Thanks for a very enjoyable read. I’m a user-experience designer for web software and I’m absolutely baffled by modern product design. Fuck capacitive buttons and unnecessary screens.
Good design is problem solving. That means first it has to work, then it can be elegant and beautiful. Function before form.
I have a new stove that I already resent to heck after less than 3 months. I yell at it impotently multiple times a week. It’s a glass induction cook top with capacitive buttons on the top. To turn it on you have to press the power button, then the icon for the burner you want, then tap or mash a line with + and - icons multiple times to set the power. All that to replace turning a single knob on my old gas burner. The icons for the different heating elements have digital clock type displays to the left of them that light up with – if the thing is on, but TO the right of the last icon is another identical display so new users can’t tell which display is for which icon (turns out the last one is for the timer but it lights up and looks exactly the same as the others when the timer isn’t active and is spaced exactly the same distance from the last icon as the other displays). If you rest anything metal near the buttons it beeps incessantly. If it gets the slightest moisture on it it switches itself off and then beeps incessantly. I’m a patent person but whoever designed that thing deserves to spent the rest of their life in a void with only their own creations and a horseshoe crab for company.
They have a cached copy of the content from before defederation. It’s a bit weird, but they can still comment and make posts in the zombie community, but the posts go nowhere. Only users from their own instance can see them, every federated instance sees the ‘true’ Beehaw content.