141–150 of 271 posts
The capitalist system loves the CLI. That complicated series of commands you just ran? Copy and paste them into the Jira ticket so the junior employee who makes half your salary can run them next time.
If the solution to a problem is as simple as “copy and paste this command”, I want to hand that off to a junior employee so I can go do other things that require more creativity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way has it been “dumbed down?” I use modern MacOS as a Unix software development workstation and it works great- nothing substantial has changed in 20 years other than better package managers. I suppose they did remove X11 but it’s trivial to install yourself.
Not GP, but usually when people talk about the "dumbing down" of macOS, they refer to new apps and GUI elements adopted from iOS. macOS as an operating system has been "completed" for about 7 years. From that point, almost all additions to it have been either focused on interoperation with the iPhone (good), or porting of entire iPhone features directly to Mac (usually very bad). Another point of view is that macOS i…
This also applies to Windows, by the way (except it’s more like 20-30 years ago).
> Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows? I know about the ad-thing where the cast of Friends or whatever bought windows 95,…
Shouldn't this be written in Latin?
> Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows? I know about the ad-thing where the cast of Friends or whatever bought windows 95,…
Definitely. A new boxed OS version would often be the only updates anyone ever applied to their system. Even if you had Internet access, dial-up speeds and limited disk space meant downloading OS updates was often impractical. Even relatively small updates took forever to download.
There was also the relative costs of a computer. A $2,000 computer in 1995 would be about $4,000 in today dollars. Buying an OS update would be a relatively inexpensive way to upgrade the capabilities of your expensive computer without completely replacing it. Going from some Windows 3.1 release to Windows 95 would have been a nice upgrade in system stability for many people. Certainly not everyone but for many.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>On the command line, the context is obvious. But CLI contexts are only obvious if the computer user is already familiar with the CLI which biases the learned mind to perceive things as obvious when they really are not. A lot of CLI commands syntax are based on position instead of explicit argument names. E.g. creating file system links via CLI has opposite syntax positions in Linux vs Windows: - Linux: ln srcfile ta…
These days it’s easier to ask ChatGPT for the ffmpeg command line to do the thing you want, imo.
I'ts just that if I'm going to rely on someone else, I'd prefer for that someone else to be one of the people who has developed and applied their own expertise to that problem domain, rather than a statistical model that only actually knows how likely words are to appear in proximity to each other, and has no capacity to validate its probabilistic inferences against the outside world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These days it’s easier to ask ChatGPT for the ffmpeg command line to do the thing you want, imo.
When some big shit hits the fan either with ChatGPT or internet connections, the only people able to fix systems without an internet connection will be us, the millenials. The rest will be prompty fired in the spot.
People whose first exposure to computing was in the mid-'90s or later seem to have less depth of understanding of the fundamentals and less experiencing tinkering and using process of elimination to solve problems. I started encountering people who didn't understand certain fundamental concepts and had no exposure to the CLI, but still had CS degrees and were applying for developer positions, about 15 years ago.
The CLI has a massive blind spot in today’s operating systems: it knows nothing useful about events. Yet events are the primary way anything happens on a computer, whether it’s a user system or a server.
This just seems like an odd non sequitur.
One major advantage of the CLI is that instructions/fixes etc are very concise and can be easily communicated. If someone has a Linux system that needs a known fix, then it's trivial to send someone the commands to copy/paste into a terminal. However, if there's a known fix for a graphical program, then it suddenly becomes much harder to communicate - do you go for a textual instruction (e.g. click on the hamburger m…
That said, the best late 90s expression of the core advantage of the GUI over the TUI/CLI is that it demands less of the user:
"recognize and click" vs
"remember and type"
That seems very fundamental to me.
I have not seen as succinct expression of tradeoffs for V(oice)UI or L(LM)UIs