Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.
I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in.
Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep.
It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body.
What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating light on it in the first place?
It’s a fan. The fact that it’s working tells you it’s working.
A Jobs or Torvalds type character would have pointed that out.
I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.
Kinda related but also not really, my own pet peeve is the pouring spout in many products, coffee machine, water jugs, buckets... they might look effective but I find that more often than not, they are curved too much and drip all over when actually pouring.
And I always have to wonder, after serving coffee from one of those things, did the person who design it never even try it just once? Didn't they ever use such a thing, they never ever poured water from a pot?
Adding a appropiate diode in it's place is advised.
It was more just the observation that an unnecessary light had been included that degrades the performance of the product.
I find it intriguing how that comes to be. On paper it seems like adding the light wouldn't hurt the product even if not useful but no body actually used it it seems.
More often than not, those annoying features are direct requests from the person up top who smacks people. They want that feature because they think it will sell, and it's no use trying to argue with them because you'll just get smacked again.
I think that is pretty unusual in large companies.
the middle appreciate metrics and deliverables
One example is how this product manager type, because of company politics, isn’t really under the same department as the other software teams.
Because of his very very narrow horse blinkers approach, he doesn’t see or even comprehend why we’d want to align with literally anything in any other team and that includes visual UI stuff.
That’s why we have a bright neon pink “Back” button. Right in the literal center of the screen. It’s insane.
(I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter but I couldn’t help it in a discussion on quality)
I suspect an LLM wouldn’t be the most optimal choice
In terms of 'can I run it locally on an early 2000s machine?' LLMs are definitely the wrong choice.
In terms of 'what can I quickly hack together in 2025 regardless of variable cost?' LLMs might be the right choice.
> I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker [...]
You can get pretty far with some lookup tables and some heuristics.