The Slow Death of the Power User:
There's a certain kind of person who's becoming extinct. You've probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.
That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care. In fact, most of them are actively celebrating the funeral while billing it as progress.
This isn't an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You've built a generation that can't extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
The average person who grew up with smartphones has a fundamentally broken mental model of computing. Not broken in the sense that they can't operate their devices — they can, with terrifying efficiency. Broken in the sense that their understanding stops at the glass. They know how to use apps. They do not know what apps are. They know files exist somewhere, in the cloud maybe, or possibly inside the app itself — the distinction isn't clear to them and they've never needed it to be.
[...] 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. Ask them to tell you the difference between their router's public IP and the local IP of their laptop. Ask them to open a terminal and list the contents of a directory. These are not advanced topics. Twenty years ago these were things you learned in the first week of any serious engagement with computers. Today they're exotic knowledge that even a lot of working software developers don't have, because you can go a long way in modern development without ever leaving the managed abstractions your platform provides.
And that's the real damage. It's not just end users who don't know this stuff. It's developers. People who write software for a living who've never had to think about what happens between their API call and the response. Who've never had to debug something at the network layer. Who've never had to read a full stack trace and understand every frame of it. Because the frameworks handle all of that, and the frameworks are good enough, and figuring out how things actually work is optional.
[...] The smartphone didn't just shift computing to a smaller screen. It replaced a computing paradigm — one built on ownership, modification, and composability — with a consumption paradigm built on managed access, curated experience, and dependency. And it did so with the full, deliberate, enthusiastic participation of every major platform vendor.
[...] All of this was sold as a feature. "It just works." Safety. Privacy. User experience. What it actually was, was control — Apple's control over what you could do with hardware you supposedly bought. And the genius move, the move that should make any serious observer furious, was convincing users that this control was being exercised on their behalf.
[...] Android played the same game with better PR. Google launched Android as an open platform, and for a few years it genuinely was. You could sideload APKs trivially. You could root your device and replace the entire OS. Manufacturers shipped custom builds. The ecosystem was messy and fragmented and occasionally awful and genuinely interesting. Then, gradually, systematically, Google started closing it down.
[...] The users who grew up on these platforms don't know what they're missing. They've never used a system where they were genuinely in control. The idea that you should be able to run arbitrary code on hardware you paid for is foreign to them — not rejected, but simply absent as a concept. They'll defend the restrictions without prompting because they've internalized the vendor's framing so thoroughly that they experience the cage as comfortable. "I don't want to root my phone, that sounds scary." Cool. You've successfully trained yourself to be afraid of ownership. The platform vendors are proud of you.
Technology culture used to celebrate technical competence. Not as gatekeeping, not as elitism — as genuine, infectious enthusiasm for understanding how systems worked. The BBS scene in the eighties ran on self-taught systems operators who understood their hardware and their network protocols well enough to build infrastructure that had never existed before. The early web had a "view source" ethos: you saw something interesting, you looked at how it was built, you learned from it, you made something of your own. [...]
These were not professional circles. You didn't need a CS degree. You needed curiosity and stubbornness and a tolerance for reading things that were too long and trying things that didn't work on the first ten attempts. The culture valued that and passed it down. Kids learned by watching, by lurking in forums, by getting their stupid questions answered by people who then expected them to answer someone else's stupid questions eventually. The knowledge propagated because the culture treated knowledge as worth propagating.
That culture didn't die because the knowledge became irrelevant. It died because it became economically inconvenient. The platforms that replaced the open internet — YouTube, Reddit, Discord, eventually TikTok — are consumption platforms. Their business model requires passive engagement. A user who spends three hours going down a documentation rabbit hole, breaking things in a terminal, and actually understanding something is worth less to them than a user who watches three hours of content. They don't ban technical material. They algorithmically deprioritize anything that demands active engagement, they reward passive consumption, and they shape the culture of their platform accordingly over years and years until the culture that emerges is one that treats passive consumption as the default relationship with technology.
[...] The man page is dead for most users. The RFC is unread by most developers who depend on the protocols it describes. Stack Overflow, which used to be a genuinely valuable resource for understanding why things behaved certain ways, has become a paste-and-pray operation: scan for a code snippet that looks related to your problem, copy it, run it, hope it works. When it doesn't, find another snippet. The understanding never enters the loop. LLMs have accelerated this to a degree that should make anyone who cares about software quality genuinely alarmed. You can now write complete programs without understanding what a single line of them does, and the programs will often work well enough in the happy path that you'll never know how thoroughly you don't understand what you've built until something goes wrong in production at two in the morning and you are completely without tools to respond.
