The Slow Death of the Power User
25 points by qznc
25 points by qznc
Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level. Ask them to tell you the difference between their router’s public IP and the local IP of their laptop. Ask them to open a terminal and list the contents of a directory. These are not advanced topics. Twenty years ago these were things you learned in the first week of any serious engagement with computers. Today they’re exotic knowledge that even a lot of working software developers don’t have, because you can go a long way in modern development without ever leaving the managed abstractions your platform provides.
I was alive twenty years ago. (To be more precise, I was 37 twenty years ago.) This simply isn't true. In fact, it's completely, wildly false. It wasn't true twenty years ago, and it wasn't true forty years ago, and I doubt that it has been even remotely true for most people over (almost?) the entire time that personal computers have been a significant part of our lives.
When I was in college in the 80s, I had a Brother word processor. I had zero idea how it worked. It was a tool. I wrote papers on it. (I loved that machine. I still kind of miss it.)
When I was in grad school in the early 90s, I got an Apple laptop for the first time. A roommate taught me how to use a modem to connect to the library catalog remotely. We all used pine for email at the time. I had no idea how any of that worked. Neither did anyone else. You got instructions from the university's IT department, and you followed the guidance on the handout. (I still called them "dittos" then. Far out, right?)
In the later 90s, I wrote my dissertation in WordPerfect, like all the other humanities people I knew. It was terrible, and I missed my Brother word processor. But I could use a series of incantations to type ancient Greek into it. Then, very suddenly (for me) in 1997, there was an internet. I assume that then, as now, it was a series of tubes. I never heard or read the words "SSH," "DNS," or "terminal." I opened a browser, went to Alta Vista, and searched for stuff. Again, it was a tool—and a place to play. Again, I had zero idea how any of this worked. I learned what I needed to, and I got by.
Why do people assume that the things they know are central to the lives of all other people? It's just silly, to be blunt.
Edit: maybe "any serious engagement with computers" is doing a lot of work. In that case, maybe it's not completely, wildly false, but it's still a huge stretch.
Mid-twenties here. I, and all of my colleagues, know these topics, because all of us need to know these topics for the work we do: low-level software security testing. Outside of this, many people don't know such things -- but they also don't need to, because their work does not revolve around understanding the mechanism, just the abstractions that we have spent considerable effort making safe. I fail to see how this is harmful, to allow people to specialize on what is relevant to them.
Drop me in front of a webpage, and I could not tell you how the developer's design works. But I can tell you all about how it got to me, and a lot about how its render pipeline works. Drop me in front of a piece of hardware, and I cannot tell you how it works or what it does, nor how to necessarily communicate with it. Give me an interactive shell on the device and I might be able to tell you what I can do with it. We all work with the abstractions we know, and I can only imagine that it has, for the largest part of computing history, worked that way, simply because the mechanism is oftentimes simply irrelevant to accomplishing an objective. When it isn't, I ask a colleague who specializes and build a mental model with them.
I agree with the broad thrust of this, and it's upsetting to me. I would like to see something more in the nature of a positive vision for how computers and the culture around them should work... I've been gradually coming to the conclusion that I'm going to need to write it myself. :/
I think I've seen that future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE (Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo) or its more hypothetical friend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq7xab6X4To&t=60s (HellOps) although I don't think that story is farcical:
Pod out of Service without killing itI recognize my comment is very developer-centric but those do classify as power users, IMHO
Am I crazy or this reads like LLM-generated text? The structure, the pace, the turnarounds, it all feel eerily… manufactured? Idk it’s exhausting even to consider this now. I’m tired, hoss…
I think it might be padded using an LLM but the entire post is standard premise-analysis-conclusion. On the other hand the topic has been beaten to death through the years so it's possible you can prompt an LLM to write something like this.
The concept of a filesystem — of hierarchical storage that you own, that lives on hardware you control, that persists independently of any company’s servers — is genuinely alien to them.
Dear sir, filesystems have nothing to do with how computers work. They've always been a UX layer; simple enough for humans to understand, efficient enough for early memory-constrained computers.
They're a compromise, and neither "native" to computers (who navigate using inodes or b*trees or whatever) or humans (who much prefer collections of overlapping tags and metadata search)
Subsequent UX compromises can in no way be required to respect these limitations forever, especially as computers get increasingly capable.
LLMs are a new UX compromise, one that gives computers (a semblance of) human language. Right now we're using them to build React apps faster, which is a lot like driving places by always putting your horse in the truck bed.
I'm excited to see where things are going, even though I dread the effects they might have on society in general and me in particular.
I intend to come back to this, but at first glance, this hurts my eyes to look at. Something about the font/contrast combination is bad. The pure white 255,255,255 text against a mid/dark grey feels harsh.