The Slow Death of the Power User
fireborn.mataroa.blog
The Slow Death of the Power User
1–10 of 102 posts
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#2On one hand, it's a "people problem"... on the other, it's a software problem too.
"back in my time", you'd have some c code, one .conf file, you'd "make", edit the config (or hope it works with default settings), run, and you'd have a program running. Now you need five different services running, it comes in a docker, running on some random port, proxied to another random port, the configs are split into 12 yaml files, plus it needs 7 gigs of hdd space...
..sometimes providing the same functionality as the old 300kB software of the yesteryear.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#3The purpose of what he describes is to preserve the structure of denial around the implications of possessing, and the consequences of using, any or all technology. Politics as found -- war, law, class, etiquette -- depends entirely upon that structure of denial.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#4I 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.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#5You see it in how services have twisted the meaning of "saving" something. Very rarely does it mean actually putting a file on your computer for you to access on your own terms as long as you have possession of it. More often, it just means associating something to your account, which is ultimately subject to the whims of the service provider.
It's engineered dependency.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#6I see this even within the developer community, people who understand systems programming is becoming rarer and rarer. Developers are constantly looking for GUI solutions and don't bother understanding how to script. I think this likely stemmed from a similar issue as introducing the smartphone, we software engineers separated the disciplines of DevOps from Software Engineering, this led to people not caring about the infrastructure at the background of their solutions.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#7Weird blog, I imagine the next one would be:
These are the type of persons who would get a girlfriend without a master degree in psychology.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#8"Don't Make Me Think" wasn't descriptive. It was prescriptive that became descriptive. An entire professional class, PMs and UX designers, adopted as axiomatic that cognitive effort is friction, friction is bad, therefore understanding is a design failure.
Then they spent 25 years engineering understanding out of every single interaction, and now point to the resulting learned helplessness as validation. "See? Users don't read!" No, you spent decades training them not to by ensuring that reading was never rewarded and never necessary.
My read has always been it was painful for a certain type of PM to think and so they assumed "minds like mine" and ... here we are.
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#9Am I the only one who feels this is AI generated?
Re: The Slow Death of the Power User
#10On one hand, it's a "people problem"... on the other, it's a software problem too. "back in my time", you'd have some c code, one .conf file, you'd "make", edit the config (or hope it works with default settings), run, and you'd have a program running. Now you need five different services running, it comes in a docker, running on some random port, proxied to another random port, the configs are split into 12 yaml fil…
I think this is also a big part of it, the whole "system" has become so complex and broken into so many different service layers that no one can be a power user over it all. Which somewhat resembles the "death" of the power user