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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Wow, great stuff. Tell her she did a fantastic job!

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By necessity, kids these days don't even need to learn what a file is. Videos are "on youtube". Documents are stored "in ms word".

The median developer even seems to have a very shallow understanding of how a computer actually works. And why would they, if they can just glue some Lambdas together to earn a buck?

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Praise those that look a bit deeper and really want to know how a thing works, how you can create something truly original with a tool, instead of simply using it along the happy path.

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Abstractions will start coming and they don't stop coming.

People in the late 90s/early 2000s probably complained about people like me who learned about HTML but only had a shallow understanding of how laying out a GUI and text rendering works. Which why would we, when we could just glue some HTML together to make a Chrono Trigger fan site?

Abstractions are fine. Everything we do is a dozen layers of abstraction on top of the metal anyway.

It just happens that people who know how the bits actually move underneath the abstractions tend to be better at solving problems related to those abstractions, than those who don't.

There are problems where understanding one level below the abstractions indeed leads to better solutions. However, I would argue that for a large set of problems, this is not the case. I think being aware of the abstraction (at multiple levels) would lead you to choose the right abstraction level for solving the problem. Of course, apart from school assignments, these abstraction levels are never given with a certain problem, so the more you know, the better you'll be able to see it.

To be honest, being able to think about things in multiple levels of abstraction is an advantage no matter what level you are (writing assembly or writing react)

It's because abstractions always leak. You are never completely insulated from the levels above or below you, nor sideways from the other components you interact with.

Exactly. I said a variation of this and some user flagged my comment.

Files are an abstraction that was very useful in the last several decades, but that just isn't as relevant in the current world. Those videos and documents you mentioned are likely managed via object storage in a distributed database, itself possibly using block storage directly, with no actual "file" in an old-school filesystem anywhere in sight.

I still personally cling to files personally, but I have no real reason to believe that they are a fundamental abstraction that is more true than cloud lambdas.

Sure, call them byte streams or blobs, that's fine too. I'm not disagreeing, but the point I wanted to make was that recently, people seem to have gotten the idea that their objects are semi-magical things locked into some app or some cloud service. Which is fine by the SaaS providers, or course. But it doesn't really foster understanding of the world around you.

Like kids thinking corn comes from the corn factory.

When I was a kid I used to think that pasta came from a pasta factory.

When we were children we were taught about the spaghetti harvest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

Hah, so young and foolish. Everyone knows pasta grows on trees: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8scpGwbvxvI

I think that part of the reason for my thinking is that I've recently been playing around with USD (Universal Scene Description). It is currently mostly based on files, but I find the underlying representation - of layers of atomic properties being composed together in a massive tree - to be very elegant, and it can be managed in a database without any files or blobs anywhere.

As another example: in the early web, behind every url was a file (with an actual file extension), but then we abstracted them into resources, and I feel that this coincided with an evolution of the field.

The concept of a file or blob will probably still be useful in some capacity for decades to come, but I wouldn't want it to hinder us from realizing better abstractions.

Until you try creating one of those videos, and now you need .movs and .mp3s and .pngs and a place to store the render output.

Files have a way to go yet.

Also, replying to myself, have you ever had a job? At a place? Where the primary function isn't coding?

Files are everywhere. They are every-thing. Except now, thanks to the disaster that is SharePoint, nobody has a fucking idea where they are any more. Because they've been abstracted away by some genius on the Teams team.

So nobody can find what they were just working on. Or they have no idea if the thing they find is the right version. It's a total shambles.

A hierarchical file system was boring, but it worked. And it still does.

Disclosure: I'm Johnny.Decimal and my business depends on files still being a thing.

I can't believe I'm seriously reading a discussion around the existence of files, what is this, an SNL sketch?

This very site is being served from a file system.

I don't think the comment was about the "file system", more like about the "humans" that dump every file they have to whichever folder they find available, and in the end of the day/week/month/year nobody knows where that file is.

And then the person leaves the company/org and this file will float in space (SharePoint) forever, never to be recalled again, never to be read again, alone, in a cold world (computer room).

Speaking about SNL sketch.. it reminded me James Cameron's reaction on the Papyrus sketch --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm1-k__LF40

>And then the person leaves the company/org and this file will float in space (SharePoint) forever, never to be recalled again, never to be read again, alone, in a cold world (computer room).

It will likely eventually be used as training data for an LLM and get an afterlife. Resistance is futile.

You’d be surprised! With many apps on the iPhone you can get by

Edit a video? Built in app, or your social media app is already loaded with that and you can save state instead of posting

Reverse a video? There’s an app for that which just goes back into your Photos app to let you tried that content

and so on

people dont need to have that mental model until something breaks

Right, but those videos are amateur and get 200 views on TikTok.

