Game makers should hire me to test their maps, if thereās a spot where I can get 100% stuck no matter what, you bet your shiny metal ass Iāll find it.
Me and dumb compact design blueprints on Dyson Sphere Program. Iāve had to tear parts of builds down an embarrassing amount of times to get unstuck because of the way hitboxes on refactionators and a few other buildings work in close proximity.
Yes! I remember this happening a lot, and I could never really truly understand the thought process behind it! But the thing is, this is still happening today, just in different context, and itās still equally as baffling!
I donāt remember what it did though. I think it wasnāt the browser, and I have a vague memory it wasnāt for dial up either, but my memoryās shit so I personally wouldnāt trust me on that
Edit: had to look this up, it was IE. I think I didnāt remember it because I never really used IE since I started off with NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape
It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.
As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser āThe Internetā. And thatās the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.
I promise you I have done exactly that, i had an auto clicker bound to my space bar and was to lazy to click and would just hold the space bar down when I knew that I was going to click a bunch of gui buttons.(which I though wouldnt be problem) Quickly learned some programs donāt like it at all. Lol
I didnāt have to work on it for just to not click through ui menus, I just had my autoclicker enabled from some reason(likely game) and just randomly thought, āIāll use the autoclick, lolā and had some interesting stuff happen. It was entertaining and nothing about being practical.
Iām a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I donāt remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldnāt explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position ā theyād coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldnāt see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I donāt know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you canāt really know until a user fucks everything up.
Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, thatās not even good on paper. Those are a retarded pair of things to have next to one another regardless of any coloring on them. Especially with the same handles
Iām not a fighter pilot, but when I think āejectionā, canāt imagine anything but a high-stress situation where the pilot doesnāt have time to figure out which is the ejection lever. Imagine a real emergency where the pilot grabs the wrong lever, gently slides back with the seat, and then fucking dies on impact.
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didnāt have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didnāt need the stick to mechanically move. They decided theyād just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldnāt estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that āpulling backā is slightly pulling towards the pilotās body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
Thereās no ācomputer iconā. Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system filesā¦ which are locked and canāt be deleted.
i mean, this story sounds like itās from pre-release testing, or maybe a trade show demo showing a pre-release build. it not working this way in the release version just makes sense, and doesnāt mean this is a fake story.
No such demo happened. They unveiled the 128K with that System 1.0 on stage at a special event. The Lisa has a different UI, but also canāt do whatās described.
The story seems to be referencing the first time apple had regular people try it which may have been in a focus group or at some kind of publicity event. If this did happen Iām sure they made safeguards against it before selling it
I have to agree. The Macintosh 128k didnāt even have an internal HDD. Everything was run on 3.5" floppies. Heck they may have invented the 3.5" floppy, idk. As you said, dragging the system dick icon to the trash on a 128k was literally the easiest way to eject the disk.
My father still owns one, that may actually work. He also got 2 extra external floppy drives for the thing. He also has an Apple ]|[
Unless this story is from preproduction software and they got rid of the computer icon. Or maybe that detail was misremembered and it was actually a disc icon.
I hadnāt heard the Mac story before. I wonder if itās legit, as I donāt think the Mac, or the Lisa before it, ever had the equivalent of a My Computer icon. Disks appear directly on the desktop; dragging a disk to the trash can ejects it if its removable media, and the only type of disk the original Mac had was a 400KB single-sided 3.5ā floppy drive.
The act of someone sitting at a brand new Mac, with a never-before-used interface, and immediately clicking the computer icon to drag it to the trash, is such a powerful image for me.
The statement of, āthis is what I think of this computerā is so strong, because I have to believe that whomever did that must have been a tech person to be at the event; but perhaps they just thought it was a shortcut and didnāt like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windowsā¦ Because the computer object (in Explorer) is immutable, and any reference to it is simply a link to that object.
I prefer the thought of them just being like āthis computer is trashā and doing that, and causing the system to crash.
Moments like that are why I belive in timetravel, in the real timeline it took two years to find that bug and it was resolved quietly but of course someone is going to come back and troll them by doing it on day 1.
I think itās more like they thought they were supposed to do that. Iām guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so thatās what their brain told them to do.
Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.
It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.
I always remember that when Iām working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things weāre not thinking ofā¦
I can imagine thinking itās be funny in the early stages where things wouldnāt really be too logical they way they are now. Might even assume it wouldnāt actually do anything and I could just pull it back out.
People speak weird all the time, and LLMs are trained on people. Some arenāt native speakers, some just like to omit verbs, nouns, or tenses when it seems obvious and they want to be expedient, some just do it for fun or laziness (see, l33t speak and or early texting, typos).
LLMs are trained on human input, so of course it on occasion uses our bad habits. Thinking like your comment suggests is what gets people who really wrote their own stuff in trouble, because people think they can identify stuff like this more than they actually can.
You do agree that itās a weird way of saying it though, which is all I was making fun of. Itās similar verbiage an AI would use. I get it, but lighten up lol
When I started working in the late 90s early 00s, every company had their own It-department. These days itās just some consultant or subscription to another company offering their consultants to do specific tasks.
This thread reminds me of why having an IT department makes good sense financially - today.
You can add up all the salaries, equipment and training costs and itāll still be cheaper than wasting time and money in meetings with consultants trying to either explain the task or moan about pricing.
Shit doesnāt work, because they arenāt paid to make shit work.
I can make code that works for me and I can make code that works for you. The price is different, but you also need to know what you actually want it to do, and I donāt know how much money you are willing to sacrifice for us both fumbling around in that equation.
