Idiot proofing just results in a better class of idiot.
A proper engineer would make the tag absorbent and use the principle of capillarity to transfer the water to the bag (and the other way round once tea flavoured) to cover this case.
Users can’t avoid being stupid, but a proper engineer should be able to cover all cases.
So you’re saying it should wick the water from the cup to the table like an oil lantern. That seems like a good way to have half of your cup on the table.😂
If you get it to travel up the string, gravity will definitely do the rest. It seems like such a passive aggressive way to design a product and I’m all for it.
This assumes an infinite timeline and budget.
And also the existence of a perfectly insulative, yet durable and long-lasting sheath for the bag and string. I realise it’s just an analogy, and in cyberspace that sort of thing is trivial, but with real matter it’s beyond a pipe dream.
Well, no proper engineer will agree to less than that
No, that complicates things way too much. Simplicity in design is beauty. A real engineer would recognize the tag on the string not only as a point a confusion, but also a superfluous feature. Simply remove it. The end user will have to use a spoon supplied by themselves to remove the teabag, but thats their problem. At least there is actually tea in the cup at that point.
Loose leaf tea is peak design.
I disagree. The teabag is a welcome replacement to having to have yet another unitasker in the kitchen.
Or the pg tips approach: ‘d’ya know what? No more tag or thread for ya now you’ve got to fish and pinch the baggy out of your scolding tea ya wanker’.
if ( parameters.teaMass <= TEA_BAG_WEIGHT ) { return "Error: incorrect input. Check if tea bag was inserted correctly into water container." }#define TEA_BAG_WEIGHT 0And then a user starts adding weights to the label until it passes.
unlikely
I don’t even work in IT but I make complex Excel tools for my Finance team.
I get an email about once every week or two from one of my coworkers asking what to do about an issue. Nearly every single issue would have been resolved if they just read even the first few instructions.
My favorite is a specific tool we use to review the financials. It relies on
Scripting.Dictionarywhich is only present in .NET 3.5.1 or prior. The very first instruction on the file says you need to download it. There’s even a very handy button right there which will take you to our software center to install it.Yet every single time someone gets a new laptop, they immediately assume that the file is broken.
If you hear about it that much, why not make the script check for .NET before crashing?
It’s not worth the effort and testing. People would only experience it once every 3-4 years, depending on when they get a new laptop. Must still shouldn’t have to worry since other software would install that version of .NET already.
Plus, people don’t bother to read error messages anyways. Another tool I created would create PDFs of the financials. The first section would be pulled from the EPM and the second would be a data dump of every transaction for each cost center. If the totals don’t match to the dollar, the script would throw an error.
90% of the time, it was because the EPM data was being refreshed as it’s scheduled to do so every half hour and takes 3-4 minutes. So I had the error message tell the person to just go take a quick break and come back. Still, people would email me saying they don’t understand why they’re getting the error and it would always be fixed if they just wait.
“I’ll add this to our knowledge base and other people can assist now!”
“Hey So-and-so, it looks like you our are guru at this issue, can you take a look at these 4 users who mentioned the software in their ticket?”
I just need to make progress on my projects, stop giving me desktop tickets pls :)
I can be an idiot every once and a blue moon. Thank you to anyone who put literally everything a manual just in case someone is braindead and isn’t afraid to rtfm.
To be honest it’s just after I’ve spent 10 hours on something fairly complicated and new to me. I suddenly can’t think for myself anymore. It literally becomes a chore to do the simplest shit sometimes.
Honestly, if you read the manual you are very much not dumb
I do appreciate it, I know I’m no idiot.
To be honest, I kinda wish some projects came with API manuals. I understand it’s not a priority in an open source project with limited resources.
It would be nice to use a python based ml tool without passing commands through it via shell. People do it, I just don’t have the time or experience to analyze a complex project like ML voice synthesis.
I’d* better write some documentation
Using better by itself is fine in an informal context, and “had better” is only required for formal contexts. And I don’t think a meme on the internet counts as a formal context.
And also, 🤓☝️
That’d be a contraction of ‘would’ in this case, wouldn’t it? As an ESL speaker I used to find these grammar ‘mistakes’ (for lack of a better word) made more difficult for me to parse the sentences. As with code ‘written once but read many times’ would apply here.
For a lot of English speakers, the “had” and “have” in contractions is completely omitted in certain contexts. It’s more prevalent in some dialects (I’m in the south US and it’s more common than not). Usually “had” is dropped more than “have”.
