[HN Gopher] When the push button was new, people were freaked
___________________________________________________________________
When the push button was new, people were freaked
Author : SongofEarth
Score : 234 points
Date : 2022-09-28 13:08 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (daily.jstor.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (daily.jstor.org)
| BrainVirus wrote:
| _> The mundane interface between human and machine caused social
| anxiety in the late nineteenth century_
|
| The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of
| buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a
| symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by
| anticipation of things like:
|
| - Disconnect of people from nature an each other.
|
| - Replacement of real things with simulacra, which then begins to
| be perceived as the real thing.
|
| - Mounting, yet fragile complexity of systems people interact
| with (initially) and within (eventually).
|
| Looking at our society today, it's pretty clear that none of
| these fears were irrational.
| jdmdmdmdmd wrote:
| My mind immediately went to Forster as well:
|
| > _They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of
| technology into a black box: "effortless, opaque, and therefore
| unquestioned by consumers."_
|
| rings true to me. I think this was and still is a valid
| concern. At the very least it's a real trade-off. I almost get
| the feeling that the author in the OP looks down on the
| knowledge needed to understand machines/technology since it can
| be replaced by a button. That misses the point entirely though.
| Taking technology for granted makes you a mindless consumer in
| my opinion. That's why we're so instinctively disgusted by the
| population in The Machine Stops. They don't exist in any real
| sense; they're just the exit nodes of the machine's functions.
| skydove wrote:
| It's interesting to see that what some companies like Apple are
| doing nowadays has such historic precedence. And it ties in with
| the current state of affairs - fewer and fewer people understand
| electronics. Children are less computer-literate than ever.
| legulere wrote:
| The question is wether you really need to be literate. As a
| software developer I cannot write correct assembler code ( with
| aligning rules, red zone and what not), but at least I can read
| it. I would guess most programmers cannot do even that. But do
| they really need it? Isn't that the advance?
| eternityforest wrote:
| I can't write or read assembler, but I can program modern
| languages.
|
| We're talking about a whole different level, people who don't
| even know how to effectively use what they have, troubleshoot
| basic issues, etc.
|
| It's not "This is a magic box" so much as "I don't even know
| how to use the controls on this box and even if I could
| there's no button to do that thing anymore".
|
| "I can't type or use a calculator" not just "I don't know how
| to divide numbers on paper"
| hulitu wrote:
| As a HW developer I cannot write correct code but at least I
| can read it. /s
|
| As a french I cannot write correct english but at least I can
| read it. /s
| eternityforest wrote:
| Apple is a unique case. The CAD app might make you forget math,
| but it lets you make stuff with CAD.
|
| Apple hides the filesystem and such but it doesn't really
| replace it with anything. It's not like they have some super
| ultra abstraction on top of it, they just straight up reduce
| the functionality a bit.
|
| I don't see much critical value in understanding the things
| only specialists can or want to do, like how a CPU actually
| works or how to make an OS, but before Apple every generation
| had a level of abstraction they could work at that had the full
| power of previous levels(So long as you accept having to buy
| all the underlying stuff off the shelf).
|
| Now it seems that the very newest computer users actually have
| less capability, because the abstraction doesn't expose the
| full power of the machine.
| granshaw wrote:
| > Children are less computer-literate than ever.
|
| Going back 20 years, I wouldve never guessed this would be the
| current state of affairs! As an industry we've succeeded in
| unlocking computing as a background enabler, but have utterly
| failed in making create-side computing friendly and accessible
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Today, you'd probably have to schedule an electrician to fix
| what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells,
| buttons, and buzzers.
|
| "Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th
| century children.
| tiagod wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's way more children today with
| electronics/electricity skills than back in the day...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Now it's Redstone in Minecraft.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there were way more children back then who
| had practical skills, now everyone is pushed into "college
| prep" and discouraged from having practical skills, as they
| are associated with the lower class workers.
|
| The people who keep us all alive are viewed as less worthy...
| that's our problem in a nutshell.
| noirbot wrote:
| Is that true? I feel like the drumbeat I constantly have
| heard for the last 10 years is that the trades pay really
| well and are easier to get into. Most of the electricians I
| know are definitely not "lower class". That said, they're
| harder jobs physically. They're not particularly good for
| your body a lot of the time.
| veltas wrote:
| Class isn't all about money.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| And being a clerk instead of a workman isn't a ticket to
| the aristocracy either ...
| lisper wrote:
| Yeah, this.
|
| Two days ago we returned home from a short trip and when we
| turned on the tap for the first time the water pressure
| seemed unusually high for 5-10 seconds before returning to
| normal. I would have thought nothing of it except that
| about fifteen years ago I had experienced the same
| phenomenon after installing a water pressure booster pump
| in our house and so I learned the hard way about the need
| for thermal expansion tanks in modern domestic plumbing [1]
| and so I knew right away that our tank had failed and
| needed to be replaced. It's a pretty trivial DIY project,
| but only if you do it _before_ your pipes burst. I suspect
| most people have never even heard of a thermal expansion
| tank.
