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I once deleted system32…That’s when I began calling the shots.
QA today seems to just be releasing software in whatever state and maybe fixing it later.
“Users will let us know if something is really broken, then we’ll see if it’s worth fixing”
QA in large companies seems to be first to get outsourced or at best, contacted into temp positions. First to get mixed, too. It’s the “skill-less labor” of the tech world.
In other words, blame the idiots in charge for not really investing in QA lol
It’s the “skill-less labor” of the tech world.
Which is funny because you need a technical AND a creative person to handle QA.
Isn’t it, haha. And yet I know a place that outsources it to slavic countries to save cash. I guess they’re tech savvy, but as contract workers it’s hard to say their dedicated to their craft.
Oh I am. Blaming the end users still buying buggy shit too.
Our QA manager is one of the founders of our company, so the work his team does is amazing. Doesn’t take away I get a heart attack any time I get a message from him…
Looks like someone asked ChatGPT, not their friend lol
“Human beings then do…”
People speak weird all the time, and LLMs are trained on people. Some aren’t native speakers, some just like to omit verbs, nouns, or tenses when it seems obvious and they want to be expedient, some just do it for fun or laziness (see, l33t speak and or early texting, typos).
LLMs are trained on human input, so of course it on occasion uses our bad habits. Thinking like your comment suggests is what gets people who really wrote their own stuff in trouble, because people think they can identify stuff like this more than they actually can.
You do agree that it’s a weird way of saying it though, which is all I was making fun of. It’s similar verbiage an AI would use. I get it, but lighten up lol
That seems like a perfectly normal phrase…
Perfectly cromulent, even.
YES I TOO BELIEVE IT TO BE A COMPLETELY NORMAL PHRASE USED BY US AVERAGE HUMANS ALL THE TIME
Especially in context, where it’s contrasting QA testers and ‘normal’ people.
It would probably take longer to prompt ChatGPT to write this than it would to just write it. It’s two short paragraphs.
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.
Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.
There was actually a german ad about this quite some time ago: a grandma did this, then called her grandson “i think i just deleted the internet”.
How the ad continued? No clue.
What it was advertising? No clue.
Yes! I remember this happening a lot, and I could never really truly understand the thought process behind it! But the thing is, this is still happening today, just in different context, and it’s still equally as baffling!
It just means that they called their browser “the internet” right? Or am I missing something here?
I have a vague memory of the browser icon having the name “Internet” back in the day. Or maybe it was the dial-up icon. Might be that?
The original “Internet Explorer” icon was a globe and magnifying glass, with the text “The Internet,” underneath
It was an actual icon:
(found the image here https://mastodon.social/@benjedwards/11031604817437112)
I don’t remember what it did though. I think it wasn’t the browser, and I have a vague memory it wasn’t for dial up either, but my memory’s shit so I personally wouldn’t trust me on that
Edit: had to look this up, it was IE. I think I didn’t remember it because I never really used IE since I started off with NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape
It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.
As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.
Game makers should hire me to test their maps, if there’s a spot where I can get 100% stuck no matter what, you bet your shiny metal ass I’ll find it.
Me and dumb compact design blueprints on Dyson Sphere Program. I’ve had to tear parts of builds down an embarrassing amount of times to get unstuck because of the way hitboxes on refactionators and a few other buildings work in close proximity.
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.”
A bear has time and motivation to keep trying over and over again to get into the garbage. People are generally much less determined to figure it out.
I’ve seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn’t be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn’t require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
There was a solar eclipse when I was in grade six. One of my classmates was riding his bike home, and was stupidly looking at the eclipse, and got hit by a car. The irony.
Omg that’s so messed up but so incredible haha, was he okay after?
I’m curious if he was okay before.
It was pretty bad. He missed a lot of school. I think he ended up repeating grade six. I never saw him much after that, but I did hear that he got married to another person I went to school with eventually, so presumably his life wasn’t ruined or anything.
So you’re somewhere between 18 and 58 than
Ladies and gentlemen, we gottem.
What do you mean? Sun is blocked = no sun rays = not blinded when staring directly. The logic is sound! Just like in programming.
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If I had someone run through hot coals I would scold them, sure. Much like for being angry about others not believing in zombie carpenters or letting quacks give their kids overpriced sugar pills. But that’s jot the context right now, is it?
