Found elsenet. And now, with my memories of home taping off the radio using a cassette recorder and a microphone, I feel *ancient*:
@cstross Before that, we’d put tapes in our cauldrons. You know, to mix them.
@whybird @cstross Sad side note is that that generation cannot wrap their mind around the concepts of: 1) fetching media 2) keeping their own copy.
There is no "home right-clicking/save as-ing" or "home USBing" to replace the home-taping and home burning of yore.
(one can thank DRM and DMCA-like law around the world for that).
@cstross @dryak @whybird yeah I find it shocking how little some of my younger relatives know about how computers actually work in spite of sometimes using them since they were toddlers like I had to spend half an hour explaining to my cousins oldest how to copy a video from her phone to her laptop without using the cloud she didn't even understand that her phone keeps the video as a file on her SD card let alone what folder it was in it doesn't help that MTP is a piece of shit
@addressforbots @dryak @whybird By over-focussing on making computers easy enough for 50-90% of the population to use, big tech has consequently disincentivized understanding. (This doesn't hurt their viability as advertising channels, of course.)
@cstross @addressforbots @dryak @whybird As much as I loved '90s Unix for catering so completely to people who knew what they were doing, and I've always been infuriated by people insisting that a language or OS should be designed exclusively for ease-of-use for newbies, a middle-ground would be nice.
Easy to do the obvious/common things, but also inviting you in and making it possible to do non-obvious, complex and advanced things - and to learn how it works.
I'm confident it's possible. I'm also completely unqualified to work on the design.
@KatS Unfortunately, it's not possible.
"The solution has to be as complex as the problem" is a law of nature, which in turn compels a sufficient abstraction (computer language, interface, material controls, etc.) to encompass as much complexity as the problems you're trying to solve.
So just like an annealing oven or a commercial bread oven have substantially more complex controls than a home kitchen oven, computer complexity gets discontinuous.
@graydon @cstross @addressforbots @dryak @whybird This is true, but it doesn't rule out layered interfaces, or UIs with selectable levels of complexity for beginners and experts.
It's a difficult problem, but I have faith that it's not insurmountable.
@KatS There are things one must be taught how to use; the cultural transmission part is not optional.
For computer stuff, this might not start at "this is a file" (though it turns out file-as-abstraction comes from a former world) but it surely applies to "compiler" or "data abstraction".
(XML solves a problem domain if, and only if, someone explains it to you effectively. Otherwise you go invent JSON, and now someone has to explain that, too.)
