The pleasures of poor product design

There's a certain kind of bad taste that goes with AI art like there was with NFTs.

Oddly a few months ago somebody who was a few years too late DMed me on Tumblr to say he wanted to make NFTs of my photos. I played it cool and eventually asked him "which ones do you want?" which got him to pick the last 5 I posted which proves he isn't even looking.

Nextdoor for a nearby city lately has been spammed my somebody who makes AI slop videos with senseless motion like a bad Instagram Reel about our police department (he's black but seems to love the blue) -- at least he has some sense of praising vs dissing people but to people like that there is not difference between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, just ceaseless motion that never stops.

You assumed it is about effort, and not quality.

Are you aware that without explanation you just assumed things can be achieved with less effort without quality degradation?

A similar thing happened in the early days of 3D printing. When hobbyist 3D printing started you needed to be skilled and tenacious enough to build a 3D printer and tune it well enough to print.

Then as companies like Prusa and later Bambu made 3D printing more and more accessible to the masses there was a subgroup of 3D printing fans who were unhappy about the change. They lost interest in the hobby. Some became bitter and spent their time finding things to complain about on Reddit and other forums instead of enjoying their printing.

Logically, enabling other people to produce something shouldn’t subtract from others’ enjoyment of their own hobbies. Many still do woodworking with hand tools even though we can buy factory furniture now.

I think some people are more interested in seeking status and doing things for personal branding reasons than the joy of the hobby itself. For that group, any advancement that makes it easier for other people to do something similar to what they do (even if lesser quality, as is often the case with AI) it interferes with their ability to use that hobby for status. They carved out a niche as the person who did something rare or semi-unique, but making that thing accessible to more people took that away. So their motivation wanes.

> I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment

People who loved mixing colors enough to become experts may have been disappointed when their hard-won skills were rendered obsolete by the march of progress.

There are some aspects of my work that are enjoyable on their own and others that I only do because they're necessary overhead to achieve a desired result. I appreciate technology that eliminates the latter but lament technology that eliminates the former.

So when AI obsoletes yet another human skill I suspect a lot of the wildly different emotional responses are dependent on whether someone considers the skill being obsoleted more "enjoyable" or "necessary overhead".

My first thought is that this is a sign of burn-out.

This reminds me of the time I really wanted an FT-86 (Toyota low end sports car). I spent ages researching them and reading reviews and stuff. Then they started to get popular and I’d see them everywhere and I kinda didn’t want one anymore.

I described this to a friend and he turned to me, shocked, and said “you’re a sports car hipster!” And I’ve never been quite the same since.

I think you are incorrect in assuming that the reason she doesn't want to use AI is because of democratization. She is pretty clear about her reasoning; she enjoys the effort of her work, and removing the effort removes the joy.

In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response that is pretty common in the AI space. Creatives who don't like AI are always haughty elitists who don't like that the peasants can now create works as brilliant as them.

In reality, most artists I know wouldn't use AI because the friction is part of the joy of creation for them. Or maybe they want to feel like the work truly emerged from their own brain. Or they find their art practice both productive and meditative, and those are equally important to them. Or numerous other reasons, mostly compelling.

I'm not an artist, or even particularly creative, but the only reason I would undertake any hobby is because I enjoy the process. I like building Gunpla models, which seems irrational if you are only thinking about output. If someone were to say to me, "You know, they sell plastic toys of the RX-78-2. You could just buy one if you wanted it," I would stare at them blankly.

I actually don't think her reasoning has to do with other people at all. I think it's that given she wants to make an image of a poorly designed object, she knows she could either do it herself, or she could do something that takes 99% less effort but produces a result that's 90% as good. Her brain says "the easier way is obviously more efficient, clearly that's what you should do". But using AI isn't actually a satisfying process so even though it's way easier, she doesn't have a desire to do it. Of course the option to do it the way she's always done it is still there and would be just as satisfying in the end. The difficulty is that now there's a little part of her brain that would be going "you're acting inefficiently/irrationally", which just makes the process less pleasant and harder to convince herself to continue with. To me it seems like

I know I have experienced this, and I bet a lot of people here have experienced this, with writing code by hand vs having Claude do it. I genuinely enjoy writing code, but now to get that joy, I have to commit to writing code _for the sake of writing code_, since it's no longer necessary to do it to achieve the end goal I have.

