The darkest UX pattern I have ever hit is trying to cancel Google Workspace; whereby they disable the scrollbar on the page so you cannot actually get to the cancel button.
Don't assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence:
* new automated UX experiments starts
* the UI bot made a change that made the page unscrollable
* the experiment has a much higher rate of retention then the control (because people can't scroll)
* the experiment is deemed a success by results analysis (no one looks at the page to see WHY)
* the experiment is blessed as the new pipeline
Such an obvious business improvement made by Gemini !
Oh yes, I have had that! I tried disabling workspace for my brother-in-law through screen sharing and I thought it was a screen sharing issue. I successfully did it on my own computer but I’m glad to learn this was probably on purpose. I’m not crazy!
I think there needs to be a new kind of 'razor': 'Never attribute mistakes to stupidity that benefit the ones making them'
The dressing up of purely malicious or greedy actions as merely resonable ones, that were executed poorly has become incredibly prevalent in the modern world.
one time had cancel Google Colabs and really I couldn't figure out have to yell at them in support ticket to remove my subscription (eventually they did)
maybe productive isn’t the right word - more like satisfying and constructive. Right now I might play blitz chess or end up checking the news or X. But when I’m in the middle of a good book or some long form content, I’ll use that time to read and it’s much more fulfilling.
And I think breathing meditation is an excellent idea! I didn’t only mean phone-specific activities at all! Thank you
- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.
- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)
- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.
I like that coffee is clearly a drug, a mind-alterer. But it's mostly harmless so it's been boosted as a sort of society-wide mascot. Humans really love drugs.
It’s a shame because people forget how good IBM research was back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people in those r&d labs, or if they all left.
There are good people in IBM. But they don't have the resources behind them anymore. Look at the market cap of ms, Amazon. Google, meta et al, compared to IBM.
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