This is what the culture has normalized: outcomes without understanding, solutions without models. And the response when you point this out is "okay but who has time for that," as if understanding were a productivity cost rather than the entire point.
The problem is not, primarily, that services collect data. The problem is that users have been convinced to treat pervasive surveillance infrastructure as benign or beneficial, and to respond to any criticism of it as paranoia, technical elitism, or failure to appreciate convenience. The learned helplessness is the crisis. The data collection is the symptom.
[...] The algorithm situation is the one that most directly affects daily life and receives the least serious scrutiny. Every major platform uses recommendation systems that are, in the most literal sense, making decisions about what information you encounter. What news exists in your world. Which of your friends' thoughts reach you. Which ideas get surfaced and which get buried. These systems are explicitly not neutral — they're optimized for engagement, which empirically correlates with outrage, anxiety, conflict, and tribal reinforcement, because those emotional states produce the behavioral signals the engagement metrics reward. The platforms are making your information diet worse on purpose, because worse converts to engagement, and engagement converts to revenue.
[...] We're losing the ability to audit. A person who understands their tools can notice when those tools start behaving badly. They can run a packet capture with tcpdump or Wireshark and see what their phone is actually transmitting. They can look at what their DNS resolver is returning. They can read the permissions an app requests and reason about whether those permissions make sense for what the app claims to do. They can notice when an update changes behavior in ways that benefit the developer at the user's expense. Most people have none of these capabilities and depend entirely on external review — journalists, academic security researchers, occasionally regulators — which is slow, incomplete, paid for by advertising revenue from the same companies being reviewed, and easily captured. [...]
We're losing resilience. Communities with high concentrations of technical competence can adapt when platforms change or die. They migrate. They self-host. They fork. When Google killed Reader, the technical community had self-hosted alternatives running within weeks. When Twitter's API became hostile to third-party clients, developers built ActivityPub implementations and federated alternatives. When a platform shifts its terms in ways that make it untenable, technically competent users can leave and rebuild elsewhere, carrying their data with them, because they understand their data as something they own rather than something that lives in the platform. Communities without those skills get stranded. [...]
We're losing the builder pipeline. This one compounds over time and the compounding is already visible. Power users become developers. Tinkerers become engineers. The kid who roots their Android phone and breaks it and fixes it and then writes a script to automate something the official interface doesn't support — that kid, ten years later, has intuitions about system behavior that you cannot get from a bootcamp and cannot get from building inside managed platforms your entire career. They know what it means when something is running slower than it should. They have hypotheses about failure modes before they start debugging because they've caused those failure modes themselves. They understand that abstractions are leaky and that the leak is usually where the interesting problems are.
Close off the tinkering and you close off the pipeline. What you get instead is a generation of developers who've only ever worked within platform constraints, who've never pushed against the edges of the abstractions they've been given, who treat framework behavior as ground truth rather than implementation detail. [...]
We're losing the adversarial capacity to hold platforms accountable. This is the one that matters most and gets talked about least. The open-source movement, the early security research community, the hacker culture in the original sense — these were not just about building things. They were a check on the power of institutions. [...]
[...] The industry isn't going to fix this. Every financial incentive points the other way. Confused, dependent users are more profitable than competent, autonomous ones. Lock-in is more valuable than interoperability. Opacity is more valuable than transparency. The architecture of modern consumer technology has been optimized against user competence with extraordinary success, and every quarterly earnings report validates the approach.
Regulators aren't going to fix it. They're fighting over app store fees while the underlying issue — the right of users to own and control the devices they've paid for — gets no serious legislative traction in most jurisdictions. The EU's Digital Markets Act has done some real work on interoperability requirements and is being fought by every affected platform with everything they have, because the platforms understand that the real threat is not the specific provisions but the principle that user autonomy is a value the law should protect.
Educators aren't going to fix it. Most digital literacy curricula teach application use. How to use Google Workspace. How to spot a phishing email. "Coding" in the form of block-based visual programming that produces no transferable understanding of how software actually works. The schools that teach real systems thinking, real network knowledge, real debugging skills — those schools cost money and are not where most people go.
