I wonder if pedantically speaking the definition of lake would include non-tidal in many countries but ....
A) humans use names sloppily and if it's an important detail I wouldn't assume a lake is non-tidal without checking.
B) non-tidal bodies of water might still change height over the year, for example after a heavy rainfall.
Mainly I'd question the need to automate it. It's difficult, and in many cases the cost of a human to drive it is tiny compared to all the other costs you need to pay so just do that (as in the article - those weren't automated). Also, driving them can be fun :-)
The exetools website seems to be on its way out (domain for sale, no updates), which shows how hard it can be to get these types of projects to go well - I'm hoping I can help a bit!
Totally this! In the UK many landlords only have one or a few properties and it would be obvious which tenant is bad mouthing you. In some cases there are laws against "revenge evictions" but I don't know how much people would be willing to get into a shitty situation and trust arguing about those laws just to leave a review.
I had a similar concern about a custom monitoring script that was regularly writing out a metrics file in Prometheus format to be picked up by the Prometheus node monitor. What if the script breaks?
So I set the script to also write out a metric that was just the time stamp the metrics were last updated. Then it was simple to set up an alert in Prometheus - I can't access the config now so you'll have to look it up yourself, but it was basically "alert if metric less than now minus a time gap"
Anyone else find the "buy ticket" and "cancel" button text confusing? I had to take a second to work out which one was which. I'd try clear text like "buy ticket anyway" and "use contactless".
But "use contactless" isn't what that option does. It cancels your transaction which is why it's labelled cancel.
Suppose I'm at this screen about to get myself a paper ticket to Brixton to see my friend Jim, as this prompt appears I see Jim - oh that's right, Jim is coming here we're not meeting in Brixton. Cancel. I'm not making a journey, I don't want to "use contactless" I want to cancel this purchase, and that's exactly what this option does.
Yes most users who choose to cancel might end up using contactless, but that's not what the choice itself does, it does not, for example, check that you're carrying some form of contactless payment, nor does it charge you for a journey, it just cancels the ticket purchase.
I think in that situation most people would just walk away from the machine. Or try and press the red "start again" button.
Ok, maybe my suggestion is the wrong wording but I still think the original is confusing. If I'm going throught a process and suddenly get a confusing popup I didn't expect, my first instinct is I can press cancel and get back to what I was doing. But in this case it takes me out of the whole process.
But I'm not saying my UI choices are representative of all - really, it's about proper UI testing. The article doesn't say what user testing they did, if any.
I guess this falls into the trap a lot of tech metrics stuff falls into: ok, we can clearly show that sales of paper tickets fell. We assume there is a corresponding rise in card sales (But crucially, the article doesn't prove that). But what none of the stats can clearly show is whether people were happy with all this or not. Maybe they would have preferred the cheaper prices AND a paper ticket.
