You can create the most mathematically perfect computer security system known to humanity and people will misuse it, or bypass it. If you make it impossible to bypass, you will sooner or later discover that all actual work is being done on people's personal laptops, passed around on USB keys, and only enters your perfect system when someone needs to file an archival copy (assuming they remember to).
I'm no designer, nor a computer security expert, but I suspect this principle applies to any piece of software.
People do what works for them. And the people are lazy. Also half the time they don't see the button that says click me for help or if they do see it, they don't click it because that's not what they thought the button would look like. Then they spend twenty minutes searching for your email so they can tell you that they can't install your .exe on their Chromebook.
By people here, I mean me. I discover this behavior in my self all the time. Makes me think that the job of people who make software is very difficult. You must make a highly functional thing that only does what I want it to do. Probably this involves a lot of artfully showing only one button.
I came to the above-linked post when I was reading this one, which was also pretty good:
Thank you for sharing your context!
I often find that when I'm not disciplined about keeping my heap of browser tabs bounded, the pressure to reduce the number of open tabs leads to me abandoning this retracing of "why/how did I get here". If the tab was only exploration of some topic for general enrichment, that's fine, although often I realize a few minutes or hours later that I had some undocumented reason for ending up on that page... so ending the digestion of one article with determining that context is definitely a good habit.
This is something with which I strongly identify. A tab holds much more information than the url. I'm surprised there isn't a well-designed browser solution for showing some hierarchy of tabs. Also, I'm surprised that tabs and bookmarks haven't merged in some way. I'll frequently open a tab as a sort of short term bookmarking, but the fact that it draws memory ends up crushing my laptop.
Hmm I run out of tab space on Brave past where I can navigate it properly and then I just close the entire thing lol. Not running out of memory because I just use a shitton of swap.
There's a setting though, which I haven't switched on:
Same. I'm thinking of vibing up a local variant of
Deferthe main reason that I'm not actively seeking a software solution for this problem is that I consider it a subproblem of more general ADHD[1], and thus deem it more appropriate to attack the more general behavioral issues.
edit: thank you for mentioning and linking Defer; I should at least include it in my brainstormy research towards a more general praxis.
at least, that's my judgement for my own case! obviously, some people might only suffer from this when they have 16GB RAM and fifteen notification channels all going off at once; however, my solution should ideally work equally well in the entire space of my distractions, that spans graphical desktop environments, console sessions, smartphone distractions, and books that include musical scores with scribbles on looseleaf... ↩
I have the same issue with terminal consoles that I have with tabs. And spreadsheets, and RStudio tabs, and "IDE" (glorified text editor) open files.
So what I was thinking was to build something that I can feed a short note + a link and it will look at the context, the link content. Maybe pass it browsing history of the tab. And then close the tab out.
I desperately need a knowledge base that helps me navigate the gigabyte of info I'm taking in all and every day. Getting older, and I have trouble retaining every single thing
There can be several reasons for this, and laziness and distrust are the ones I consider the most likely. Regardless of the excellent work the developer has done, I usually don't trust that something will work as intended, and I'm even surprised when it does. Maybe with the new generation this will be different, since they grew up with cell phones that demand all this simplification—they don't have that distrust.