I think the bittersweet feelings are | precisely because very few people try to understand the box, | because they consider it to be a black box. | | But it's often a white box in reality. When the electric push | buttons came out, you could trace the wires and usually see the | mechanisms which were being triggered. The doorbell, for | example. | | But curiosity rarely seems to push us in that direction, it | seems. | duxup wrote: | >we don't have to understand or even think about | | But also don't have to make all the same mistakes other folks | did / toil our way through to the ... potentially same | endpoint. At least as far as code goes I've gone through plenty | of experiments that go: | | "Man I don't need this complex chunk of software, let me just | try ..." | | "Ok now I understand why that chunk of software is the way it | is... and it's better than mine... I'll use that." | | Good learning experience! But do that enough and you just spin | your wheels endlessly. | eternityforest wrote: | I don't do that at all these days. It's almost a guarantee | that I'll eventually use the big complex thing, so I rarely | even consider trying anything else if it's a project that | actually matters. | andirk wrote: | 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. | | On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating | without physical constraints. "The software guys can | independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to | the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car | can be updated." [1] [1] | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 | | On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix | anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather | just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and | small appliance repair store are all but gone" [2] [2] | https://qr.ae/pv5PjI | capableweb wrote: | > 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 over-used for the sake of updating | without physical constraints. "The software guys can | independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to | the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car | can be updated." [1] [1] | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 | | This is akin to frontend developers doing everything in their | power to make their development environment the most | comfortable, while sacrificing end-user | performance/bandwidth/usability for getting it. | oakesm9 wrote: | 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. | Liquid_Fire wrote: | MacBook touchpads still have it though. | NonNefarious wrote: | And yet the (defectively) giant trackpads don't support | the Apple Pencil, which would have been great. | eternityforest wrote: | What we really need is more standardized swappable modules. | | The odds of me replacing a BGA chip are low. By the time one | fails, the device may be obsolete, the part may be expensive, | my soldering skills probably could never be as good as a robot, | etc. | | But if my computer has an issue, I can totally replace a bad | drive in full confidence that it's probably worth it. | | The fact that there's no standards body for modular consumer | goods really sucks. | gregmac wrote: | > On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix | anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather | just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and | small appliance repair store are all but gone" | | Very few people have _ever_ been capable of fixing things, | especially electronics. As electronics got smaller, more | integrated and more complicated the bar got higher, reducing | the pool of capable people even more. | | The other problem is that TVs have gotten cheaper at the same | time labor prices have gone up. This drove all the TV repair | shops out of business because the bench time alone to even do a | quick diagnosis is already starting to approach the cost of a | new TV. Spending hundreds of dollars to (maybe) repair your 5+ | year old TV just doesn't really make a ton of sense to most | people. And that's assuming there's not a major fault: | replacing a few capacitors is one thing; replacing the | mainboard or LCD panel can cost _more_ than buying a new TV. | | This same pattern repeats for most consumer electronics, sadly. | atoav wrote: | The problem with Push Buttons is that they are (magnitudes!) | cheaper than sometimes more suitable input devices like knobs, | switches, etc. | | This is why they are used everywhere. | | Sometimes other electromechanical devices would have been the | better choice tho. | aaron695 wrote: | d--b wrote: | > The word "button" itself comes from the French bouton, meaning | pimple or projection, and to push or thrust forward. | | What? | | https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&tl=en&text=bouton&op=tra... | sp332 wrote: | Scroll down a little bit on that page, and you can see the | alternate translation as "pimple". | LittleNemoInS wrote: | 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... | vel0city wrote: | 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. | mbrubeck wrote: | Note that the English word was derived from Old French, not | Modern French. And Old French noun _boton /bouton_ ("bud") | is itself formed from the Old French verb _boter /bouter_, | "to thrust." It's had a variety of meanings in French | generally related to "thing that pushes out." | | Google Translate is not a very complete dictionary. You can | find many more definitions in _Tresor de la langue | francaise informatise :_ | | https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/bouton | | It means "projection" in the sense of "bit that sticks | out," like its use in goldsmithing or for the foot at the | bottom of a harp. | mbrubeck wrote: | (minor correction: the pegs of a harp, not the foot.) | pessimizer wrote: | > It means "projection" in the sense of "bit that sticks | out," | | And it also means that in English. | cercatrova wrote: | From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: | | Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of | the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is | called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He | it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and | astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, | letters. | | Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who | lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks | call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To | him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to | be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use | there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed | praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. | | "The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise | or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to | repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O | king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will | improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom | that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious | Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to | judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs | to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been | led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of | that which they really possess. | | "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of | those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their | memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters | which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their | own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of | memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the | appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many | things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many | things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get | along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." | SilasX wrote: | Did you have a point with this? That couldn't be placed at the | top? | | I don't know how hating on writing is related to people being | disoriented by pushbuttons, and maybe if you stated what you | thought the parallel was, you could have saved everyone some | time and effort in reading hard-to-parse prose. | cercatrova wrote: | > _people worried that the electric push button would make | human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would | seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: | "effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by | consumers."_ | SilasX wrote: | Any reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the | first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills | would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get | the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing | a critical block of 50? | lostgame wrote: | Y'know...it was clear that the original commenter was | telling a story. If you didn't want to read it, you | could've stopped. Nobody was making you. :) There are | plenty of other comments, and I found this one | fascinating; myself. | | Maybe it's just that some of us still have patience - and | don't need things condensed into sound bites or | summations for our convenience. | cercatrova wrote: | Yes | plurinshael wrote: | Lighten up, Francis. | yamtaddle wrote: | I think the reference is cliche to the point that I | usually hate to see it, but did understand the original | post's intent in context (that is, the context provided | by skimming the linked article to which the post is a | reaction) without issue. It didn't even occur to me that | it was anything other than plain. | dwringer wrote: | For this reason I actually thought it was a good comment. | I've seen the reference come up almost without fail in | discussions like this, but I've never seen it so | elaborated. | SilasX wrote: | It has a block of text, whose purpose isn't clear at the | beginning [1], and requires you to read the entire | comment, in its thick prose, and the article in order to | understand, and even then you have to guess which point | its referring, but could be wrong because cercatrova | didn't actually own one. | | Here is how I would have done the comment: | | --- | | >people worried that the electric push button would make | human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would | seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: | "effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by | consumers." | | This reminds me of Socrates's story about how people in | the ancient world worried about the atrophy from being | able to use writing: | | >>"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the | minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not | practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced | by external characters which are no part of themselves, | will discourage the use of their own memory within them. | You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of | reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of | wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things | without instruction and will therefore seem to know many | things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard | to get along with, since they are not wise, but only | appear wise." | | Full context (Plato's Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b): https://ww | w.