I held weekly board game nights at my home for a year or two during the latter part of COVID. I loved board games and missed the weekly meetups that stopped happening due to lockdown. I only invited very close friends, all of whom are still very close. And I genuinely ruined my love of board games from how frustrating the experience proved to be. I put in a lot of effort to be a good host and everyone sure seemed to want to play board games, but over and over it was like herding cats once they were over. They were all acting in good faith, and yet that experience burned me out so much and my brain now associates board games with that experience so much that I barely play anymore, and don't enjoy it like I once did.

Now whether you want to use the label "introvert" or not, I was determined to push outside of my comfort zone that was staying in alone. But each of those dozens of nights drained me in a way that that cumulatively has left an emotional scar deep enough to impact my identity (being a person who loves board games was part of who I was, a part I liked)

I suspect that of the ways people will respond to this story, there are two that will be most common

1. What the heck are you talking about? I can't imagine having that experience

and

2. Yeah, that tracks

Whether or not you call those groups extrovert & introvert, and whether you believe such preferences are inherent, learned behavior, or social conditioning, here is a truth:

Trying to change your nature, however you came to have it, comes with a cost and can go wrong.

So for those who consider introversion to be mere choice, I encourage you to be less flippant in how you try to convince people of that.

> we don’t have a word for ... the ... distribution

> Until we have a ... word for the ... shell

distribution/distro and shell are exactly the words we have for these things

But OS sounds more impressive/important, so it's a lot more prevalent.

> Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button.

> Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button

Neither of these is an instruction to fix the problem, they're treating the AI like a person and telling it what it did wrong, expecting the implied admonishment to be enough to steer it back. But without an actual instruction, it just goes and does whatever it thinks will help, which is often arbitrary.

The response I would have used in this situation is

"The Cancel button is also blue now. Make sure the color change is only scoped to the Add to Cart button"

Most of the available responses throughout this "skit" are similar cases of expressing frustration first and guiding the result second.

Skip the emotion and say exactly what you want, and nothing besides that.

To make it easier to get insurance to pay for support. That's a big chunk of it at least. If each of these profiles was a separate diagnosis, it'd be way more common for insurance to deny paying even things like therapy for stuff in the long tail. Rather than have to re-argue again and again that people are worthy of support, the diagnosis broadens to help get that support to all that need it.

This is also true for ADHD, and I'm sure other diagnoses as well.

There's also a layer of making it easier to get kids the academic support they need when that support requires meeting certain officially recognized criteria. "Oh, little Jimmy's psychologist says he has Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome? We don't consider that as needing accommodations." It's already sometimes exceedingly challenging for parents to get schools to actually support their children when it's a commonly understood and accepted diagnoses like ADHD.

At the same time, it's often smart to avoid putting things into production that haven't matured or demonstrated staying power.

Or, to badly mangle Postel's law:

Be liberal in what you learn, and conservative in what you deploy

The former is traditional analytics and is not enough to uniquely identify an individual.

Not all analytics are as privacy invasive as fingerprinting.

Yes, it is.

It is also, very obviously, placed in such a way to reduce the bounce rate off the landing page and increase conversions.

When was the last time you were on a site that had meaningful content below its "releases" section?

Why is the answer to the "How do I pay?" FAQ question bend over backwards to first say >Hyperspace is a free download in the Mac App Store. Once downloaded, it’s free to scan an unlimited number of files. Scanning will let you know how much space is eligible to be reclaimed.

Why doesn't the app store description say which capabilities are free and which are paid?

One or two of these are innocuous, but there are are a dozen small choices like this that have been made here, all aligned to increase the likelihood of one thing: Put the user in the position where they've already installed the app, sunk some time into it, and are anticipating the benefit before making it clear that they have to pay money.

That the page technically contains the words "you will need to pay for Hyperspace" does not mean this isn't a dark pattern.

You can make it trivially deterministic by running single threaded on a cpu, but it's becomes too slow for practical applications if you do that.