The technical community is mostly not going to fix it either, because most of it has retreated into professional specialization and has largely given up on the broader project of maintaining technical literacy outside the profession. The open-source community does important work maintaining alternative infrastructure. It communicates almost entirely with itself.
So what's left is individual stubbornness. Which is not nothing. Organized individual stubbornness, pointed in the right direction, is how every important counter-cultural technical movement has worked.
Learn how your tools actually work. Not just how to operate them. Use the command line. Set up a home server and break it and fix it. Root a phone or, if you're on a platform where that's been made impossibly difficult, buy something where it isn't. Run a Linux install on bare metal and deal with the driver problems. Learn to read a network capture. Understand what your browser is sending with every request — the dev tools have been there the whole time. Host something yourself instead of using the managed service. Use open protocols where they exist: XMPP, ActivityPub, RSS, SMTP — these are old and unglamorous and they work and you own your data when you use them. Feed the federated alternatives even when they're worse than the centralized ones, because they're worse partly due to network effects and network effects respond to participation.
This is not about purity. Nobody is asking you to reject every managed service on principle or run Gentoo on everything. It's about maintaining enough technical competence that you are a participant in the systems you depend on rather than a permanent subject of them. It's about being able to make informed choices instead of having choices made for you by systems optimized for someone else's revenue.
The power user isn't dead. The skills exist. The communities exist — smaller, grayer, more scattered, fighting an institutional headwind that grows stronger every year. But they exist, and the knowledge is still propagating in the spaces the platforms haven't fully colonized.
The trajectory is bad. Every generation of new users arrives knowing less and expecting less. Every generation of new developers builds on more layers of managed abstraction and understands fewer of them. Every year it gets harder to explain why ownership matters, why understanding matters, why the convenience-for-control trade is a bad deal even when the convenience is genuinely excellent — because the people you're explaining it to have lived their entire lives inside the control and experienced it as freedom.
The obituary for the power user is being written right now. The people writing it are the same ones who sold you the phone, designed the app store, wrote the terms of service you didn't read, and built the algorithm that decided you didn't need to see this.
They are probably right about the timeline. They've been right about most things. The market has validated them at every step.
That is not an argument for giving up. It is an argument for being considerably angrier about it than most people currently are.
The full blog post is much longer and is a very interesting read.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by optotronic on Wednesday March 11, @01:45AM (29 children)
Sadly, this rings true. But are we overreacting? How is this different from the populace losing the ability to do long division by hand? The world progressed nicely when people switched to using calculators.
Maybe a better analogy is the popularization of the automobile. I imagine early owners had to be more able to diagnose and repair their cars. Nowadays most drivers have no clue about the processes involved when you press the accelerator or brake. And dealerships continually try to convince owners to come in and have this part or that serviced. Capitalism marches on, only the products change from time to time.
I'm not condoning the behavior or outcome. It's sad, except that it makes those of us in the know special again.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @02:20AM (5 children)
> I imagine early owners had to be more able to diagnose and repair their cars.
At least one early car owner's manual included driving instructions--because for most of their customers this was their very first car. No chance to get a driving lesson from family or friend, it was likely the first car in their town. The "how to drive" instructions were detailed and very well written. Anyone learning from that booklet would still have a good start on the fundamentals of car control today.
Computer analogy(??!!) My first home computer was an Apple ][ and the manual even included a listing of the system monitor code.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RS3 on Wednesday March 11, @02:28AM (1 child)
Ever look at the technical manual that came with original IBM PCs and XTs? IIRC full schematics, pinouts, signal timing diagrams, full BIOS listing, etc. I'm pretty sure all of that info had much to do with the IBM PC pretty much winning the major market share (regardless if other computers were better or not).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bentonite on Wednesday March 11, @03:00AM
Computers and appliances used to come with full instructions and schematics, as people wouldn't buy unless the hardware came with the information necessary to use it and the needed information to repair it - it had nothing to do with market share.
A bit after the IBM PC, many clueless were able to afford for appliances and computers and thus paid without thinking, thus it didn't impact sales to withhold schematics, or instructions how to use (suits do not like providing information that delays repeat purchases, even if that means less total sales - after all, there are 5+ billion people to sell hardware that lasts with schematics to).
