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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#171

Post by perl4ever »

stormbrew wrote: post #147
perl4ever wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think vastly more people are reading and writing due to modern computer literacy, and I can't stand the way they are changing the meaning of words because they don't read books . It appears vocabulary is increasing, but people get their vocabulary from inadequate online dictionary entries and/or peers that don't read books either. So to me, because I grew up reading books, it's incredibly aggravating because it see…

What, precisely, makes it inferior?

When people look up and misunderstand the meaning of a word, they base their interpretation on what they already know. So they are likely not to absorb a new concept but only get a new way of saying an old one. That means that the redefined word is likely to be an inferior tool on average.

It's also the case that just losing the utility of something hurts, regardless of the merits of the replacement so it's subjectively inferior to someone like me - getting older and crankier, you know.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#172

Post by pm90 »

nostrademons wrote: post #165
unqueued wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want that world back at all, and actually I never grew up with any of that. But, there is a very simple and direct relationship between fuel in, movement out. And most new cars can also estimate how far they can go on how much fuel. I think that this is actually the perfect relationship, and any more optimization at this point would be harmful.

I'm looking forward to self-driving electrics. You hop in the car, it takes you to your destination, and then you hop out. At off-peak hours they drive themselves to a car farm far away from the city, and recharge. The car service handles all maintenance. There's this phenomena where anything invented before you turn 10 is just part of the natural order of things, anything between 10 and 30 is a great new opportunity…

You're making some great points here. I'm curious to know how you're handling this part:

> I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30

I do agree with you mostly and most younger coworkers don't seem to want or care about hacker news. I remember when I was in college and found this website, it was the greatest discovery ever and there was so much interesting content. But (purely anecdotally) the viewership seems to be limited to that demographic.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#174

Post by perl4ever »

pm90 wrote: post #169
stormbrew wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, precisely, makes it inferior?

Not the OP, but will take a crack: A divergence from the acceptable usage of words makes comprehension difficult, and can cause miscommunications, especially where precision is required; which happens often in a business environment. Even in a misunderstanding of proper usage can severely change the intent behind the messaging, if most communication happens over text (Slack/Email etc.). That being said... if I'm read…

I don't think impurity is what I'm complaining about. What I preferred was when most of the people defining written English by their usage were more of an elite. It's not about who those people were or how exactly they used language, just that they read a broad variety of published material and not just contemporary communications.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#175

Post by ubercow13 »

scarface74 wrote: post #132
tomc1985 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Files still doesn't have the concept of a 'home folder' on the local device. I heard they even had this feature in early betas but took it away.

You can download a 3rd party app that lets you use your local storage as a document location. https://medium.com/codezillas/how-to-add-a-local-folder-to-y...

No need any more, you can create a folder in the home folder without any link to any particular app

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#176

Post by ken »

cproctor wrote: post #74

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth ex…

Is it a problem that students don't know abstraction layers lower than they regularly use, or that we're collectively climbing up the abstraction ladder as the years go by? I'm a full generation older than these students, and most of my colleagues can't read or write assembly language. I've worked with programmers who have never even written a compiler, database, or central processor.

I'd say we're seeing that filesystems weren't a great user experience, at least the way they've been implemented in the past, and I'd place the blame on the other side. The design of computer systems today isn't the only possible way to design them. They exist to serve users. If our old systems aren't well-liked by users, and we spend all our efforts hiding their inherent design so people can actually use them, maybe our foundation is wrong.

Even the most technical people in the world have been trying to replace our filesystems with object databases for a few decades now, and plenty of people use only "services" (database in the cloud) or "apps" (database on phone). Isn't it possible filesystems have outlived their usefulness? For a lot of people, they really only exist to boot the OS.

Computer science students need to learn about filesystems and C and Unix, sure, like cooks and carpenters need to learn US customary units.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#177

Post by pm90 »

unqueued wrote: post #109
jedimastert wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow. I very rarely send emails at all outside of work. Maybe one or two support emails. I also fairly rarely create zip files either. Of course, I know how to do these things, but I don't really do it anymore. I haven't needed to, for the sam…

> I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow. I suppose, in the same way that people using crayons are moving away from the printed word. > Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a goog…

I think its important to stress on this part:

> and meet them half way?

In other words, OP is not suggesting that you force students to use another method, but work with them to understand what makes sense to them. In your specific anecdote, if the teacher showed the students how to share hyperlinks, or how to get text dumps and share them instead of screenshots, maybe they would respect her for that.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#178

Post by jwilk »

elliekelly wrote: post #33
cosmojg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a better reading experience and for those using Cloudflare's DNS: https://outline.com/yU64Cu

I do use Cloudflare’s DNS but I’ll admit I don’t know much/anything about how it really works... can you explain why the DNS server would matter here? Somewhat related, I have made a deal with the devil and use Comcast and, until yesterday, I was using their combo modem/router. Comcast doesn’t let you change the router’s DNS settings (which are, of course, set to Comcast servers) but I was under the impression that t…

archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#179

Post by Causality1 »

jedimastert wrote: post #92
unqueued wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years. She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos, spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in zip files, and email them to her. Students have no idea how to do this. Some of th…

I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow. I very rarely send emails at all outside of work. Maybe one or two support emails. I also fairly rarely create zip files either. Of course, I know how to do these things, but I don't really do it anymore. I haven't needed to, for the sam…

I don't need to compress anything either, but zips/rars are good for getting around other types of limitations. For example, splitting a collection of files into chunks to send one by one or to increase copy speed. As an example, my archive of downloaded comics takes well over an hour to copy onto a drive as file folders, but as a single archive file it takes only a few minutes and I can unzip it on whatever device I'm putting it on.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#180

Post by ubercow13 »

beefhash wrote: post #18
ACS_Solver wrote: post #12

One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - TV episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Then I just connected t…

I'm not sure if this is only an about accessibility to non-tech people. Think about it: You can't get files on your device in a useable format anymore. This means piracy becomes exponentially harder to consume (i.e. you can't use your iPad [easily] as a reader for your pirated ebooks). Quite honestly, that's a stroke of genius and likely a secondary motivation for this workflow.

This is not true any more. I can go to a music blog on my iPhone, download a zip of an album to my phone using the Safari download manager, unzip it in place with the core iOS file manager, move the resulting folder into the media library folder for my music player app, and play it on my device.

I can later open up the iOS file manager and find the mp3 for my new favourite song in my music player's folder, click Share and send the file to my friend on Telegram or whatever.

iPhones are pretty reasonable piracy tools now.

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