Gregory's ServerUX designers who eliminated the filesystem from user consciousness in name of simplicity ruined the world and are morally culpable for shriveling minds of children who are unable to tackle the challenges of today thanks to a choice sold as advocacy for the user but was ultimately motivated by control of a disempowered customer.
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@SwiftOnSecurity âok kids, time to learn about inodes and b-treesâ - hmm maybe thatâs over compensating.  @johnelamb @SwiftOnSecurity It's not really the form the storage takes, so much as the abstracting it out. Some image-based OSes don't *have* a filesystem, for instance, they've got an object database instead. @lispi314 @SwiftOnSecurity sure. I was just being ridiculous. I agree with swift, but was joking about my tendency to over do it.  @SwiftOnSecurity I felt bad because we wasted so much effort on this at the expense of later topics in #GIS.  @Brett_E_Carlock @SwiftOnSecurity Iâm even seeing this with some younger engineers out of college who are somehow having difficulties with navigation in a Windows 10 PC⊠:psyduck: @DeltaWye @SwiftOnSecurity Yeah, this has seemingly hit all disciplines. Shit, when I worked consumer ITS I had college students in Computer Science coming to me to fix their computers, remove virsues, install software, setup backups, perform OS upgrades, install Linux... You would assume that these skills would be defacto in that disciple, but no. Mobiles have abstracted so much away that folks really have no idea how much of it functions. This isn't a judgement, either. There isn't a need. @SwiftOnSecurity I had one student that downloaded the intro project datafile over fifteen times before they asked me why the nothing was happening when they downloaded it... Doesn't beat working Small/Local Government and seeing someone download the same exact excel file every single day instead of you know... saving a copy and editing it. They had over a thousand copies in their download folder -_- @Brett_E_Carlock @SwiftOnSecurity I feel for you. I cannot comprehend how it must be explaining what a file is, what file types are. There seems to be so much knowledge yet not enough education. I wonder how computer skills are taught in schools now. My schooling was the late 90s, a very different time. I wonder if they are taught filesystems, folders, files, types, permissions, what being âconnected to the Internetâ actually means. @rahulgaitonde @SwiftOnSecurity At least for the cohorts of students I taught, they were not more than passingly aware of any of the above, except internet. They were all bright kids, so they caught on, but there's a lot of tacit knowledge you acquire from years and years of managing files, data, and the operating system itself that is lost when you have generations of folks coming up that are not exposed to any of that. It needs to be taught, and it isn't the kids' fault. @Brett_E_Carlock @SwiftOnSecurity I agree -in my (limited) experience, computer education in schools is tactical & tool oriented. That doesnât build foundational knowledge of what is now pervasive in our society. I blame non-file-oriented apps less than our educators. File-less interfaces are just one branch, if dominant today, of interacting with information. There will be others - the web is one, chat like with GPT is one, AR/VR will be another. @SwiftOnSecurity Job Security. In a world there isn't any. It's fucked all the way down. @SwiftOnSecurity I was literally teaching file systems to High School students today, and had to demonstrate to them that their Macs, Androids, and iOS devices have file systems. It was enlightening. @pjsliney @SwiftOnSecurity its not just file locations - its file sizes. I work education IT and We even have teachers in their 30s who can't wrap their heads around why their 3GB video they recorded can't be uploaded quickly or that it fills their sharepoint quotas. Or why the file size means that their class will choke the AP when 30 students all need to sync that file. When you compress their videos for them down to 120mb with no noticeable quality loss they think its voodoo  @SwiftOnSecurity and kids these days canât even write in cursive! Moral decay of society etc lmao @danirabbit @SwiftOnSecurity Practically no nation besides Russia bothers, though I'm not sure it's all that dramatic of a loss. Its purpose - fast writing - is rarely done by hand now and even then it wasn't anywhere near as fast as shorthand (also known as stenography) even in its day of prime. @danirabbit Ah I see. It's not quite on the same level, mostly because no actual capacity was lost (and books have been in print-type for so long that the notion of cursive books is practically a curiosity now), while for those systems they still very much do use those mechanisms and their obscuring does hinder the users' control and ownership of their computing. I literally wish I could unlearn both vim and cursive. OPs point, on the other hand, is a genuinely important one, having to do with "power in the machine" A vast everything-belongs-to-the-cloud conspiracy against private data so they can surveil it into the advertising industry's universal spyware. @SwiftOnSecurity I prefer to think that number of people who understand how to balance a red black tree is fixed and finite and we canât expect all people to learn how this stuff works.  @vertigo @codekoan @SwiftOnSecurity Not entirely. While the particulars of specific balanced search trees are an especially esoteric example, if most people don't need to know something to live their lives, why would you expect it to be a universally taught skill? @SwiftOnSecurity alternate take: the âfilesystemâ is a bad data structure. Directories are fine but subdirectories? Really?  @SwiftOnSecurity As a college professor, I approve this message.  @SwiftOnSecurity Not exclusive to children. Also adults, including boomers, whose first encounter with technology is their first iPhone. No concept of files, directories, folders. Everything is somehow magically "in the app". Send them a file, they don't know what to do with it. @AtanasE Well they at least have some excuse in that they didn't grow up in that technology. Younger folks don't have that excuse... @job @AtanasE @SwiftOnSecurity Found out younger folks grew up using technology, but often not understanding technology. @AtanasE @SwiftOnSecurity My first encounter with computer technology was seeing the sealed computer room in the insurance company where I worked in 1969. But my first actual interaction with computers was the mainframe at the University of Colorado, Denver, in 1975, using punch cards and Fortran to run statistical analyses. My first personal computer was a Kaypro II running CP/M, on which I wrote my doctoral dissertation in 1983-1986.  @SwiftOnSecurity UX Designer here to say âPreach, brotherâ. Thank you for your witness.  @SwiftOnSecurity EXACTLY! I'm shocked at the #TechIlliteracy of post-millenial #Kids despite them having easier access to #Documentation and #HowTos than I could've ever dreamed of, despite having #ISDN in 1999... @kkarhan @SwiftOnSecurity not if all their search engines ever feed them are youtube tutorials that obfuscate deep understanding for convenience of presentation. The quality of potentially available information is better than it has ever been, BUT the signal to noise ratio has gotten far worse. @ikanreed @SwiftOnSecurity Yeah, because the availability of high bandwith allows the propagation of low quality fancy shit in lieu of good writeups and howtos... Needless to say people don't even get #TechLiteracy taught in #School and so in 2019 I did met a highschool graduate on a dual-study/apprenticeship position who confessed to me that they've never ever used a #PC before. And I'm not talking about #Linux or a #Mac or #Windows in General but like how to use a #Keyboard & #Mouse... @ikanreed @SwiftOnSecurity I was completely speechless because even as a millenial born in 1992 this was more or less unthinkable to me to be possible. I don't expect much in terms of #TechLinteracy but someone who was deemed eligible for university in 2019 should be able to turn a PC on, enter a password and open #MicrosoftWord or even #NotePad of all things... Shit that even the #ECDL fake-#certification expects people to be able to do... Apparently this person never got to touch a PC b4. @ikanreed @SwiftOnSecurity And no, that person wasn't from some marginalized family living on foodstamps or whatever, but like their allowance was likely bigger than my net payout I had on that job... @SwiftOnSecurity my 20 year old brother couldnât figure out how to install a program on his new PC. Chromebooks and iPhones set back a whole generation.  @SwiftOnSecurity  @SwiftOnSecurity when demonstrating chemistry practical classes I had to deal with 20 something students unable to save and find files on spectroscopy instruments. Just staggering! @SwiftOnSecurity Everything happens in loops. I remember binging forensic files with my wife and how some of these people thought they were evil geniuses using their computers to research horrifying things, at the onset of the information age, and digital forensics. Now, we're seeing the same thing today because the filesystem layer is intentionally abstracted. It makes me wonder whether or not it was intentional. @SwiftOnSecurity This is different from 'old people yelling at clouds' about how 'the kids don't know cursive now', this is more like 'basic digital literacy to ensure that private things remain private or in limited distribution don't exist because you have notion of it'. @SwiftOnSecurity like, comparing digital literacy to lacking life skills that are no longer relevant is the most asinine logical fallacy. @SwiftOnSecurity just because you don't know that filesystems exist doesn't mean that there isn't a huge cache file and internet history on your mobile web browser of you searching for abortion clinics out of state, then leo taking your phone and using it to prosecute you or your parents. This shit has consequences. @da_667 @SwiftOnSecurity Geez reminds me of the Casey Anthony thing where reasonable doubt regarding the computer forensics performed might have gotten her off of murder charges.  @SwiftOnSecurity A little strident but, as a fan of knowing exactly whatâs in all the directories, I like it.  @SwiftOnSecurity Itâs a conspiracy, all the UX people wear black roll neck sweaters, have an ear ring and use Macs!!  @SwiftOnSecurity There are developers who don't know any shell commands whatsoever, on any OS.  @SwiftOnSecurity I was once in a high school programming course where a student couldn't understand what it meant to press the Windows and U keys to look at page source... @SwiftOnSecurity some people forgot the blood that was shed over interoperable document formats. |
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