This reminds me of that poster in my highschool chem lab:
Same with shooting without eye/ear pro. I dunno about other folks but I use my eyes and ears a lot, and I’d hate to miss out on music and color the rest of my life because I thought I would have a transcendent experience blowing them out for a minute. 😬
Being able to see properly is also something they’ll never be able to do again, so, I hope that one second was “spiritual” enough for them lol
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Being able to see properly
immediately go blind
You’re immediately taking the argument to the extreme. You won’t immediately go blind, but it will damage your retina in ways you sometimes don’t notice because the brain compensates for it. It happened to my uncle when he was a welder, he had a second blind spot where he couldn’t see sharply, but it didn’t really affect his quality of life.
Eclipses happen every year like clockwork (it basically is clockwork, but on a huge scale). Eclipse seasons are spring and fall, around the equinoxes. You could very easily fly to see a total eclipse every few years if you want to, because we know when they are going to happen and where will have totality - it’s very routine stuff. There’s literally nothing special at all about the one that just happened, except that a lot of people haven’t seen one before because it hasn’t happened -at that location- in a time.
So no, absolutely not something you’ll never get a chance to see again, tho you won’t be able if you go blind like a fucking moron.
Total eclipses aren’t rare, but them being in an accessible location and not just over some random place in the ocean is. I looked this up the other day, and any one particular location on Earth will see a total eclipse once every 350 years or so.
Except they aren’t just visible from a single location, so almost every time they are over an accessible place on land. Not for the whole thing, sure, but visible all the same.
This might be helpful for reference. It’s maps of where the next 50 years worth of total eclipses fall. The first one that isn’t really visible by people is 2039 in Antarctica. There’s a few like that. Other than that, there’s at least an island you could go to for it, and see one every few years. Eclipses being totally unavailable to view is actually far more rare than seeing one :)
There’s a pretty big difference between temporary pain and permanent damage though.
Unless you royally fuck up walking on coals you get some pain, fuck up a little and you just get some blisters.
Glancing at the eclipse while it’s in totality is not going to give you permanent damage. Now if you stare at it until totality is over and the sun is on full blast again…
playing russian roulette is not going to give you permanent damage every 5/6 times
Or if you’re not in the path of totality…. The risk just isn’t worth it.
Let’s just not look up at the bright thing in the sky that can cause permanent damage at any given time.
…and ignore one of the coolest things there is to see on the sky
Congratulations! You’ve leveled up in the game of life.
I genuinely had someone stop and ask me why you can’t see the moon during an eclipse because “it’s got light in it right”.
They’re soon to replace our HR manager.
There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.
They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.
I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.
It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.
A solar or lunar eclipse?
The solar eclipse from Monday.
Answer: Light travels in straight lines (well, for this purpose) and the moon is roughly an opaque sphere. Maybe you could see it with earthshine, but I get the impression the corona is still much brighter.
I’ve heard dumber.
Holy shit this. And not even “educated” people. Where I work is about half degree holding engineers… many of these engineers were seen outside staring at the partial eclipse Monday.
“Pfff I have a master’s degree I know what I’m doing”
Sounds like your typical engineer. I passed fluid dynamics, I deserve to look at the big ball of plasma.
My eyes haven’t hurt this bad since studying for differential equations theory… Have I told you I’m an engineer?
Can you put your computer in a bear proof garbage can?
You could, but who is worried a bear will use their computer?
The QA engineer obviously.
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.
And I think that hits on the truth, which makes this less “iamverysmart”. It’s not that the tourists are dumb, it’s that they’re new and not willing to pay much attention to things like trash can design. 1% of a normal person’s attention presents a lot like a really dumb person.
Is it 1%? Maybe when they first try to open it they’re distracted But when doesn’t open and now they’re concentrating on the problem and still fail, then we have to kinda own up to the fact that a lot of people aren’t smarter than a bear.
I can’t believe this comment chain is this long and no one has pointed out that drunk and stoned humans are terrible at figuring stuff like this out.
You’re not planning for the dumbest human trying in earnest. You’re planning for humans who are tired, distracted and/or chemically altered. A 80 IQ person can figure out a weird trash can eventually if they are trying.
These comments (not just yours) feel misanthropic. I haven’t been to a campsite in ages so I don’t know what sort of trash can puzzlebox we’re talking about, but I work somewhere with alcohol so I can guess what the true issue is.
I’d be pretty distracted by the bear waiting behind me for his go.
I think if they can score 100 on an IQ test, they can figure out any reasonable trash can eventually, assuming the moving parts are visible. Many people would rather just litter.