This has resulted in no schematics anymore and for a lot of computer peripherals, all you get is a proprietary program that doesn't work properly and you're told to shut up if you ask for the information needed to use the hardware properly.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Wednesday March 11, @02:44AM (1 child)
Cars manuals now don't even include basic information, like how to change the oil, spark plugs, brake pads, fuel filter, or timing chain - there are only instructions how to add oil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @01:49PM
What? I just recently bought a new car. It came with FIVE manuals, and yes, it tells you how to change the oil and plugs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @09:04AM
But what would be the car analogy?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Reziac on Wednesday March 11, @02:22AM (12 children)
And what happens when no one remembers how anything works?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Funny) by RS3 on Wednesday March 11, @02:25AM (7 children)
AI to the rescue?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Reziac on Wednesday March 11, @02:38AM (6 children)
+1 Ouch!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Wednesday March 11, @03:23AM (5 children)
I meant humor and appreciate the upvotes, but (sadly?) I've been using some AIs to get all kinds of answers, mostly car repair, potential mods, etc. It's been very helpful. Like any websearch, you really have to formulate the questions, and often have to steer hard to get the deep insights. It's an interesting ride we're all on.
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Wednesday March 11, @05:10AM
Google's for-pay AI subscriptions offer something called Deep Research [gemini.google]. I suspect its utility varies based on what you ask it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Wednesday March 11, @05:50AM (1 child)
You and lots of folks. So far I've resisted, but it's dark in my cave and AI doesn't dare come in.
Actually, I can think of some things I'd use it for, but haven't got around to it.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @04:34PM
Wanna buy one?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bussdriver on Wednesday March 11, @11:06PM (1 child)
Search used to be better. It became worse to increase engagement; google admitted this.
So AI does a better job than the search; probably better than the pre-enshittified search we have today. Maybe not. But it's still better and all we've got... unless you use a paid search engine.
They will make the AI worse to push ads and increase engagement. Since it costs a ton to operate, I would expect search and AI to end up about on par as far as quality-- with the AI costing more to run and having to eat up more of your time to make up for it doing better... it can feed you ads and sneak those in while profiling you... but the search and profile you too without the overhead and more clear ad placement...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Friday March 13, @12:10AM
I've missed Alta Vista for 25 or so years. They had a keyword "near" that was extremely useful. Results would be pages that contained the two terms within 10 words IIRC. Now, with google and others, you're forced to put things in quotes, and you'll still get crap results that do not have the thing you put in quotes.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 11, @11:35AM (3 children)
As long as you can remember which end of the thermometer to stick where and that plants crave electrolytes you should be fine.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Reziac on Wednesday March 11, @03:25PM (2 children)
Hmmm. Is that thermometer oral or anal ??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Funny) by r_a_trip on Wednesday March 11, @10:45PM
Yes!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13, @12:13AM
You can sniff it to find out. :-P
(Score: 5, Interesting) by corey on Wednesday March 11, @02:32AM (1 child)
Yeah similar analogies.
I don’t like this article. I’m a “power user” too, or at least was. But the author confuses power users with average people. Even in the 90s, with early computers people owned, average people weren’t understanding low level stuff like DNS. They say that power users are the ones dying but go on about how average people don’t understand the system - they’re two different things. And constantly painting the whole thing as a big company conspiracy sounding story - which I think is partially true but also not. I mean I think things evolve and change and phones and computers have changed from early tech which needed debugging, to tools that people use to do other things. For me, I don’t have time any more to be a “power user”, I just want the tool to work so I can do my other things.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RS3 on Wednesday March 11, @03:35AM
Similar here. Just when I've dug deep and gotten really good with something, the new version comes out and now some of my knowledge is obsolete. Or more importantly, there's so much more to learn to get the same result I get weary. I've learned enough and I want to use what I know.
Some years ago I used to love upgrades and trying new tech, but I guess a big factor is that as we age, time is more and more valuable and I don't want to waste any more time learning new things when the thing I have is Good Enough, gets the job done. Yes, I'm talking to You, Microsoft, and somewhat to many Linux things especially systemd and that whole pile. I still don't understand what problem it solves. I'm still running Windows 7, which I didn't want to run. 10 and 11 at work but I don't care so much about inner workings and I'm really not allowed to mess with them too much there.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Wednesday March 11, @02:42AM (2 children)
Even if people no longer do long division by hand, people can still do division, as they have learned about how to use the division function on the calculator.
A computer is the ultimate calculator, but people are using them like using a pocket calculator without bothering (or being permitted able to learn in the case of a demon rectangle), those difficult × or ÷ operations (let alone x²) and only using + or -, despite how it's a waste of time to use a calculator without using at least all of the basic operations.
