• 4 Posts
  • 318 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • Yes… it’s like default settings. The very action of changing a setting on any devices means you are a “power user”. You made a conscious decision on how the device should behave and you suspect it can be done. Meanwhile the vast majority of users do not even consider this a possibility.

    Windows users are not using a computer, they are doing another task that happens to required a machine, they don’t learn about what it is, how it works, how it can be modified.

    IMHO it was perfectly in the 70s when there was no laptop, desktop, mobile phone, mobile data. Now that one needs to use such infrastructure to interact with others, vote, pay bills, get access to culture, etc then I do believe computer literacy is not optional anymore.







  • A VR headset is basically a phone with lenses, so yes. That’s why cardboard and free promotional gifts of lenses snapping on phones work.

    My point though isn’t about the technical abilities but rather about the social expectations. If you buy a device that does something intrusive but you know that in order to deliver the main value it will do that, it’s OK. It’s part of the social contract. If somehow though a device is intrusive but it’s not expected, either because it was thought to be impossible to do or unrelated to it’s original purpose or both, then it’s a big problem, a breach of the social contract.





  • Yep. In fact I wrote a blob somewhere (will link back if I find it) that for most users I believe we reached “peak good-enough” compute few years ago already.

    Sure for some very VERY specific use cases, it’s never enough (e.g. super high res video editing, photo realistic rendering, weather simulations) but for the average Joe with normal eyes… at some point you just browse Website that show photos and text, even 4K videos… you don’t NEED 8K or a more powerful CPU when you are jolting down your 5 family holiday options. We got into a habit that year after year we would get significantly better hardware but… you can store your entire life of text, photos, documents, etc in a microSD that fits in your wallet and costs you the price of a meal.

    It’s weird that we needed the AI bubble to realize it but that’s OK.