I’m not entirely sure I agree with you on this. It’s hard for me to say because I really like the imperfections in things I build, for the most part. Like I’ll full spartle a wall (not entirely sure if this is the correct English description) and I’ll intentionally leave the finish less than “perfect” because I think it adds a little soul to it that will make me happy down the years.
Then you have things like flooring, installing windows, and anything on outside, however, where I’ll absolutely make sure it’s perfectly everything. Basically so my floors have none of the issues you describe as an example. Part of the success behind this is to hide the imperfections. You’re not going to ever build a perfect floor if you build it all the way to the wall. So what you do is that you leave a gap between the wall and the floor and you cover that gap up with wooden “footlists” (again not sure if that’s the correct English description). This gives you a “perfect” floor which aligns with everything in the room. The more crooked a room is, the more you have to cheat, but if you put in the effort it’s almost always achievable.I would like the small imperfections in these things as well. Ok, maybe not on the outside unless I was very sure it wouldn’t have an impact on the integrity of weather protection, but I wouldn’t mind crooked floors. The reason I strive to make them perfect is that other people won’t, which will make a property much harder to sell. Because unlike imperfect ”walling”, a floor correction/replacement will absolutely impact the value of a property.
But then there is the part where you will absolutely notice it when it’s not installed correctly. Which is what I guess you’re getting at, and I agree with you. The thing with buildings, however, is that you have to cheat. Buildings are imperfect and they can even more around a bit as weather conditions change. So with buildings you have to cheat. Which is different than with aligning things on the web, or at least it should be. So this is the part I disagree with a little.
As a side note people shouldn’t accept crooked floors and so on, especially not when you’ve hired professionals. They should know how to cheat.
> You’re not going to ever build a perfect floor if you build it all the way to the wall. So what you do is that you leave a gap between the wall and the floor and you cover that gap up with wooden “footlists” (again not sure if that’s the correct English description). This gives you a “perfect” floor which aligns with everything in the room.
“[Baseboard's] purpose is to cover the joint between the wall surface and the floor. It covers the uneven edge of flooring next to the wall; protects the wall from kicks, abrasion, and furniture; and can serve as a decorative molding.”
And commonly, in the US, you'll see baseboards (3-4" tall) which were sloppily cut and then that was, in turn, covered up with a quarter-round moulding. If the floor and wall are installed properly, the quarter round shouldn't be necessary.
It’s also to prevent moisture issues. If you plaster right down to the floor then the plaster slowly soaks up moisture over time. Instead an unsightly gap is left to prevent this bridging. Skirting / baseboard covers the gap.
So much of what happens in house construction is about water management and without understanding it, it’s common for people to create issues. Regularly see patios that cover airbricks, causing suspended timber floors to rot.
"Spartle" = Spachteln? You may trowel your wall (with a trowel full of plaster). At least that's what I do here in Canada.
"Footlist" = Fussleiste? Leiste is not a list. Leiste translated can literally just be "trim" and "foot trim" is quite close - leave out foot and you have what it's actually called. Floor trim, baseboard, baseboard trim (to distinguish from 'baseboard' just meaning 'baseboard heating' if context isn't clear etc).
I think your parent, like you are saying in the end as well, was also less worried about seeing your own imperfections (tho that's of course a thing too) and more in line with the original comment about "not being able to unsee it" in general.
And that is definitely true. You see all the badly hidden imperfections from professionals. And you will also see all the well hidden ones but you still know they're there now while before you did it yourself, you never even noticed. It can also make your relationship with professionals worse because you will see the hiding but have trouble distinguishing the correct line between "well hidden but visible to the professional eye" and "bad job" :)
> The thing with buildings, however, is that you have to cheat. Buildings are imperfect and they can even more around a bit as weather conditions change.
design systems are imperfect, and can become even more so with changing specs/frameworks/dependencies/browser updates/...
I’ve noticed these things all my life. Even as a young child I would point such things out and others would have trouble seeing it. Once I was diagnosed with autism, this tendency of mine made a lot more sense.
I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily. It’s like there’s a part of my brain just looking for anomalies and I can’t turn it off.
I have this with grammar. When I read modern websites, articles, papers, emails from HR, etc. with their sloppy English and comma-splices everywhere, it annoys me way too much and it's a real challenge to push on through and keep reading.
It feels like walking through a maze, with an uneven floor and bad lighting, full of dead-ends, compared to walking down a pleasant, well-lit corridor.
I used to write some of the worst English out there. Then I became part in a streamers community, where proper English grammar was encouraged/enforced. (Well, more like having to at least try to write proper English, there was quite a bit of leeway) Ever since then, I get incredibly annoyed at people just writing "liek this and not giving an crap about proper grammar or punctuation this makes text harder to read then necessary"
Same. Also I get annoyed when pointing out (in good manner) misspellings, bad grammar, or technical inaccuracies gets called out as pedantry or policing, especially here on HN. Sure, it's not the end of the world - but the reason we have a nice place here is, in big part, because enough people care to set certain quality expectations. When that erodes, so do nice things.
