1. ← Home
Login
Operant conditioning by software bugs
~devbugs
blog.regehr.org 3 weeks ago

Summary

From the article:

Have you ever used a new program or system and found it to be obnoxiously buggy, but then after a while you didn’t notice the bugs anymore? If so, then congratulations: you have been trained by the computer to avoid some of its problems. For example, I used to have a laptop that would lock up to the point where the battery needed to be removed when I scrolled down a web page for too long (I’m guessing the video driver’s logic for handling a full command queue was defective). Messing with the driver version did not solve the problem and I soon learned to take little breaks when scrolling down a long web page. To this day I occasionally feel a twinge of guilt or fear when rapidly scrolling a web page.

The extent to which we technical people have become conditioned by computers became apparent to me when one of my kids, probably three years old at the time, sat down at a Windows machine and within minutes rendered the GUI unresponsive. Even after watching which keys he pressed, I was unable to reproduce this behavior, at least partially because decades of training in how to use a computer have made it very hard for me to use one in such an inappropriate fashion. By now, this child (at 8 years old) has been brought into the fold: like millions of other people he can use a Windows machine for hours at a time without killing it.