4.0 KiB
Assuming Direct Control
An Audi
Matthew Crawford in his excellent "Why We Drive" writes about his experience of driving an Audi RS3:
The Audi RS3 makes 400 horsepower from a furbocharged, five-cylinder engine mated to a seven-speed, dual-clutch automatic transmission with paddle shifters... I was a little worried this test run might ruin the experience of driving an old Volkswagen, however radically mortified.
[...]
I eased out of the parking lot; we navigated through some suburban streets and then onto an expressway. There were a few on-ramps in the course of the drive, and traffic was light enough for some spirited maneuvers. But I could not connect with the car. I had it in the most aggressive of its driving modes (these determine the throttle map, shift responses, and suspension settings), but it still felt like there was a layer of decision-making happening somewhere else. The paddle shifters felt like what they in fact are: mere logic gates. I'm sure living with the car for an extended period would have allowed me to develop more feel for it, more connection, but my first impression was that it seemed to have its own priorities. It took my shift commands as a general statement of mood, a request to be given due consideration when the committee next convenes. The car never spoke rudely to me of being wrong, as when I nearly rolled my 1963 Beetle. It was more like "Your opinion is important to us." I must have been doing _something_ wrong, but was left to speculate what this might be.
Hugo
I just re-did my personal website. In doing so, I finally wrote it from near-scratch. If you've ever worked with a static-site generator, they're billed as being super easy to use with tons of ready-to-use themes out there.
Garbage. Cruft. So much of it.
I never find a theme quite the way I like it. So I pop the hood to try and tweak it. There's a master template file that uses a few sub-templates, which then use a few more sub-templates, and a big SASS file referencing a config file referencing.... there's so much interconnection. The solution seems worse than the problem of manually writing the HTML for each page.
In re-writing my theme, I assumed direct control. Both in the sense that I rolled my own, but in the sense that the theme I left had a very thin template. The content files allow you to put in CSS overrides.
By default, in writing content for the site, you have a simple "user-friendly" interface. But the manual overrides exist.
You may still assume direct control. Want to inject raw HTML? Go for it.
Combine Auger
On the farm, we've been having an intermittent issue on our combine's unload auger. In the cab, you push the button to deploy the auger - then a few milliseconds go by before an error message comes up, telling you that the position of the auger (read by a rotary sensor) doesn't match what was expected, and so the combine has gone into emergency shutoff mode.
What's the fix?
Presumably, the correct fix is to replace the sensor and get correct readings. But I mean, what does this sensor do? In the grand scheme of things, nothing. This machine would function perfectly fine if the operator had direct control over the hydraulic cylinder that deploys and stows the auger. Aside from deploying it into a rigid object outside the machine (which the rotary sensor would not stop), there is nothing the operator could do through a manual override that would damage the machine.
Yet, there is no such manual override.
The fix we took? Get on top of the combine and push the auger out. This fooled the sensor, I guess - and the problem went away. Was this the safest thing to do? Didn't this sensor actually make the situation less safe, or at least, less productive?
Whether the sensor is necessary or not in the grand scheme of things is another question but it remains obvious: a manual override would have improved safety and productivity.
Subsidiarity was violated, and we suffered for it.