Mastodawn

Jeremy Keith 6d ago

annaecook

At this point, we should be designing/engineering with the lowest amount of tech or code possible to meet a goal.

Instead, it feels like we are forcing the highest tech solutions into problems that do not require them.

It's frankly embarrassing.

Sometimes the right solution is the low tech one.

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Andrew Jennings 6d ago

@annaecook @kboyd I had the thought that we are using ICBMs to hammer in a nail, it’s nuts

@annaecook Saw documentation a few days ago how to use some coding agent CLI:

`pi "list all *.ts files in src/"`

I didn't bother to suggest a fix, because this is not the first time I've seen stuff like that on internal wiki pages and the response is always "it's just an example, obviously you'd use it for more complex things" - and then they might follow up with yet another example that a shell command could solve. It's hopeless.

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Fiona Bianchi 6d ago

@tkissing
@annaecook I once set a simple coding test for some grads that I had already solved in a single line of shell. As I admitted to them I was effectively cheating as I obviously tweaked the scenario so it would work in one line ... But that is also a serious point: many problems either have really simple solutions or can be transformed a little to be equally straightforward.

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cyklista 6d ago

@annaecook ++ https://lawsofsimplicity.com/ by John Maeda - The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)

The Laws of Simplicity / John Maeda

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Fiona Bianchi 6d ago

@annaecook
Completely agree!

I worked on a project for DWP which was some massive sprawling event driven monstrosity which only had a requirement for relatively low TPS for incoming requests from citizens (big form to fill in) and then some slow and laborious manual steps. I think the internal bit could have been a monolith with a simple DB and run the lot on a laptop. But no, they had lots or teams and tech for a simple problem

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Ian Tindale 6d ago

@annaecook I’ve noticed this in the design world over the past fifty years or so, the availability of a thing that makes a thing easier to thing, whereas if previously you wanted to thing the thing, but you didn’t have a thing that thinged the thing like that, you’d have to thing the thing yourself and it would take a lot of time and effort and be expensive to perform and you’d do it for special occasions or if someone asked for it and said they’d pay for it.

For example in 1970s design, drop shadows were achievable but quite hard to do properly. Obviously just a solid block of K as a line-art shape could suffice as a shadow of a thing, but we desired convincing soft-edged replicas of the shape we wanted to dropshad, and this was achievable using a process camera and many stages of interneg and defocusing and enlarging etc (in much the same way we used to perform unsharp masking to sharpen up a piece of imagery, by making a pos mask and then a neg mask, each slightly enlarged than the prev by being spaced using blank film sheets to defocus it, to create an accentuated highlight then shadow ‘edge’, which we perceive as sharpness - that’s USM back in the day using actual film masks). So you can see that it’s tedious and expensive to make a convincing realistic dropshad, but it could be done.

As time went by and computer-assisted imagery came into the design world, it became possible to simulate a dropshad in the computer, but it wasn’t very good, everybody knew it was artificial. Still, we over-used it everywhere because now it was not only cheap, it was effectively free. Everything in the 80s and 90s had drop shadows - terrible ones

Now in the future because we’re in the 21st century, a perfect dropshad is basically a click away (well, a motion up to the menu bar and a click and then a motion down and then a motion sideways and then a click and so on). Dropshads aren’t everywhere anymore, they’re only where needed, again, free, but they’re actually in more places than the non-design public thinks.

I use the example of a dropshad because everyone knows what one is, and even if a person doesn’t work in a design-related field, and has perhaps lets say a ‘normal’ job, they still know about USM from their daily use of photoshop or affinity photo or whatever, and perhaps have never seen the connection between the two, they just use them because it’s there and have no knowledge of how hard it used to be.

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Wiley 6d ago

@annaecook I've always liked the "Appropriate Tech" framework. It focuses on building tech that's sustainable, people-based, and locally autonomous. I'm still new to Mastodon and haven't found where the appropriate tech folks are hanging out on here yet, so if any #solarpunk or #maker folks know where to look, I'd love some hints 😂