If you own a car, you really should be able to to diagnose and service it.
Many dealerships offer needed servicing, although at far shorter than necessary or useful intervals (i.e. for your modern car and modern oil, come in and get your oil and filter replaced every 4500km).
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @01:55PM (1 child)
If you want to get technical, computers don't even do math. They just flip bits in logic gates. Ah, the ol' "you should learn..." This is the same idiotic argument people make that all programmers should have to know how to write a compiler. I've written many compilers, but I can't service a car. I don't need to. I can pay someone with that skill set to do it. By your logic, I should be an expert in everything I touch. Where does it end? Do I need to be a skilled brain surgeon before I take aspirin for a headache?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday March 12, @11:57AM
I just end up loading my old version of Mathcad, Borland Eureka, and GWBasic in my machines. And often my old Borland TurboC and Turbo Assembler.
( Warning...do not use Borland's "huge" model...there's a bug somewhere with the segment registers.)
I usually find one of these tools can be programmed to do what I need.
I have my basic 386sx machines, and my latest are Centrino laptops. I think my next "big" machine will be a full size Android type laptop, but given what I have heard about dropping ability to write and side load my own apps, I lack incentive to upgrade to something that will not meet my needs. In that case, Raspberry Pi based laptop.
I consider the latest technology so enshittified as to be beyond repair. I see it as just a corporate entity to snoop on me and show me ads. Same things that weaned me off of network TV. And I still prefer my 30 year old IDI van to the new ones. At least when it does break, it's pretty obvious what is broken. If it's electrical, at least I have a good chance to get it going again.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jb on Wednesday March 11, @08:03AM (2 children)
When did they stop teaching long division in schools? Calculators are incredibly handy, granted, but when you need to divide two numbers at least one of which is too long to fit on your calculator screen ... you need to understand at least the concept of long division (even if you let the calculator do all the short divisions and subtractions along the way and just write down the end result one digit at a time). If you have a computer in front of you can just use an arbitrary precision calculator program (like dc or bc) of course, but there are plenty of large but simple arithmetic problems that a regular pocket calculator simply can't do unless the operator has sufficient understanding to break the problem down into steps small enough for the pocket calculator to handle.
Very true and yes that's a much better analogy. But it kind of proves the point being made by TFS. In each case the trend makes the attainment of some kind of freedom (of movement, in the automobile case; or of expression in the computer case) conditional on long-term dependence on some third party, for all those who fail to learn the skill that the tech was designed to render "obsolete". But of course, freedom conditional on dependence is no freedom at all.
This is not a problem with capitalism. Rather, it is a problem with consumerism. The former without the latter is possible, has been seen in the past and is a highly desirable state to return to. The big question is how to get back to it ... and that I don't know.
(oh and by the way consumerism without capitalism is possible too ... but that's one of the most nightmarish dystopian scenarios imaginable)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @12:36PM (1 child)
I think one piece of the puzzle is to expose all the people that claim to be capitalists, but really want to be monopolists (or part of a duopoly, oligopoly or cartel). Where is our current trust buster--we need someone that channels Teddy Roosevelt.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday March 11, @01:44PM
10,000% this. I'd upvote you twice if I could. Unfortunately, there isn't a bull moose in sight, just a bunch of lizards.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Opyros on Wednesday March 11, @04:51PM
There’s a famous quote [libquotes.com] from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead:
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Wednesday March 11, @07:56PM
I am going to be optimistic here and hold out hope that one day some brilliant scientists and engineers will invent a way to build an automobile that does not require microprocessors. In theory, it might actually be possible.
Stupid people exist because nothing in the food chain eats them anymore.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @02:09AM (7 children)
Curiosity is a threat. An "excessive" amount of either will draw unwanted attention from the internet gatekeepers. So kids, don't ask too many questions. It'll just get you into trouble.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Reziac on Wednesday March 11, @02:18AM (6 children)
Which questions did you ask that got you into trouble?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @02:26AM (3 children)
Different AC...
I didn't really get in trouble, but in a high school science class there was some discussion of surface area vs. volume. I made the tactical error of wondering (out loud) how you would go about measuring the surface area of a person. It came back to bite me when it appeared in the yearbook, forever marking me as a nerd.