This is spot-on. HR is bad, but at least writing is not their main job, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.
My main concern is the writing I see coming out of the Public Relations and Communications departments. Writing is not exactly tangential to those fields.
Maybe it’s related to how we (government, industry) used to routinely make great instructional videos and other learning materials, but are now largely terrible at it.
I suspect it’s all connected to the rise of a professional management class, rather than promotion through the ranks, and management by people who’ve done the work. Nobody who’s in a position to demand better or to make sure the right people are in the right roles, actually knows WTF they’re doing outside of a spreadsheet and PowerPoint.
It feels like there is a whole lot more cronyism and nepotism than I remember 20 years ago.
I am observing a lot of people in high paying jobs who don't have a clue how to do even the basics of their job (like being able to type proficiently in a job that requires written documentation).
This one is a bit more reasonable (to me at least). It seems to be an internet/texting convention that messages ending with a period are more formal/serious or potentially angry/irritated, whereas messages without a period are lighter/more fun. As an example:
“Have you taken the dog out?”
“Yes”
Vs
“Have you taken the dog out?”
“Yes.”
The second comes across as the responder being potentially irritated at the asker. I believe that this comes down to the amount of effort required to type the reply; adding a period is making the explicit choice to do so, whereas not doing so is the default. This isn’t the case for sentences in the middle of a multi-sentence answer, since a separator is needed anyways. But I find myself not adding a period even at the end of multi-sentence messages, and I automatically read any message ending with a period with a different tone than one which does not.
Maybe I’m just nuts though, that’s always an option. But with text being such a relatively limited medium for conveying emotion in short messages, I think this is a reasonable solution.
I have this with spelling. Even a fractional glance at a poster/billboard/sign, without focusing my eyes on it, and certainly without reading a single word ... any misspelled word triggers a flag in my brain sort of "pinging" me with the precise location of the misspelled word.
The grocer's apostrophe (which I will argue should be called the grocers'(1) apostrophe, since there are many offending grocers) is the bane of my existence
(1) My phone absolutely tried to correct that back to "grocer's"
If you want to make your existence slightly more irritating: Learn German and move to Germany. There the possessive s ending is written without an apostrophe - but there is an equivalent which then falsely writes the possessive with an apostrophe - the so-called Deppenapostroph (idiot's apostrophe).
What annoys me most about German vs English is that German has lots of English loanwords ending in "y" (e.g. "Party"), but it's officially not allowed to use the plural form that would be correct in English, e.g. "Parties" - you have to write "Partys". As a bonus, you could try using "Party's", but that would be incorrect again...
Well, it is "a baker's dozen", right? Not "all the bakers' dozens". Since the phrase incorporates a reference to a single individual, as a representative concept for all bakers.
So "the grocer's apostrophe" makes sense as a phrase referring to a typical individual grocer with a typical atypical apostrophe, standing in as a representative for all grocers and all their darned grocers' apostrophes.
Humans brains are pattern recognition machines. It’s how you are able to read efficiently, why you enjoy music, and why you are able to say “this alley seems shifty, best not enter it.”
Most people are able to naturally filter out most of it. You’re just a little less equipped to. People with ADHD have similar problems.
Psychedelics remove most of those filters, causing someone’s brain to get the raw data including all the anomalies in the processing, which makes patterns (visual and mental) both suddenly much more apparent and do weird things :)
My overconfident understanding is that "regular people" notice a "regular" amount, but let themselves forget about or ignore a "regular" amount of what they found. People with Autism are less able to let go of what they find, and often struggle with over-stimulation from it. People with ADHD start at an under-stimulated baseline, are instinctively looking for too much, and often overcompensate; which leads to a similar over-stimulation.
I'm autistic and I see patterns and issues with misaligned patterns which cause psychic pain. Also phase issues with sound because it feels physically painful.
I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily
All the time, and I learned to not care a lot, even like some; for instance there's a lot of (mostly abstract, surrealism) art which does all the things wrong on that front but which is extremely enjoyable to me. Same weird way with music: exact 4/4 stuff is mostly boring, often even annoying, but give me funky off-beat stuff, chaos and noise and it brings a smile to my face.
There's only one thing which I can't shake off and that's lines which are meant to be, but aren't eaxcatly, parallel or right angles. Can keep staring at those. Especially when they are like very close to being correct but look like they're off (for like 1mm over 1m). Not the first time I actually get up and take a ruler to verify.
But then there is the intentional curvature in ancient stone columns, where ther the pillar is neither a perfect cylinder nor even a perfect cone, and it's on purpose because actual perfect forms don't look right to humans.
Like one part of the article shows the Apple logo in a circle, and the correct centering is not to have all points on the logo equidistant from the circle, but to allow the leaf to go a lot closer than the rest.
Is that autism thing? My therapist suspect I'm autistic, and I have always noticed things like this - or trying to align everything in my mind when I look at things, or trying to split the into two halves of equal volume.