|
| [1] https://homeinspectioninsider.com/thermal-expansion-
| tanks-in...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > I suspect most people have never even heard of a
| thermal expansion tank.
|
| I suspect that if you did surveys every year going back
| to the 19th century, in every single one of them the
| majority of people would have never heard of a thermal
| expansion tank.
| lisper wrote:
| That's because they didn't exist back then.
|
| But I'll bet most people could tell you why they had
| separate hot and cold water taps. (These things are
| related BTW.)
| [deleted]
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I know it's a joke, but "some" children in the developed world
| give their parents stuff they made themselves... like macaroni
| "images", clay pots and ashtrays, painted rocks, etc.
|
| In china, those children can give their parents smartphones and
| other electronics :)
| osrec wrote:
| And is probably as applicable to a geeky subset of 21st century
| children.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems like basically the same problem, really. The "some"
| is a small chunk of the population maybe, but it is the chunk
| that is interested in this sort of stuff and would normally
| use this as a stepping stone on the path to designing the
| next thing.
|
| The hope is that our abstractions are not too good, and the
| clever kids manage to bash them into something that does what
| their imagination wants.
| amelius wrote:
| And the "normal" children just visit YouTube and search for
| "how to fix a doorbell".
| rasz wrote:
| MIT graduates cannot power a light bulb with a battery.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIhk9eKOLzQ
| sarchertech wrote:
| I'm always skeptical of those man on the street interviews.
| How many students did they interview to find the handful who
| couldn't do it? And how many of those were just flustered by
| the situation.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Well, I'm of 20th C. origin--not 19th--and the first electrical
| things I played with as a young kid were electric bells,
| buzzers, batteries, flashlight globes and reels of bell wire--
| lots and lots of it. (Experimenting with such items wasn't an
| unfashionable activity when I was a kid.)
|
| Bell wire, which usually came in the form of two single-
| stranded copper wires twisted loosely together and insulated in
| red and white PVC plastic, was installed under the house, in
| ceilings, in wall cavities and elsewhere by yours truly to
| enable us perform all sorts of electrical tasks--door bells,
| for mother to signal us to come to dinner, etc.
|
| Isn't that standard kids' stuff anymore? The thought of an
| electrician being called to fix these Rube Goldberg/Heath
| Robinson-type installations would have been preposterous. If
| No.-1 son wasn't about say to change a battery then my parents
| would do it themselves.
| namrog84 wrote:
| I was born in 84. And in the 90s I knew this 1 kid who told
| me on his 11th birthday his dad would raise his bicycle seat.
|
| I was super confused as that an easy thing to do(loosen a
| bolt, adjust height and tighten the bolt). Turns out lots of
| parents don't allow their kids to touch their tools or tinker
| or do anything like that.
|
| I was very fortunate that my parents encouraged me to do such
| things. E.g. take apart things to put them together but it
| doesn't surprise me why lots of people have all the
| creativity and curiosity purged from them from an early age.
| eastbound wrote:
| Living in Europe, I'm one of the rare millionaires so I have
| a house, 150m2 (on the Cote d'Azur, I admit it's expensive),
| but even for me, thinking of "a bell for mother to signal us
| to come to dinner" is the thing that belong to the times when
| energy was unlimited, and therefore house sizes and taxes on
| inhabitable square meters. It's not that we do have bells
| here, but we don't have the square meters anymore.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _"...but we don't have the square meters anymore. "_
|
| I well understand what you say having lived in a crowded
| part of Europe for a time. It made me all the more
| appreciative of the fact that I grew up in a big home with
| a large front and back yard and that our house was only a
| few hundred metres from bushland.
|
| Nevertheless, in some ways I envy you living in the Cote
| d'Azur. That is one of my most favorite parts of Europe.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Well, I'm of 20th C. origin--not 19th
|
| This already is a massive difference. Large majority of
| children in the 19th century did not have any access to
| electricity, let alone knowing how to fashion an electric
| bell.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Yes, there's a huge difference between the amount of
| information that 19th C. and 20th C. kids had access to,
| but then this is a broad generalization and it requires
| qualification. In fact I'd argue that some 19th C. kids
| (albeit few in relative numbers) would have had access to
| more information than many of their 20th C. counterparts.
|
| Broadly, the reason for why some 20th C. kids would have
| had access to less information is that they were more
| protected from dangers than those in 19th C. (and in some
| ways that's problematic when it comes to learning). Also,
| clearly, the types of information available in each era
| would have been different--and this difference would have
| been accentuated depending on which part of each century
| we're referring to.
|
| The 19th C.--being the height of the Industrial Revolution
| --change came thick and fast, so it's almost superfluous to
| say kids' knowledge of electricity at the turn of the 20th
| C. would have been much greater than at the beginning of
| the 19th however this difference wasn't anywhere near as
| stark at other times throughout the 19th C.
|
| This is best illustrated by example and for that I'll use a
| book published in 1858 by Elisha Noyce titled _The Boys
| Book of Industrial Information._
| https://archive.org/details/boysbookofindust00noyc
|
| So by 1858 enough information was known about electricity
| to include technical aspects about it including its
| industrial applications such as electroplating, p129, and
| the telegraph, pp273-280 in a kids' book. I'd also posit
| that some 20 years later (by say 1880) with the coming
| together of electrical engineering--telephone, electric
| motors, generators, transatlantic cables, theory by
| Maxwell, Wheatstone et al, that much more information about
| the subject would have been available to kids.