That quote is so relatable lol.

I've repeatedly told people you ignore AI at your peril.

I had the same experience when I was a front-end dev and all the JS frameworks were getting big. I didn't want to use them, I tried to stay away from them as much as I could. I reluctantly learned Angular after being put on a project where they were using it. After 5 years, I wanted to leave my company and started looking around for dev openings. Whoops. Literally every front-end dev role was now "full stack role" and unless you knew ReactJS or one of the other now common JS frameworks in depth, you had no options. I was able to pivot into a few other roles that were essentially front-end related, but have yet to get back to doing dev work unless its on my own hobby time at home.

I completely removed myself from an industry because I didn't want to change with the industry I spent ten years making a career from. Now with this new wave of AI, I know better. I don't like AI, I think companies are already using it recklessly to pad their bottom lines, but I've seen this movie before. Now I keep pace, I use it at work, I vibe code at home, I create agents and use MCP servers, I work constantly on learning to create better prompts.

Maybe she hasn't been sidelined by a technology yet in her career, but someone told me recently, "AI may not replace YOU? But someone who can use and know AI very possibly could replace you." This same thing is happening in the art world. Unfortunately, either you figure out how to leverage it to stay in the industry, or get passed up by people who are using it to do what you used to do and find yourself too far behind to ever catch up.

> I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all.

This might sound pedantic, but I think it's very meaningful when it comes to art: AI's cannot (yet) produce paintings anywhere near the quality of a human painting. What they can produce are images of paintings, and those are not the same thing.

I think the problem is more the knowledge of an information hazard combined with her just not liking AI.

She doesn't like AI, so she avoids using it, fine. But she's also aware that using AI would make doing the task very easy. Because she is aware of AI's ability to complete the task, she would have to consciously avoid using it, and doing that us the problem itself. Having to consciously avoid the action you know is more efficient.

You see the same effect in video games. Being aware of a powerful item or meta tends to compel one to take that path, even if its less enjoyable. And sometimes it can bring the enjoyment low enough that one doesn't want to play anymore. If one were left unaware, they could keep playing blissfully unaware.

It reminds me of "bazaar" shops I lived next to at some point.

They had all sorts of cheap objects shaped like simple household items. Obviously, you don't expect premium quality when you buy these things, but you expect it to at least have some function, but they manage to fail at the most simple things. Examples:

- Sewing needles with the eye too small to fit a thread into, they also bend as easily as a piece of wire

- Tubes of "super glue" that are mostly empty, also when you press on it, it all goes on your finger instead of out of the nozzle

- Screwdriver bits with tolerances so loose they don't even fit the screw, some even had bubbles inside, like swiss cheese

- Packing tape that doesn't stick to carboard, at all

- Steak knives that break at the handle as soon as you start cutting steak with them

- "squares" that are off by more than 1 degree

i need a roller desk EV.

I like the iPhone Control Center screenshot in there…

Funny how some of those ideas are obviously useful, some I even see in stores... and then turns out the selfie stick is an example too, which makes one question the whole categorization.

I would spend an extra $0.20/lb if my butter came in a stick (though I think the form factor should emulate deodorant and not chapstick) and would shamelessly rock the umbrella tie.

Every few years something like this surfaces, i think mostly completely isolated from Chindogu and about 50% are renders. I honestly think there is something humbling, or “un-uselessness” in making a physical object thoughto both the intended audience and creator.

I believe it is actually called: The masochist’s teapot.

I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in design. Even today it is fantastic.

If the cap is screwed on and sealed, you should pour it from the side like a bottle of oil: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/technical-stuff/1...

The "cannon" one is maybe the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in months. It almost makes me want to add autoplaying music to my own website, just to add that too.

I think the difference is AI images tend to create mush or impossible geometry. The ideas here where a minimal change to the design renders the item entirely unusable takes a fair bit of creativity.

Or you could believe what she said instead of implying that she's lying??

Hm? That seems like a different thing?

> Chindōgu (珍道具) is the practice of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem to be ideal solutions to particular problems, but which may cause more problems than they solve.

