If everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. I don't understand why so many managers fail to grasp this.

It's the same with prioritization. I've literally had conversations that go:

Manager: I need you to drop everything and do X right now, it's top priority

Me: Ok, well I'm currently doing Y, which was top priority this morning. Which is more important, X or Y?

Manager: Well, they're both equally important!

Me: OK, sure. I can't work on both, which one would you like me to do first?

Manager: [uncomfortable thinking noises]

Manager: Are you sure you can't do both at once?

Me: Yes

Manager: [Pause] Keep going with Y. I'll see if someone else can do X

sigh

It strikes me as something that can be incredibly useful or do great harm, depending on dosage. A selection of conversation partners at your fingertips, and you can freely test reactions without risking harm to a relationship. At worst you reset it. Maybe you can even just roll back the last couple messages and try a different angle. Sounds like a great way to enhance social skills. Yet as you point out, healthy development also requires that you deal with actual humans, with all the stakes and issues that come with that.

Yeah, I at first, I though I knew exactly how it worked. Then I saw the search field, and I suddenly had no idea what the hell was going on. Now, the big question, do I want to spoil the magic trick and read how this was done, or should I keep being astonished and flabbergasted?

I do not want to criticize anybody. But I think this is a fire hazard and I would not recommend it in a place so close to jet fuel and jet engines.

The same thing can happen in the US- People may be able to get a job, but it will then prevent them from receiving any aid that may still be needed.

How so? Healthcare? FIRE seems much more attainable in the US

I really dont understand why we cannot just go back to chronological as a default. This is how I use X/Twitter, and anything else that lets me just go chronological.

I don't know how long that failure mode has been in place or if this is relevant, but it makes me think of analogous times I've encountered similar:

When automated systems are first put in place, for something high risk, "just shut down if you see something that may be an error" is a totally reasonable plan. After all, literally yesterday they were all functioning without the automated system, if it doesn't seem to be working right better switch back to the manual process we were all using yesterday, instead of risk a catastrophe.

In that situation, switching back to yesterday's workflow is something that won't interrupt much.

A couple decades -- or honestly even just a couple years -- later, that same fault system, left in place without much consideration because it rarely is triggered -- is itself catastrophic, switching back to a rarely used and much more inefficient manual process is extremely disruptive, and even itself raises the risk of catastrophic mistakes.

The general engineering challenge, is how we deal with little-used little-seen functionality (definitely thinking of fault-handling, but there may be other cases) that is totally reasonable when put in place, but has not aged well, and nobody has noticed or realized it, and even if they did it might be hard to convince anyone it's a priority to improve, and the longer you wait the more expensive.

The only one? Cafe Racer in Seattle had an excellent collection in their OBAMA room (Official Bad Art Museum of Art) :P