|
| Noyce's book was a true eye-opener to me when I came across
| it some two to three decades ago, so much so that I now
| truly regret not having a copy of it as a kid. I know I
| would have gained a great amount of useful knowledge from
| it despite the fact that it was published a century before
| my time.
|
| Whilst I had access to more modern texts they didn't
| provide the information in such a useful and meaningful
| way. Moreover, much of that information is still very
| relevant and valuable today. For instance, I refer you to
| pp57-58 on the dangers of lead and lead poisoning, therein
| Noyce issues a stark warning especially so with respect to
| white lead as used in paint.
|
| _(This advice would have been invaluable to boys who would
| have gone into industries where they 'd be exposed to such
| dangers. It also infomes us that knowledge of and concerns
| about bad and dangerous working conditions of the era may
| have been better understood at the time than some modern
| history books would have us believe.)_
|
| Keep in mind this warning was in a book for boys written to
| provide them with practical and useful information--not
| published in some erudite scientific publication. The fact
| that by 1858 the dangers of lead had filtered down not only
| to ordinary people but also to their kids makes the failure
| of governments and those knowledgeable of the facts to act
| in a decisive way over the forthcoming century all the more
| tragic (when I first read Noyce's warning I was quite
| horrified that so little action had been taken until recent
| decades).
|
| As you see, with actual information to hand things seem a
| little more nuanced.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I also strongly suspect the number of people who were freaked
| out by buttons in the 19th century is approximately in that
| "some" range.
|
| Mistrusting electricity is a different story, but that's not
| the title of the article.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| An inspector refused to come look at our house because there is
| a power line near it. People are still afraid of electricity.
| It's funny because he probably uses a cell phone, drives a car,
| lives in his own house, uses a microwave, owns a computer, all
| situations in which _ghasp_ electricity is close to his body!
| We 're just glad we didn't actually hire him.
| pitaj wrote:
| I assume he was talking about a high voltage line?
| Aboveground power lines are quite common.
| contextfree wrote:
| It would be interesting to see articles like this for various
| common elements of UI widget toolkits, which I guess kind of mix
| metaphors in that some of them (buttons, sliders) evoke
| electromechanical devices while others (checkboxes, text boxes)
| evoke paper forms.
| NonNefarious wrote:
| I'm going to write one about the idiocy of the "flat" design
| fad. I wonder how people of 1900 would have felt about having
| to experimentally poke at things that looked like plain labels
| or placards, or decorative swatches of paint, to operate a
| machine.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| "Every time you try to operate on of these weird black
| controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a
| little black light lights up black to let you know you've
| done it."
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7405023-it-s-the-wild-
| colou...
| contextfree wrote:
| I guess flat design can be tied back into that tension/mixed
| metaphor between electromechanical and print analogs - it's
| based on a decision to lean towards the print side of things.
| Actually the designers of early-ish influential "flat"
| designed systems such as Windows Phone 7 were quite self-
| conscious about this, e.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20120
| 322023540/http://mkruzenisk... (from 2011)
| NonNefarious wrote:
| Thanks for the reply and that link. That article is replete
| with pretty bogus assertions, even for its time. Print is
| not all that informative for interactive presentations,
| aside from general principles of good layout with
| whitespace and appropriate visual emphasis. The article
| does indeed mention those, but goes on and on about print
| without saying what it has to do with buttons you need to
| press or values you need to adjust.
|
| The article also treats all physical-control analogies as
| bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent
| into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather"
| textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you
| could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two-
| pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons
| that instantly told you
|
| A. This is a button. B. The button is "pressed."
|
| At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the
| real world. In the real world (even one full of
| touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you
| press on something malleable it will deform, and the light
| and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave
| where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can
| come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been
| pressed.
|
| This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be)
| learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with
| minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some
| new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize
| and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means
| ON! Brown means OFF!
|
| There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out"
| unavailable functions is the best example I can think of.
| But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and
| making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's
| ineffective (or less effective).
|
| Conclusion: Windows 95 nailed it.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Tangental, but the physical mechanisms of electronic controls are
| often worth study. Ingenious mechanisms move little slivers of
| metal around in carefully engineered enclosures. It's a more
| accessible magic that's easy to disregard.
|
| The "channel dial" switch on old TV's was _awesome_.
| cfraenkel wrote:
| The engineering & tolerances to make a typical microswitch
| (what makes the pushbutton actually do anything) would make
| most peoples eyes water. (from boredom, perhaps...)
|
| Fun fact - if you engineer the people facing mechanism to keep
| the switch pin from being depressed all the way flush to the
| switch housing, the lifetime of the switch increases by roughly
| a factor of 10. A 0.1 mm difference in pushbutton throw is the
| difference between getting maybe a million cycles, say 3 ~ 4
| years of constant use, and the switch outlasting everything
| else in the product.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Well, they must not actually be doing that on cheap switches,
| they fail probably 10x as much as anything except maybe power
| supply equipment and connectors.
