> These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed
But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.
That's the point.
I agree with the author regarding Apple's walled-garden app distribution, but the analogy just doesn't work here.
It's engineered dependency.
These are the type of persons who would get a girlfriend without a master degree in psychology.
Then they spent 25 years engineering understanding out of every single interaction, and now point to the resulting learned helplessness as validation. "See? Users don't read!" No, you spent decades training them not to by ensuring that reading was never rewarded and never necessary.
My read has always been it was painful for a certain type of PM to think and so they assumed "minds like mine" and ... here we are.
The user's other blogs also have the same telltale em dash usage and usage of “” instead of "". Reading obviously AI generated text feels unpleasant. I don't know how much thought was put into this. Is this just "hey Claude write me a blog post about the death of the power user"? Maybe they just used AI for proofreading. I can't really know but it's hard to justify putting in effort to read this when there could have been zero effort put into writing it.
I was ambivalent about it. The way the arguments are presented don't read as much like AI.
Perhaps it was indeed just for proofreading. Although I know that MS Word turns single dashes into em-dash. Maybe they used Word when writing the thing?
It's one of the reasons I am sort of abandoning dashes when writing and using instead semicolons.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Can we please stop with this nonsense? You must think my blog is LLM-generated too.
I’m so tired of the illiterate denying the humanity of the literate. How do you think LLMs were trained? On human writing.
I have no idea what your long form writing looks like. But can you look at something like this https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/if-you-recognize-me-in-pu... and seriously come out of it not thinking it's AI slop?
> The version of me you know — the writer, the ranter, the one who tears into accessibility failures or rips Linux a new one — that’s a persona.
> Not fake. Not dishonest. Just deliberate. It’s tuned for the internet, built to survive in a world that eats subtlety alive. It’s the volume turned up, the emotion sharpened, the thoughts sculpted until they’re worth reading.
Or perhaps the radically different stylistic decision of using emojis and using italics and boldface for emphasis in this older blog https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/hellcaptcha-accessibility... could be more convincing?
But it’s not justification. You made your argument worse, not better, by citing em dashes and quotes.
Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as potential signs of AI writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:AICURLY https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:AIDASH
From the same article:
“Do not rely too much on your own judgment.”
“human editors and writers often use em dashes”
For the record, I am not an AI.
So true, but this has been going on for quite a while. Phones accelerated it and I have seem many of the concerns come up in IT where I worked.
A couple of examples:
1. My favorite, about 10 to 15 years ago. A user said this finance report always had 2147483647 in the total. This was looked at for weeks by another group.
After a few weeks our manager's manager called a meeting with everyone to look at the issue. Everyone had no idea what to do. When I saw the number it look real familiar to me. I then released it was the max value if an int. I told them the issue was its variable could was too small. A simple change fixed the issue.
Another old programmer who was not at the meeting asked me what happened. I showed him the report and he know instantly what it was too.
2. hex dumps, no one can read them now. About 25 years ago I was looking at a dump to see where a packed numeric value was, people who saw be thought it was magic. I had to explain how that number was read and what the hex represented.
I fear what will happen if AI becomes a real thing.
The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise.
In many many domains I am that person.
If a person doesn't know (except in the vaguest terms) where their water comes from, where their poo goes when they flush, where their food comes from (the supermarket!), or the energy that heats their home... what do they really know? Most of us know very little about the concrete networks and systems that keep us alive.
But this is what civilisation is.
> 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.
What? Computers were everywhere in all kinds of domains by 2006, but you can bet that your average accountant of the time would most likely not be able to SSH into a server (nor should they need to...) I guess it really depends on what the author qualifies as a "serious engagement with computers."
I'd say almost all of that became redundant for the average person with windows 3.1 release (34 years ago) or, maybe, more windows 95 (31 years ago).
I remember desperately trying to get two computers to talk to each other so we could play doom in the early 90s, whatever black magic we had to do seemed to take hours to get working.
The time we had 3 or even 4 computers playing Baldurs Gate together I swear we started trying to get the computers talking at 7pm and didn't start playing till 10 (but it was amazing).
Curious coincidence, I was literally thinking yesterday: “but why does the water come out of the tap?” I self-answered “must be the pressure somehow” but did not dig much more…
Can't both of these be true?
Apple, Microsoft, and the evil tech companies us nerds love to vilify actually brought computing to the masses. In the early 1980s only tech geeks and corporations used computers—the Apple Macintosh changed that. In the early 1990s, only tech geeks and universities used the internet—Microsoft Windows changed that. In the mid 2000's, only tech geeks and business people used "smart" devices[1]—the iPhone changed that.
At every technological leap, business savvy entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to expand their markets by making their products enticing and useful to millions of more people than the previous generation of products did.
Unfortunately, this also came at the expense of the apparent "dumbing down" of computers, as every new abstraction hid more of the actual computer users had to interface with. And it also made things easy to control and lock down for corporations.
But I don't think we would've seen the explosion in the popularity of computing had this played out any other way.
I also disagree with the article's premise that power users are dying. We're still here, but we're a tiny minority of computer users now. We're both amused and frustrated at the insanity of where technology is taking us, and who is leading us there, but we still have our corners of computing we can retreat to.
And I also disagree that our favorite layer of computing is somehow more "real" than anyone else's. We scoff at Gen Z's inability to use the terminal as much as Baby Boomers scoffed at our inability to program in assembly. It's all relative. Except "AI". That is more of a disabler than an enabler, even though we're too hypnotized to see it now.
