One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said “There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
Lmao, yeah… You can make a can so secured a bear definitely won’t get in; but will people go to the effort to use it then?
Definitely some overlap there.
And I think that hits on the truth, which makes this less “iamverysmart”. It’s not that the tourists are dumb, it’s that they’re new and not willing to pay much attention to things like trash can design. 1% of a normal person’s attention presents a lot like a really dumb person.
Is it 1%? Maybe when they first try to open it they’re distracted But when doesn’t open and now they’re concentrating on the problem and still fail, then we have to kinda own up to the fact that a lot of people aren’t smarter than a bear.
A bear has time and motivation to keep trying over and over again to get into the garbage. People are generally much less determined to figure it out.
I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
I genuinely had someone stop and ask me why you can’t see the moon during an eclipse because “it’s got light in it right”.
They’re soon to replace our HR manager.
Holy shit this. And not even “educated” people. Where I work is about half degree holding engineers… many of these engineers were seen outside staring at the partial eclipse Monday.
There was a solar eclipse when I was in grade six. One of my classmates was riding his bike home, and was stupidly looking at the eclipse, and got hit by a car. The irony.
What do you mean? Sun is blocked = no sun rays = not blinded when staring directly. The logic is sound! Just like in programming.
I’ve seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn’t be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn’t require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
The monitor disappeared rather than the computer, but we can assume the tower somewhere under the desk did as well. But what of the keyboard? It’s in the icon, yet remains after deletion!
I think you found a bug. Either the keyboard is not compatible with the bin or we have a immutable peripheral and we should consider containment.
One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was “it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it’s spreading.”
Turns out the rendering engine couldn’t handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning “hair on fire” it broke things:
🔥
😬
Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays… because that’s when this user actually used the application
Why would you post this, my phone exploded and took a shit. I didnt know it could do that.
User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.
Why the fuck are your users flipping a page back and forth 10 times. I understand the Bluetooth bit, they wanted it to restart probably from a device not showing up. Also what was the issue
I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?
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, “this is what I think of this computer” 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 didn’t like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windows… 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 “this computer is trash” 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.
why would it take 2 years to find a bug? release something new to the public and it will always take seconds
I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.
As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
I was a QA engineer. I think one of the guys on the team I was on developed a stress response from hearing me walk over to his desk.
Lots of “page crashes if the user doesn’t have a last name”
“Why wouldn’t they have a last name??”
“No idea, but 372 users in the DB don’t, and 20 of them were created this month so it’s not an old problem”
“incoherent muttering and cursing”
Because I have been completely unable to find it again and this seems like a relevant place to ask: does anyone have a link to an article similar to this, that I believe might have been titled ‘My First Name is My Last Name’? This is made extra hard to look up because I’ve forgotten the specific culture and details it’s talking about, but it’s about the same basic issue with cultural conventions on names.
As a user, I sometimes do everything I can to see what breaks a system. (Often unintentionally)
Then, I don’t do those this things.
(Learning permissions on Linux was a great way to destroy a system. Eg “sudo chown -R user:user /” didn’t work as I first thought)
Let me guess; does it recursively remove all permissions from the file system?
The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account “user” and group “user” for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.
On this ubuntu system I’m using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you’d basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it’s easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.
