We had a dishwasher with auto-dispense where you pour the whole bottle of detergent into a reservoir and it would automatically dispense what was needed.
Well one day it was getting low I poured a new bottle in and all the dishes weren't getting washed. I called the detergent company to report a defective bottle, but turns out there was some sort of formula change due to a new regulation. Apparently mixing the two together in the auto-dispenser causes them to harden and clog the dispenser. So I tried just pouring it into the manual dispenser, slightly better but the dishes weren't really clean. I called my dishwasher repairman who just told me to buy Finish tabs and we would be fine.
My mother called me weeks later saying that six of her tenants complained that their dishwasher was broken and she had already replaced one (two of the dishwashers were less than two years old). I told her to just gift them all a tub of tabs from Costco which worked.
This happened to me in the car when adding a new kind of windshield wiper fluid over the old one. It did not clog the pipes, but made the resulting fluid very slimy, and it could not be wiped out by the wiper blades. The result was that the windshield became translucent and very hard to see through. When it stayed longer on the windshield, it frosted like ice, making it even harder to see through. I had to stop at a service station and drain all that fluid out, then fill the washer fluid tank with water to clean everything.
The new fluid by itself was fine, it was just the combination of the two that created a reaction.
Different brands use different formulations, apparently the brand that the dealership puts in at BMW/MINI doesn't play nicely with some of the brands from supermarkers.
More of an issue for newer cars though, I will give you that.
True, though tenants in corporate owned single family housing all tell me it's closer towards the worst landlords. The corporations won't harass you, but they essentially don't want to do anything. You just get an expensive "as-is" house, which can be okay if it's in decent shape.
Specifically I was referring to large apartment buildings owned by corporations. Have never lived in a corporate owned SFH nor did I know that it was common. In my experience these large apartment buildings are quite proactive about getting anything fixed - likely because they have a team of people dedicated to doing that full time or at least contract it out, and just chalk it up to the cost of doing business.
I've been sick for almost ten years and had low vitamin D levels. Last two years I've finally found some treatments that work for me, now that I'm healthier my vitamin D level has gone up to about 40 even though I rarely go outside and don't supplement. It's typically 5 without supplementation.
Previously, I tried supplementing with 10,000IU daily, didn't help me feel any better and took a long time to get my levels up. Doctor even told me to lie outside in a bikini every day in the sun and not to burn myself. My doc's theory is that some process in sick people uses up their vitamin D and calcium, and that's what needs to be stopped. He says he has seen patients with Vitamin D deficiency where they are cured with supplementation and/or sun, but it's not very common. It's cheap, easy, and harmless enough though to try before moving on to other things.
A sizable portion of the car washes in Los Angeles have an aggressive chip repair salesman who will circle all the chips and aggressively try to sell you on free windshield repair. Guy was always confused and upset about why I wouldn't want to buy something that was free.
Finally one day my windshield had enough chips to be replaced. Guy sees me pulling out my insurance card and goes "Mercury? They don't cover anything!" so now when the guy starts walking over I say "I'm with Mercury" and he immediately moves on.
I was in my front yard performing an oil change when one of these window chip sales people started bothering me. I literally had to threaten violence to get her to leave my property.
They have rental scams here where they will show you the house as well. One is where they pretend to be realtors and get the key from the listing agent.
I usually look up the tax records of the house. They are usually available on the county website and will show the owners name and when the house was last sold.
Hospitals will pay their own money for residencies in specialties that are wildly profitable. Usually, some fancy types of surgeons. Primary care, endocrinology, rheumatology, and a lot of other needed specialists are not so the limited slots are whatever the government will pay for.
I’m in the same boat as you. My PT has helped a lot. I discovered many of the treatments were in the book The Perrin Technique. The symptoms in the book described me exactly.
I gave her a copy to read and it has helped greatly. My PT told another one of her patients with similar symptoms who has gone from mostly bed/housebound to regular outings.
Older people have had more practice operating the TV. Just getting the phone to work is often a mental challenge.
A ton of them are constantly inadvertently opening control center and then accidentally turning it on airplane mode or whatever. Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.
