I get what the author is getting at, but I really think this is a poor comparison. Selecting a gear on a bike gives immediate feedback. Selecting a power level and cook time on a microwave...does not. Not needing to remember a formula for figuring out a cook time and power level based on the quantity of meat I'm defrosting is a really useful feature.
Plus, I can always select whatever levels I want manually on the microwave, and when using a pre-programmed function I can see what the microwave is doing.
I think an example that makes it clear that the author needs to more carefully work out their point is the Honeywell AllergenPlus line of airfilters. For a while, they had three settings, "Allergen", "General Clean" and "Germ" which are merely 3 fan speed settings. This method was so disjointed form reality, the eventually started shipping them with stickers covering it up with "Low", "Medium", and "High" (I forget what the actual order was...).
It's a real life nightmare bicycle, but of course there is no risk of losing intuitive understanding because of instant feedback. The user will quickly figure out which setting is low, which is medium, and which is high based on simply pressing the buttons. A similar thing will happen with the bicycle. People don't actually look at the numbers and select a number, they just shift gears until it "feels" right.
This really needs a better product example, perhaps just AI over search.
You must be one of the few people who use the "program" buttons on a microwave then. I personally don't know anyone and all the people I talk to really just want a two wheel microwave. Even if I tried the programs they almost never worked accurately anyway. Admittedly newer inverter microwaves are the exception, the defrost mode actually does work (and is the one program I use on these microwaves).
Not sure why you were downvoted, my experience is the same. What people (including myself) want is power and time (and usually there’s a defrost mode on the power dial).
I have an actual oven where I can select "programs".
As far as I can tell, they control three parameters:
* Where the heat comes from (top, bottom, or both)
* Whether or not ventilation is activated
* The temperature
There is also a dial for temperature, but not for the other two parameters. I am not sure whether every combination is covered by the "program" dial. I am not sure whether or not my understanding is even correct.
I would say it's an 7.5 out of 10 on the nightmare bicycle scale.
Settings like "Bake", "Roast", etc are quite frustrating. They do have meanings, but pretty much no user knows what they mean. A selector that lets the user choose which heating elements they want to use might be useful, but this seems like it might be a case where if the user doesn't know the difference between "Bake" and "Roast" they may also not be in a position to decide if they want heat from the bottom, top, or both anyway.
I teach media technology and electronics at an Art University. The people I teach vary wildly in how interested they are in technology.
Yet one truth that emerged over the years is: The more people understand the underlying principles the easier it is for them to make the technology do what they want.
Good equipment empowers users to understand the underlying principles by using simple abstractions, bad technology tries to obscure underlying principle by using bad abstractions.
If the abstraction made mistakenly tries to simplify a thing more than is reasonably possible, it not only takes agency away from people new to that technology — it can also make it hard or impossible to for people who know the technology on an expert level.
Plus, the programs on the microwave can make use of weight and humidity sensors to determine when to turn off, rather than requiring a predetermined duration.
I question the degree to which even numbered gears matter on bicycles. I have two bicycles, none of them have numbered gears.
One has modern integrated brake-shifters with two separate parts that can be clicked inwards to shift up and down. There's no feedback on which gear it's on, but I know which part to click to make pedaling harder, and which part to click to make it lighter. At the stops, the shifter just won't move. The drawback is that if I want to know how close I am to the end of the range, I have to look down at the chainrings.
The other bike has un-indexed downtube shifters. These are tiny, frame-mounted levers that are moved smoothly (no clicks) forwards or back and they directly control the derailers which move the chain across gears. This is my favourite interaction pattern for bike gears, because you can put your hand down and feel the position of both levers and immediately know which gear combination you're in. Incredibly practical in heavier traffic to never need to take eyes off the road.
The old style friction shifters should also be much easier to maintain and repair. Modern indexed shifters are more likely to have issues where due to cable and housing stretch the indexing gets unaligned and you have to adjust it periodically. This might not be an issue any more with electronic shifting components. On the other hand, those are expensive and require battery power, so you need to remember to recharge. Fiction shifters also allow you to trim by feel and sound to always get the perfect chain position. The pathlesspedaled youtube channel has many videos on the advantages of friction shifters for causal riders and touring cyclists.
After >16000km mileage, my Shimano Saint shifter gave up on me 50km into a 200km audax. It is easier to shift gears with an indexed shifter. However, audax riding requires higher reliability. My 35-349 wheels (I'm riding a Brompton clone) makes it hard for me to install modern electronic shifting, except maybe Ltwoo's AE.
I've since switched to a Microshift 12S mountain bike friction shifter. Quite happy so far. It has click mode and pure friction. With my Shimano Saint derailleur (10s), due to the clutch, it took me some getting used to due to the hand strength needed. A spare friction shifter is also lighter to carry. An unintentional plus point is the ability to move to an 11s (jockey wheels on the Saint derailleurs seems to be able to work with 11s chain) the next time my cassette and chain needs replacing. 11s will give me less dead zone in between each shift.
