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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.”
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.
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.
💥 😳Before that we had ‽:-)
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.
As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
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.
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”. 🤔
First image I could find of the desktop and there is computer icons right there.
If dragging one of those to wastebasket at the bottom right crashed the computer, it would fit the description of the event.
The point of the trash was that nothing happened until you emptied it. And the OS was loaded into memory so you could eject the OS disk so it wasn’t actively using those files. I don’t think even dragging System to the trash and emptying it would have done anything except prevent you from booting with that System disk.
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.
I’m so used to Windows getting dunked on here that I forget MacOS must be more hated, being even more locked down than Windows.
The original Macintosh had the OS on a floppy disk. So there wasn’t a “Computer” on the desktop. And if you dragged the Macintosh OS disk to the trash it would just eject it so you could put in another disk. (Unless you were lucky enough to have an external floppy drive.)
If you ever think “an actual human couldn’t possibly click that fast”, you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.
deleted by creator
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.
I once deleted system32…That’s when I began calling the shots.
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.
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.
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 ]|[
If they crashed the computer irrecoverably did they have to throw away the computer after?
Looks like someone asked ChatGPT, not their friend lol
“Human beings then do…”
That seems like a perfectly normal phrase…
Perfectly cromulent, even.
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