|
| Mechanical keyswitches have some pretty amazing reliability
| though.
|
| I actually like the touchscreen everything movement in most
| applications, partly because of this. A screen may be
| expensive, but good switches might be just as expensive.
| gist wrote:
| This sounds trivially correct but the short article doesn't do
| enough to support it other than the few anecdotes that are
| mentioned. This is similar to today when, as an example, the NYT
| tries to get in front of a trend by highlighting and cherry
| picking a few examples of people who are doing what one of their
| articles purports in so many words is more widespread than it
| really might be.
|
| Then take a statement like this:
|
| "many laypeople had a "working knowledge not only of electricity,
| but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between
| the two," according to Plotnick"
|
| What does 'many people' exactly mean? Nothing at all you wouldn't
| say 'many people got sick from the pandemic' you'd back it up
| with some type of figure or number.
| teddyh wrote:
| "Americans are being crushed by falling grand pianos"
|
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347005#30350402)
| buescher wrote:
| I haven't heard it in a long time - I think it was mostly
| confined to people born before 1930, and there aren't many of
| them around anymore, but "what if I press the wrong button?" used
| to be a major concern people had about new gadgets. A lot of it
| came from the shift from appliances like old time wringer
| washers, where every control has a visible mechanical function or
| other affordance, to more automated "pushbutton" appliances with
| internal sequence "programs".
| [deleted]
| anarbadalov wrote:
| Rachel Plotnick's book (Power Button, referenced in the article)
| is very good. Here's a much longer excerpt from it, on the button
| as it relates to carrying out life-and-death decisions (e.g.,
| warfare and executions): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-
| war-and-electric-death...
|
| (Full disclosure: I work for the MIT Press, who published Power
| Button. But it really is one of my favorite history of tech
| titles we've published in the 10+ years i've been here)
| trophycase wrote:
| they weren't wrong
| NonNefarious wrote:
| Fluffy but pretty interesting post. Thanks!
| hulitu wrote:
| > When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked
|
| So that's why they dissapeared from "Modern" GUIs, UIs and UXs.
| /s
| tomcam wrote:
| I used to spend ridiculous amounts of money on Halloween
| displays. The thing that scared people the most was a big red
| button I encouraged them to press. My plan was to give the first
| person who pressed it all of our candy and a cash prize. No one
| ever did.
| daveslash wrote:
| This is brilliant. tbh, I too, would probably be hesitant to
| push the _History Eraser Button_ without a case of _Space
| Madness_.
| tomcam wrote:
| Not only that I answered all questions, things like "Will it
| scare me?" No. "Will something jump out if I press it?" No.
| "What's going to happen?" I can tell you that nothing bad
| will happen and you'll probably like the result. And so on.
| dhosek wrote:
| It's worth noting that there are always the fears of losing touch
| with the details of stuff that some along with various advances.
| The same thing was the case when I was in junior high with
| calculators, "how will you add and multiply if your batteries run
| out?" but the fact of the matter is, not having to be able to
| make your own push button switch freed people to advance to other
| topics. Similarly, in mathematics education, when I was in high
| school, there were classes entitled College Algebra and College
| Trigonometry1 which had the implicit message that these were
| materials traditionally taught in college2 and not in the third
| year of high school. On the other hand, things like calculating
| square roots by hand are no longer part of the curriculum,
| although they may still be taught on occasion by the rare teacher
| who has those skills as an enrichment topic to fill some class
| time or as part of the math club's after-school explorations.
|
| We may be filled with nostalgia for our own learning and think
| that it's the only way to learn, but as time goes on, some skills
| just become less important.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. The backs of the textbooks included printed tables for log
| (both base 10 and ln), sin, cos, tan, cot, sec and csc, with the
| latter six tables to three thanks to the fact that sin _th_ =cos(
| _th_ - _p_ /2).3
|
| 2. The disjunction between practice and theory has led to this
| sequence being renamed precalculus in most (if not all) high
| schools now.
|
| 3. The skills to make those tables in the first place are yet
| another thing that we no longer dedicate long classroom hours to,
| although Charles Babbage would have thought that being unable to
| verify the accuracy of your tables was a sign of intellectual
| weakness.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Not much more magical than delivering a chicken to the butcher,
| and getting back pieces of meat. Or delivering a typed manuscript
| to your publisher, and getting a bound book. Or any trade
| essentially.
|
| Having a machine do it - that was new. But not the part about
| abdicating responsibility for function.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Almost every trade has people freaking out and trying to push
| us all to be generalists.
|
| And I'll continue ignoring pretty much all of them, because
| division of labor is a lot of why society is so advanced.
|
| I'll grant them the chickens though, mass produced meat is one
| case where the abstraction hides some horrors that should be
| exposed.
|
| But simple loss of skill isn't enough to convince me. I don't
| need to be able to build a CPU from scratch, any more than the
| CPU designer needs to know all of CSS.
