One of the best points here so far is empathy. If nerds even half understood this idea, that what they create, must be a relationship with the user; it must be to get people to feel and understand the benefit of what the creator is offering, that is the single, most important part of all of this! You have to show, don’t tell. Oh sure, you’ll have a few curious people poke at your idea, but without directly offering a Good Experience and to emotionally and cognitively realize the benefit of your creation you are going nowhere fast, generally. Steve Jobs seemed to intimately understand this concept, and it helped put him light years ahead of the competition. First impressions are supremely important, and ongoing impressions which lack pain probably even more important.
Your software or hardware is a relationship with whoever experiences it. You need to curate that relationship and represent it somehow using a fixed thing, software or hardware, and in a way it almost needs to anticipate and read people’s minds . Represent the product factually, so it can do what a person expects, and represent it emotionally so people have a good feeling when they perceive it. Obviously, the technical side must be good to fulfill both of these too. But that is only the first step.
Technology should serve mankind, not the other way around, and people who are too locked into the technical side seem 1000% blind to this idea. They feel excited at their own accomplishment, which is a totally valid by the way, but failed to take it the next step to represent it to other people. Sometimes it isn’t an idea that can be represented well with things as they are, so it’s a non-starter and just a personal project.
At this point in my life, I have a very old house that needs fixing. I have a partner that needs attention. I have my self who needs attention. I have 1.5 jobs that need attention. I have a network of social friends who are worth attention…
Well, it used to be fun a long time ago to go down a rabbit hole for endless hours or days trying to fix things. AI has helped lessen that time too!
My benchmark for a good OS, or a painful one, depending on how you want to look at it, is how often I need to spend an hour or two diagnosing and fixing something. Is that simplistic? Yes. Am I a power user? Only once in a blue moon because I don’t really have to be yet.
Do I learn a little something? Yes. Am I curious to learn? Yes, and no… I have the urgency certainly to fix it because I am frustrated and the system is not doing what I wanted to do…
But you don’t define hand or tooth washing well enough. A pithy response means little if we haven’t broken down the comparison into appropriate component parts for meaningful comparison.
The other question is, is it even worth it? These things have worked for you well enough up to this point, all three. That’s fair and valid.
The question might be is it worth the cognitive friction to change those things?
I change the way that I brush my teeth, and now my overall health is better perhaps. Perhaps my mouth biome changed over decades, while I was unaware. A better way involves changing a habit, getting some new technology, and even this simple change may have knocked on effect in the rest of my life if I have a tight schedule and rigid habits, which benefit me. Is the trade-off worth it? Can we really know?
I’m not a surgeon so I don’t have an extensive method of washing my hands. However, some people don’t even wash their bodies more than once in a while. Science has discovered that this is probably healthier over the long-term, but other people simply take a shower and scrub scrub, scrub every single day. They say it benefits them, but the facts point to otherwise. They have a hard time changing that habit or believing the facts.
Same applies to an OS. Sure, looking backwards it has been good, but will it continue to be? Is it worth the cognitive friction to make those changes though? Honestly? For you, probably not at this point. But who is to say? Could what you have learned be leveraged in a different OS and bring you even more of what you feel benefits you? I suppose only you can know this, and that’s totally OK.
Past returns are no guarantee of future performance, in short.
Offloading ongoing cognitive consideration when a situation seems to have proved itself consistent is the main idea at hand, perhaps? The notion of loyalty?
Pets are only interested in who feeds them and make them feel good, eventually offloading cognition to other tasks the same way we do; nature merely an agglomeration of entities seeking growth and propagation. We can count on these things, we can think about them, we can engage with them or let them slip past our minds, which a person might call “trust?” a lack of mental friction after that work has been done to our satisfaction.
Recognizing what may benefit us, and the short and long term dimensions of it, as well as acknowledging that we cannot know all those dimensions or control them or the future, seems the best way to go, if i may.
The idea of loyalty is naïve and dangerous, if I may use those terms without defining them also.
To be clear, it’s not cold calculation, far from it, simply acknowledging how systems tend to play out while leaving room for the unexpected. Once we recognize a pattern or system locking in that pattern in order to use our limited cognitive energies in other ways.
‘Course where i grew up we had it ‘ard. Aye…
We’d get woken up 2 o’clock in the mornin’ after sleeping in a road crater filled with sulphuric acid, race down the street naked in the dead o’ winter to distract the hungry velociraptors while one of us used a dull butter knife to chop off a limb we’d throw into the road hole so the steamroller could come by, flatten it to patch the hole, then use the stump to tamp the edges into place.
And drivers these days keep complaining how tough it is to get a pothole fixed…
this was exactly my first thought as well. And it was long enough ago that it sure seems like it could be a test of that system, whatever it was.
and we somehow weren’t able to figure out what it was or how it worked...
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