Now things are holonomically controlled, every behavior is arbitrary and computer generated, nothing arises from necessity if we can avoid it.
With a spoon, anything you add will probably make it worse, you can sit and think and not find anything to change other than the material. If I give it adjustable length, the mechanism may be unsanitary.
There's no long list of features to pick from, once you've decided you're not making a spork, there's no real question of what to include, so the feature set(Be spoon) feels perfect, since I have no alternate design to compare it to.
Once you add a microcontroller you have so much possibility. Why can't my flashlight report battery level via Bluetooth and alert me when it's fully charged? A minor convenience, but it could be cheap enough I'd pay for it.
The tradeoff is a bit more code and a cheap chip. And I'm sure there's a dozen other features that I'd like to have if they were cheap.
Not only does the thought of a perfect harmony of only the necessary parts not always arise in a modern mindset.... but I wouldn't know how to recognize it if I saw it anyway. Is there a real engineering reason to leave out a feature? Did they not think of it? Or are they just appealing to love of simplicity for it's own sake? I don't know, I wasn't at the meeting, so I'll probably be annoyed and leave a comment saying they shouldn't have left this or that out.
Now, simplicity feels more like another feature to include or exclude, it doesn't just arise from the desire for low cost and reliability, since we sometimes but not always can make insane complexity cheaply that lasts decades.
The difference is that simplicity isn't compatible with a lot of other features, because it's almost like intentionally choosing to give up arbitrariness and holonomic control.
With a spoon, anything you add will probably make it worse, you can sit and think and not find anything to change other than the material. If I give it adjustable length, the mechanism may be unsanitary. There's no long list of features to pick from, once you've decided you're not making a spork, there's no real question of what to include, so the feature set(Be spoon) feels perfect, since I have no alternate design to compare it to.
Respectfully, this is completely untrue. If you really study spoons you will notice they exist in various scales, shapes, depths and materials for good reason. Furthermore, some are single use while others are optimized for longevity, various surface properties, weight, reduced physical envelope, ergonomics, aesthetics, strength, rigidity or flexibility, handling of liquids-vs-solids, pouring, surface piercing, tasting, use by machine, specific length, safety, environmental impact, regulatory requirements, measurement, cost of manufacture, logistic concerns or some other set of requirements.
Some clearer examples to consider are a wooden spoon used for mixing in a traditional kitchen baking context, a foldable single-use polymer spoon atop a yoghurt container, a traditional English teaspoon with decorative enamel, a ground coffee spoon, measurement spoons and the entire category of ladle-like instruments.
(Source: Stepped out of pure software 7 years ago to work in food robotics.)
That is a good point, many specialty spoons exist, but it's not quite the same as software.
I'm sure we all have utensils we like and dislike, but the feature set is pretty much the same on all of them, especially within a category of specialty type, the difference is mostly decorative and ergonomic.
Wheras with tech, we often add things that are only tangentially related to the original purpose, and we add layers of indirection between user and the actual purpose, with millions of ways that mapping can happen.
Two variants of nominally the same idea can have totally different possible applications, like a phone with and without a GPS. These days all smartphones have GPS, but what about UWB? What about a stylus? Or wireless charging?
They're all smartphones, sold for basically the same general market rather than some specific application, but everyone has a different set of features they want, because it's not a single-function device.
Some people might like more or less ornamentation, and some people might prefer silver over stainless steel, but even most of the specialized types don't have extra features, and nobody picks them up and wishes they did, and rarely do people prefer spoons to be multi-purpose.
Now things are holonomically controlled, every behavior is arbitrary and computer generated, nothing arises from necessity if we can avoid it.
With a spoon, anything you add will probably make it worse, you can sit and think and not find anything to change other than the material. If I give it adjustable length, the mechanism may be unsanitary.
There's no long list of features to pick from, once you've decided you're not making a spork, there's no real question of what to include, so the feature set(Be spoon) feels perfect, since I have no alternate design to compare it to.
Once you add a microcontroller you have so much possibility. Why can't my flashlight report battery level via Bluetooth and alert me when it's fully charged? A minor convenience, but it could be cheap enough I'd pay for it.
The tradeoff is a bit more code and a cheap chip. And I'm sure there's a dozen other features that I'd like to have if they were cheap.
Not only does the thought of a perfect harmony of only the necessary parts not always arise in a modern mindset.... but I wouldn't know how to recognize it if I saw it anyway. Is there a real engineering reason to leave out a feature? Did they not think of it? Or are they just appealing to love of simplicity for it's own sake? I don't know, I wasn't at the meeting, so I'll probably be annoyed and leave a comment saying they shouldn't have left this or that out.
Now, simplicity feels more like another feature to include or exclude, it doesn't just arise from the desire for low cost and reliability, since we sometimes but not always can make insane complexity cheaply that lasts decades.
The difference is that simplicity isn't compatible with a lot of other features, because it's almost like intentionally choosing to give up arbitrariness and holonomic control.