I was in IT for 30 years when I transitioned two years ago to gardening. It's the best decision I have made for my mental, physical and spiritual health. I had been accused of being a programmer for many years and even convinced myself a few times. Funnily enough, it's been the last year that I have been able to actually build things with Claude that I would never have tackled a few years ago. For so many years I had all sorts of loose ends with clients... all the hard stuff that was difficult to deliver and I was constantly stressed out and depressed. But as of today I can honestly say, with all the personal projects I have going for my own business and a few web dev jobs for friends, I have absolutely no loose ends hanging over my head. What a time to be alive.
DC doesn't have a congestion charge that restricts all access to the city but it has dynamic toll road pricing that can hit rates that are far more expensive than NYC's congestion charge. It would be interesting to see an analysis comparing these 2 programs in terms of their effect on transit and air quality as well as the economics and public perception of each.
Herzog talks about actually hauling the boat over the hill in Fitzcaraldo because audiences can tell real from fake. Nowadays even movies that don’t use special effects rely much more on editing and post processing. Movies shot on film feel more connected to what actually happened on set.
At least in the US, the design choice of barn door or no door might also be driven by ADA compliance. You have to provide a lot of space to meet all the accessibility requirements and a hinged door can make the minimum square footage much higher than you’d think.
I just left a company that’s enabling the preloads of this product and the ‘opt-in campaign’ will be full screen, aggressive, and difficult or impossible to stop depending on the device model.
Major retailers for sure but DC stores are typically more compact than their suburban counterparts. IMO it’s great. I far prefer the small WF in Logan Circle to a giant one in NOVA - it’s much faster to get in and out and still has everything I need.
You could say the same thing about colonial Williamsburg. The list seems focused on removing restrictions and red tape. It doesn’t dictate form. You could still build a typical single family McMansion in an area that adopted this list… if that’s what you’re into.
Even if they couldn’t identify a universally understood icon, an existing user can recognize a familiar symbol faster than text, and symbols at least provide some clue that isn’t dependent on English comprehension.
The point is that it wasn't a universally understood icon at the time. It was culturally, not even linguistically, dependent. The footnote even suggests that it was a relatively new symbol in computer interfaces, having been introduced some 8 months earlier in NextSTEP. Adding to the difficulty: some people couldn't identify the simplistic icon as a magnifying glass.
English compression was not an issue here. The buttons would have been translated.
Anyways, it was an interesting read for me. It took me several years to figure out why the icon disappeared after I upgraded from a 386 to a 486. (Clearly an OS upgrade was involved.) Now I know why Microsoft made that change.
> The point is that it wasn't a universally understood icon at the time
Just like the hamburger, or the 3 dots menu, or whatever a program manager thinks it shall be the symbol for a menu.
The point is: everything is learned (see discussions about intuitive interfaces in alt.sysadmin.recovery 20 years ago). If you change every couple of months the meaning of a symbol, nobody will know what that symbol means anymore.
To be fair to Microsoft, this was in their help system. They probably wanted to be as clear as possible, to avoid confusing people in an application that was supposed to help people. It is not as though they were removing icons from all applications. It was also a time when companies were exploring how to present GUIs and many people were much more timid about experimenting with computers. Where people today become frustrated with constantly changing interfaces, people then were more likely to fear breaking things.
You are also right about learning things, but also look at it from a different perspective: would a person have even realized that a hamburger menu did something 35 years ago, particularly with today's flat UIs?
> Even if they couldn’t identify a universally understood icon, an existing user can recognize a familiar symbol faster than text, and symbols at least provide some clue that isn’t dependent on English comprehension.
Of course any such decision will be a balancing act, but I can certainly imagine that an unexpected or confusing symbol would be genuinely confusing or frightening to a new user (think how early this was in mass-market computing!), and that an experienced user (1) can re-learn, (2) anyway probably doesn't have to re-learn muscle memory still gets them to the right place, and (3) is more likely to be invested in the system than a new user, so that it might be considered less essential to invest in keeping them than in bringing on new users.
Many apartment buildings have policies about where trash can be left, including at move out, otherwise there’s always trash around building entrances for the maintenance staff to clean up. Also, the Durham area is pretty suburban, so this apartment complex might not have much pedestrian traffic or even a sidewalk. It’s wasteful, but this is likely the situation.