Nobody would look at a fork with a chain separating the end and the handle, or a toothbrush with a 90 degree bend before the head, or a watering can where the spout bends back over to face the opening, and think it seems like an "ideal solution to a practical problem".

What she's doing is something else entirely: making humorous designs which are obviously, viscerally terribly suited for their purpose. The point is that you look at the item and immediately go, "oh that's horrible".

Regardless, even if Chindōgu actually did describe what she was doing, I don't think "design humorously bad products" is such a unique concept. It seems plausible that two people in history could independently come up with it.

It really highlights how much we associate "good design" with aesthetics first, even though function is doing most of the heavy lifting

It does do the rounds on the various social medias on the regular. The website looks interesting enough at least.

Yes! (The article says the project started a while back but the writer/interviewer only just discovered it)

It’s been on HM a couple of times, first in 2017:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theuncomfortable.com

Or the M4 Mini power button...

on the bottom (both) WHY?

Well, bash offers vi and Emacs as editing modes. We're already covered on that front. Many of the parameters for ls are cryptic, making it awkward to use for anything other than routine tasks without referencing the man page. more is so limited that many people choose to use a program used to concatenation files (cat) as a file viewer. Those who don't want to reach for their mouse to use their terminal's scrollbar buffer will use less, since it does more than more. Don't bother parsing that last sentence with bison, unless you have a yacc to shave.

jus used new ubuntu instead of ifconfig (weird name) it had ip couldnt figure from the help how to get actually show the ip

so linux is already there

Feed all command output through AI to summarize the results instead of actually giving the results.

Results from ls would be a few sentences explaining the types of files in the directory. Add a -l on there and it will give you a general overview of the permissions and size of the files. Ex. “These are rather large files that are primarily, but not exclusively, limited to root.”

Results from cat would give a summary of the file. You’d get the same results, with some degree of randomness from more and less as well.

Using any command with sudo would provide the same type of results, but in all caps.

Trying to pipe commands together would be a slop multiplier.

Use an agent for all CLI work.

This is a fun idea

The lowest-key example of this is tools that enforce a particular order of arguments, or where the order of arguments carries semantic meaning. It's the worst. Please don't make me put the file name last, or first. You don't know which part of the command I'm tweaking.

Easier to find uncomfortable websites. Back in the 90s with all the Flash, lots of peeps said these sites made them uncomfortable because they couldn’t figure out how to do anything. Couldn’t figure out the navigation.

I instantly recalled a site from this era and amazeballs it’s still there! Superbad.com All hail!

Require interactivity (ask for confirmation on cat).

Output success error codes in unexpected range (see: robocopy).

Use special characters to try TUI things but leave the buffer in weird states.

Have many input params, and default to the most useless ones when nothing is passed. Make some params unnecessarily required.

Go on very long tangents for no reason in the manpage, but keep your -h message as just the list of badly named params.

Use stderr as your stdout.

---- I present to you worse-cat:

wcat notes.txt

error: --encoding is required. Exiting.

wcat --encoding=utf-8 notes.txt

┌─────────────────────────────────┐

│ About to display: notes.txt │

│ Are you sure? [y/N/maybe]: │

└─────────────────────────────────┘

y

stdout: ≈3 paragraphs

stderr: [file content]

echo $?

212

(I'll save you the manpage and worse-ls)

Ah yeah thats a cool (coding) exercise! Friction is always an interesting parameter (like Brian Eno Oblique Strategies). Maybe… using a different input device than a keyboard to interact with the CLI? Like move your mouse around to choose or even draw letter?

"Snooker glasses" (with the lenses mostly above the bridge rather than mostly below) are actually a thing: https://snookerchat.com/snooker-great-dennis-taylor-tells-wh...

Pointy bit on the bridge of the nose.

the sharp point on the bridge is going to hurt your snout.

The sharp angle of the bridge would dig into your nose.

you don't have glasses ever, i guess?

Agree. Been seeing this popping everywhere up over the years. Not sure what the attraction is? Almost zero humor, zero critique, zero cultural-historical context, zero insight, zero charm and…renders. This is just a Jugaad Shanzhai of Chindogu in the worst possible way.