|
| These things are cool and worth exploring, but most any tech
| one person can understand themselves is probably a historical
| curiosity more than a practical thing. The rare exceptions like
| rope and knots are incredibly fascinating.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Poppycock.
|
| The concept of mechanical push (and pull) buttons have been long
| present in locks and alarm triggers long before electricity was
| introduced to general public.
| gumby wrote:
| As the article points out.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Yes, but in my opinion, much of the mental exercise in the
| article and the book is based on how the electric push button
| was an entirely new concept.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > entirely new concept.
|
| The new concept was power amplification: a small effort
| causing a larger than "natural" effect.
|
| E.g. you were always able to press a button to tinkle a
| bell, but pressing a button and obtaining a sustained
| electrical ringing was new.
|
| Valves and transistors took it to the present stage, by
| cascading the effect of small inputs switching larger
| amounts of power from an external supply.
|
| (Yes, power amplification could be done mechanically before
| electricity with energy from water, weights, etc. but it
| was too cumbersome.)
| dmix wrote:
| I don't think the appehresion was so much of the button
| interface but of the 'black box' automation aspect of it.
| Where the button isn't physically triggering a function
| like a spring or lever, instead some 'magic' happens in the
| behind the scenes. The interface was no longer directly
| connected to a simple, easily understood sequence of
| actions.
|
| > At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had
| a "working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of
| the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the
| two," according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity
| and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button
| interfaces to be "simplistic and worry-free." They thought
| the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and
| more automatic action. "You press the button, we do the
| rest"--the Eastman Company's famous slogan for Kodak
| cameras--could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of
| life.
|
| > Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916
| lamenting that pushing a button "seems to relieve one of
| any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind
| the button."
| dmix wrote:
| We're seeing the same reaction today with AI image generators.
| snvzz wrote:
| Behold... Abstraction!
| cm2187 wrote:
| Plus you were never sure you wouldn't receive an electric shock!
| hulitu wrote:
| > Plus you were never sure you wouldn't receive an electric
| shock!
|
| But the electric shock will help you remember what not to touch
| again.
| yathaid wrote:
| A meh article, but this:
|
| > They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of
| technology into a black box: "effortless, opaque, and therefore
| unquestioned by consumers."
|
| was prescient.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| So I never used "bouton" for "to push forward", and while it is
| used for a pimple, above all, today, a bouton is simply... a
| button.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I have noticed an effect similar to Gell-Mann amnesia:
|
| Often you see news articles about new things freaking people out:
| technology, social changes, products, apps. Sometimes people are
| freaking out for good reason, and sometimes they're just silly,
| and you think: there are smart people and dumb people in the
| world, and the dumb people like to freak out about the wrong
| stuff.
|
| And then you read about times in the past when people were
| freaking out about something that we now know to benign, but you
| easily forget that those might just be the dumb people from the
| past. Did anyone who was, like, intelligent or wise worry about
| push buttons? Presumably not.
| eckza wrote:
| Marshall McLuhan's _Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man_
| continues to provide critical insight.
| trgn wrote:
| The book itself is so much richer than the catchphrases. It's
| just as important today as 60 years ago.
| charles_f wrote:
| > Today, you'd probably have to schedule an electrician to fix
| what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells,
| buttons, and buzzers.
|
| Where I live you are technically not allowed to install equipment
| on 120 or 240 if you are not a certified electrician. Insurance
| won't cover water damage if installation hasn't been done by a
| professional plumber. People still do it, but this is not going
| in the right direction.
| acheron wrote:
| But it keeps work coming to the electricians' and plumbers'
| unions (motto: "If you didn't make any mistakes, you're not
| working fast enough"), and isn't that the important thing?
| Infernal wrote:
| Strange, my experiences with unionized labor have found the
| exact opposite - safety conscious to the nth degree, and much
| more likely to criticize each other for working too quickly
| than too slowly. They seem to be incentivized to 1) not get
| dinged for safety infractions and 2) get as many billable
| hours out of every work order as possible.
| charles_f wrote:
| For the story, I used "professionals" to rebuild drywall
| after a flood. They managed to fuck up my ethernet network in
| the process, but they don't want to admit guilt, and they're
| telling me to "use wifi instead".
| JTbane wrote:
| That's pretty ridiculous, so you can't change a socket without
| calling a guy?
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| This is very much like this in Australia. I had friends warning
| me against setting up my own pendant light because of insurance
| and other blabla and was denied to buy some electrical cables
| at the local hardware shop as I wasn't certified even though I
| hold a bachelor in electronics .... Compared that to France
| where I spent time at uni building my own guitar amplifier for
| my bachelor thesis, manipulating 300V-500V and blowing a couple
| valve along the process, ha fun time
| CodeSgt wrote:
| Wow the insurance is one thing but not even bring able to buy
| electrical cable is crazy to me. Australia's government truly
| is more dystopian than most people give it credit for being.
|
| Every now and then I hear about another fundamental freedom I
| take for granted that they just don't have and it just
| reminds me how lucky I am not to live there.
| throwie_wayward wrote:
| I completely disagree...
|
| on the trend you back up, I see a future where you cannot cook
| your own food unless you've become a professional specialist of
| cooking (for food safety).