Vis-a-vis an index shifter, I like it that I now have a way (apart from cadence, gradient and speed data from my bike comp) to know approximately which gear I'm at by just feeling the lever position. With the time I've had with this setup, I'm almost always able to shift whatever gear by muscle memory.
In reality, for my city's (Saigon) traffic, I find myself shifting gears more and hence my hands does get a bit sore. The bumps and uneven drain holes can also cause the friction shifter to shift unintentionally. I could tighten it but it'd at the expense of my hand comfort.
However, in an ultra distance ride (>=200km), there's less gear shifts and hence less of an issue. I'm also able to use both hands to take turns shifting gears which is more important on a super long ride.
Electronic shifters don't have any issue with cable stretch and typically don't need any adjustment once they're setup on a bike. Also, electronic shifters automatically adjust the trim on the front derailleur so that the chain line is optimal.
However, there are situations where you would want numbered gears. My road bike has Di2 electronic shifters and I set it to synchro shifting mode. This means that it'll do a double shift - front chainring and rear cassette - when shifting down a gear at the selected cross-over point (can be changed according to preferences and gear setups). This means that I like to know when I'm in the lowest gear before a double-shift as I'd rather not be out of the saddle and putting down power during that shift. What I do is I use an MT800 gear display which shows the Di2 charge level and current gear (it also provides bluetooth connectivity).
Incidentally, I'm surprised that you like unindexed shifters - they're a lot more clumsy than correctly adjusted indexed shifters.
Interesting that the tech these days is going in the opposite direction. These trends to hide technical details (e.g. files on iPhone) can get really frustrating when it doesn't work. Almost a mockery.
Apple's hate for the concept of files has me up in arms ever since I realized this is why my parents are so confused anytime anything on their iPhone doesn't work.
Same query, but for my dryer. Particularly the "Jeans" program. It is explicitly stated on every pair of jeans which I own that I should never attempt this.
And yet, the program exists. Did they find a workaround? Or are they selling an empty promise?
The problem with clothing labels is that they don't know the type of equipment you have. Lots of stuff that says on the label to never put in the dryer works fine in my heat-pump dryer, because it doesn't get nearly as hot as a conventional dryer.
This reminds me of the Japanese principle of "fuben eki". Sometimes it makes sense to make a task more difficult in order to increase mastery or improve a person's understanding of how the process works.
On this note, I used to make android apps on the oldest slowest phone I could find. Was always complimented how snappy my apps felt since most users had a modern phone
The author is advocating for simpler single-purpose products I guess.
The microwave example just doesn't make sense when what you have isn't a single "just push the power button" machine, but a combined microwave/oven for instance. You'll want clear mode management, temperature management when defrosting meat, pre-heating and convection when cooking a whole chicken etc.
Anecdotally, a lot of people don't really understand/care about bicycle gears, and stick it to the heaviest and call it a day (on city bikes it's not that heavy, they can dance when it's tougher, and just get off and push the bike when it's really hard). We've seen the same cycle for cars, where people only caring about going from A to B will enjoy automatic transmissions better.
All in all, I agree single purpose products are great when you can afford one and it does the job. Paradoxically it also helps expand the use cases as the user comes to better understand how it works and how it can be "abused".
No, the author is advocating for the simple two dial (power and time) microwaves, which give you all the control at the cost of having to understand how it works.
The author is saying that in the effort to "simplify" stuff, microwaves now add a potato button and a chicken button, but then you want to cook an eggplant and don't know how.
I think we're in agreement. To me the two dial microwave is the single purpose tool.
As a user I just happen to have very little kitchen space, so I ended up with a microwave/oven combination by necessity, and as it does exponentially a lot more than the two dial microwave, it also requires more complex modes and buttons and dials and I'm fine with it, as that's exactly why I paid for it. The "chicken" mode isn't some dumb time/power setting, as mine does the pre-heating, accepts additional watering, and adjusts the temperature curve so it's crisp at the end of the cycle.
Advocating for simple tools is fine IMHO, as long as we understand not everything needs to be overly simple.
PS: perhaps the part I'm missing is that while researching before buying my microwave/oven, I never saw a "dumb" machine that had useless buttons that could be exchanged for just a time/power setting. Each special modes usually have specific tweaks, and going through the manual it was made abundantly clear.
Man, most folks will never go through oven manual. Usually new oven means new kitchen, and more focus is ie on induction hob, fridge, dishwasher etvc.
I am one of those that just wants simple clear stuff like a lot of people here mention. Whats more important is the consistency between various products - if I am used to a recipe that requires 15 mins at this setting and this temperature, let it be consistent across all products. Which is never the case, more sophisticated cooks struggle in new environment.
But yes the specific use case of mixed products you mention this won't be enough. I'd say thats fringe part of the market and folks knowing they are getting something special take time to understand the tool.
Yes, it comes down to what people care about, and I'm sympathetic to not wanting to care much for people who don't enjoy cooking.
On consistency...I think it's just not possible. Even for super simple things like blasting something at 500W for 30 sec, we quickly realize that some microwaves ramp up faster than others, and at the same power they don't all diffuse the power evenly (flat floor microwaves are pretty different from the rotating plate ones for instance).
Doing trial and error for any new model feels like a fact of life, and I assume pros are more severe regarding properly knowing how their tool actually behaves, same way we'd benchmark a new computer to get an idea of its actual performance profile with our exact installation.
I’m an avid home cook and one of the most temperamental tools in any kitchen is the oven, with the ranges, microwaves and broilers you can quickly get a sense of their character but with the oven and specially for baking you need a long term relationship.
>Anecdotally, a lot of people don't really understand/care about bicycle gears, and stick it to the heaviest and call it a day (on city bikes it's not that heavy, they can dance when it's tougher, and just get off and push the bike when it's really hard). We've seen the same cycle for cars, where people only caring about going from A to B will enjoy automatic transmissions better.
...Where do you live? This is completely foreign to most of Europe, where I havent seen anyone stuck to one gear (except hipsters on fixies, making a fashion statement), and almost everyone drive manual.
How can it be possible that "lot of people" where you live aren't able to do those very basic things? To the point of being unable to bike correctly (ever tried to start a bike in the highest gear)?
> I havent seen anyone stuck to one gear (except hipsters on fixies, making a fashion statement)
Fixed wheel cycles aren't just for hipsters - there's a fair few cyclists who enthuse about them for teaching cyclists to have a smoother pedalling style which can help with higher cadences. I've only ever used fixed wheels on unicycles (which to be fair could be described as making a fashion statement) as they don't lend themselves to having gears.
Tried to figure out what temperature my Ninja slow cooker cooks at. Not possible, only Hi and Lo. Internets say different models use different temperature.
Mine at least has a temperature setting. But it also has modes, Reheat, Air fry, Roast, etc. What do they mean? I have absolutely no idea. I would guess it's the fan speed but it sounds exactly the same in each mode...
I recently bought myself a mini "smart" rice cooker from Aliexpress. Works really well, but the buttons are just labelled in chinese as it's only meant to be sold in that market. Even the app needed to have its location changed so that it would pair with the device, but at least it let me keep "English". The app has a whole list of different rice varieties so that it presumably customises the process for different grains, but it's great as I choose either the quick or the slow cooking method and let it do it's thing.
design design design
how I love good design
how I love designing and building things
how I love dissasembling things, and fixing and modifying things, re purposing parts
how I love wrecking yards, with the worlds guts casualy spread out and on display, and making friends with the denisins thereof, some intricate
shiny thing bieng rended for its intrinsic worth
and comments such as "ya...we get a lot of THOSE..", the whole thing bieng quite litteraly a modern archiological dig for treasure, and at $10000/ton for #2 copper, the digging is quite enthusiastic........but certain things, get reverantly.,...removed from the maw, set aside and traded back into the world, to be rebuilt
and put into service.....
The main issue I see is that the old axiom of supply, following demand has been perverted by advertising, and it is now possible to supply demand for ANYTHING, and largely face no repercussions, as the market is so large, and moving so fast, that concensus amongst end users dissatisfaction cant coaless to the point of financial penalties on the designers and pervayors
of junk. And as junk, can be made junkier, and therefor cheaper, good stuff is pushed into unprofitability......except in industrial and comercial versions of products, where there is no room for shenanigans involving durability OR useabality.
I know this isn't really about bike gears, but... "people will get it" - yes and no. Since the shift-of-least-resistance is the one to smaller sprockets, a lot of clueless cyclists with 3x gearing are riding around in small-small gear combinations which are the worst - least efficient and most wear-prone.
Maybe that's why the bike industry went to 1x drivetrains. That, or being able to sell you $250 cassettes where a $20 one used to do.
The popcorn button on a microwave actually does something unique, or at least it does on microwaves with a real popcorn button. I think microwave designs are only bad insofar as they have been made so cheap that the special functions have been made vastly less useful.
> Meanwhile off-by-one errors are ludicrously common…
Off by one errors in general have nothing to do with being 1 or 0-based indexed.
In French off-by-one error is called “the post and fence problem” because there's always one more post than piece of fence (unless your fence makes a loop).