[1]: Yes, the BlackBerry was a cultural phenomenon, but it didn't have the capabilities nor mass appeal of the iPhone.
Power users, tinkerers, and so on were always extremely niche. By definition they were always only a few. They are still a few, probably in similar numbers as before.
The only thing that changed is that normal people now have access to computing devices. My wife does not want to know what a file system is, or what happens behind the scenes when an app is installed. She has no idea what a DNS is. Why would she? She is a lawyer with little interest in technology. She wants to use Instagram, not self-host a Matrix instance.
The normal users are the majority, and it's more profitable to serve those users than assholes like me who get pissy when they can't sideload an apk.
And I am okay with that.
Modern IT has become a ubiquitous commodity, much like the car. You don't need to know how an engine works to drive; while that knowledge might make you more efficient, it isn't strictly necessary to get from A to B. Besides, most twenty-two-year-olds ten years ago didn't know how to use ssh, either.
However, if you want to call yourself an engineer (and work in the field), you must understand the underlying mechanics. IMHO if you want to defeat a competitor today, you don’t need industrial espionage - you just have to cut their internet and/or AI subscriptions. Modern vibe engineers would struggle to function.
> The man page is dead for most users. The RFC is unread by most developers who depend on the protocols it describes.
Well, those who are accustomed to using man pages still use them today. I find them far more accurate than whatever an AI might spit out at any given moment. As for RFCs, they were always read by a small population - either those implementing the protocols or the few of us who like to brag about obscure technical details.
> You can now write complete programs without understanding what a single line of them does... until something goes wrong in production at two in the morning and you are completely without tools to respond.
I’m not worried about this. When things go south, there will still be experts who will know how to fix them. But since those experts will be fewer and farther between, they will likely charge $1k/hr, and rightfully so. If you are in that field, more power to you! :D
True, but on the other hand, when I started programming (hell, even before the whole LLM craze began) and you took away my internet/stackoverflow/google I would also drastically lose productivity. Especially in my more junior years, and later, of course I could still write code, but if I had to figure out how a certain library worked or why a certain error in the auth layer happened, without internet I would be nowhere.
I feel like when I was twenty two I would have been very surprised if more than a couple of my peers knew this stuff.
Connecting to SSH seems like something a "power user" should be able to learn but not necessarily know already (probably more likely they know what a VPN is)
In my time, not being able to read assembler code meant you weren't a power user.
DNS and SSH were/are things 'techie' people know. I can assure you most people had no idea what their IP was or what a DNS was. Being the "hey my computer is acting kinda slow can you look at it" guy. It felt like they actively sought out to not know. Honestly cellphones and tablets have basically ended my endless side job of 'hey can you look at my computer'. Because they hid all of that techno junk that is interesting to me but to most people isnt.
But most importantly, and what the author missed, is that it works both ways. I know how to connect to a BBS, but I was literally paralysed by the fact that there is no LAN game in Counter-Strike 2. Where is LAN?! Why do I need a Steam account for every player to play with friends sitting in the same room? Why would I even need external servers for this?
idk, it's a modern world and I don't belong to it, so perhaps we should accept the slow death of 90s or 00s 'power users', and the rise of new 'power users' of the 20s, who won't even know what floppy disk icon on the Save button means.
If it was only the Apples' and Google's who thought sandboxed apps were the future you might have a point, but most tech savvy people arrive at something that looks and awful lot like sandboxed apps. You see power, most see[1] a[2] dumpster-fire[3]
: [1] ; ls /usr/lib | wc -l
: [2] ; ls /usr/bin | wc -l
: [3] ; find /usr/share/man/man* | wc -l
Pre-AI, I worked with Devs that didn't even know what an HTTP request is (difference between GET/POST/etc) - we were building an enterprise software where higher level libraries abstracted that away..With AI, it's becoming even worse now - just ask Claude
People are still building these apps at every level of developer experience so the kids must be alright.
Yes people, in general, have less knowledge of file systems and networking now because things just work. Every LAN party as a kid took at least an hour of networking to get started. Now kids don't do LAN parties because everything is already networked by default. But there is also an order of magnitude more people doing these things now -- in the past those people just went without.
The vast majority most of knowledge I ever had from the time the author describes is obsolete now anyway. I can still remember so much but that's not going to help me with my React app.
To put a slightly finer point on it for puncturing the cliche, "needing to hide" has a time-component. Everyone has something to hide from a potential future, whether they're good at predicting it or not.
I "have nothing to hide" about my religion today, but when if extremists seize power and declare "death to apostates", the exact same fact-pattern will very very much need hiding.
> The industry isn’t going to fix this. Every financial incentive points the other way.
Cory Doctorow has a hopeful--perhaps over-hopeful--idea that a disruptive wedge can be created, where a profit-motive will promote breaking the system of control. Specifically, that some place with a legal haven for tinkerers and wall-breakers will reap benefits from letting them openly sell device-unlockers, export-your-data tools, etc.
ajsnigrutin•1h ago
"back in my time", you'd have some c code, one .conf file, you'd "make", edit the config (or hope it works with default settings), run, and you'd have a program running. Now you need five different services running, it comes in a docker, running on some random port, proxied to another random port, the configs are split into 12 yaml files, plus it needs 7 gigs of hdd space...
..sometimes providing the same functionality as the old 300kB software of the yesteryear.
chris_money202•1h ago
runevault•1h ago