Good thing I hadn't been introduced to fractals, or the answer would have been even more complex (how long is your ruler, etc...)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday March 11, @03:33AM (1 child)
One cannot beat the gas adsorption method/BET theory [soylentnews.org] - will offer answers that include the inner surfaces too (e.g. lung area)
:very-large-grin:
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @12:39PM
So, ask an embalmer what the surface area is of the body they are preserving?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12, @12:10PM
I would have loved to have heard the teacher's answer to that one! So simple in concept. I haven't the foggiest idea how to give an exact figure.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12, @05:14PM (1 child)
Sorry, but you know too much [fineartamerica.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by cereal_burpist on Saturday March 14, @03:21AM
This link works (and looks) better for me:
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/im-sorry-but-you-know-too-much-bruce-eric-kapla.jpg [fineartamerica.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Zoot on Wednesday March 11, @04:35AM
We seek to do more and more, and to do it faster and faster, and the only way to move to a new level is to add an abstraction layer which removes the need to fill your brain to the brim with the details of the previously highest layer. Eventually there are enough layers that even if you understand the bottom one (the hardware say) and the top one (the thing you interface with and operate on daily), there can be so much in the middle that there's no way to connect the top and the bottom.
And we thought the next generation would be the ultimate computer whizzes, having grown up with computers everywhere from the time they were born. But as the article talks about, we got a generation of "users" who are mentally melded to the end-user application interfaces and yet know absolutely nothing about what's going on inside. How many of us have watched a kid insist on taking their Wi-Fi iPad on a car trip and the subsequent shocking discovery that the whole internet is not somehow literally inside their device when it doesn't function away from the Wi-Fi network? Most of their generation also has absolutely no interest in how these things work, perhaps because unlike us, they did not have to know any of that in order to use the machines to begin with.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by YttriumOxide on Wednesday March 11, @06:54AM (9 children)
The problem with this framing is that it's exactly the same as an earlier one, which also didn't end the world.
When compilers first became popular, people like me were complaining that it would destroy people's ability to write software. We bemoaned the fact that you didn't even know what the CPU was doing at any given point. And how can you really understand what's going on in your hardware if you're not aware of what data is held in what memory locations?
I was wrong to think this way. Yes, hardware-banging programmers doing assembly by hand still have a couple of niches, but we're near extinct, and that's fine. We're not needed anymore, because the abstractions made us unnecessary. Compilers didn't destroy people's ability to write software, they created the ability for abstractions to allow for much bigger and better software to be written. The very idea of what this simple web browser in front of me is doing would have been inconceivable back in those days; not just for the size but the absolute complexity of state and operations.
I see the rapid growth of AI development to be similar as well. One day - in the not too distant future - we won't need people to write code anymore, and the AI will be yet another abstraction layer. The skill will be in defining what you want to do, and the software will be as vast and complex in comparison to today, as today is in comparison to the hardware-banging software of my youth.
Abstractions are good. We use them everywhere. Biology is just applied chemistry; chemistry is just applied physics; but would it make any sense at all for someone to try to describe biology in terms of the particle physics involved?
(Score: 5, Informative) by jb on Wednesday March 11, @08:19AM (1 child)
That may be the conventional wisdom, but I'd contend that it's mostly wrong. No, I'm not advocating that all software should be written in assembly language (far from it!). But familiarity with the level of abstraction one (or more) steps closer to the hardware than where you're working make you a far better programmer at whatever level of abstraction you may be working. As I've often put it:
* Learning assembly language (for any sane instruction set) makes you a better C programmer, even if you'll never write anything lower level than C for a real world project;
* Learning the design and implementation of compilers makes you a much better programmer in any language, even if you'll never end up having to write a compiler yourself;
* Learning C makes makes you a much better ${insert_faddish_language_of_the_week_here} programmer, even if you'll never end up having to write anything in C;
* repeat ad infinitum for every level of abstraction thereafter (because an abstraction is most useful when you understand what the abstraction is doing).
The same thing goes for most fields of endeavour (not just programming). Obligatory automotive analogy: being able to strip and rebuild a gearbox makes you a much better truck driver (once you can "feel" exactly what's going on in the box whenever you're driving, chances are you'll improve the lifetime of whatever you're driving substantially ... and maybe even your own safety too), even if you'll never actually need to work on a gearbox yourself again.
In short, understanding how something (anything) works tends to make us better at using it.
