
Dumb Software Isn’t Dumb - blasdel
http://www.markbernstein.org/Sep09/DumbSoftwareIsntDumb.html
======
kristiandupont
As a general principle, I guess that I want my software to be smart and make
_suggestions_ in an unobtrusive way. It shouldn't make the _decisions_ \- just
show me what it thinks I might want to do and make it easy for me to accept
that suggestion.

~~~
andymism
Yes, software we use should make smart _suggestions_ based on our basic usage
patterns, but not _decisions_. Good point.

Bernstein misunderstands Seth's calendar example: _defaulting_ to PM when I
select 2 o'clock is definitely _not_ the same thing as changing my 2AM entry
to 2PM automatically. In that straw man example, the "smart" feature is
actually a bug.

What I took from Seth's post is not that software should be able to read our
minds, but that opportunities to delight our users abound, especially in
features/functions that we would consider trivial.

------
jrockway
_In fact, server-side developers are likely to be short on CPU, so lots of
clever inductive strategies that are viable on the desktop won’t work in Web
apps. Well, they’ll work in beta, and for the press briefing when the system
has maybe ten users. Once things get built out? Fail whale._

Sigh, that is a _vast_ oversimplification. I love it when non-programmers
debate each other over programming.

Counterexample: Google Search. My desktop does not have enough CPU or disk to
analyze the entire Internet and suggest spelling corrections for me. But
Google does.

~~~
blasdel
Mark Bernstien is definitely a programmer:
<http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/>

------
quant18
Well yes, probably everyone on HN is computer-savvy enough that when they type
some input into a general consumer application, they damn well mean what they
said, not what the application thinks they meant.

I wonder if there's cases where this has degenerated into a game of "guess
two-thirds of the average": your app starts out with a level of automatic
input cleaning which is not enough to catch all the mistakes of the least
savvy 1/3 of your users, is mildly helpful to the next 1/3, but annoys the top
1/3 enough that they switch to another product. Then the least savvy users are
half of your userbase, so you lower the focus of your product to account for
them ... (this assumes that the least savvy users don't know how to switch
products, since if they knew that much they wouldn't belong in the "least
savvy" category).

------
shrikant
The so-called "smart" features in office suites annoy me so much, that the
first thing I do on any fresh install is ensure to switch all of them off.

Basically Seth was saying the software needs to read his mind..

------
edw519
_...machine learning is hard..._

Hard is relative. I remember Seth's post and pretty much agreed with all of
it. Nothing in it struck me as particularly difficult or unusual. We routinely
do these things all the time:

    
    
      - provide options in most likely order
      - default to the most likely option
      - auto-complete based on indexed options
      - auto updating software
      - auto maintaining databases
    

Users don't necessarily want more "features". They just want their software to
work the way they do. The developer's job is to find that out and make it
work, no matter "hard" it is to do.

