In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.

Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).

That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.

Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.

It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.

That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.

People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.

It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.

You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?

I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.

Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.

I disagree, they would do a lot of good if part of any weapons being available (not just guns, but FPV drones and ammo for them, anti-tank and anti-air missiles, small mortars, and so on), but not for crime levels. The benefit would be in improving political stability (no, it wouldn’t help MAGA and such, because they don’t really want a violent takeover, they want an administrative takeover and then unpunished violence against those who can’t defend themselves).

When only rifles are available, it doesn’t help that end at all - you can’t fight the government or the invading army or some terrorists with just rifles.

So I agree that one has to pick a lane here. If we understand private weapons’ ownership as that well-organized militia to protect against tyranny yadda-yadda, then that includes a lot of stuff. Drones with grenades at least. If we don’t and, say, the national guard is that militia, then allowing just pistols and rifles lacks the advantages, preserving the harm.

It’s confusing. Usually such a pic means a single stream of possibilities branching, so to say. Here multiple branches are for the same data point.

They could at least make them different colors, which would be the components of the initial color if combined. I think I’ve even seen such a graph.

That’s how you don’t do infographics.

So close, but not there.

OK, you’ll know that I’m right when you somewhat expand your expertise to neighboring areas. Should happen naturally.

Are you a software developer? Or a hardware engineer? EDIT: Or anyone credible in evaluating my nonsense world against yours?

you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just “does” it

No you can’t. Simplifying it grossly:

They can’t do the most low-level, dumbest detail, splitting hairs, “there’s no spoon”, “this is just correct no matter how much you blabber in the opposite direction, this is just wrong no matter how much you blabber to support it” kind of solutions.

And that happens to be main requirement that makes a task worth software developer’s time.

We need software developers to write computer programs, because “a general idea” even in a formalized language is not sufficient, you need to address details of actual reality. That is the bottleneck.

That technology widens the passage in the places which were not the bottleneck in the first place.

If it’s acceptable, then a wildcard ban of undetected protocols and the “bad” ones from among the detected is possible. China-style.

That is, everything is possible.

Also, it’s a misconception that a decentralized service cannot be banned. In fact it’s not hard at all

Yes, if banning protocols is acceptable for you.

It’s baffling just how much language is used to dehumanise, other, and discriminate against people.

Yeah, such language sucks, of course, but since right now that connotation of marijuana, for example, seems to be lost - why the hell worry about it. There are worse things which are not in the language, but in the way “protected group” works in the heads of some homo sapiens specimens.

I’ve recently had my comment deleted for answering “Armenian Genocide was bad, but not even close to the Holocaust” with “Holocaust was bad, but not even close to the Armenian Genocide” and in the next sentence clarifying that for me they are on the same level, but people for whom one of these statements is acceptable are not people.

or Perry Mason.

Loved those books. Maybe he’s too perfect a character morally, but still.

Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.

Schools included.

Many students today don’t touch a personal computer a lot outside of school and then workplace.

My conspiracy theory:

I suspect that’s the desired effect of “smartphones”, and also the reason “smartphones” without keyboards are such an industry consensus. Not them being cheaper. Not them looking nicer. First, keyboards can be very sexy (think ZX Spectrum, or Blackberry for PDAs), second, however they look, touchscreen UIs are PITA, third, they are not that more expensive.

The strategy thus is that entertainment personal computing should be pressed out to devices hardly usable for work. So that “normal” people would gain their experience with that, and thus not gain the experience accompanying normal personal computing. As in - tinkering, customization, creation.

Because I remember how in my childhood any kid with a PC at home would do some tinkering and exploration. Today’s kids scroll, and scroll, and scroll.

Mind-boggling actually, my sister (now kinda helpless with computers) was making websites and RPGs with RPGMaker2000, my younger cousin who is a designer was - I actually don’t remember what she was doing, but something connected to editing amateur films they were making with my older cousin, who’s a software engineer now.

Getting back to various pressures, this reduces the space for personal computing free from corporate and governmental policies. And this also reduces the unwanted effects from more creative entertainment - people who do something as a hobby are a direct competition to corporate gaslighting. The contrast is like between an 18yo girl on a rock festival and a Soviet propaganda poster. The latter never wins. And such a situation sadly negatively affects the chances of people getting the kinds of hobbies corps wouldn’t want them to have.

It’s a rather bold claim to be able to create a system where you can achieve more power honestly than cannibalizing others. It’s a good ideal goal, of course, and people are optimizing for it, but no, that’s not a realistic solution.

Replace goodwill with encryption. That’s about data and metadata safety, but the same logic applies to everything else. No trust to people interested in breaking it.

As in - browsers’ developers’ goodwill was intended to keep Web standards’ race in check. Protocols’ extensibility was intended to allow for future backward-compatible development.

This was a wrong idea.

Gemini is one example of solving it, but one can imagine many others.

And it’s fine if we have 12 Web protocols each for some specific idea of the Web. Among them some, say, would allow people to easily create webpages like year 1996, but sufficient for modern tasks and without all the bother with DNS and hosting (perhaps there is a p2p solution), Telegram shows that this is in huge demand. Many such variants are better than one overly complex, dangerous, corporate and oligopolized Web.

That’s similar to how it seemed working anyway, we had e-news for global forums, webpages for personal pages, IRC for chats, ICQ\AIM\MSN for DMs, e-mail for reliable DMs, well, everyone remembers that time.

Nostr is a very raw, but maybe interesting idea for public social media.

Funny how Unix philosophy always shows itself in unexpected places, yes? =)

The site is atrocious. I’ll look at it another time and try to get what it’s really about. But it seems really ADHD-hostile.

Maybe the Web should look more like Freenet or like BitTorrent.

But using a technology working the known way and trying to force conveniences by law seems sisyphean and harmful in many aspects.

If someone wants to keep old versions, let them. But forcing companies to host something is I dunno.

The whole of USA is something 300+mln people, now do Christianity, then do Islam, then do Hinduism, then do Communism, and then do Fascism.

The set of indicators, of course, was selectively chosen. The authors, of course, have decided which of these they consider important and which don’t, that is, decided upon weights and criteria.

It doesn’t work. It’s some urban legend that this is sufficient. Even those 600k may or may not be stopped by a threat of real ammo being used. I’m not even talking about coordination.

One can “prove” anything with selectively chosen statistics.