You want to produce a video of any quality at all? You're using files.

source quality and editing prowess doesnt matters at all for views

and you can edit in high quality on an iphone, higher than what’s necessary to view on an iphone

so, two premises that arent substantiated

Show me a million-view TikToker that does it unedited with no files.

They might exist. I don’t watch TT, I’m happy to be wrong.

But MKBHD, Justine, Mr. Beast, CGP Grey — you name ‘em, they use files to edit a production.

That’s such a random bar with such random outliers

Someone that doesn’t watch tiktok thinks a millions views is a lot there

Stick with YouTube your worldview isn’t relevant this decade

I am the last generation that helped my parents with technical setup and support, and my children with technical setup and support.

For the childrens' sake I hope so. Parental accumulated tech debt from not keeping up with developments is stressful to deal with!

Looking around though I think it's going to depend on what industry parents are in. There's still a lot of cluelessness around even among people who have grown up in an era of computers.

> By necessity, kids these days don't even need to learn what a file is. Videos are "on youtube". Documents are stored "in ms word".

Coincidentally, I've been thinking about that recently. My conclusion was that this couldn't be true, as it didn't make any sense.

I mean, even when using a phone or a tablet, the pictures they take or the videos they make end up somewhere. And that somewhere must be found, to be able to upload their take to the app or the website of their choice, or to be edited in an app before uploading.

So by extension, as that medium is "somewhere" on their device, they must be able, intuitively, to deduce the concept of a file?

And the take on the median developer frightens me even more. Somehow it feels akin to giving a soldier a firearm and letting him off to go and fight. Surely that's going to end in disaster?

    Praise those that look a bit deeper and really want to know how a thing works

Are people really that hermetic to understanding how the items and tool they use actually work?

> Are people really that hermetic to understanding how the items and tool they use actually work?

From what I've seen in some of our new recruits, yes. And those are technically educated people.

In general public, I've noticed that if stuff is working well, people don't tend to take a deep look into how it works.

I guess that's how different minds work right ? For example a curious mind wants to know how a thing behaves and how it works etc, whereas a visual mind would look for how it looks.

> From what I've seen in some of our new recruits, yes. And those are technically educated people.

That's really the part I can't wrap my head around.. The first thing I tend to do when I encounter something new -a new phone, a new bike, new tools, etc- is to understand how it works, to see what I can do with it, what its limits are, and most importantly, if I can bend those limits to suit my needs..

Accepting something at face value is really not an option. Partly because, more often than not, that would also mean settling for mediocrity as "quality" seems to be a secondary target nowadays. Thing will not work how you want, things will break and will need to be repaired, some artificial constraints might be need to be circumvented. And on the other hand, there is always something interesting that can be learned by being curious.

We are not all wired the same. But if the "technically educated" people are no longer "technical" than at least I shouldn't fear about future employability.

I'm 22, and most of my "not tech savvy" peers and anyone I've met under 20 have zero concept of how most tech actually works.

The pictures taken on your phone are not "stored somewhere", they are stored "in Google" or "in iCloud" or "in the photos app". Documents are similarily "in Google" or "in Word". There's no intuitive relation between photos and documents being the same thing on the filesystem, nor is there a concept of the filesystem at all. Generally, things jusr "work" (until they don't) and nobody asks any questions.

Now, I would like to clarify that this isn't a "darn kids these days" tangent, in fact, it's the opposite: darn adults these days won't teach their kids how to use the computer!

I would expect/really hope that when my generation starts having kids, computer literacy will start going up again. But for now, it's totally in the drain.

With respect to developers... Most of them know a lot less than they should. This is also an education/incentives problem.

> darn adults these days won't teach their kids how to use the computer!

I would bet most of the greyhaired people on here as well as those who were born at the time of the personal computer revolution didn't have parents who were proficient in a technology that was literally just made available to consumers yet those kids learn to use a computer on their own at a time where there was no internet available to check.

Why do kids suddenly need to be taught personally when they are the first generation to have the greatest amount of resources to learn how to use a computer available for free, in multiple teaching styles, multiple formats, at different levels of detail?

I feel this is related to the helicopter parent mentality that replaced parenting styles from earlier periods

It ain't that deep. Back then, you had to understand the lower level concepts in order to use the computer... Nowadays, you don't. It's that simple.

Still an abstraction if you don't understand how each of the parts of the computer work. And that level of detail goes all the way down to the actual implementation of the logic gates. One who could also include how your monitor display work and the keyboard.

Lower is not lowest.

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