I’m impressed by scale. Scale is an important concept because it’s easy to see 4 (2 power of 2) but way less to see 65536 (2 power 16).
Here’s a stupid example that shows how complex things can be:
So for some computers running Windows 8.1 or above, when you crank up the volume you get that annoying popup.
Damn it Microsoft, it’s all your fault and you suck and you’re the worst oh god why?
Where does that message come from? Well Reddit answered and a MS engineer confirmed that there’s no code in Windows that displays that popup.
This popup is a European Union requirement that manufacturers are free to implement or not at the audio driver level. So Samsung thought it would be cool to implement that on my laptop.
It’s not much of a deal –it’s loud enough before the popup shows up 90% of the time- but what’s interesting to me is that at the scale Windows and Microsoft work, there are tons of shit we don’t know about, things that as users we think are all about Redmond getting their shit together but it’s not. It’s WAY more complex there’s even countries chiming in.
Right there we have MS, computer manufacturer, audio driver maker, EU battling over the sound volume experience in an OS.
If you don’t know now you know.