This is a big part of why education must always be about principles, never about products.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @02:13PM
I agreed. A programmer really needs to understand what's going on with the code they're writing. And I don't want anyone touching my real-time/embedded code without a basic understanding of machine code.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Wednesday March 11, @03:23PM (5 children)
One of the many problems Unix solved, and got right, was software reuse. The way it does this is via the shell, more specifically the Bourne Shell and compatibles.
The shell gives the user access to all (most?) of the features of the Operating System via a convenient and mostly safe plain text interface and it facilitates the combining of functionalities of all the other programs (commands, utilities, applications) on the system via stream (stdin, stdout, stderr etc.) and pipelines. The shell makes it trivial to create processes and files, and to run things concurrently.
If all you ever experience is one of the common GUIs and web browsers, you are really not going to learn to appreciate this fully.
The shell is the boundary between the binary world (compiled code) and the outside world.
When was the last time you saw a GUI that let you drag-and-drop icons representing utility programs into a graphical representation of a pipeline and execute it?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Wednesday March 11, @07:29PM (1 child)
"When was the last time you saw a GUI that let you drag-and-drop icons representing utility programs into a graphical representation of a pipeline and execute it?"
SQL Server DTS packages - roughly 25 years ago.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday March 11, @07:58PM
Yes, and I saw a programming tool like that for MS-DOS in about 1989.
Where's the one for shell scripts?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 11, @07:48PM (1 child)
Labview and Node-RED and N8N, all are a pretty good time. Old stuff, BTW.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday March 11, @07:56PM
And how good are they at genetics Bourne Shell scripts?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @09:56PM
> When was the last time you saw a GUI that let you drag-and-drop icons representing utility programs into a graphical representation of a pipeline and execute it?
While it may not come with the unix utilities you are thinking about, I'll bet that they would be straight forward to migrate to Snap or Scratch -- https://snap.berkeley.edu/ [berkeley.edu] https://scratch.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] https://forum.snap.berkeley.edu/t/what-is-the-difference-between-snap-and-scratch/1759 [berkeley.edu]
One of my old friends has a kid who is now mid-20s. The kid programed some neat stuff in Scratch in elementary school. Now he's graduated from engineering school and programs in a bunch of languages--I think mostly physics and astronomy software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @05:03PM
Precisely what happened to the flight engineer. Abstractions (automation) have made some industries incredibly safe, especially where fast thinking is required. But sometimes it can go too far [justice.gov]...
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Wednesday March 11, @07:24PM (1 child)
Someplace, somewhere, there still have to be people who know these things for it all to work "seemlessly" for everyone else. This knowledge can earn you a very comfortable living.
But wait, AI you say! All that's over.
You know that little legal disclaimer at the bottom of whatever AI spews back in response to your prompt? The one that says you shouldn't trust the answer? Yeah, the organization still needs someone with enough knowledge to know whether it's useful or bullshit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bloodnok on Wednesday March 11, @07:46PM
I agree that there is still a need for such people. The problem I see, and that the article points out, is that the initial spark of curiosity that starts kids on the road to becoming those people is being damped down. There is no value for the tech giants in encouraging curiosity, and so the platforms discourage it. As the behaviour of the platforms becomes more mysterious it simply becomes "what is". How often to we hear about "The Algorithm" with no analysis of what that means.? The Algorithm has simply become a capricious god that must be appeased. Where curiosity used to create engineers, appeasement of The Algorithm is now creating acolytes.
So, yes we will still want and need engineers and the like, but unless things change, there will be fewer and fewer of them. And for those that think past generations of engineers were socially inept oddballs, the next, who will likely be viewed as heretics by the acolytes are going to be even further from the societal norm. I like them already.
__
The major
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 11, @07:51PM
consumption era means the platform is dying. The growth people have left the platform. Where are they now? Wouldn't we like to know ahead of time, LOL, I'd invest money in that.
Its not consumption as in cows eating grass to make meat, its more a saprophyte thing, like mushrooms turning a rotting tree trunk into, eventually, nothing. Low value dirt, I guess.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Friday March 13, @03:49PM
In the beginnig of cars, every driver knew a lot mechanics. Not any more. I'm a driver and I can barely change a flat tire.
That's what has happened in electronic world. They are tools and they have been working to make them easy to use for common user. The complexity is hidden so common user needn't to know It, moreover common user can't break anything. Power user can't access hidden complexity either.
And more important, to take the great advantages of such a great tool, you needn't to be a power user.