- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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The closest I ever got to this story was working help desk in 1996. A user called up saying they had deleted the Internet.
Took me a while to understand he dragged “the Internet” to the recycle bin on the desktop.
Yes! I remember this happening a lot, and I could never really truly understand the thought process behind it! But the thing is, this is still happening today, just in different context, and it’s still equally as baffling!
It just means that they called their browser “the internet” right? Or am I missing something here?
It was an actual icon:
(found the image here https://mastodon.social/@benjedwards/11031604817437112)
I don’t remember what it did though. I think it wasn’t the browser, and I have a vague memory it wasn’t for dial up either, but my memory’s shit so I personally wouldn’t trust me on that
Edit: had to look this up, it was IE. I think I didn’t remember it because I never really used IE since I started off with NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape
It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.
As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.
I have a vague memory of the browser icon having the name “Internet” back in the day. Or maybe it was the dial-up icon. Might be that?
The original “Internet Explorer” icon was a globe and magnifying glass, with the text “The Internet,” underneath
There was actually a german ad about this quite some time ago: a grandma did this, then called her grandson “i think i just deleted the internet”.
How the ad continued? No clue.
What it was advertising? No clue.
Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.
Looks like someone asked ChatGPT, not their friend lol
“Human beings then do…”
That seems like a perfectly normal phrase…
Especially in context, where it’s contrasting QA testers and ‘normal’ people.
It would probably take longer to prompt ChatGPT to write this than it would to just write it. It’s two short paragraphs.
Perfectly cromulent, even.
YES I TOO BELIEVE IT TO BE A COMPLETELY NORMAL PHRASE USED BY US AVERAGE HUMANS ALL THE TIME
People speak weird all the time, and LLMs are trained on people. Some aren’t native speakers, some just like to omit verbs, nouns, or tenses when it seems obvious and they want to be expedient, some just do it for fun or laziness (see, l33t speak and or early texting, typos).
LLMs are trained on human input, so of course it on occasion uses our bad habits. Thinking like your comment suggests is what gets people who really wrote their own stuff in trouble, because people think they can identify stuff like this more than they actually can.
You do agree that it’s a weird way of saying it though, which is all I was making fun of. It’s similar verbiage an AI would use. I get it, but lighten up lol
Game makers should hire me to test their maps, if there’s a spot where I can get 100% stuck no matter what, you bet your shiny metal ass I’ll find it.
Me and dumb compact design blueprints on Dyson Sphere Program. I’ve had to tear parts of builds down an embarrassing amount of times to get unstuck because of the way hitboxes on refactionators and a few other buildings work in close proximity.
This story is a lie.
There’s no “computer icon”. Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can’t be deleted.
You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac
Well if the story is true, wouldn’t they have just fixed the software, so it would have never seen the light of day?
If they had “fixed” it, there would be a “My Computer” icon. No such thing exists, go TRY the Infinite Mac I linked above.
Unless this story is from preproduction software and they got rid of the computer icon. Or maybe that detail was misremembered and it was actually a disc icon.
Not necessarily – the story might have described a beta version of the OS, in which these interactions worked differently.
i mean, this story sounds like it’s from pre-release testing, or maybe a trade show demo showing a pre-release build. it not working this way in the release version just makes sense, and doesn’t mean this is a fake story.
No such demo happened. They unveiled the 128K with that System 1.0 on stage at a special event. The Lisa has a different UI, but also can’t do what’s described.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means that the demo wasn’t public.
Yes your uncle who works at Nintendo ^W Apple told you about it.
I have to agree. The Macintosh 128k didn’t even have an internal HDD. Everything was run on 3.5" floppies. Heck they may have invented the 3.5" floppy, idk. As you said, dragging the system dick icon to the trash on a 128k was literally the easiest way to eject the disk.
My father still owns one, that may actually work. He also got 2 extra external floppy drives for the thing. He also has an Apple ]|[
The story seems to be referencing the first time apple had regular people try it which may have been in a focus group or at some kind of publicity event. If this did happen I’m sure they made safeguards against it before selling it
I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, that’s not even good on paper. Those are a retarded pair of things to have next to one another regardless of any coloring on them. Especially with the same handles
I’m not a fighter pilot, but when I think “ejection”, can’t imagine anything but a high-stress situation where the pilot doesn’t have time to figure out which is the ejection lever. Imagine a real emergency where the pilot grabs the wrong lever, gently slides back with the seat, and then fucking dies on impact.
“Gently slides back” 😂
I once deleted system32…That’s when I began calling the shots.
