innovating at what 
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“you’ll never need to learn how it works underneath, we take care of it!” is a trap, folks. every. fucking. time. learn the thing, it’s cool. it’s good. learn the thing.
@djsundog Exactly. There's a term I've been cooking in my head and trying to decide if it's a big enough idea to be worth a blog post: the frosted-glass box.
A black box does not provide the openness and honesty to be trusted, and increases the learning curve if you do need to modify the contents.*
A totally clear box, or an unboxed set of contents, is cognitively overwhelming, distracting, and possibly a safety hazard where you modify something important by accident.
What you want is a frosted-glass box, where you can get a demystifying vibe of what's inside, you can open it easily when you want to, but you can still see the box itself shielding you from the full complexity of the internals until you're ready to spend attention on it. Corporations hate these.
*philosophical stance: just like how a gun is "always loaded," a box will always need to be opened and modified eventually.
@flyingsaceur @djsundog There's a lot of truth to that. Although for me, I'm not satisfied without some loose intuition of how it works - I don't need or want the details until I do, but without a "good enough for now" mental model of how that component sees its role or the world, it's hard to use it well!
@MaddieM4 @djsundog I love this and one thing that’s easy to do to that end as long as I remember to is a “defense of design” section in README.~md~rst
Here is the approach we went with and here are all the other things they are gonna ask about and we tried and they didn’t work
I also saw that if I have a hard time coming up with a name for the thing it’s because it’s doing too much or it’s doing the wrong thing. Also if it’s an ugly hack it should have a name that makes the caller feel dirty using it, like rust’s unsafe
@djsundog Also let's not pretend that these real-life electronics were anything less than sick as hell aesthetically.
“we’ve added a new layer of abstraction to the thing that you’ve already been doing! it makes it better!”
how?
“we’re opinionated!”
GTFO of here with this bullshit