|
| going to cartoon levels of ridiculousness, a society in which
| you cannot do anything other than consume unless you're doing a
| job (which would involve safety, insurance, and other various
| legal and bureaucratic requirements).
|
| what keeps things sane where you live is the 'technically'
| aspect. which I read as "individuals often ignore those rules
| for personal reasons (meaning when no businesses are
| involved)"...
| mellavora wrote:
| Huh. Extending your distopian cartoon by reference to an
| earlier (today) HN thread about sex workers, and thinking of
| a society where ...
| [deleted]
| charles_f wrote:
| Yeah I think that you mis-interpreted what I meant. Being
| prevented to do stuff as simple as changing a switch, a plug
| or a faucet is plain stupid, and I'm pretty sure it's not
| even backed by data (or if it is, it's probably
| overconservative).
| burlesona wrote:
| Fascinating. There's always a loss of lower-level knowledge when
| we introduce abstractions. Yet "we stand upon the shoulders of
| giants," it's the layers of abstractions underneath us that we
| _don't_ have to understand or even think about that free our
| minds to compose ever more amazing technology on top. Still,
| progression from the layer that you know and love to the next
| that paves over it is bittersweet.
| falcolas wrote:
| Philosophizing a little bit (and in agreement with one of the
| quotes in the conclusion), I think the bittersweet feelings are
| precisely because very few people try to understand the box,
| because they consider it to be a black box.
|
| But it's often a white box in reality. When the electric push
| buttons came out, you could trace the wires and usually see the
| mechanisms which were being triggered. The doorbell, for
| example.
|
| But curiosity rarely seems to push us in that direction, it
| seems.
| duxup wrote:
| >we don't have to understand or even think about
|
| But also don't have to make all the same mistakes other folks
| did / toil our way through to the ... potentially same
| endpoint. At least as far as code goes I've gone through plenty
| of experiments that go:
|
| "Man I don't need this complex chunk of software, let me just
| try ..."
|
| "Ok now I understand why that chunk of software is the way it
| is... and it's better than mine... I'll use that."
|
| Good learning experience! But do that enough and you just spin
| your wheels endlessly.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I don't do that at all these days. It's almost a guarantee
| that I'll eventually use the big complex thing, so I rarely
| even consider trying anything else if it's a project that
| actually matters.
| andirk wrote:
| Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer
| physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does
| nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen
| if it's not responding.
|
| On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating
| without physical constraints. "The software guys can
| independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to
| the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car
| can be updated." [1] [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497
|
| On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix
| anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather
| just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and
| small appliance repair store are all but gone" [2] [2]
| https://qr.ae/pv5PjI
| capableweb wrote:
| > Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer
| physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does
| nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid
| touchscreen if it's not responding.
|
| Unless, of course, your phone is one of the few where pushing
| harder will make it perform a different action, if used in the
| right place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch).
|
| > On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating
| without physical constraints. "The software guys can
| independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to
| the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car
| can be updated." [1] [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497
|
| This is akin to frontend developers doing everything in their
| power to make their development environment the most
| comfortable, while sacrificing end-user
| performance/bandwidth/usability for getting it.
| oakesm9 wrote:
| Force Touch was discontinued in 2019 and replaced with a
| simple "long press" feature called Haptic Touch. iPhone 11
| and later and Apple Watch 6 and onwards don't have the
| pressure sensitive layer anymore.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| MacBook touchpads still have it though.
| NonNefarious wrote:
| And yet the (defectively) giant trackpads don't support
| the Apple Pencil, which would have been great.
| eternityforest wrote:
| What we really need is more standardized swappable modules.
|
| The odds of me replacing a BGA chip are low. By the time one
| fails, the device may be obsolete, the part may be expensive,
| my soldering skills probably could never be as good as a robot,
| etc.
|
| But if my computer has an issue, I can totally replace a bad
| drive in full confidence that it's probably worth it.
|
| The fact that there's no standards body for modular consumer
| goods really sucks.
| gregmac wrote:
| > On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix
| anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather
| just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and
| small appliance repair store are all but gone"
|
| Very few people have _ever_ been capable of fixing things,
| especially electronics. As electronics got smaller, more
| integrated and more complicated the bar got higher, reducing
| the pool of capable people even more.
|
| The other problem is that TVs have gotten cheaper at the same
| time labor prices have gone up. This drove all the TV repair
| shops out of business because the bench time alone to even do a
| quick diagnosis is already starting to approach the cost of a
| new TV. Spending hundreds of dollars to (maybe) repair your 5+
| year old TV just doesn't really make a ton of sense to most
| people. And that's assuming there's not a major fault:
| replacing a few capacitors is one thing; replacing the
| mainboard or LCD panel can cost _more_ than buying a new TV.
|
| This same pattern repeats for most consumer electronics, sadly.
| atoav wrote:
| The problem with Push Buttons is that they are (magnitudes!)
| cheaper than sometimes more suitable input devices like knobs,
| switches, etc.
|
| This is why they are used everywhere.
|
| Sometimes other electromechanical devices would have been the
| better choice tho.
