Title is very misleading. I initially thought this is a high-tech prank.
TLDR: Not just any "New Yorkers", but specifically "customers who want to buy a propeller hat". And hats are dropped not "onto", but "somewhere on the sidewalk next to" these New Yorkers. And sure, this might be "using AI", but AI seems like an overkill to recognize that a person is standing longer than three seconds under the window.
So a guy sells hats by dropping them out of the window. Not sure why there are so many comments praising this. Is it because of the pun? Am I missing something?
Design of Everyday Things has some interesting anecdotes and ideas throughout, but I found the style very long-winded and dull. Haven't finished it yet though.
Similar book, The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski, was a bit more to the point, even though there is also plenty of philosophy on design, success and failure.
On the same theme, A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (of SMBC fame) is a humorous yet an in-depth pragmatic look at why space colonization will suck.
Summarizing: space will kill you fast, moon will grind you down with the regolith, and Mars will poison you. There are some interesting bits about international/space laws and treaties too.
Wasn’t that convincing for me. The hard science elements seemed a bit cherry-picked and the later sections on governance and laws seem to want almost a wide spread agreement across multiple countries on every detail before people are allowed to go.
A multi-part review [1] is available which detailed more aspects quite well.
In short, people will go for a multitude of reasons (whether it is sensible or not).
+1, great book. Their recommended strategy is to 1) wait until technology improves and we have a better understanding of how to solve the fundamental problems of Mars colonization, then 2) go big and build a large settlement that has the scale to actually succeed.
To add to your list (I made very similar choices):
Standard Notes was pretty decent for acessing notes between multiple devices when I used it. Now that I am back on Android, I use Syncthing for both pictures and notes, without a cloud intermediary.
Aegis instead of Google Authenticator. I found it the most straightforward, and it has backups/transfers not tied to any account.
QKSMS instead of Google Messages. It doesn't support RCS and reactions come across as texts, but no issues otherwise.
Fossify apps for other basic functionality.
Something to keep in mind with custom ROMs and OSes is that only some have VoLTE support. Which, with 3G shutdown, is a must in the US, unless you are in a great 2G coverage zone.
This year, I started teaching basic computer literacy to adult students, and that put the current UI and design into another perspective for me. So many things are made "easy" instead of straightforward, which makes explaining them difficult.
For example, the URL/search bar in browsers. It's not a web address, so if you mistype an address or it doesn't exist, the text typed in it will be redirected to search. Another browser feature, the back button. It will go to the previous page in history, but only within the current tab and browsing session. Try explaining that to someone with almost no experience using a desktop browser.
Many designs are based on already knowing what to expect. For example, GMail does not separate fields on email composer. Body field does not have a border nor label, it is literally a blank space you have to know to click.
Yet at the same time, terminology is somewhat archaic: compose, carbon copy, forward, paste, and a few other words still remain.
FFMpeg really helped me out not too long ago. I tried KDenLive and ShotCut to edit some videos, which I rarely do, only to be overwhelmed and then discover that ffmpeg command can do everything from timelapses to trimming and brightness/contrast adjustments. And you can "preview" the result too, using ffplay.
I have had the same thoughts. In my opinion, from the developer's perspective, there are two issues in the industry:
1. Conveyorization of development process.
Developers write code, that's it. Most what I have done for the past 6 years was do ticket-based work, constantly moving from project to project. Ironically, at the start of my carreer, I was responsible for an entire internal application (including designing new features, being on-call, and talking to end-users), so I grokked the entire setup and purpose.
2. Self-perpetuating push for constant change for the sake of change.
Producer (e.g: tech corporation) releases an update to their product to improve some internal metric or make more money -> Consumer updates their product (or jumps on the hype for next big thing) -> Producer metrics go up -> Repeat. This keeps both Producer's and Consumer's developers employed while providing very marginal benefits.
While this is a bit of a strawman, think of how many versions (and names!) Of .NET, or React, Angular, Vue or any other framework there has been over the last 10 years and whether each version improved much.
Combine the two, and, as a developer, you don't know how what you're doing matters, nor why you're doing it at all.
Some old (pre-smart, pre-camera, chunky ones with small B&W LCD screens) cell phones had a side scrollwheel that was used for menu navigation. I think it was clickable too.
The only more modern take on that that I know of was Marshall's "audiophile" Android phone [0] from 2015, which had a side scrollwheel for volume, but not sure if it was used for navigation.
My first cellphone (Sony) had this. I think it was https://images.app.goo.gl/Xc1RtzQSurxcFktt7
I even wonder if there wasn't haptic feedback. It was so cool at the time and I still miss it.
The dials on all the "medium-end" digital cameras I've owned always worked reliably despite many years of regular use, as do mouse scroll wheels, so I gather you're correct about cheap components.
Come to think of it, the scroll wheel on my Logitech G502 — three-way clickable, switchable between free-scrolling and traditional mode — would work well in sort of handheld hardware scrolling device, and an electromagnetic scroll wheel of the sort used on some newer Logitech mice would work even better, as it could be configured in a free-scrolling mode with variable friction.
TLDR: Not just any "New Yorkers", but specifically "customers who want to buy a propeller hat". And hats are dropped not "onto", but "somewhere on the sidewalk next to" these New Yorkers. And sure, this might be "using AI", but AI seems like an overkill to recognize that a person is standing longer than three seconds under the window.
So a guy sells hats by dropping them out of the window. Not sure why there are so many comments praising this. Is it because of the pun? Am I missing something?