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

On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Mike Spencer wrote:

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

True, but it seems to me that the general trend is downwards, and that it will
have negative implication for the innovation in the future. Even implications
for maintenance, if the horror stories here are to believed. =(

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.

True! I enjoy the fact that my bash scripts have worked for several decades! =)

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.

I tell my students that a career in IT is life-long learning, and if they don't
enjoy learning new things, they should find another career. A bit over the top
perhaps, but I do try to scare the ones who do not enjoy learning new things at
the start of the program. ;)