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Comment by lrossi | Hacker News Reader

There is a chess engine in there :)

https://opensource.apple.com/source/Chess/Chess-408/

Containing this wonderful comment:

"Paradoxically enough, moving as quickly as possible is not necessarily desirable. Users tend to get frustrated once they realize how little time their Mac really spends to crush them at low levels. In the interest of promoting harmonious Human - Machine relations, we enforce minimum response times."

https://opensource.apple.com/source/Chess/Chess-408/Sources/...

This is basically Skeuomorphism, right?

Not really — Skeuomorphism refers to using existing (usually "obsolete") user interfaces as an analogy to help users understand a new UI. Artificially increasing computation time is about making users think that the computer is doing a lot of work when it's actually not.

The goal of the former (skeuomorphism) is to help users understand; the goal of the latter is to misdirect users, either 1) so they have a better experience (like Apple here) or 2) so they are willing to fork out more money. Users are willing to pay more when they think more work is being done (c.f. TurboTax "finding" the most deductions possible, or a public record website "searching" through "all the databases" for a person).

I ran across an extreme example of this recently trying to track down an old acquaintance: the website mylife dot com. There was a street address of the person but if I wanted their email address it was like 10 minutes of progress bars before finally being asked for money. I didn't wait and didn't pay, but was mesmerized and intrigued by how much UI/UX investment had been made and how profitable the endeavor must be to merit such efforts. Also made me very sad knowing how many people must have been scammed out of money. Or maybe the paid reports serve some valuable purpose. I think the former.

All of those "lookup X person" sites do the same thing. You may assume that you've sunk so much time waiting for them to scan all their data, surely it's worth a few dollars to see the results.

Those sites can be worthwhile and there's nothing necessarily scammy about the UI/UX IMHO.

The scammy part is where they push you into a nearly impossible to cancel subscription with promotional pricing as a way of "saving" vs an expensive one-time payment for one report.

The loading bar UI/UX correctly gives the impression that the report will be thorough. In my experience, they are quite good. So that's just fine.

> The loading bar UI/UX correctly gives the impression that the report will be thorough. In my experience, they are quite good. So that's just fine.

The loading bar is lying, plain and simple. "Giving the impression" of something that very much isn't true is just a polite way of saying "screwing with your user's perception of reality". Developers often complain that users cannot at all understand computers - these kinds of practices are part of the reason that is the case.

It's not that far conceptually from the tech support scammers that show you errors in your system's Event Log to "give the impression" that you're insecure, and then offer to sell you bogus security products at inflated markup. Same kind of ethics underneath.

Additional fun examples (artificial projections of expected behaviour, for the purpose of human familiarity or trust):

- The "Checking for Audit Risk" progress bar in TurboTax/etc software, which is shown while comparing about a dozen floating point values, perhaps after a division step. This takes imperceptable time, but the appearance of "doing work" projects value to humans.

- Comfort Noise (very low volume pseudo white noise) played into a VOIP phone to replicate the ambient inductive noise in analog lines. This assures humans that their handset is not broken.

- Engine Noise generated by some (nearly silent) electric vehicles. This has a huge safety component, so it's not frivolous at all!

I don't think it's how smart the computer is that annoys people. It's that people want a moment to see and think about the board after their move, before the opponent's move.

I didn't realize that this would end up the single most cited comment (measured on a pretty small scale) of my career when I wrote it.

But frankly, I wouldn't trade it for "You are not expected to understand this".

What was that on?

https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...

It's in the Research UNIX scheduler code,

https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/sys/ken...

This texture had me smirk. :)

https://opensource.apple.com/source/Chess/Chess-408/Styles/G...

Wonder what their workplace policy is. It’s pretty much “don’t ask, don’t tell” around here.

That's pretty much what it was like when I was with their AppleCare group. During the hiring process, I was fully expecting a drug test (that never came).

Yes, at the time I was hired at Apple, my Intel colleagues were drug tested at hiring. I was not.

But I never saw any on-premises use of illegal drugs, and there were policies around the serving of alcohol.

The book "The Cult of Mac" has a chapter around it (not necessarily employer oriented)

Lol "grass". They've applied some heavy transformations to it in-game, so it's not at all obvious what it is. For the sake of whoever did this, I hope Apple has a sense of humour lol

I think they might be okay with it.

https://youtu.be/sDZYTLf8L4c

Some people more than told, offered and used drugs openly or the end at the day while I worked there. Nobody cared.

In my brief stint at Apple, only two things seemed to matter; what you could deliver to your org, and whether your manager liked you (highly correlated with the first).

Edit: I guess there was a third thing, don’t do anything that could screw up the brand at all, but that “mattered” only in that it was table stakes.

Considering it's well known Jobs would ask in interviews how many times a candidate had done LSD, I doubt they're particularly worried about recreational drug use.

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