| aaron695 wrote:
| d--b wrote:
| > The word "button" itself comes from the French bouton, meaning
| pimple or projection, and to push or thrust forward.
|
| What?
|
| https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&tl=en&text=bouton&op=tra...
| sp332 wrote:
| Scroll down a little bit on that page, and you can see the
| alternate translation as "pimple".
| LittleNemoInS wrote:
| While I agree that bouton can mean pimple or zit, it's the
| rest of the phrase that I don't understand. Bouton doesn't
| mean projection, and sure isn't a verb...
| vel0city wrote:
| Projection can be a noun in English, and often is.
|
| Related definition from Google: "A thing that extends
| outward from something else: 'the particle board covered
| all the sharp projections'"
|
| Synonyms: protuberance, protrusion, sticking-out bit,
| overhang, prominence, spur, outcrop, outgrowth, jut, bulge,
| jag...
|
| And obviously, projection can be a noun in its probably
| most common usage as in "an estimate or forecast of a
| future situation or trend based on study of present ones".
| In the phrase, "this is the projection of where the
| hurricane will go", "the projection" is a noun. The verb in
| this phrase is "is", a linking verb.
|
| "Wall Street bankers crafted a projection of the market."
| The verb here is "crafted". What did they craft: a
| projection. A noun.
|
| "I watch the projection on the screen." - The verb here is
| watch. What am I watching: the projection. A noun.
| mbrubeck wrote:
| Note that the English word was derived from Old French, not
| Modern French. And Old French noun _boton /bouton_ ("bud")
| is itself formed from the Old French verb _boter /bouter_,
| "to thrust." It's had a variety of meanings in French
| generally related to "thing that pushes out."
|
| Google Translate is not a very complete dictionary. You can
| find many more definitions in _Tresor de la langue
| francaise informatise :_
|
| https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/bouton
|
| It means "projection" in the sense of "bit that sticks
| out," like its use in goldsmithing or for the foot at the
| bottom of a harp.
| mbrubeck wrote:
| (minor correction: the pegs of a harp, not the foot.)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > It means "projection" in the sense of "bit that sticks
| out,"
|
| And it also means that in English.
| cercatrova wrote:
| From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b:
|
| Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of
| the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is
| called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He
| it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and
| astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all,
| letters.
|
| Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who
| lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks
| call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To
| him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to
| be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use
| there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed
| praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved.
|
| "The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise
| or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to
| repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O
| king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will
| improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom
| that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious
| Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to
| judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs
| to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been
| led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of
| that which they really possess.
|
| "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of
| those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their
| memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters
| which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their
| own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of
| memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the
| appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many
| things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many
| things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get
| along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
| SilasX wrote:
| Did you have a point with this? That couldn't be placed at the
| top?
|
| I don't know how hating on writing is related to people being
| disoriented by pushbuttons, and maybe if you stated what you
| thought the parallel was, you could have saved everyone some
| time and effort in reading hard-to-parse prose.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > _people worried that the electric push button would make
| human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would
| seal off the wonders of technology into a black box:
| "effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by
| consumers."_
| SilasX wrote:
| Any reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the
| first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills
| would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get
| the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing
| a critical block of 50?
| lostgame wrote:
| Y'know...it was clear that the original commenter was
| telling a story. If you didn't want to read it, you
| could've stopped. Nobody was making you. :) There are
| plenty of other comments, and I found this one
| fascinating; myself.
|
| Maybe it's just that some of us still have patience - and
| don't need things condensed into sound bites or
| summations for our convenience.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Yes
| plurinshael wrote:
| Lighten up, Francis.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I think the reference is cliche to the point that I
| usually hate to see it, but did understand the original
| post's intent in context (that is, the context provided
| by skimming the linked article to which the post is a
| reaction) without issue. It didn't even occur to me that
| it was anything other than plain.
| dwringer wrote:
| For this reason I actually thought it was a good comment.
| I've seen the reference come up almost without fail in
| discussions like this, but I've never seen it so
| elaborated.
| SilasX wrote:
| It has a block of text, whose purpose isn't clear at the
| beginning [1], and requires you to read the entire
| comment, in its thick prose, and the article in order to
| understand, and even then you have to guess which point
| its referring, but could be wrong because cercatrova
| didn't actually own one.
|
| Here is how I would have done the comment:
|
| ---
|
| >people worried that the electric push button would make
| human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would
| seal off the wonders of technology into a black box:
| "effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by
| consumers."
|
| This reminds me of Socrates's story about how people in
| the ancient world worried about the atrophy from being
| able to use writing:
|
| >>"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the
| minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not
| practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced
| by external characters which are no part of themselves,
| will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
| You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of
| reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of
| wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things
| without instruction and will therefore seem to know many
| things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard
| to get along with, since they are not wise, but only
| appear wise."
|
| Full context (Plato's Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b): https://ww
| w.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
|
| ---
|
| Advantages:
|
| A) Gets right to the point (so that if you already know
| the point, you can skip it.)
|
| B) Saves everyone the time and effort of reading thick
| prose, most of which includes references to historical
| figures
|
| C) Still quotes the relevant part.