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... | | --- | | Advantages: | | A) Gets right to the point (so that if you already know | the point, you can skip it.) | | B) Saves everyone the time and effort of reading thick | prose, most of which includes references to historical | figures | | C) Still quotes the relevant part. | | D) Still contains a quick link to the rest of the context | that cercatrova considered oh-so-important to add. | | E) Contains a citation that can be googled in case the | link goes dead. | | F) Doesn't take a big wall of text. | | But yes, it does have downsides: it G) takes actual | communication effort, H) owns a specific point, and I) | doesn't make cercatrova look cryptically wise. If those | are your desiderata, then yeah, I agree he did it right, | and everyone was right to vote it to the top of the | discussion. | | Can you elaborate on what you think we gain from making | everyone read 6x as much with no indication of what the | actual point is? | | [1] I'm including people who weren't already aware of the | quote, though you don't seem to think their vote matters | here. | fredrb wrote: | That's usually how human conversations go. It's not | always efficient. You should try it sometime. | jimjimjim wrote: | nah, forget the point. I'm off to rabbit hole some dialogues | [deleted] | CobrastanJorji wrote: | How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! | Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but | my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic | being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for | sophistry. Right? | emptyfile wrote: | Ouch. | RobRivera wrote: | I remember when Amun-Ra personally attacked me the first | time. What with the calendar and the clock, oye nothings ever | enough for the schmuck. He'd have my legs for their ability | to atrophy my arm strength if he'd have his way, making me | look like a Glukkon | Guthur wrote: | Amun-Ra has missed one important part of writing. It is not | just for remembering one's own thoughts but also for | transmitting them over great distances of time and space. | | If one is to read Wikipedia and repeat it verbatim without | understanding then one is only a single component of a | greater transportation medium. But if in contrast, if one was | to internalise those words and draw lines of inference | between ideas so elusively captured therein and a wider base | of knowledge then maybe you are something more. | MereInterest wrote: | It depends on where you draw the boundary between "you" and | "not-you". If that boundary extends only as far as your skin, | then your cell phone makes you forgetful and dependent. If | that boundary extends to tools that you use, books in front | of you, texts that you can summon up at a moment, then your | cell phone gives you a phenomenal recall for facts, though | also an increased risk of mind control. | | For me, I draw the boundary based on latency, unconscious | guidance, and predictability. I can send a thought to move my | hand, and it moves as I think of it. The hand is within the | boundary of "me". Holding a pencil, I do not need to | consciously consider how to form each curve of a letter. The | pencil is within the boundary of "me". I can predict what | emacs will do when given keystrokes, so emacs is within the | boundary of "me". | | On the other hand, there is a large delay between deciding to | open a door and it responding to my pull, so it clearly is | not "me". I need to consciously consider what search terms to | query, and cannot do so at an unconscious level. Even when I | repeat the exact same query as I did a year ago, I may not | find the results I was searching for, and so there is no | predictability. These lead me to feel that a search engine is | not within the boundary of "me". | CobrastanJorji wrote: | Your system of distinguishing "me" from "not-me" via a | quantitative metric is interesting to me because it's not a | binary. Human reaction time for hands is a bit faster than | feet. Are my hands more "me" than my feet? Well, that kind | of intuitively checks out to me. But reflex reactions, like | blinking, have less than half the latency of conscious | reactions. Are my reflex reactions more me than my | conscious decisions? | | Your door example raises further questions. When I pick up | a remote control, the control moves just as easily as my | hand. Does the remote become an equal part of me | immediately? | Joker_vD wrote: | It seems you suggest to base the boundary on how | easy/trivial it is to make something go away from your | posession, akin to "big man in a suit of armour -- take | that off, what are you?" line of reasoning. Well, the | problem is that stripping tools from someone is not that | much more difficult than stripping memory: some fair | amount of violence would be necessary in both scenarios | (blunt torso traumas vs. blunt head traumas). | MereInterest wrote: | > via a quantitative metric is interesting to me because | it's not a binary. | | It also means that it depends on the situation. If I'm | reading a book, then the movement of my hands feels | instant as I reach to turn the page. But back when I | played the piano, at times my hands could feel like they | are falling behind, not listening to what I'm telling | them to do, responding too slowly for what is being | demanded of them. Whether or not my hands feel like "me" | depends on what I'm trying to have them do. | | > Does the remote become an equal part of me immediately? | | I've never really thought of it in terms of time, in part | because it is only something to quantify in retrospect. A | pencil in my hand feels like a part of me, that responds | as I move it. If I press it against a piece of paper, I | interpret the sensory input as "felt" from the tip of the | pencil, even though I know that I have no nerve endings | there. But a pencil on the table isn't part of me. | Whether there's a smooth transition between the two as I | pick it up and gain control over it, or whether it's | something that just "clicks", I'm not sure. | medstrom wrote: | A remote-controlled door would become part of you, the | instant you hold the remote. | VoodooJuJu wrote: | >See - people even rejected great design like buttons when they | first came out! It just takes time to get used to new designs! | | Still don't like your hamburger menu. Sorry not sorry. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-28 23:00 UTC)