The Slow Death of the Power User

So true, but this has been going on for quite a while. Phones accelerated it and I have seem many of the concerns come up in IT where I worked.

A couple of examples:

1. My favorite, about 10 to 15 years ago. A user said this finance report always had 2147483647 in the total. This was looked at for weeks by another group.

After a few weeks our manager's manager called a meeting with everyone to look at the issue. Everyone had no idea what to do. When I saw the number it look real familiar to me. I then released it was the max value if an int. I told them the issue was its variable could was too small. A simple change fixed the issue.

Another old programmer who was not at the meeting asked me what happened. I showed him the report and he know instantly what it was too.

2. hex dumps, no one can read them now. About 25 years ago I was looking at a dump to see where a packed numeric value was, people who saw be thought it was magic. I had to explain how that number was read and what the hex represented.

I fear what will happen if AI becomes a real thing.

I agree with the author regarding Apple's walled-garden app distribution, but the analogy just doesn't work here.

Can't both of these be true?

Apple, Microsoft, and the evil tech companies us nerds love to vilify actually brought computing to the masses. In the early 1980s only tech geeks and corporations used computers—the Apple Macintosh changed that. In the early 1990s, only tech geeks and universities used the internet—Microsoft Windows changed that. In the mid 2000's, only tech geeks and business people used "smart" devices[1]—the iPhone changed that.

At every technological leap, business savvy entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to expand their markets by making their products enticing and useful to millions of more people than the previous generation of products did.

Unfortunately, this also came at the expense of the apparent "dumbing down" of computers, as every new abstraction hid more of the actual computer users had to interface with. And it also made things easy to control and lock down for corporations.

But I don't think we would've seen the explosion in the popularity of computing had this played out any other way.

I also disagree with the article's premise that power users are dying. We're still here, but we're a tiny minority of computer users now. We're both amused and frustrated at the insanity of where technology is taking us, and who is leading us there, but we still have our corners of computing we can retreat to.

And I also disagree that our favorite layer of computing is somehow more "real" than anyone else's. We scoff at Gen Z's inability to use the terminal as much as Baby Boomers scoffed at our inability to program in assembly. It's all relative. Except "AI". That is more of a disabler than an enabler, even though we're too hypnotized to see it now.

[1]: Yes, the BlackBerry was a cultural phenomenon, but it didn't have the capabilities nor mass appeal of the iPhone.

Power users, tinkerers, and so on were always extremely niche. By definition they were always only a few. They are still a few, probably in similar numbers as before.

The only thing that changed is that normal people now have access to computing devices. My wife does not want to know what a file system is, or what happens behind the scenes when an app is installed. She has no idea what a DNS is. Why would she? She is a lawyer with little interest in technology. She wants to use Instagram, not self-host a Matrix instance.

The normal users are the majority, and it's more profitable to serve those users than assholes like me who get pissy when they can't sideload an apk.

And I am okay with that.