I'm curious why SSH and DNS, and not ATDT or ATZ?
In my time, not being able to read assembler code meant you weren't a power user.
The Slow Death of the Power User
31–40 of 102 posts
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#32I agree with the article fully, but: > These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.
An important difference is that governments are elected, but private companies (in some cases monopolies) are not
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#33I find the author is projecting heavily having entirely bought into the unix way of doing things he's become his own jailer. That a filesystem is somehow "fundamental' to the function of a computer. Nope, it's an abstraction designed to help the programmer, it should be thrown away. These kind of unified approaches are going to fail to specialization every time. There are endless things to understand, deprecated tech is at the very end of that list.
If it was only the Apples' and Google's who thought sandboxed apps were the future you might have a point, but most tech savvy people arrive at something that looks and awful lot like sandboxed apps. You see power, most see[1] a[2] dumpster-fire[3]
: [1] ; ls /usr/lib | wc -l
: [2] ; ls /usr/bin | wc -l
: [3] ; find /usr/share/man/man* | wc -l
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#34So true that's why I love the Google? interview question: how does a modern browser work (basically one needs to understand the entire journey from a file on the server, through DNS, and browser rendering engine). Sadly, this is becoming lost to many folks.
Pre-AI, I worked with Devs that didn't even know what an HTTP request is (difference between GET/POST/etc) - we were building an enterprise software where higher level libraries abstracted that away..With AI, it's becoming even worse now - just ask Claude
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#35[flagged]
> The user's other blogs also have the same telltale em dash usage and usage of “” instead of "". 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.
That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe.
I have no idea what your long form writing looks like. But can you look at something like this https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/if-you-recognize-me-in-pu... and seriously come out of it not thinking it's AI slop?
> The version of me you know — the writer, the ranter, the one who tears into accessibility failures or rips Linux a new one — that’s a persona.
> Not fake. Not dishonest. Just deliberate. It’s tuned for the internet, built to survive in a world that eats subtlety alive. It’s the volume turned up, the emotion sharpened, the thoughts sculpted until they’re worth reading.
Or perhaps the radically different stylistic decision of using emojis and using italics and boldface for emphasis in this older blog https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/hellcaptcha-accessibility... could be more convincing?
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#36I don't know if I agree. Look at modern application development: even building the most basic GUI application in any platform, but especially the web, is significantly more "power-user" than Visual Basic ever was.
People are still building these apps at every level of developer experience so the kids must be alright.
Yes people, in general, have less knowledge of file systems and networking now because things just work. Every LAN party as a kid took at least an hour of networking to get started. Now kids don't do LAN parties because everything is already networked by default. But there is also an order of magnitude more people doing these things now -- in the past those people just went without.
The vast majority most of knowledge I ever had from the time the author describes is obsolete now anyway. I can still remember so much but that's not going to help me with my React app.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#37[flagged]
I found the article tedious, even though I agree with its main point. However, the so-called “obvious” signs it was written by an AI—quotation marks and em-dashes—are within the ability of anyone with a Compose key (on Linux/BSD, ask your window manager or DE; on Mac, Karabiner; on Windows, WinCompose).
For the record, I am not an AI.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#38I agree with the article fully, but: > These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.
An important difference is that governments are elected, but private companies (in some cases monopolies) are not
I agree with the sentiment but to a certain degree you can vote with your currency. Also, in many places you can certainly vote for elected officials who are interested in using government tools to prevent and breakup monopolies.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#39I'm curious why SSH and DNS , and not ATDT or ATZ ? In my time, not being able to read assembler code meant you weren't a power user.
Most likely basically because the cut off for atdt being any use to most users was mid 1990s. I still like the fact that it is still being used millions of times per day by cell phones.
DNS and SSH were/are things 'techie' people know. I can assure you most people had no idea what their IP was or what a DNS was. Being the "hey my computer is acting kinda slow can you look at it" guy. It felt like they actively sought out to not know. Honestly cellphones and tablets have basically ended my endless side job of 'hey can you look at my computer'. Because they hid all of that techno junk that is interesting to me but to most people isnt.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#40> 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. 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, eith…
> 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.
True, but on the other hand, when I started programming (hell, even before the whole LLM craze began) and you took away my internet/stackoverflow/google I would also drastically lose productivity. Especially in my more junior years, and later, of course I could still write code, but if I had to figure out how a certain library worked or why a certain error in the auth layer happened, without internet I would be nowhere.