transcript
tlirsgender:
Laptops are always so much more Fucked than phones in my experience. A laptop is like a beautiful horse that wants nothing more than to break all of its legs. A decently solid android phone will act normal.
A laptop is a living creature. It has weight to it. A laptop breathes and produces body heat. And it wants to die badly. Mobile phones are not sentient like that & that’s why they don’t experience mental illness. A phone problem is like “out of storage :(” or “charging port broke”. Laptops will cough weakly as they fade in and out of consciousness.
You will hold a laptop in your arms and it’s like “I can’t feel my legs”. And you tell it girl you never had any.
I miss the old days when you needed to actually understand the machine to use it. Using the terminal wasn’t something reserved for “tech wizards,” it was the primary way to use the machine. Things weren’t as capable, but at least the average user understood it. Also, back in those days, devices came with schematics and whatnot so you could repair it yourself, and many did! It was a magical time when people cared enough about their stuff to learn how it works.
It’s tempting to agree but I think we should be careful about gatekeeping technology through that kind of nostalgic lens. The improvements to ease of use in computing have, broadly, benefited everyone.
You can be a good driver without knowing how to rebuild an engine.
Sure. My point is that if everyone understood a bit more about the tools they use, they’d have fewer problems, need to spend less money, and get more out of them, and that goes for pretty much everything.
If you know how to do basic car maintenance, you could swap a few parts now and them and save the trips to the mechanic for larger problems. It’s not hard and the tools for most jobs are minimal. If people were capable of that, they’d prioritize things like Right to Repair, which benefits everyone and can help reduce waste (i.e. prevent harm to the planet).
Likewise for laptops and phones. You shouldn’t need to replace the whole thing just because the screen got cracked or the storage is going bad. If the average person was capable of basic repairs, repair would be a much more common thing. It wasn’t that long ago that places carried computer parts (not just drives and RAM, but board level components like caps and connectors). I get that things are more complicated these days, but if people understood how their devices worked a bit better, they’d demand that tl be available at shops and repairs would be cheap.
The same goes for software. If someone knows how the system is oit together (kernel, userland, apps, etc) at a high level, they can do a much better job diagnosing problems and determine if an issue is likely hardware or software, and be able to follow guides online to diagnose further.
I’m not saying everyone should be an expert on everything, I’m saying I wish people knew a bit more than “press this button to see funny videos.” Teach it in schools to demystify things a bit, so people feel confident in digging in and learning more.
That’s fair. A little bit of a deeper understanding can indeed go a long way in terms of knowing how to take care of something properly, not to mention saving on minor repairs!
And for something like computers, it can dramatically reduce the effectiveness of scams. If the support person asks you to do something fishy, you’ll immediately recognize it’s a scam if you k ow a few things about how computers work (or hopefully you’ll never get in that situation).
There was a good middle ground, and we passed it like 20 years ago