[darcs-devel] old-fashioned removal notice

[Eric Kow]

Sorry, I'm going to skip the important stuff and jump straight to
the fluff.

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 23:22:17 +0000, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> In any case I would be inclined to cut down the ASCII art and long
> message to the minimum required to get the information across, but I
> don't feel strongly about that.

For the record, I'm not too attached to the ASCII art.  I'm also a bit
embarrassed about it and find a bit ugly.

The ASCII art has one useful property (I think), which is that a face
sort of jumps out at you and increases the chance you'll pay attention.

One problem is that the frowny face could be a sort of mixed signal.  Is
it supposed to mean:

 - bad user: still using OF?
 - darcs is sorry?

So maybe we should just do away with it... and maybe there's another
way to say "hey! this one is actually important, pay attention!"

Eric

PS. The origin of the ASCII art (this is where my embarrassment comes
in) is that just a couple hours before the patch, I'd read a chapter in
the book /Nudge/ which showed an interesting experiment with electricity
bills and energy consumption.

  1. If you tell people how their energy use compares with their
     neighbourhood average, people will tend to converge to the
     centre. The good side, people who use more than average will
     moderate their consumption, and the bad side, people who use
     less will let themselves go a bit.

  2. On the other hand, if you couple that information with smiley
     and frowny faces accordingly, the convergence becomes asymmetrical.
     Over-consumers use less and under-consumers still underconsume.

My attempt at using this in Darcs is kind of silly because it misses the
point of this nudge and just focuses on one almost accidental aspect.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
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