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that, but otherwise, sure
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that
At the risk of pedantry, if 100 is the average (the mean), we’re saying “most people are at 100”. If it were the median, then we’re implying “100 is the middle score of those sampled”. A subtle, but important difference.
Yup. The ranger did say “stupidest”, I guess, but I feel like at 70 or something you still know to pull on stuff in a few set ways until it moves.
And bears around 130 probably know that too.
Yah, that’s possible too. But I can’t say I’d figure anyone that litters is much smarter than a bear either.
Stupidity is a moral flaw after all.
Ecology (or just waste management) is even more complicated and boring than a garbage can.
It’s apathy all the way down.
i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.
here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:
Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.
you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)
even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”
I know. It’s a shorthand quantitative measure everyone’s familiar with, though, so it’s useful for communicating. Thanks for adding a disclaimer for me.
When I started working in the late 90s early 00s, every company had their own It-department. These days it’s just some consultant or subscription to another company offering their consultants to do specific tasks.
This thread reminds me of why having an IT department makes good sense financially - today.
You can add up all the salaries, equipment and training costs and it’ll still be cheaper than wasting time and money in meetings with consultants trying to either explain the task or moan about pricing.
Shit doesn’t work, because they aren’t paid to make shit work.
I can make code that works for me and I can make code that works for you. The price is different, but you also need to know what you actually want it to do, and I don’t know how much money you are willing to sacrifice for us both fumbling around in that equation.
“Look how much
money we can saveproductivity we can eliminate by outsourcing IT!”One could, indeed, argue that consulting firms make their bread and butter by not having things work but fixed temporarily.
I hadn’t heard the Mac story before. I wonder if it’s legit, as I don’t think the Mac, or the Lisa before it, ever had the equivalent of a My Computer icon. Disks appear directly on the desktop; dragging a disk to the trash can ejects it if its removable media, and the only type of disk the original Mac had was a 400KB single-sided 3.5” floppy drive.
well id expect the computer to crash if i threw it in the trash can
no you’re getting it confused with the crash can
I can imagine thinking it’s be funny in the early stages where things wouldn’t really be too logical they way they are now. Might even assume it wouldn’t actually do anything and I could just pull it back out.
hahahaha i was thinking of this very gif, stop reading my mind
would be even better if the pc actually teleported to his trash bin
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.
That one is a ‘whoever’ btw.
Okay, but can you explain why?
Whoever is the subject of the verb “did”. Whoever did something.
Whomever is an object, so whoever did something to whomever.
In other words, “whoever” does things; “whomever” has things done to them.
I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.
“okay… What happens if I do this?”
Moments like that are why I belive in timetravel, in the real timeline it took two years to find that bug and it was resolved quietly but of course someone is going to come back and troll them by doing it on day 1.
why would it take 2 years to find a bug? release something new to the public and it will always take seconds
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“I put the computer in the trash” is pretty easy to replicate.
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
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 have to agree. The Macintosh 128k didn’t even have an internal HDD. Everything was run on 3.5" floppies. Heck they may have invented the 3.5" floppy, idk. As you said, dragging the system dick icon to the trash on a 128k was literally the easiest way to eject the disk.
My father still owns one, that may actually work. He also got 2 extra external floppy drives for the thing. He also has an Apple ]|[
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
Not necessarily – the story might have described a beta version of the OS, in which these interactions worked differently.
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
I’m not a fighter pilot, but when I think “ejection”, can’t imagine anything but a high-stress situation where the pilot doesn’t have time to figure out which is the ejection lever. Imagine a real emergency where the pilot grabs the wrong lever, gently slides back with the seat, and then fucking dies on impact.
“Gently slides back” 😂
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
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:
🔥 😬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.
Why the fuck are your users flipping a page back and forth 10 times. I understand the Bluetooth bit, they wanted it to restart probably from a device not showing up. Also what was the issue
I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?
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.
Don’t worry, I had a bit too much to drink last night so it’s covered
Before we had mindblown emoji, we had this.
💥 😳Before that we had ‽:-)
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
I did actually find a very similliar bug in the experimental rendering engine of element (the matrix client). So yes, this is something that exists somewhere else too.
I’m so glad you can automate QA jobs
Automated tests are cool, but they definitely aren’t a panacea in place of humans
As a QA, ha! Good luck.
Why
don’t need an extra guy
what about the guy you need to maintain your test scripts.
the average developers doesn’t have enough of a test head to do a full end to end test suite
Extra guys have brains that automation scripts don’t though
You sound like an asshole to work with.