When I started working in the late 90s early 00s, every company had their own It-department. These days it’s just some consultant or subscription to another company offering their consultants to do specific tasks.
This thread reminds me of why having an IT department makes good sense financially - today.
You can add up all the salaries, equipment and training costs and it’ll still be cheaper than wasting time and money in meetings with consultants trying to either explain the task or moan about pricing.
Shit doesn’t work, because they aren’t paid to make shit work.
I can make code that works for me and I can make code that works for you. The price is different, but you also need to know what you actually want it to do, and I don’t know how much money you are willing to sacrifice for us both fumbling around in that equation.
One could, indeed, argue that consulting firms make their bread and butter by not having things work but fixed temporarily.
“Look how much
money we can saveproductivity we can eliminate by outsourcing IT!”
I’m a good enough software engineer that this isn’t true. I bet I get paid a lot more than you. 😎
(The above statement is not a truthful statement.)
QA today seems to just be releasing software in whatever state and maybe fixing it later.
“Users will let us know if something is really broken, then we’ll see if it’s worth fixing”
QA in large companies seems to be first to get outsourced or at best, contacted into temp positions. First to get mixed, too. It’s the “skill-less labor” of the tech world.
In other words, blame the idiots in charge for not really investing in QA lol
Our QA manager is one of the founders of our company, so the work his team does is amazing. Doesn’t take away I get a heart attack any time I get a message from him…
It’s the “skill-less labor” of the tech world.
Which is funny because you need a technical AND a creative person to handle QA.
Isn’t it, haha. And yet I know a place that outsources it to slavic countries to save cash. I guess they’re tech savvy, but as contract workers it’s hard to say their dedicated to their craft.
Oh I am. Blaming the end users still buying buggy shit too.
One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was “it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it’s spreading.”
Turns out the rendering engine couldn’t handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning “hair on fire” it broke things:
🔥 😬Before we had mindblown emoji, we had this.
💥 😳Before that we had ‽:-)
Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays… because that’s when this user actually used the application
Why would you post this, my phone exploded and took a shit. I didnt know it could do that.
Be thankful it didn’t take an explosive shit.
Don’t worry, I had a bit too much to drink last night so it’s covered
I did actually find a very similliar bug in the experimental rendering engine of element (the matrix client). So yes, this is something that exists somewhere else too.
User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.
Why the fuck are your users flipping a page back and forth 10 times. I understand the Bluetooth bit, they wanted it to restart probably from a device not showing up. Also what was the issue
I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?
I would be absolutely amazing at this job, I do this naturally, I am inescapably an agent of chaos.
It can be a good job if you go for a lead position. Then you’re designing tests basically.
I work in QA, my colleague is exactly this guy. Breaks everything without even trying. Doesn’t even have much of an IT background, but man he’s good at breaking things.
The problem there is that you have to know exactly what you’ve done to mess it up in order to fix the bug, and when I fuck up my system, I usually have no idea what I did.
You could just blame the devs for incomplete logging.
If you ever think “an actual human couldn’t possibly click that fast”, you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.
It doesn’t matter if a human can’t, some idiot is going to open an autoclicker at 1000cps and break it
I promise you I have done exactly that, i had an auto clicker bound to my space bar and was to lazy to click and would just hold the space bar down when I knew that I was going to click a bunch of gui buttons.(which I though wouldnt be problem) Quickly learned some programs don’t like it at all. Lol
What would you do when you needed to type a space?
I would turn off the auto clicker, I just had it on randomly
Love the extra work you went through in order to not have to click the mouse button. :p
Humans are wild.
I didn’t have to work on it for just to not click through ui menus, I just had my autoclicker enabled from some reason(likely game) and just randomly thought, “I’ll use the autoclick, lol” and had some interesting stuff happen. It was entertaining and nothing about being practical.
well id expect the computer to crash if i threw it in the trash can
no you’re getting it confused with the crash can
hahahaha i was thinking of this very gif, stop reading my mind
would be even better if the pc actually teleported to his trash bin
I can imagine thinking it’s be funny in the early stages where things wouldn’t really be too logical they way they are now. Might even assume it wouldn’t actually do anything and I could just pull it back out.
The monitor disappeared rather than the computer, but we can assume the tower somewhere under the desk did as well. But what of the keyboard? It’s in the icon, yet remains after deletion!
I think you found a bug. Either the keyboard is not compatible with the bin or we have a immutable peripheral and we should consider containment.
SCP should be able to secure the keyboard anomaly
Retired gif or inspired gif
Yes.
