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The Slow Death of the Power User

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Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#81

Post by johnnyanmac »

blauditore wrote: post #54

That's... Normal. Technology has always been moving towards higher-level abstractions. In terms of software, many engineers nowadays know how to code in high-level languages like JS or Java, while maybe 30-40 years ago many folks probably knew C, assembly, and all the low-level stuff like e.g. explicit memory management that most modern devs never deal with.

How abstract before it becomes a problem? these days they want to outsource thinking itself to technology. At that pare, are we failing DeCarte's "I think, therefore I am".

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#82

Post by pibaker »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #80
pibaker wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the depressing part in modern (western) society Do you think the average medieval farmer was questioning how everything around him worked while he worked day and night trying not to starve? Do you think today the average Japanese person knows more about water supply than the average American? This is such a weirdly romantic view about the past that I don't know where to even start. > Food comes from trucks d…

>Do you think the average medieval farmer was questioning how everything around him worked while he worked day and night trying not to starve? I think the average medieval farmer understood how to harvest food and draw water, yes. This isn't as esoteric as using SSH in 2026. Knowing where your necessary resources come from should be basic knowledge. For a more modern context of why: I hope people don't simply rant ab…

The medieval populace wouldn't blame food shortage on Joe Biden for sure. They would just blame the Jews instead.

Or maybe they would take it as divine punishment. Who knows.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#83

Post by johnnyanmac »

pibaker wrote: post #82
johnnyanmac wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you think the average medieval farmer was questioning how everything around him worked while he worked day and night trying not to starve? I think the average medieval farmer understood how to harvest food and draw water, yes. This isn't as esoteric as using SSH in 2026. Knowing where your necessary resources come from should be basic knowledge. For a more modern context of why: I hope people don't simply rant ab…

The medieval populace wouldn't blame food shortage on Joe Biden for sure. They would just blame the Jews instead. Or maybe they would take it as divine punishment. Who knows.

They would understand the foot shortage came from bad crop yields or low trade.

But sure from there they would blame the bad weather causing that on their respective religion's directive. Or some other group for lacking resources they desired.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#84

Post by lamontcg »

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…

> Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from.

Yeah, but at some point you need a plumber who at least has a passing understanding of where it comes from, and more importantly knows how to fix any problems you may have with your plumbing and its connection to municipal water/sewer.

And there needs to be someone employed somewhere who understands the whole municipal water supply and sewer system and how it is engineered and all the problems that it has.

Also, it is good to have the intellectual curiosity so that you could at least take a stab at it off the top of your head, and you wouldn't be averse to learning about it, if it suddenly became relevant to your life.

And there is a difference between the person who will hit a high priority "bug" in their life and will grind on it until they get it fixed, learning whatever they need to in the process, and people who just get stuck and try to avoid the problem.

As an example from work, I've been dumped into an open source codebase that I had zero familiarity with (keepalived) and found a missing ntohl() bug that affected Solaris/sparc servers (explaining quite nicely why it didn't affect Linux once the bug got found). And I did this when we were shipping keepalived in our product, fixing it under an extreme time crunch, and rescued a large contract with a Bank. This wasn't even a product that I was actively working on as a developer anymore either, but the devs on the product weren't familiar enough with C hacking.

I get the feeling that "kids these days" would just say "I dunno, Solaris is just cursed".

And that is an out of date, overly specific technological problem, but you can probably update that with any of the popular blog posts on this site where someone digs into some highly specific problem to find some incredibly detailed problem resolution. There's still people doing that. The stories are fairly popular. But it is weird to see so much "I don't need to know, and I don't need to care" sentiments on "Hacker" News in response to the (admittedly AI generated) title article.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#85

Post by QuercusMax »

teekert wrote: post #60
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…

I feel a certain uncomfortableness when I don't know these things. It's annoying, and yet it brings me many things as well. When I drive off in my car, I half visualize the clutch plates coming into contact with each other etc etc etc. But my kids call any internet connection WiFi. My wife didn't understand why she couldn't print with the WiFi switch off (back when we had switches). And every time I try to tell them…

I just blew my college sophomore's mind when I showed them that it's literally 10x faster to transfer data over Ethernet than over wifi. They literally had no idea that hardwired cables are massively faster and more reliable than wireless.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#86

Post by QuercusMax »

frizlab wrote: post #53
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…

> What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out? Curious coincidence, I was literally thinking yesterday: “but why does the water come out of the tap?” I self-answered “must be the pressure somehow” but did not dig much more…

Water is pumped to a water tower which is up high. From there it's just gravity plus siphon type effects.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#87

Post by QuercusMax »

koenvdb wrote: post #40
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…

> 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)…

Either read the source code if you have it, or read the docs and do your best. That's how it worked when I was learning to code as a middle schooler in the early 90s.

In grad school I worked on TinyOS, and my advisor told me to print out the source code and spend a week reading it until I knew how to make the changes I wanted.

When I worked at Google there was no external documentation to use, so if you couldn't find the docs, you better figure out how to read the source. They have very good code search there.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#88

Post by rkagerer »

Author mentions a "curated experience" is part of the consumption paradigm on mobile. That's actually one point I wish existed, but IMO does not. I would pay good money for a version of the Play Store curated by other power users like myself. Which let's me filter out all the apps with adds, micropayments, unexpected permissions, etc.
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