Re physical buttons: I always wonder why there are no "modal buttons" in cars. E.g. 4 buttons on the left, 4 on the right.
The ones on the left open "submenus" the ones on the right trigger an action from the submenu.
Can be visual, but should not depend in the GUI to keep up.
Examples: Left 1 puts you in the audio menu, Right 1 increases volume. Left 2 puts you in the cruise control menu, Right 1 activates.
Humans are actually pretty good at learning simple patterns like that.
4x4 gives you 16 functions on the wheel. Going one level deeper (left, right, left) would give you 64 possible results. That should be enough to cover all bases.
I got a car whose cruise control state was never displayed (the mechanic used the wrong dashboard), but since it worked anyway, I accepted it. So that's a data point (me) that modal buttons do work.
But "should not depend in the GUI to keep up" is wrong, I think. It needs at least one LED per mode. Because sometimes it's a bit annoying. Rarely cruise control doesn't engage or turns off by itself or something caused the cruise control mode diverge from what I have in mind, and a quick glance would help to resync.
I am not ruling out the GUI. I just should not be required to look at it. The GUI is a necessity for learning, but once you know a key sequence there must not be a delay before the second click can be made.
The menus should be shown on the dashboard (not on the central screen). I would argue that that would be even safer than trying to look at the symbols in the wheel/stalks while driving.
What? An opinion piece, written by a human, in 2026?
Don't want to go into the details of the article, but to me it becomes ever more apparent that there is a clear divide between LLM and human written text.
Good luck with that. NX is such a pain to use compared to other alternatives (commercial and free/open source). NX Open being even more painful because it's basically 90% guesswork.
I love NX (10-12), it feels very intuitive to me and it's absolutely rock solid compared to Inventor, Solid Edge, and SolidWorks, and it seems like it could run performantly on a literal potato (currently an offline Windows Server 2022 qube with 8GB RAM and 2 vCPUs, no GPU passthrough).
If only it were free for minors to play with as a toy, beats Minecraft as a builder!
Version 10-12 is 10-ish years ago. They switched to yearmonth (e.g. 2604) release names long ago.
Let's just say things changed since then.
There is also a difference between intuitive and familiar.
I learned to CAD on Fusion 360 with no formal education and it just worked. I can use FreeCAD sufficiently well to be productive (it really has become better over the years). I tried OnShape and just started working. I like using OpenSCAD and CadQuery...
... but I still struggle to get spline extrusions to work in NX because you just have to know which buttons to press in which order.
I have some fond memories of getting into computers around 2000. Building PCs, installing Windows, re-installing Windows ever so often.
At some point Windows just crashed and couldn't be brought back to life, straight up refused to be installed on that disk again.
(Funfact: the crash happened while playing some opensource sci-fi game... Produced by Microsoft)
I had a Gentoo Linux partition back then thanks to a friend from school and used that for everything from that point on.
Interestingly I never really had major issues. Running Warcraft 3 on Gentoo, writing my thesis (theseses actually) on Ubuntu and later switching to Arch Linux just worked.
I still remember switching to Gnome 3 (from KDE) and being impressed by how fast the Shell felt.
...
Fast forward to two years ago and I am forced to use Windows for the first time in 20+ years, in a locked down corporate setting nonetheless.
"buy twice" is one of those live advices I heard and adhere to since.
It's basically the optimistic interpretation of "buy cheap, buy twice":
When I consider getting into something I buy cheap first, the idea being that that is enough to get a feel ...
... then you buy the second time and don't cheap out. But this purchase is more informed and you really get to appreciate it more because you know the step up from the cheap thing.
And sometimes... maybe even most of the time... the cheap thing is just enough.
As opposed to the old mechanics koan "Buy once cry once"
But sure, in general if you don't know what you are doing start cheap and treat it like a learning opportunity.
The real danger is in when you use shitty tools and think that because of that you are bad at something, so give up.
My personal story on this was when I hosed a laptop(don't disable usb when there are only usb devices) All the normal ways to fix it were not working so I went way out of my comfort zone and was going to try and reflash it the hard way with a chip programmer(It's already a brick I am not going to break it further) And I bought the cheapest sioc flashing kit I could find. and... nothing was working right, and because I have no idea what I am doing, does it just not work? do I have the wrong programmer? should I desolder the chip from the board? No clue. So it sat on the healing bench for a year. Then I stumbled on a forum thread complaining about cheap sioc clips, gathered my courage and bought a nice clip, tried again and it worked the first time. So on one level thanks Pomona electronics, your sioc clip was amazing, but the bigger lesson, I thought the task was just too unknowable and really I just had bad tools.
and think that because of that you are bad at something, so give up.
If you are learning a meaningfully new domain, you are bad at it.
If that causes you to give up, you are giving up on learning.
And in the case of your repair, the fact that the broken system sat on the bench for a year while you learned more meant that you did not give up.
Meaningful adult learning of new domains takes years. If something doesn't it either is not a new domain or the standard of performance is not an adult standard.
Finally, you could have bought the more expensive programmer first, but you might not have had the skill and knowledge and relevant experience to use it properly a year earlier...or to put it another way, you didn't have the direct experience to recognize the value of the post on which tool to use until after you had direct experience.
Buying tools twice or three or four times is just "the cost of doing business." You can't make an informed decision until you have experience.
Yes and buying the expensive item is not insurance against losing it, or breaking it, or it not being particularly useful. That’s before the possibility of buying the expensive version used…or the expensive item not being more robust.
On top of that, the canon of fine objects includes careful use and high maintenance…I know a guy who took offense at the suggestion he could drive his 911s in the rain.
And of course, you can buy a $45 keyboard twice and have a backup or one for your other computer, etc. Likewise, you can replace a $45 keyboard at 7pm on Tuesday at your local Walmart.
One of my student jobs was to transport film spools to theaters. They would arrive at my door in a box, I would walk them to the cinema on a small trolley and spend 2-3 hours in the projection rooms. The reels were spliced on site by a technician, projected, cut again and I transported them back home where they would be picked up again.
The job was less to transport the spools, but to supervise that there was no copying happening.
This was late 200x-ish, before digital protection became widespread iirc.
Actually yes. It's been a while, but now that you mention that, that probably was the reason for somebody (me) bringing the reels to the cinemas for a single showing in the first place.
"Back in the day" people were afraid that pupils would create CS (beta 6.5) maps of their schools. Gaussian Splatting would have been very convenient for that :-)
The ones on the left open "submenus" the ones on the right trigger an action from the submenu.
Can be visual, but should not depend in the GUI to keep up.
Examples: Left 1 puts you in the audio menu, Right 1 increases volume. Left 2 puts you in the cruise control menu, Right 1 activates.
Humans are actually pretty good at learning simple patterns like that.
4x4 gives you 16 functions on the wheel. Going one level deeper (left, right, left) would give you 64 possible results. That should be enough to cover all bases.
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