At the farmers market earlier this fall, the seller was having a hell of a time getting his phone to work so that he could swipe our card on his Square.
After looking a little, he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen while he tried to poke buttons with his other hand.
Since there were multiple fingers on the screen, it kept interpreting them as gestures and not doing anything.
Further, his case made it so the Square dongle thing wouldn't stay plugged in all the way. So when he finally did get it to the swipe screen, it wouldn't read the card.
Finally ended up offering to look at it myself and manually entering my card info. The guy was so visibly relieved to be out of that situation.
Smart phones aren't nearly so user friendly as a lot of tech people like to think.
> he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen
Yeah, the perfect amount of bezel is significantly more than zero, I really don't get the hype for maximising screen/body ratios. It's just impractical, at least without serious measures against wrapped touch like having a fully touch enabled side only tho know which touches near the edges of the screen to ignore.
Although I'm sure this gets said fairly often around HN, smart phone "advancements" have stopped being "advancements" a while ago. They're they're closer to fads, and the cheaper brands have to chase the luxury brands, because the luxury brands get to define what is trendy. Much the same way that the rich get to set fashion trends, and the rest have to follow.
I'm not denigrating the upper class, fashion, or trends in general -- just pointing out that fashionable trends are different from technological advancement.
On the zero bezel phones the software makes a huge difference. I have very small hands where I can barely grip friends' XL phones. If they have some cheap off-brand, discount prepaid or even fancy Chinese Android I am constantly activating it despite barely touching the edges, whereas I never have the problem on the Google Pixel or an iPhone.
Any tool requires learning and understanding- a time and effort investment. Using a cash register also requires training.
The more power you put into a tool, (frequently) the more complex the interface becomes. This is a trade-off that must be weighed. Either you make your devices do less, or you require your users to learn how to use their tools.
I do not think we should sacrifice the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use.
Final note: Of course better interface design can help mitigate the increase in complexity of the tool with the increase in power of the tool, but I believe this has a limited effect.
Sure, you think that now, because you're in the group that interfaces are designed for. But once you're the guy at the farmer's market, you'll think differently. Power only matters if one can get something done with it. A kilogram of plutonium is enormously powerful, but that's no reason to carry it around in your pocket.
I'll also note that we have been sacrificing the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use since the 1980s and it's great. Manually configuring X-Windows in those days was enormously powerful, and enormously user-hostile. We sacrifice vast amount of computing power on the altar of usability, and that's exactly what we should be doing. Contrary to my early computing experience, I have never once had to rebuild the kernel on my phone, and I am very happy with that.
And third, you mostly create a false dichotomy here. If we're talking about a typewriter or a steam loom or something, yes, power and user complexity go together. But the true power of software is the ability to hide most of the complexity most of the time. Most of the work of software development is pushing complexity down, wrapping it in abstractions that provide the next level up with a clean interface.
A perfect example here is Google Search. It's a magic box into which I can type (and now, just say) anything, and it will apparently intuit what I want. The "powerful" version of that interface was 1980s search, where you carefully specified the various fields you wanted to search (because all data had to be carefully fed into the system's structure) and a painfully constructed, manually stemmed, boolean query. For maybe 1 search in 500, I still want that kind of power. But for the rest of the time, I'm very grateful that thousands of nice people at Google have made it so that their search's power has increased continuously, with users needing to learn less and less to get good results.
> Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.
I have my own story from today: I have iOS devices since forever and sill I had to google how to access some option. The damn things move between versions and some become invisible until you read somewhere where they are etc. It’s really that bad.
Well one day it was getting low I poured a new bottle in and all the dishes weren't getting washed. I called the detergent company to report a defective bottle, but turns out there was some sort of formula change due to a new regulation. Apparently mixing the two together in the auto-dispenser causes them to harden and clog the dispenser. So I tried just pouring it into the manual dispenser, slightly better but the dishes weren't really clean. I called my dishwasher repairman who just told me to buy Finish tabs and we would be fine.
My mother called me weeks later saying that six of her tenants complained that their dishwasher was broken and she had already replaced one (two of the dishwashers were less than two years old). I told her to just gift them all a tub of tabs from Costco which worked.