|
| D) Still contains a quick link to the rest of the context
| that cercatrova considered oh-so-important to add.
|
| E) Contains a citation that can be googled in case the
| link goes dead.
|
| F) Doesn't take a big wall of text.
|
| But yes, it does have downsides: it G) takes actual
| communication effort, H) owns a specific point, and I)
| doesn't make cercatrova look cryptically wise. If those
| are your desiderata, then yeah, I agree he did it right,
| and everyone was right to vote it to the top of the
| discussion.
|
| Can you elaborate on what you think we gain from making
| everyone read 6x as much with no indication of what the
| actual point is?
|
| [1] I'm including people who weren't already aware of the
| quote, though you don't seem to think their vote matters
| here.
| fredrb wrote:
| That's usually how human conversations go. It's not
| always efficient. You should try it sometime.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| nah, forget the point. I'm off to rabbit hole some dialogues
| [deleted]
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that!
| Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but
| my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic
| being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for
| sophistry. Right?
| emptyfile wrote:
| Ouch.
| RobRivera wrote:
| I remember when Amun-Ra personally attacked me the first
| time. What with the calendar and the clock, oye nothings ever
| enough for the schmuck. He'd have my legs for their ability
| to atrophy my arm strength if he'd have his way, making me
| look like a Glukkon
| Guthur wrote:
| Amun-Ra has missed one important part of writing. It is not
| just for remembering one's own thoughts but also for
| transmitting them over great distances of time and space.
|
| If one is to read Wikipedia and repeat it verbatim without
| understanding then one is only a single component of a
| greater transportation medium. But if in contrast, if one was
| to internalise those words and draw lines of inference
| between ideas so elusively captured therein and a wider base
| of knowledge then maybe you are something more.
| MereInterest wrote:
| It depends on where you draw the boundary between "you" and
| "not-you". If that boundary extends only as far as your skin,
| then your cell phone makes you forgetful and dependent. If
| that boundary extends to tools that you use, books in front
| of you, texts that you can summon up at a moment, then your
| cell phone gives you a phenomenal recall for facts, though
| also an increased risk of mind control.
|
| For me, I draw the boundary based on latency, unconscious
| guidance, and predictability. I can send a thought to move my
| hand, and it moves as I think of it. The hand is within the
| boundary of "me". Holding a pencil, I do not need to
| consciously consider how to form each curve of a letter. The
| pencil is within the boundary of "me". I can predict what
| emacs will do when given keystrokes, so emacs is within the
| boundary of "me".
|
| On the other hand, there is a large delay between deciding to
| open a door and it responding to my pull, so it clearly is
| not "me". I need to consciously consider what search terms to
| query, and cannot do so at an unconscious level. Even when I
| repeat the exact same query as I did a year ago, I may not
| find the results I was searching for, and so there is no
| predictability. These lead me to feel that a search engine is
| not within the boundary of "me".
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Your system of distinguishing "me" from "not-me" via a
| quantitative metric is interesting to me because it's not a
| binary. Human reaction time for hands is a bit faster than
| feet. Are my hands more "me" than my feet? Well, that kind
| of intuitively checks out to me. But reflex reactions, like
| blinking, have less than half the latency of conscious
| reactions. Are my reflex reactions more me than my
| conscious decisions?
|
| Your door example raises further questions. When I pick up
| a remote control, the control moves just as easily as my
| hand. Does the remote become an equal part of me
| immediately?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| It seems you suggest to base the boundary on how
| easy/trivial it is to make something go away from your
| posession, akin to "big man in a suit of armour -- take
| that off, what are you?" line of reasoning. Well, the
| problem is that stripping tools from someone is not that
| much more difficult than stripping memory: some fair
| amount of violence would be necessary in both scenarios
| (blunt torso traumas vs. blunt head traumas).
| MereInterest wrote:
| > via a quantitative metric is interesting to me because
| it's not a binary.
|
| It also means that it depends on the situation. If I'm
| reading a book, then the movement of my hands feels
| instant as I reach to turn the page. But back when I
| played the piano, at times my hands could feel like they
| are falling behind, not listening to what I'm telling
| them to do, responding too slowly for what is being
| demanded of them. Whether or not my hands feel like "me"
| depends on what I'm trying to have them do.
|
| > Does the remote become an equal part of me immediately?
|
| I've never really thought of it in terms of time, in part
| because it is only something to quantify in retrospect. A
| pencil in my hand feels like a part of me, that responds
| as I move it. If I press it against a piece of paper, I
| interpret the sensory input as "felt" from the tip of the
| pencil, even though I know that I have no nerve endings
| there. But a pencil on the table isn't part of me.
| Whether there's a smooth transition between the two as I
| pick it up and gain control over it, or whether it's
| something that just "clicks", I'm not sure.
| medstrom wrote:
| A remote-controlled door would become part of you, the
| instant you hold the remote.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >See - people even rejected great design like buttons when they
| first came out! It just takes time to get used to new designs!
|
| Still don't like your hamburger menu. Sorry not sorry.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-28 23:00 UTC)