Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> writes:

On 2/25/25 8:08 PM, Rich wrote:
 

The prior can also largely be blamed on modern GUI OS'es.  They've
reached the point where the unknowing can make use of a computer
without ever needing a command line at any point.

 
Which meant that computer hardware and software vendors could thus
market their wares to a much larger consumer audience.

Just so.  But doesn't address the bizarre observation that PhDs in
computer-related domains are utterly unaware of the command line.

      The command line is like language.

      The GUI is like shopping.

Reports from a very different domain (sorry, I forget the URLs) are
to the effect that university-level teachers of language & literature
find that students are wholly unprepared to read whole, long novels.
They just don't get it.  Somehow, despite having reached postsecondary
level, they don't have the attention span -- or can't call up the
intellectual resources to invoke the attention span -- to read
attentively something that goes on for a few hundred pages.

A friend and fellow blacksmith -- sadly now deceased -- was very bright
and very skilled but recounted an experience from high school.
Assigned to read a novel -- I forget but I think it was Count of Monte
Christo -- he just couldn't get through it.  So he bought the Coles
Notes (or similar) version and still ran aground.  Then he happened
on the comic book version, bought and read that, got a passing grade on
the review he had to write.

All well.  There are differing kinds of intelligence and his strength
lay in spatial relations and tangible physical forms, not language.

But people taking a university-level Great Books course are a
different matter.  So are people studying how computers operate.
Language is a fundamental intellectual tool.  Shopping, stichomythia,
ideas reduced to 168-char squibs and, yes, shopping look to me like
degenerate forms of disciplined thinking.

As a digression, an assignment left for the reader, consider the
command line, even one as intimidating as that for gcc.  After decades
of change, with the accretion of a multitude of options, it retains
the same linguistic form of a command.

But how do you get along with a GUI for something of similar
complexity when someone 20 or 30 or 40 years your junior, decides that
a complete redesign of of the GUI is a desirable and necessary
improvement?  He grew up in a mental Manhattan or a Mental Tokyo,
demolishes the graphical Boston of your favorite tool and rebuilds it
to match his visual head-space.

So you can learn it all over again.  Life-long learning is supposed to
be about learning new stuff, but about learning the same stuff over
and over.


--
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada