I mostly agree with the points made, however I would not call this "invisible" as it was chosen to be called in the title.
Good tools should be obvious, with the main ways to use it being very low friction and low cognitive overhead. That is not the same as them being invisible. It is just a different type of visibility (one that doesn't require users to get a driving license before they can use the tool properly).
When I design such tools, I tend to think about the problem from the users perspective. What is the information they really need to know? In which environment does the rest of the context reside? Which error cases exist, who will have to deal with them and what will they need to know?
I'd did not claim that things do not have downsides. I said tech embargos are the wrong way to deal with that specific downside and even proposed another way to deal with it (targeted, stochastic checks). If the people making those checks are good, the paperwork you described won't be necessary. E.g. in the EU the police may put your car onto a test stand and measure the exhaust during operation. Who cares what you did to the thing if the result is that it is within the emission thresholds.
In the case of guns this documentation makes sense, because of what guns are used for typically.
To play the devils advocate: It is efficient — for them.
It is a bit of a myth that everybody in Germany talks English. Sure in an academic or business environment, or in certain social circles that can be taken for granted, but there are people who can only talk German or whose English is so bad they will avoid talking it.
If you want people not to have out of spec tractors that is a regulation and oversight issue, not an issue of locking down tech.
Right to repair argues the tech should not be locked down, it doesn't argue you should be free to break the law.
You are also free to remove the handrails on a set of stairs using a simple wrench, but if a building inspector shows up or someone falls because of it there will likely be consequences. The argument here is that the simple wrench isn't the problem nor is your potential ability to remove handrails. In fact removing them may be necessary in some situations. The argument here is, you should be able to decide when it is necessary, while also facing consequences if tou do so in a way that is potentially harmful to others and the environment.
If you worry about the environmental impact of people turning a screw in a tractor you need heftier fines and more random unannounced controls. This is btw. how gun law works in countries where they make sense. Own a gun? No you don't unless you store it correctly and have documentation of ammunition spent etc.
Yes? But if you want to solve that issue locking down the tech is not the solution. The solution is to have an inspector show up unannounced and give you a hefty fine if that screw is set incorrect.
So if that is really an issue, apply the correct fix and don't push the blame on environmentalists.
"I did not plan to relocate, but the opening at $your company made me reconsider. I then delved into $location history and culture, and found it really fascinating. Since I am [young|experienced in $oldcareer], I decided it would be worth trying out something new."
> I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders.
I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open. I know there are some US entities who have public carnary style notices ("We have not been visited by a government agency, ..."), with the idea being that while they can compell you to not say a thing, they can't force you to say a thing. How well that would work in practise, I dunno, but it shows that some in the US anticipate the issue and at least signal to care about it.
But in the end I agree with you, the safer route for people in the EU is to not deal with this risk to begin with.
I get the difference between business and academic note taking, but I still think it is benefitial to do it yourself in a business meeting, because as you write down the notes you may realize a point hasn't been made as clearly as you wish it was made, which allows you to intervene.
Actually I think one of the main values of note taking isn't that you get notes, it is that engaging your brain to summarize points makes you understand and remember the points better, even if you throw your notes away right after.
It is like writing: One of the main purposes of writing (for me and many others) is that it forces you to structure your thoughts. You could give that task to AI, get the resulting text, but your loss is the lack of clarity you could have gained from doing it yourself.
Well in this case it is a documented trail of defering needed maintenance with the argument of needing to safe money.
I did not argue that this is a outcome that can only happen to conservative governments. In fact I am convinced it is a fundamental problem of how politics work: you elect politicians to government for a limited period, so they often try to push off costs for which the ultimate prize will be paid to the next period, in which they may not be in government anymore.
But of course conservative governments tend to be more often part of that dynamic since austerity politics and conservatism often (although, not always) go hand in hand. Often the austerity has a smidgen of corruption as well, where government contracts that then need to be made (urgently! since maintenance was deferred!) often go to the politicians private friends. Free market for thee and not for me.
Another classic is to starve some working government/public institutions budget, only to then point at the mess and explain why this needs to privatized (coincidentally you know exactly the right guy to step in, what a surprise).
I am not saying that it is only conservative polticians that do that, but it tends to be a bit harder to do while e.g. demanding democratic socialist policy and strong public institutions.
The issues you see now in Germany are the direct consequence of the Merkel era conservative government and its austerity policy. They really wanted to get the deficit down at all cost. And all cost included any sort of needed maintenance on public infrastructure.
I always bring the receipts, so if I say it is them, then the chances are it is them. Pointing fingers before investigation the cause is a waste of precious time.
Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so.
And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats and surveillance-lovers, but I think having authocratic laws should have consequences for the businesses in any country.
XML is ok, the problem IMO is that the way some people use(d) it is utterly unhinged.
So a return value that could have easily been two lined of text is now a nested demon of XML. The complexity isn't what that application does, the complexity is in how it returns the values.
Another good one is to use XML when something else would have made things simpler, e.g. for a config file where you could easily have used a .ini or a .toml file.
Or you have an application that tries to so generic that the definition for a simple use case is a whopping 5MB XML file. Cool. When I feel writing a config for your application is harder than programming the whole thing yourself you have really made it. /s
Button ≠ Button. People like to believe they should all be the same, but they really should not be.
On physical keyboards we already have three different kinds: normal buttons, modifier keys (shift, etc) and toggle keys (caps lock).
High stakes rare actions can require special button designs. E.g. on a black magic cinema camera the button that formats the memory card needs to be held for three second while it visually counts down. This gives a small delay during which the user can decide: "Fuck this is the wrong memory card!" and cancle.
The downside is that some imaginary power user that uses the camera only to format a stack of SSDs will get burdened. You have to decide which is more common and make a decision.
Bad programming. People who have experience with embedded programming knows that reading out a button usually means denouncing. At the speed a microcontroller can read out a button it will change it's state multiple times per press because of contact bounce. Meaning when a user presses a button the program sees off, on, off, off, on, on, off, on, on, on, on, on, on, etc.
Now if you just naively read out the current state of the button and do something with it elsewhere in the program looping may be off or on randomly.
It is not hard to imagine if there is some other logic (or e.g. a rate limit) on the 30 seconds and on the beep that these would see different slices in time of the button. Congrats you built a button-debounce based RNG.
Physical buttons can be surprisingly complex if you don't rely on someone else's driver. The correct solution is to debounce the button, that can be done either in hardware (too expensive, so rarely done) or in softeare, by e.g. averaging the last 50 reads and wait till the majority is either off or on.
This should be common knowledge for embedded programmers, but every noe and then you will see someone who has never heard of it.
It is not that complicated. You need to introduce CO₂ threshold levels that make sense from a medical standpoint. Then you need to enforce them in the same way other basic environmental regulations or worker rights are enforced in regions of the world where these work.
The main question is: If your workplace, city, whatever forces you to work or live in an harmful/unhealthy environment, do you have any realistic course of action to improve the situation? In the US you would call this (gasp) regulation, I would call it a basic human right.
If we talk about stairways, nobody complains about building regulations that mandate handrails. CO₂ levels are not totally different.
Good tools should be obvious, with the main ways to use it being very low friction and low cognitive overhead. That is not the same as them being invisible. It is just a different type of visibility (one that doesn't require users to get a driving license before they can use the tool properly).
When I design such tools, I tend to think about the problem from the users perspective. What is the information they really need to know? In which environment does the rest of the context reside? Which error cases exist, who will have to deal with them and what will they need to know?