The Slow Death of the Power User

Modern IT has become a ubiquitous commodity, much like the car. You don't need to know how an engine works to drive; while that knowledge might make you more efficient, it isn't strictly necessary to get from A to B. Besides, most twenty-two-year-olds ten years ago didn't know how to use ssh, either.

However, if you want to call yourself an engineer (and work in the field), you must understand the underlying mechanics. IMHO if you want to defeat a competitor today, you don’t need industrial espionage - you just have to cut their internet and/or AI subscriptions. Modern vibe engineers would struggle to function.

> The man page is dead for most users. The RFC is unread by most developers who depend on the protocols it describes.

Well, those who are accustomed to using man pages still use them today. I find them far more accurate than whatever an AI might spit out at any given moment. As for RFCs, they were always read by a small population - either those implementing the protocols or the few of us who like to brag about obscure technical details.

> You can now write complete programs without understanding what a single line of them does... until something goes wrong in production at two in the morning and you are completely without tools to respond.

I’m not worried about this. When things go south, there will still be experts who will know how to fix them. But since those experts will be fewer and farther between, they will likely charge $1k/hr, and rightfully so. If you are in that field, more power to you! :D

I was ambivalent about it. The way the arguments are presented don't read as much like AI.

Perhaps it was indeed just for proofreading. Although I know that MS Word turns single dashes into em-dash. Maybe they used Word when writing the thing?

It's one of the reasons I am sort of abandoning dashes when writing and using instead semicolons.

Oh for fuck’s sake. Can we please stop with this nonsense? You must think my blog is LLM-generated too.

I’m so tired of the illiterate denying the humanity of the literate. How do you think LLMs were trained? On human writing.

> 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.

What? Computers were everywhere in all kinds of domains by 2006, but you can bet that your average accountant of the time would most likely not be able to SSH into a server (nor should they need to...) I guess it really depends on what the author qualifies as a "serious engagement with computers."