It arises because it's easy to confuse the number of intervals between elements and the number of elements (which is also: do I need to include the bounds or not). 1-based indexing isn't going to help at all in the general case (it will help for the most basic error which is getting the last element of an array with `a[a.length]`, but that's it)
Off-by-one errors are more likely with 1-based indexing because they don't have the nice properties of 0-based/right open intervals that mean you don't have to add or subtract 1 all over the place.
For example what is the index of pixel X,Y in an image buffer? X + Ystride right? Nope! It's X + (Y-1)stride.
What's the range of the Ith block of N elements? [in, in + n)? Nope! It's [(i-1)n+1, in].
I have to deal with that nonsense in Matlab all the time. Nightmare.
I imagine zero based indexing is because resources were scarce and number of bits low in the bad old days. Why waste that zero index. From there is was backwards compatibility.
If machine code uses zero then assembly inherits that, them C and everything else. Even JS months!
No, zero based indexing just is based on how arrays actually work. It has nothing to do with resources being scarce. You have an address for the beginning of the array and an offset. The first element has no offset so you use zero. Therefore you naturally end up with zero indexing.
It does make some sense: if I have some apples, and I ask a child to count them, they'll address each one starting with the number 1, not the number 0.
Yes, indeed. But when indexing to an element in an array you aren't measuring from a zero (well, in memory you are, but not conceptually). You're conceptually pointing at an apple.
I think maybe it's just hard to unlearn the offset mentality. Of course you can convert a direct index mentality to an offset mentality, but I don't think anyone is pointing at the first item in a row of items and thinking "that's a zero offset from the start of the number of items". They're thinking, "That's item number 1".
Yeah that's because the distinction between indexing and counting is pretty much irrelevant to every day use, and to maths where you can just hand-wave syntax. So people are very used to doing it "wrong".
That's what most of the issue with this debate is. Indexing from 1 is wrong, but people are soooo used to it they just can't get over what they think is the "normal" way.
I couldn't agree more. However the reason we have a Popcorn option on the microwave is because it makes the difference at the point of sale, not at the point of use. Most people when presented with two devices that essentially do the same thing, but one has more options will chose the one with more options because they have been lead to believe it's better.
Design is so often polluted by marketing. The direction of progress from concept to design to marketing to sale should be one way only.
It used to be a real feature, but so many microwave makers made fake ones that popcorn sellers have been printing “do not use the popcorn button ” on their instructions for a while.
bike gears are numbered now? Is 1 high, or 8? I press the little button at the front to pop one gear up, and push that big thumb lever to push the chain back up the cassette, it's intuitive. If I need to check if the bike is in the right gear (not concerned exactly which one) I pedal a little. What product manager added _numbers_ to bike gears?
Bike gears have had numbers for many decades. The ancient (even then) Raleigh 20 I had as a kid had gear numbers (3), though searching now I see some Raleigh 20s had names instead. Every non-road-bike I've had since has had clearly visible numbers on the gear shifters.
You can ignore the numbering if you've got no interest in which gear you're currently using. Usually the lowest number will be the "lowest" gear - the one that is easiest to pedal up-hill which will be the largest cog on the rear cassette.
I don't understand the complaint. It's useful especially for people not riding every day or dozens of km on weekends. Sure, press or rotate to go up or down, but then you end up cross-chained on the largest chainring and largest cog.
I have had bikes that did not have numbers, but at least had indicators giving you an approximation where you're at. I sometimes miss that on my road bike when I'm not sure if I should change the gear on the front or not. When you ride enough you get a feel for it, but again not everyone does that.
i guess i ride enough - not dozens of kms or daily, but over many years - to intuit the gear, which is helped by the gear mechanism jumping to discrete positions. The first bikes i rode with gears were Marins back in the 90s which had no indicators, there was an old 3-speed Sturmey Archer (had to Google this one) where the gears are within the hub, I don't recall a gear indicator for that, but perhaps there was
> Along the same lines: one of the worst misconceptions in product design is that a microwave needs to have a button for every thing you could possibly cook: “popcorn”...
Plus, I can always select whatever levels I want manually on the microwave, and when using a pre-programmed function I can see what the microwave is doing.
I think an example that makes it clear that the author needs to more carefully work out their point is the Honeywell AllergenPlus line of airfilters. For a while, they had three settings, "Allergen", "General Clean" and "Germ" which are merely 3 fan speed settings. This method was so disjointed form reality, the eventually started shipping them with stickers covering it up with "Low", "Medium", and "High" (I forget what the actual order was...).
It's a real life nightmare bicycle, but of course there is no risk of losing intuitive understanding because of instant feedback. The user will quickly figure out which setting is low, which is medium, and which is high based on simply pressing the buttons. A similar thing will happen with the bicycle. People don't actually look at the numbers and select a number, they just shift gears until it "feels" right.
This really needs a better product example, perhaps just AI over search.