• niktemadur@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Yet one more item in an endless exhibit of how mankind is unable to standardize anything at all. Get TWO engineers together to agree on ONE standard plug and the assholes will come out with THREE separate plugs, completely non-compatible with each other, of course.

    It’s almost like a miracle that we got the world to agree on certain things like time and timezones, a system of coordinates, the metric system.
    All of them received initial pushback, and some to this day. Noisy, noisy fucking humans.

    Did you know that for a few decades, every town in the UK kept two different times on adjacent clocks? Back when their railway grid was expanding everywhere. Local time and London time.

    • DokPsy@infosec.pub
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      5 months ago

      Funny enough, it’s not the engineers that are doing it. Left to their own devices without ridiculous constraints like “someone else is doing it this way so we need you to do something that sets us apart” or “you can’t look at what everyone else is doing”, engineers will do it the laziest way they can… By copying what others are doing and essentially making it standard.

      • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        Yeah usually when engineers take extra effort to do something non-standard, it’s at a specific request from a client or management

      • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Have you ever been to an oil and air filter warehouse?
        Some are more common than others, but there are hundreds of different types, and some of them vary by a millimeter in diameter from the more common ones.

        They couldn’t design the inlet to fit a pre-existing filter already in circulation, no sir, instead of any sort of compatibility they felt compelled to make up their own fucking specification and parameters that varied by a tenth of a percentage point.

        That can only be the work of engineers, and from the looks of that oil filter warehouse, or from the different types of electrical sockets, the contrary bastards are everywhere, they REFUSE to meaningfully communicate with each other, and will NOT listen to reason.

        More recently, look at crypto. For every well-meaning and thoughtful endeavor like Bitcoin or Ethereum, there are ten thousand shitcoins. Many are just greedy con jobs, but many are also due to stubborn and petty, noisy squabbles over minutiae. Suddenly the whole damn space was a hive of useless noise and confusion.

        • DokPsy@infosec.pub
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          5 months ago

          This tells me that you know very little about how in control of designs engineering teams are. 99/100 times it’s not up to the engineers on what the specifications or limitations are for any given design.

          Typically, sales says they’ll have something that fits whatever crazy need no matter if a perfectly suitable design already exists if they consulted the engineers or shop, typically to get the sale. Engineering is then forced to adjust the design because nothing existing will fit.