Have you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk?
In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.
Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…
It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
Autocad (and most other professional design software) is like that because the vast majority of people that learn how to use it will do so whether they like it or not, because it’s a professional or school requirement. It sucks for beginners but if you’re using the software day in and day out for a few weeks, you’ll learn them, and then pick up the CLI commands for your most frequently used commands. After that, you’d be loath to give to give up the screen real estate for text labels.
These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.
A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.
> People argue and disagree here but somehow in pleasant way I haven’t seen anywhere else.
Turn on `showdead` in your settings (or don’t, probably for the best) and be prepared to read some nasty comments. No substance, only hate. There are a few on this very submission.
> I think it's a mistake to imply that just because a comment is dead because it was flagged that it is hateful.
I wish people would stop inventing arguments and “reading between the lines” when interpreting comments from people they don’t know. There was no implication. Whatever you think you read is only in your head.
Of course not every flagged and dead comment is hateful. But hateful comments do get flagged so that’s where you’ll find them.
I'm about to do what you just asked people not to do. Perhaps, we're so used to dishonest interlocutors online that we search for intentions in people's statements?
This is perhaps what most non-dev people don't get. Maintenance is a far more harder thing than building something. So you want to go slow when building things, not fast. Either way building things fast has been a solved problem for a while, people don't go fast not because we don't have tools, but there are other fairly valid reasons to go slow. This is true with so many other things outside of software. I guess its called 'haste'.
This is true for most things. Especially where money and life are at stake. But Im guessing you could extend this to anything where reputation is at stake.
Im guessing it doesn't apply to some start ups, but other wise every one is subject to this.
Imho that cancelling part was about “I still think about it, I don’t have it closed in my mind”. It was not about cancelling a specific person therefore he didn’t mention the name.
Yup. Exactly. Most people including me have (had) to learn how to not being afraid speak up.
Otherwise unresolved issues catch up with a person until the end of life.
So everytime someone tells that I am too much activist I answer “yes, because I think I need to speak up so I don’t have to have unfinished stuff in my head”. And after ten years when we meet they ask me if I remember …something… And I tell them I don’t as it was finished and I don’t live in the past.
It's ridiculous that people are jumping on the vendors bandwagon - control everything remotely, AI inside, etc.
Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?
Sure, I understand that there are a lot of manufacturers today, and basically all products are similar, so marketing people are looking for any way to differentiate a product from a lot of others... but cloud-connected devices are a road to hell... hello LG, Samsung, Canon, Western Digital and others who change cloud solutions for hardware so often that you blow your nose and get a service cancellation message in the mail :)
> Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?
One reason I can think of is I'd rather be able to remote control a device by pushing my instructions to the cloud from my phone and having my device pull from said cloud, rather than making the device itself accessible remotely.
Another is settings/data persistence (eg: if I replace the device, etc).
That said, I don't have a smart vacuum and none of my smart devices are devices I want to access when I'm not home, personally, so I'm not "for" cloud-based stuff anyway.
My comment is that despite all the automation we don't see the potential fuckups that occur with a subcritical number of customers - see infotainment and "modern" controls in cars today. Then it leads to Ford coming out with a "mechanically" controlled car and everyone can go nuts for it.
So the question was, do we really need a vacuum cleaner connected to a proprietary cloud? And is there a critical number of people using it so a supplier can maintain and run cloud for a long time?
Off topic: A few days ago there was a discussion that someone tried to turn off connecting to the Chinese cloud and the device stopped working altogether...
> do we really need a vacuum cleaner connected to a proprietary cloud?
"Really need" is a such a high bar that you're basically ensuring a "no" answer, so why ask? Rhetorically?
I think there are features that can benefit from some sort of off-device (eg: proprietary cloud) server. I also think that the percentage of customers who would want to self-host this is inconsequentially small, so the vendor has a compelling reason to build a proprietary cloud solution, but not much of a compelling reason to make it open.
But two things can be true at the same time: there could be uses for a vendor's proprietary cloud, and the vendor could (through malice, incompetence, etc) end up being a bad actor.
Personally, I'd argue that any vendor that bricks devices should legally owe their customers a (at the very least prorated) refund on what they paid for the device, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for consumer protections from any country I've lived in so far.
Honestly don't see what this has to do with my comment, especially when I end my comment with:
> I don't have a smart vacuum and none of my smart devices are devices I want to access when I'm not home, personally, so I'm not "for" cloud-based stuff anyway.
I was giving example responses to the question:
"Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?"
So if you want to reply "you don't need the cloud", I guess go reply to that parent comment?
I’m afraid you’re mixing at least two different things together.
Possible reasons for wanting remote control of home systems while away from home is one thing.
Engineering home systems in a way that they depend (to some extent varying from case to case) on external computers is another thing.
I don’t think there’s any single answer to either of those, but there are a lot of possible reasons.
Personally, I had a use case where I ran a vacuum remotely. I was on a work trip, and thanks to a robot vacuum I returned back to a clean home. That was a convenient and desirable outcome. Others’ reasons may vary.
As for engineering, I imagine reasons must be complex, consisting of at least tradition, cost, state of home network connectivity, and current disparity between consumer and corporate interests.
In long term, corporations can buy everyone, unfortunately.
This is the fact, and I would say that almost no one is immune to money offer. (You have to be very financially secured. But then, you are probably from the similar class as corporate people. -> simulate level of greed)
If you (as governmental employee) have some issue to solve, e.g. alimony or faster mortgage repayment, you are vulnerable… and you have to have very strong conscience not to accept any “services”. It is similar to be strong not to ear sugar or fat-loaded chips or drinking…
In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.
Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…
It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
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