Asshole Design and Crappy Design

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This community covers both asshole designs and crappy designs.

Discuss manifestations of asshole designs whereby the design is deliberately anti-consumer. Manifestations of crappy designs are also welcome in this forum, which reflect poor designs that are not borne out of deliberate contempt for the consumer.

Use of these prefixes is encouraged:

[a/d] ← you are confident that the design is an Asshole Design

[c/d] ← you are confident that the design is a Crappy Design

[ObD] ← Obsolescence by Design (a specific variety of a/d).

Unprefixed titles are useful if you’re uncertain whether the design is deliberate.

Rules:

Please avoid posting web-related designs. Instead, post those in:

!assholedesign_web@infosec.pub

Related communities

!crappydesign@discuss.tchncs.de

Existence Rationale:

There are other communities for Asshole Designs and Crappy Designs, but all of the communities at the time of our founding exist only on centralized instances. We are currently the sole decentralized community of this kind. (update: another crappy design forum was recently found in the free-world-- see related communities above)

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activistPnk@slrpnk.net

[c/d] Lidl puts ~~fake~~ (atypically fancy) QR codes on their manuals (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/asshole_crappy_design@slrpnk.net

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The store chain #Lidl sells food and non-food items. All non-food items that come with a paper manual have this bogus QR code on the first page.

Normally it’s a very good practice to put a QR code on manual cover pages so people can trivially fetch an electronic copy. It’s especially useful in light of the fact that all the protectionist walled-garden manual websites that clobber search results tend to at least show a preview of the 1st page of the manual. You can then avoid going through all the hoops by going directly to the manufacturer’s repository.

WTF is Lidl thinking? They cover part of the QR code with a stick figure which breaks the QR code. I’m tempted to call them assholes but I suppose it could be incompetence.

Or is my QR scanner app just out of date? Is anyone able to decode the QR code attached to this post?

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[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The code just leads to https://www.lidl-service.com You might want to change your app thou, cause it worked with mine. I use Binary Eye, which is open source and for free.

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks for the clarification. So I guess they are doing something fancy that’s not widely compatible. I used the FOSS app from the Fdroid repo.

That said, it’s a shame the link is not directly to the manual. Lidl has many service hosts and searches are hit and miss. I sometimes have to try an IAN number on a few different hosts before the manual is found.

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 years ago

many years back, people were talking about “deep search” engines – crawlers can index web pages, but stuff in PDFs and in databases is hidden from them – crawlers have gotten better about PDFs, but databases are still limited to whatever front end was written for them