Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

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cocktailpeanuts

There are tons of people who would appreciate this feature and I only brought this up because these people will definitely appreciate something like this.

Reading through your comment i can already imagine you sitting there probably thinking all these inferior "normies" who don't deserve to enjoy convenience in their lives because they don't know tech.

Well, everybody on this site is a "hacker" yet not everybody has time and discipline to devote to doing this all the time. And I don't care for learning every single esoteric automation features on my computer. It's kind of weird giving a positive comment and getting all these negative snarky comments back.

Lastly it's stupid to think "Productization" is some evil thing. Productization simply means take some process that's useful and make it easily accessible for other people. It doesn't even mean you sell it for money. If you don't care about improving other people's lives, that's fine, but don't be so condescending about people who genuinely appreciate the idea and just wanted to provide some positive feedback.

I suspect you may have misunderstood the spirit of my comment. I believe that computing should be accessible to everyone, and can guarantee that the harsh thoughts you put in my head are far from my intent.

Let's say you want to enable someone to make coffee at home. One could imagine two different approaches:

a) you give that person a bean grinder, some equipment to match their taste (e.g. an espresso machine or a chemex), and teach them how to make a tasty cup of coffee in their kitchen.

b) you give that person a nespresso machine, and tell them to order capsules once a month from amazon.com

Computing used to be much more like the former approach, philosophically. The foundations that we rely on today were about small, composable, modular programs, operating using well documented open standards and protocols. This approach gave us things like UNIX/POSIX and the internet.

However, mainstream computing has shifted towards much more about the latter kind of approaches. You stay in the walled gardens, you have no way to directly manipulate your data, and you're reliant on _features_ to get anything done.

In our previous coffee example, "pulling a long shot" would have to be a "feature" on the Nespresso machine, that the designers at Nespresso decided to surface on their machine as a switch of some sort for the end user to access. For approach a) though, it's something you can naturally do as part of the process.

One could also argue that a) is also maybe more aligned with the hacker ethos.

That's where my frustration at overzealous productization in computing comes from.

That's not even getting into how approach b) tends to be consistently worse for the environment and society.

What I think is interesting is that this simple technique, which was so obvious to me having grown up with computers before there were filesystems, really - is now an interesting technique worth productising. To me, that indicates a bit of amnesia in the industry, specifically around how to be a productive user of file systems. If only there had been less intention to eradicate filesystem proficiency in generations of users by certain computer manufacturers, who wanted to productize things like that, away from the user ...

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