>Is that autism thing? My therapist suspect I'm autistic, and I have always noticed things like this - or trying to align everything in my mind when I look at things, or trying to split the into two halves of equal volume.
Very much in line with being neurodivergent.
Sounds more like autism than ADHD, but it's hard for me to tell, 'cause I'm both[1].
Also autistic, I have this very much with displays. I can’t understand how people can stand LCD televisions. They usually have non-uniform brightness which is super distracting.
I was about to write: As someone late-diagnosed[1] with ADHD[2] and discovering they're autistic, ... -
>Once I was diagnosed with autism, this tendency of mine made a lot more sense.
...yup. This is what I was a about to write.
>I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily. It’s like there’s a part of my brain just looking for anomalies and I can’t turn it off.
The answers to that are no and yes, that's the blessing and the curse of autism.
Seeking and recognizing patterns is one of the defining traits.
I haven't built/done any of these and yet notice misalignments and it drives me nuts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars (equivalent in INR) spent to on buildings and they don't bother to align bricks; it's as if there's no value in aesthetics, visual beauty, symmetry etc.,
Which I find very interesting. I’ve seen that there are constructors in India that are very much capable of recognizing and correctly implementing the alignments, but you pay so so much more than the average constructors- and then you are often in a conundrum where you have to choose between paying market rate and getting equivalent precision, or to pay 5x market rate to get a very good standard.
I deal with tradespeople on and off and I have a feeling the work quality has drastically reduced from say 30 years so. There are a bunch of contributing factors which I'm a bit tired to list down here. The net result has been that the person who does the final actual work (brick laying, wood cutting, painting etc.,) is almost always poorly skilled, are constantly cutting corners. Even if I'm willing to pay more than the market rate there just aren't such workers anymore. And it shows in the things that's getting built.
This is what causes me absolute task initiation paralysis - the fear of not being perfect - even with my new attempt at adherence to "don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough"
Does anyone else who comes into the house notice anything? Very unlikely unless they are craftspeople.
Here's how you do it, make everything so poorly in terms of fit and finish that it becomes hard to find things that are perfect (or even good). Embrace the aesthetic.
I thought the tiles on my bathroom floor were perfectly flat and even on the ground, until I switched off the light and used that damn laser on the Dyson vacuum cleaner.
What greeted me was an uneven landscape of tiles that the naked eye just didn't see.
Same, except with panel floor in our bedroom. Moved the bedframe and some cabinets around, suddenly the bed is really wobbly. Couldn't see why until I took my laser level and started sweeping the floor with the "red X" at a low angle, like it was sci-fi scanner.
That laser level actually revealed plenty of places around the apartment I dare not look at anymore, lest I get annoyed at the contractors... and the original builders of the block.
For me it was 3D printing. My vision started to occasionally annotate and code-suggest on real world objects. I kind of wish I didn't realize just how much we're enabling M3 screws.
My house is built on top of bentonite clay (I think that's the term). My doors would stick if there weren't gaps. I have a system where I measure the level across the house and adjust my teleposts every year too.
Doors. That one is a double whammy, because even if I force myself to unsee that a wing was installed unevenly, eventually gravity itself will remind me, as it will start closing on its own, or stopping at a different angle than other doors in the house, etc.
I can attest to that. Painting doors and then watching the result is akin to watching a good painting/desktop background for too long... as time passes you start to notice the irregularities. Like the girl's hand is overly big, or her legs are exaggerated.
I just patched a whole bunch of drywall cutouts after having some electrical work done. Now I when I look at a new construction house, I can tell which builders use go cheap on drywall, esp. when there's too much texture.
Tiles. There is a correct way to install them. I don’t know how you decide what’s correct, but sometimes it’s centred, sometimes a full one on the left, or the right.
Then you have the same scenario but top to bottom.
When we were building our house I built a tool[0] for exactly this problem so I could visualize how tiles would look w/ different arranging. Worked really well for both floor tile and tile on the shower walls
I was looking for something like this when redoing my bathroom tiles but surprisingly couldn't find anything. I ended up using draw.io which worked but not that easily.
A few suggestions for your tool. Add millimeters as an option. I'm using 12"x24" tile for the floor but they're really 300mm x 600mm. I learned most 12"x24" are that size. Another thing I learned is with that size it's recommended to use a 33% offset pattern. This guy explains it well https://www.diytileguy.com/12x24-tile/
Bicycle handlebars and brake levers alignement. This can drive you crazy...yet nobody has 2 arms the same length so perfect alignment shouldn't even matter that much.
Truth, I spend every free second in an Airbnb analyzing their trim, electrical, flooring, et c work. Spotting where additions were made. Can’t turn it off.
- Install flooring
- Install trim in your own home
- Build / install cabinets
You will now see:
- Odd flooring patterns and uneven floors
- Know what it looks like when trim isn't coped
- Uneven gaps between doors