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The Slow Death of the Power User

fireborn.mataroa.blog

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Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#41

Post by AlecSchueler »

dig1 wrote: post #21

> 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…

> 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.

I feel like when I was twenty two I would have been very surprised if more than a couple of my peers knew this stuff.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#42

Post by lapcat »

igloopan wrote: post #35
lapcat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > N…

> That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe.

But it’s not justification. You made your argument worse, not better, by citing em dashes and quotes.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#43

Post by jollyllama »

poisonborz wrote: post #4

I 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.

Food trucks are all the rage.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#44

Post by mattmanser »

tjhorner wrote: post #27
xyzzy123 wrote: post #17

Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from. Try asking someone "What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out?" you might be surprised how many people don't know and most importantly don't care . The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise…

The post raises several points that I wholeheartedly agree with, but the framing is poor and honestly kind of elitist (or just short-sighted). Maybe to the point that I think much of it might just be bait, lol. For example: > 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 t…

They"ve basically got the dates pretty wrong. It's make sense if they'd said 35 years ago, that's when it was common to know that.

I'd say almost all of that became redundant for the average person with windows 3.1 release (34 years ago) or, maybe, more windows 95 (31 years ago).

I remember desperately trying to get two computers to talk to each other so we could play doom in the early 90s, whatever black magic we had to do seemed to take hours to get working.

The time we had 3 or even 4 computers playing Baldurs Gate together I swear we started trying to get the computers talking at 7pm and didn't start playing till 10 (but it was amazing).

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#45

Post by reconnecting »

sumtechguy wrote: post #39
reconnecting wrote: post #31

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.

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…

What I'm saying is that being a 'power user' is not a static thing, it's relative. It changes and evolves (or downgrades) over time.

But most importantly, and what the author missed, is that it works both ways. I know how to connect to a BBS, but I was literally paralysed by the fact that there is no LAN game in Counter-Strike 2. Where is LAN?! Why do I need a Steam account for every player to play with friends sitting in the same room? Why would I even need external servers for this?

idk, it's a modern world and I don't belong to it, so perhaps we should accept the slow death of 90s or 00s 'power users', and the rise of new 'power users' of the 20s, who won't even know what floppy disk icon on the Save button means.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#46

Post by Terr_ »

> “I have nothing to hide” is the response is the response, which is not an argument — it’s a thought-terminating cliché that makes it socially awkward to point out that privacy is not about criminality, it’s about power. Whoever holds your behavioral data holds power over you. That’s true whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

To put a slightly finer point on it for puncturing the cliche, "needing to hide" has a time-component. Everyone has something to hide from a potential future, whether they're good at predicting it or not.

I "have nothing to hide" about my religion today, but when if extremists seize power and declare "death to apostates", the exact same fact-pattern will very very much need hiding.

> The industry isn’t going to fix this. Every financial incentive points the other way.

Cory Doctorow has a hopeful--perhaps over-hopeful--idea that a disruptive wedge can be created, where a profit-motive will promote breaking the system of control. Specifically, that some place with a legal haven for tinkerers and wall-breakers will reap benefits from letting them openly sell device-unlockers, export-your-data tools, etc.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#47

Post by kittikitti »

Thank you for sharing this article. I found it very insightful while eloquently proposing root causes. In particular, I found this bit to be wonderful: "The smartphone didn’t just shift computing to a smaller screen. It replaced a computing paradigm — one built on ownership, modification, and composability — with a consumption paradigm built on managed access, curated experience, and dependency."

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#48

Post by igloopan »

lapcat wrote: post #42
igloopan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. > N…

> That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe. But it’s not justification. You made your argument worse, not better, by citing em dashes and quotes.

It is justification. AI writing has certain characteristics more frequently than non-AI writing. These in particular are easy to see and cite as justification. Others like the use of the "it's not X, it's Y" construction and the way that adjectives are used are noticable too but not as easy to point as justification because longer explanations are necessary.

Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as potential signs of AI writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:AICURLY https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:AIDASH

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#50

Post by [deleted] »

mattmanser wrote: post #44
tjhorner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post raises several points that I wholeheartedly agree with, but the framing is poor and honestly kind of elitist (or just short-sighted). Maybe to the point that I think much of it might just be bait, lol. For example: > 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 t…

They"ve basically got the dates pretty wrong. It's make sense if they'd said 35 years ago, that's when it was common to know that. I'd say almost all of that became redundant for the average person with windows 3.1 release (34 years ago) or, maybe, more windows 95 (31 years ago). I remember desperately trying to get two computers to talk to each other so we could play doom in the early 90s, whatever black magic we ha…

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