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Discussion
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@cstross @dryak @whybird
I've been appalled to see someone claim that inventory menus in video games that are text-based instead of being a bunch of icons you have to hover over to get described are "outdated" and therefore a deal-breaker.
Not merely old-fashioned. *Outdated*, and this was why someone wouldn't play a video game from 2002 unless it were "updated".
@cstross @dryak @whybird I was a teacher for 35 years. In the beginning I had to teach 10 year olds how to use a mouse. The middle was fine, just keep them away from wrecking Windows.
At the end I had to teach 10 year olds how to use a mouse and keep bottles of cleaner around to wash the sticky fingerprints off the screens.
Folder was a concept always to be taught. There is the Desktop for storage and cluttering.
@cstross @dryak @whybird yeah I find it shocking how little someone 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
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@addressforbots@social.apcn.nz @cstross@wandering.shop @dryak@mstdn.science @whybird@aus.social this stuff really isn't obvious any more! My son is dysgraphic and uses a keyboard at school, and had to have a long discussion with a teacher explaining why he couldn't turn off his Internet connection while completing an assessment in Google Classroom. The teacher hadn't realised that he wasn't writing on his own device, and you know what? I don't blame them! How are you supposed to tell where things are anymore from within the 'user experience'?
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@mavnn @cstross @dryak @whybird it's kind of funny because when I was in high school it was still just barely in the era where a lot of stuff was run on prem when I was attending my high schools learning management system was run on a server physically located at the school (I was on good enough terms with the school's sysadmin to be able to get a look) when in some idiot put a backhoe through a fibre line down the street it kept working (after the schools it admin fixed DNS it's always DNS)
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@mavnn @cstross @dryak @whybird it's all running on a cloud-based solution now of course I know this because I bumped into my old school sysadmin while I was attending polytech at a networking event thing that I was referred to while doing my course (we all had to go to at least one of them) and apparently he was very upset about the cloud thing he was told to move stuff to the cloud to save money in spite of the fact that he did the math and it was objectively more expensive
@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.)
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@cstross @addressforbots @dryak @whybird The computer/smartphone has become a magic wand. You need to say the magic formula and use the magic gestures and it does what you want. Only a few wizards know how to built them and how to creste new spells, but we will replace them with little elves and daemons from the AI dimension.
@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.
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@KatS @cstross @addressforbots @dryak @whybird
Easy to do the obvious/common things, but also inviting you in and making it possible to do non-obvious, complex and advanced things
Am reminded of an old slogan: "Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible."
See also manipulexity vs whipuptitude.
@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.