Discoverability is also an issue touch screens can help with - I enjoy that in the settings app on iPhone (I believe android is the same) one can search for a setting, rather than try to guess where a given setting has been placed.
But I don't want discoverability when my windshield suddenly fogs up and I can't see anything. I want to be able to just reach out and adjust the airflow without even thinking about it when I start noticing the fog in the first place.
Last time I had something useful was in my Volvo 740. After that it has been getting worse and worse. Even physical nobs can be bad, just round and smooth, without any physical notch that snows what direction it points.
Oh, I completely agree - everything important should be accessible and intuitive - typically that does mean a well-placed physical control.
But there are so many settings on a contemporary car that it would be impractical to have a switch for all of them, and even if they were, if it's something you'd like to change once in a blue-moon being able to search for that setting is really useful.
I don't know if this makes great sense as an example, but, say you're travelling from the UK to France (or USA to Mexico?) and want to have your speedometer show km/h rather than miles/hour. That's not a setting which should have a switch, but may be something useful.
>I don't know if this makes great sense as an example, but, say you're travelling from the UK to France (or USA to Mexico?) and want to have your speedometer show km/h rather than miles/hour. That's not a setting which should have a switch, but may be something useful.
Three presses in a Mercedes on its speedometer screen.
Many here argue there should be no screens in cars. The screen has some state you'll need to at least look at to get a bearing for where in the menu you'll need to navigate to. But most people aren't going to memorize the menu layouts for settings they rarely use, meaning they'll be looking at the screen when they interact with it.
The discussion is not about buttons for everything. Ofcourse I can't have a 737 cockpit from 1980 with buttons all over the place. Even planes get smart controls for the less used things. But the fan, the air direction and other very important and time sensitive controls HAVE to be physical in a car.
In regards to dealing with windows fogging, I prefer the system in my car that automatically detects conditions where it might fog and adjusts itself accordingly. On top of that the car has a physical max defog button close to the actual driver controls.
The specific youtube channel Primitive Technology [1] definitely does not. John Plant does everything as you see, although he does have the benefit of doing research - he doesn't do things as people in the past have done, but as they might have done had they known things he does. But there's no tricks and no machinery. (And of course, some of what he's able to do is dependent on his environment - the plants he uses aren't around my part of the world.
But there are a lot of knock-off channels, which you're presumably referring to, where people build things that are basically mini-castles, and pools filled with water using a pipe network, etc. And those are definitely at least partially fake.
Excel can be really great — it’s been said that a huge amount of the world‘s programming is actually done in excel (summing a column of numbers is, after all, a very primitive programme).
I wish there were better tools to help excel users migrate to more formal coding. Something that allows the immediate visibility and accessibility of Excel code, but avoids some of the problems of updating a formula in one place, but missing another, allowing better testing, and type safety for data.
Best part: Excel supports your example and many other similar quality of programmers life use cases and has been for years if not decades (e.g. named ranges and tables). For some reason people don’t use them.
A downright comical number of analytics products are crude reimplementations of lesser-known Excel features. A rudimentary understanding of pivot tables or "goal seek" can be enough to blow minds even among an audience that has used Excel on a daily basis for decades. Spreadsheets, like word processors and presentation tools, are so omnipresent that organizations tend to assume their operation is absorbed through osmosis, and therefore fail to invest in training.
There's PowerQuery, built into Excel. It can do some great stuff (love me some fuzzy join) but the ergonomics are apocalyptic.
This is actually the root problem of trying to improve or extend Excel--it has a truly ancient, horribly broken sharing/ipc/embedding model that is integrated into everything and can't be easily fixed or worked around.
Power Query/M is the only functional language I've used, a couple years ago. I actually quite liked it, I even built up a collection of my own functions.
It's just a pity the editor is literally worse than Notepad. And the implementation wants to reload a file twenty times. And the security stuff doesn't really work, so you're constantly turning that off. And and and.
I think the main feature of excel that makes it the killer app it is, is that it is extremely approachable to non technical people. Making it more like programming erodes the core feature that motivates its use.
No joke, I built a Excel compiler once. All functions written became legit code you could compile down to a binary. But wow, I learned a lot about how complex that could get... my intermediate language was technically readable, but when every cell is a function, it got so big it would break the target binary compiler unless I split it up. Good times though....
I guess when you add type safety and tests to an app like Excel, it becomes so much closer to programming languages that it makes more sense to ditch the app and just write code directly.
Even today, complex logic in Excel is mostly done through VBA, JavaScript, Python and the like.
Its really disappointing that VBA stopped improving since 20 years ago. Imagine if you could embed C# or even better F# in workbooks, and also have a way to better way to package libraries. We wouldn't see Python notebooks.
An advertising supported YouTube creator would be delighted!
No, literally a lot of creators target this market now — for instance by making a mega mix of their existing content which runs for two to three hours. Or releasing a video „xxx hours of yyy to fall asleep to“
It’s the new ‚meta’, apparently a big part of the YouTube algorithm is watch time, and it doesn’t know if the viewers are awake or not. Even if those viewers aren’t being shown adverts, it means your other videos may get additional promotion. Plus if your viewers have YouTube premium I believe watch—time literally translates directly to payment rates.
Each corner piece needs to make contact with the core.
Consider when the top layer is rotated 45 degrees relative to the layer below. The corner is now about 0.707 units from the centre of the face, but the layer below only extends 0.5 units out from the centre.
If the corner pieces were smaller than about 0,207 units it would become disconnected from the cube as a whole.
So, any cube larger than (I believe) the 5 by 5 either needs to have bulging faces, or have the edge/corner pieces larger than the others.
You are correct, the 7 x 7 x 7 is the minimum where a perfect cube of cubes is impossible. The Wikipedia article shows the issue with the corner cubes.
Apparently the 7-cube bulges slightly which helps to hide that the larger sized edges / corners
I wonder how much of this is familiarity (i.e. I play games in the style I did when I was sixteen) versus people in older age-groups having less sustained time for gaming (i.e. grabbing twenty minutes while the baby sleeps) and single-player being inherently better for that use-case.
Part of it is reflexes too. I used to love fast paced FPS games as a teen and was actually pretty good at them until my early 30's. As time went on, I started noticing I was doing consistently worse in 1v1 firefights. I started gravitating towards games that had a 'slower' way to contribute like playing vehicles in the battlefield series.
As time goes on I've gotten more and more into single player games, especially games that let me build stuff.
This is because the multiplayer games we played at 16 are 10-15 years old. You literally can’t go back to those happy memories again. You play halo 3 today you get wrecked by the people who haven’t stopped regularly playing in over a decade. And when you try and play the latest fps game you go this sucks, its not halo 3.
REAL-TIME multiplayer is worse for that use case. There's no reason a game that is asynchronous, like an old school play by mail game, couldn't be fun for twenty minutes when you have time, and maybe there's a limit or a turn involved so you don't get too ahead, and your partner does their thing when they get time
I have wanted to see a game like that for years and years. I think this is why chess.com is huge with the youths, as it fits my description and is fairly unique -- I just don't personally care for chess.
