‘The intuition was to take the complexity and push it onto the user,’ Moxie Marlinspike says at Black Hat. ‘We were just wrong.’
‘The intuition was to take the complexity and push it onto the user,’ Moxie Marlinspike says at Black Hat. ‘We were just wrong.’
No the issue is that we had a second eternal September when the iPhone dropped, and since then the computer literacy of the average boomer was allowed to become what we expect out of everyone.
This guy might be a bit of an asshole, but hes got a point. It’s only gotten worse since then, now that all the computers with real desktop OS’s in schools have been replaced with chromebooks/iPads.
decided that the young woman would probably not appreciate the sarcasm, and took the MacBook off her so I could add in the county’s proxy server settings
I mean, the YouTube whatever, though calling that her fault is still douchey, but this is entirely on the author. If he’s logging someone on to the network and the network doesn’t work without a proxy configured, he’s the one who should know to set that up. That’s absolutely not normal end user behavior.
No the issue is that we had a second eternal September when the iPhone dropped, and since then the computer literacy of the average boomer was allowed to become what we expect out of everyone.
That is true, iPhones have made people less literate, but it is because many many devs are just like other experts: proud of their ability to do stuff the minority can. We have very few tech-folk who are willing to make things usable for non-techies.
There is a huge “git gud” and RTFM crowd out there, and I for one am glad they get to stay in their niches or get called out for that elitism. Linux forums were (probably still are) the epitome of elitism with people saying insane stuff like “its people’s own fault for using windows” and in the same breath “I don’t want more linux users because it will destroy the experience”. Just a bunch of hipsters gatekeeping stuff with non-existent or shitty documentation, doing their darndest not to let people in for fear of losing the ability to proudly claim “I use linux”.
Look at the Arch crowd. They still haven’t grown out of their ridiculous propensity to scream “i use arch btw” or recommend it to newbies. Arch users smell ineptitude and will promptly call it out to ridicule it or start frothing at the mouth before letting loose their 4 favorite letters: RTFM.
It’s taking a minority of devs who care about UX and large corpos to bring linux to the masses. Without them, we’d still be hard-stuck in with technical troglodytes that have a terminal illness and can’t stop mentioning a recompile every 5 minutes.
I don’t know I entirely agree with this take. Computers are literally the most powerful tool for creation in all of human history.
You should absolutely be expected to put effort into it.
There’s just a lot of stuff going on and everybody can make an argument for knowing something:
- Maths is the most important tool to mankind
- It is imperative to understand your own brain because it makes a lot of decisions
- If you drive a car, you better know how it works
- Politics is crucial to our society and being an informed citizen is paramount
And so on. It’s all true, but you only have so many hours in a day, and everybody has a different life. You could live in the most affluent society and be dealing with stuff that has nothing to do with computers.
Also, who decides what’s “basic knowledge”? I know a lot about software, what I know about hardware is minimal. What’s minimal to me though might be advanced to another and vice versa.
We should be trying to be more empathetic. Recommending an advanced Linux OS to a newbie isn’t empathetic. Expecting a user to know how to install an OS isn’t empathetic.
