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wharvle commented on 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective   uxtigers.com/post/41-year... · Posted by u/ravirajx7
karaterobot · 2 years ago
If you aren't making a consumer product for nursing home patients with sub-90 IQs, then you'd be wasting your time, and the feedback you got from the exercise wouldn't be useful. In fact, any decisions you made based on it could be wrong. The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have, and usability test participants should be recruited with that in mind.

There is some merit to what I assume is your underlying argument, but the way you phrase it isn't helpful.

wharvle · 2 years ago
A whole lot of us will be mentally impaired sooner or later.

Our experience with software when that happens is sad for everyone but bad UI designers. For them, it’s justice.

wharvle commented on 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective   uxtigers.com/post/41-year... · Posted by u/ravirajx7
tbitrust · 2 years ago
> a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c.

For me, the first task would be to make absolutely sure that I block any apps designed by you. Such lack of empathy in your wording proves that you cannot possibly be a decent, half-decent, or even mediocre UI designer.

wharvle · 2 years ago
… lack of empathy? Where?
wharvle commented on 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective   uxtigers.com/post/41-year... · Posted by u/ravirajx7
zer00eyz · 2 years ago
20 ish years ago I ended up with a UX gig.

Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing.

Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard Stallman to shame!

They are apparently still dancing around the edges of this topic: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/clickable-elements/

Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume.

wharvle · 2 years ago
> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume.

If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for a panel of users from a nursing home, a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c.

I expect the outcome would be a hell of a lot less twee “on brand” UI elements and a lot more leaning on proven design systems and frameworks, including fucking crucially for appearance. And also a lot less popping shit up on the screen without user interaction (omg those damn “look what’s new!” sorts of pop ups or focused tabs—congrats, some of your users are now totally lost)

wharvle commented on Full $71M breakdown for The Village by M. Night Shyamalan (2003) [pdf]   wlmager.com/wp-content/up... · Posted by u/cocacola1
eterm · 2 years ago
The film didn't work for me, because I didn't realise the "twist" was supposed to be a twist. I had assumed it from the start and was expecting the reverse to be the twist.
wharvle · 2 years ago
Same. “Oh, it’s just… the obvious thing.”
wharvle commented on Ofsted inspectors 'make up evidence' about a school's performance when IT fails   theguardian.com/education... · Posted by u/YeGoblynQueenne
londons_explore · 2 years ago
Here is how I would inspect schools:

* Collect together a bunch of metrics of each school. Eg. student test scores, parent satisfaction scores, number of police callouts to the school, number of leaks in the school roof. Also include metrics that aren't obviously good/bad: Number of acres of playgrounds, average tenure of staff, etc.

* Gather data of the success of past students, 30-50 years on. For example, employment rate, total earnings, percentage convicted, percentage in good health.

* Build a model to predict success metrics from the school metrics.

* To rate a school, go collect the school metrics, then run through the model to predict future success metrics. That is your rating.

Sure, such an approach has the correlation/causation problem. But this is self-correcting if schools try to optimize their scores as the models are rebuilt each year.

wharvle · 2 years ago
You’ve just made a map of rich and poor areas with extra steps.

Which is effective. If you’re a parent trying to decide which schools you want your kids in, maps of where the money is and maps of school rankings are damn near interchangeable (mostly not for funding-related reasons, though). You could use either and come to similar conclusions.

wharvle commented on Full $71M breakdown for The Village by M. Night Shyamalan (2003) [pdf]   wlmager.com/wp-content/up... · Posted by u/cocacola1
wmf · 2 years ago
Yes, it looks like this was her first or second notable role.
wharvle · 2 years ago
Yeah, sixth film credit… but the second one for which her character had a name.

And that other film appears to have had a box office under $1.4m, with a collection of basically nobody notable attached, including the director.

wharvle commented on AWS charge for using IPv4 expected to bring $1B/year and speed up IPv6 adoption   tomshardware.com/networki... · Posted by u/simonpure
Dylan16807 · 2 years ago
> because it’s simply not being routed

Well if you don't actually have IPv6, and you're turning off a broken ghost of IPv6, that's very reasonable.

But in that case it confuses people when you call that "turning off IPv6".

wharvle · 2 years ago
Shrug Google’s router thinks I have it. And it’s on by default.
wharvle commented on Over 2 percent of the US's electricity generation now goes to Bitcoin   arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/cdme
woodruffw · 2 years ago
To understand why people don't find this compelling (and are sick of hearing it), you probably need to first understand that people consider Bitcoin's profitability a false economy.

In other words: your scenario is identical to GP's except that someone is paying you to run your AC while you aren't at home, rather than just doing it because you can. The logical question is then to ask why they're paying you to run your AC, and that is the uncompelling part: it's not clear that we should be paying people to burn energy to crack hashes.

wharvle · 2 years ago
People’d find it outrageous if beanie baby collectors were sacrificing 2% of US food production on altars to their beanie babies, because doing so made the beanie babies more valuable to other collectors. Even if some of the collectors were growing their own food for the purpose, et c, et c—it’d still bother a lot of people. Maybe most people.
wharvle commented on AWS charge for using IPv4 expected to bring $1B/year and speed up IPv6 adoption   tomshardware.com/networki... · Posted by u/simonpure
vel0city · 2 years ago
I'm curious what breaks with IPv6 on. I've been running IPv6 dual stack for over a decade at home and pretty much never have any issues. I think I've run into a prefix change get bugged on my router's announcements that required a reboot, but that's like 2 times in the last 10+ years and I'm not 100% sure that was truly the issue. My phone is pretty much always has an IPv6 address and pretty much never has IP-related connectivity problems. I'm not using Google Fiber's router though, so that could be the complication.
wharvle · 2 years ago
The typical behavior is that DNS returns an IPv6 address, then whatever-it-is sits there until a timeout, because it’s simply not being routed. I’ve not investigated further because turning off IPv6 fixes the problem and breaks nothing (that I care about). Anything that only returns an IPv4 address from DNS works either way.

My cellular connection supports IPv6, but testing sites report it’s misconfigured in a bunch of ways. I don’t see problems in practice, though. But on my home network, it’s turned off.

wharvle commented on Ask HN: When to Start a Business?    · Posted by u/funarchist
fullstackchris · 2 years ago
I did it to protect myself. Worse case they can only take whats in my company. (I build apps, but you never know when you will encounter the next ouch-hot-coffee-in-paper-cup wacko)

Keep in mind, at least in the US a "business" is nothing more than a legal and tax entity. Lotta people talking immediately about "your startup will fail!". A "startup" is only one of many ways to do business, and more and more often I find it a smoke and mirrors way of doing things.

wharvle · 2 years ago
> the next ouch-hot-coffee-in-paper-cup wacko

Nitpick, but this specific example, despite its place in pop culture, wasn't a case of a lawsuit-happy wacko. McDonalds screwed up, after being warned they were screwing up and failing to correct, and someone got badly hurt.

u/wharvle

KarmaCake day1553November 28, 2023View Original