Also, English can drop the pronoun, article, and even copula for certain indicative statements. I think it’s specifically for observations, especially when the context is clear.
looking at someone’s bracelet “Cool bracelet.” [That’s a]
wakes up “sigh Gotta get up and go to work…” [I’ve]
“Ain’t no day for picking tomatoes like a Saturday.” [There]
“No war but class war!” [There’s]
“Forecast came in on the radio. Says there’s gonna be a hell of a lot of rain today.” [It said -> Says/Said]
“Can’t count the number of Brits I’ve killed. Guess I’m just allergic to beans on toast.” [I; I]
“House came tumblin’ down after the sinkhole opened up” [The]
“I’d” can be “I would”, mainly if used with a conditional or certain conjunctions/contrastive statements (if, but, however, unfortunately). Also when preceding “have” – e.g. “I’d have done that”. Because “I had have” doesn’t make sense, nor does “I had <present tense>” anything. “I’d” as in “I had” is followed by a past participle.
“I’d” is usually “I had” otherwise, forming the past perfect tense. But in “I’d better”, it’s a bit confusing because “had better” is used in a different sense – the “had” here comes from “have to” (as in “to be necessary to”) and can be treated as both a lexical verb and an auxiliary verb. “had better” is a bit of a leftover of more archaic constructions.
It would be a contraction of had: “I had better write…” Using would there doesn’t make sense.
More or less my point, languages are weird with lots of arbitrary idiomatic things—‘would rather’ but ‘had better’.
After posting the comment I’ve thought ‘wait, it makes more sense for it to be should’ so my guesses are a bit off today.
for lack of a better word
Usages of non-standard grammar.
This one poses me (ETL) no problem, but my brain always tilts when the natives mix subject/verb contractions (you’re, it’s, they’re) with the possessives (your, its, their).
Yeah maybe not even non-standard as much as non-formal in this case.
I wanted to mean ‘different from what you learn in English class in school as a kid’ so non-formal, non -standard, dialectal, slang, misspellings, same-sounding words…
That’s all covered by “non-standard” - because the standard of a language dictates what’s to be taken as informal/vulgar/archaic, dialectal, slang, different words or the same word, etc. And while there are exceptions most of the time when people learn a non-native language they learn the standard, in detriment of other varieties.
(Sorry for nerding out about this, I just love this sort of topic.)
Hmm … Better pigeon hole clients into only using the teabag.
“Why can’t I put the label in the water?!”
Our legacy system always puts the label in the water and our clients rely on the faint cardboard flavor.
I design optics and I’ve seen a return request because they “couldn’t see the target” and included photos to show what they meant. The customer installed it backwards and didn’t bother trying the other way.
If it can be mounted both ways it should work both ways. 🤷♂️
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no amount of explaining http errors and windows terminal commands can save my friends from trying to refresh browser on a 5xx error and asking how to exit cmd
Smart developer: let’s make the label an 8 inch square so it won’t fit in any mug.
User: Folds square in half to fit into mug.
End user: makes tea in a large pot, to fit the label.
Developer: THATS IT WE’RE A BROWSER BASED APP NOW!
End user: why can’t I run this on my AOL account?
Omg that’s gold!
Just get rid of the label altogether. I’m always suspicious when a teabag has a string on it.
You aren’t supposed to leave it in the water the whole time.
Not a problem if you’re using a teapot, or for a mug you can use a spoon or just your fingers
Huge waste of material on the label.
Since the labels are larger, the boxes for those tea bags will need to be larger too. That incurs in additional waste of material and storage space.
People working in markets selling those tea bags will complain. Now their boxes don’t fit in the aisle alongside boxes with tea bags of other brands.
Customers will find it clunky and convoluted. Some will understand why the dev did it, and get angry - because from their PoV it’ll sound like the dev is saying “I assume that you’re a muppet, unable to distinguish the label from the bag”.
And some will still do like others said: use a larger pot, fold the label, etc. Defeating the purpose of the change.
There are plenty situations where you can be smart. This is not one of them, stick to standards and document it properly. “This is the bag, it goes in. This is the label, it goes out.”
(Not that it changes much for me. I’m still ripping the tea bag apart and mixing the contents with my yerba mate. Unexpected use case!)
tea_bag.unwrap()
Speaking as a user (I’m not a programmer even if I’m often loafing around here):
Left is not “optimistic” but “assumptive” - blame the dev and the user.
Right is not “pessimistic” but “diligent” - blame the user.But the worst type doesn’t appear in this pic: they’d put a ball of chicken wire around the label so it’s physically impossible to put it in the hot water.
I’m not a programmer yet even if I’m often loafing around here
Fixed that for you…
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Then the users would complain that they can’t fit the tag in their water.
We’re talking about the worst dev, right? “No, chrust me. I have a vizhun about how the tea bag should be.”
Incidentally it’s the same answer that he’d give to people annoyed who neither need nor want the chicken wire ball.
I write graphics software that almost seems intuitive, until you realize I gave it a split personality.
Even I forget about the split personality side of it.
