Comment by unsignedqword | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unsignedqword | Hacker News Reader

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I understand that you don't think computers should be effectively reduced to becoming 'black boxes' to most people, but I wouldn't necessarily agree that the simplification and abstraction of operating systems to average joes isn't exactly a bad thing. It's been happening for a very long time and I would think some of those advancements - inteded for the convenience of these 'average joes' - ended up gladly used by developers anyway. I feel it would be wrongful to call the wider audience 'idiots,' - these average joes might not be so average after all and have special understanding in fields that I don't.

Another thing is not just handling adults, but younger people. Of course there are some kids that may take a keen interest in OS internals, but then there are those who will keenly take advice they see on the internet to delete System32, so there's the need for some degree of 'safety'. Although I suppose I'm extrapolating a little, as it's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot in most OSes nowadays anyway, in spite of the default protections Windows/macOS offers.

> I feel it would be wrongful to call the wider audience 'idiots,' - these average joes might not be so average after all and have special understanding in fields that I don't.

My opinion is that the average Joes and Janes are not idiots. We're just turning them into idiots. They're much smarter than the industry practice would give them credit for. Ask them to learn something, and they will. Just that nobody today wants to expect learning from people. Everything is supposed to be so simple, that it can be mastered in 5 seconds of initial exposure. Of course this goal isn't possible except by dumbing the thing down so that there's nothing your product can do that can't be mastered in 5 seconds.

You have a good point about abstraction - it isn't a bad thing. We reduce insane amounts of complexity to the level a human mind can handle by layering abstractions on top of more abstractions. But the particular example of "features" like hiding file extensions or full paths is something else. It's creating a second, disconnected set of user-facing abstractions that obscure the real ones. The OS is literally lying to you in an attempt to make itself "less scary", but in the process taking away your chances of building a working mental model.

Average Jane and Joe aren't dumb, they can figure stuff out. Just look at anyone who ever did anything with accounting - they're all probably Excel whizzes. Your random teenager can likely hack the Steam client in and out. People can learn stuff when they're expected to. They're not dumb. We're making them dumb though.

> Of course there are some kids that may take a keen interest in OS internals, but then there are those who will keenly take advice they see on the internet to delete System32, so there's the need for some degree of 'safety'.

Honestly, that's how you learn. In today's age of cloud-backup-everything, there's little pain and all gain when a kid bricks the OS and has to figure out how to reinstall it from scratch.

I often imagine a dystopian future where the only children interred in software engineering are the children of software engineers, because they are the only people who'll have full access to their machines, or use anything other than glorified read only devices like tablets.

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