- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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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.
The closest I ever got to this story was working help desk in 1996. A user called up saying they had deleted the Internet.
Took me a while to understand he dragged “the Internet” to the recycle bin on the desktop.
If you ever think “an actual human couldn’t possibly click that fast”, you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.
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.
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:
🔥 😬Before we had mindblown emoji, we had this.
💥 😳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.
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.
Be thankful it didn’t take an explosive shit.
That’s a very funny anecdote about Apple that I can find no evidence of ever actually happening. Leaving aside the fact that Xerox had GUI, including the modern WIMP GUI we’re all familiar with today, in 1974. The Apple Lisa was released at least a year before the Macintosh 128K came out in 1984. As much as I love the idea of Apple making such an amateur mistake, I’m going to need a reputable source before I believe that story actually happened.
Edit: I’m seeing a lot of “it’s technically possible” but still no sources to confirm that it actually occurred. Until a a verifiable source emerges, I’m still going to assume this story never actually happened. Anyone have Woz’s contact info? We could always just ask him.
I’ve seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the “Empty Trash” command before I stepped in.
It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I’m not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn’t cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.
Speaking from experience, it functionally ruined them, at least the early macs -exact os/model unknown- we had (school computers well behind the curve and all). They’d need to be reformatted after. It would delete, then iirc just crash and you’d reboot into errors (my memory of this is spotty, it was a very long time ago)
I used to do that in the computer lab when I was supposed to be doing typing practice. Fucking hate typing “properly”.
Note: I am not a verifiable source, this is anecdata.
Maybe you had ones with built-in hard drives which, if ejected unexpectedly, may have caused problems on early Macs.
But there was and still is no “computer” icon on the Mac OS desktop, and dragging a disk to the trash just ejects it.
Seconded.
I’ve read most of folklore.org and do not recall any such story. In fact, how do you even “drag the computer to the waste basket” as the first/only icon would be the System floppy and afaik they’ve never had / still don’t have a “computer icon”. 🤔
You honestly couldn’t pay me enough to use MacOS so I didn’t know there wasn’t a “computer icon” but I love that detail. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that whole anecdote is fictitious.
Hating an operating system such that someone wouldn’t use it in exchange for a million dollars is quite the flex.
I’m an IT person professionally, and I use Fedora as my daily driver. MacOS just grinds on me in ways I can’t properly articulate.
Edit: oh wait, maybe I can!
And you’re obsessed with giant cocks. This is very interesting. A therapist could write a book on you.
“Cock,” singular. It wouldn’t be a very interesting book. I don’t have any hard to pronounce problems, I’m just a jerk.
This story is a lie.
There’s no “computer icon”. Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can’t be deleted.
You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac
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 I’m sure they made safeguards against it before selling it
i mean, this story sounds like it’s 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 doesn’t 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 can’t do what’s described.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means that the demo wasn’t public.
Yes your uncle who works at Nintendo ^W Apple told you about it.
Well if the story is true, wouldn’t they have just fixed the software, so it would have never seen the light of day?
If they had “fixed” it, there would be a “My Computer” icon. No such thing exists, go TRY the Infinite Mac I linked above.
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’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t 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 couldn’t 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 – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t 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 don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, that’s 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
