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Man, I feel like half this post was my sysadmin playbook. I eventually got sick of explaining why it was such a pain in the ass to crack open vim and edit remot

Man, I feel like half this post was my sysadmin playbook. I eventually got sick of explaining why it was such a pain in the ass to crack open vim and edit remote files, and why it was much easier to edit locally and scp back. I credit interactive fiction for the problem-solving skills, and gopher for the boost to memorization (gopher because if you wanted to find that primitive search engine 12 levels deep, you had to memorize lots of strings of numbers to navigate those mazes of menus. Not much different than how we use appliances these days, really, though it's hell to manage if you're stoned or not 100% on your game. :)

sbahram 8y ago
Yeah, I hear you. Honestly the smart-home/IOT movement has been very beneficial, not because of the sorry excuses for automation being sold right now, but because it enforces a certain level of pre-2005-web-like openness. I knew all the file system structures and specific web paths back in the day because it was just necessary to memorize it and easy to access things if you had specifics, whereas now everything is cryptographic strings, super long addresses like IP V6 ones, and based on dynamic interactions so that deep URLs are pretty much worthless to memorize except maybe on sites like GitHub, where the pattern is reasonable. The reason for my comment on smart-home stuff bringing back some of this openness is only that at least now there's a backdoor, so to speak. When a microwave doesn't talk and also has very little tactile differentiation on the buttons, at least you can use your Google Home or Amazon Alexa to tell that thing to warm up a plate for 3 minutes. Same goes for toaster ovens, rice cookers, water boilers, Sous Vide circulators, thermostats, locks, lights, etc. Yet another of the countless examples of why having things be open and have an API makes it better for absolutely everyone, especially since it facilitates use cases not able to be foreseen at inception. And, yes I do believe all of that can be done in a secure and sensible way. No need for security to be antithetical to inclusion, which is a pretty popular misconception. Speaking of whacky stuff to do to access Linux and text editing, I remember back wen Jaws and even NVDA had far worse cursor tracking in the Windows CMD window, so you couldn't be sure that when your screen reader said it was beside a certain character, that it actually was. This is something I argue no sighted user of a computer has probably ever had to deal with, and never for a duration of years. So what I would do is I would type 'z' and then route the screenreader's secondary cursor to make sure that the 'z' I added was added where it would/should have been, if my cursor was in fact where the screen reader said. Just imagine needing to text edit where you can't even trust the position of the system caret .... fun times!

sbahram 8y ago

Yeah, I hear you. Honestly the smart-home/IOT movement has been very beneficial, not because of the sorry excuses for automation being sold right now, but because it enforces a certain level of pre-2005-web-like openness. I knew all the file system structures and specific web paths back in the day because it was just necessary to memorize it and easy to access things if you had specifics, whereas now everything is cryptographic strings, super long addresses like IP V6 ones, and based on dynamic interactions so that deep URLs are pretty much worthless to memorize except maybe on sites like GitHub, where the pattern is reasonable. The reason for my comment on smart-home stuff bringing back some of this openness is only that at least now there's a backdoor, so to speak. When a microwave doesn't talk and also has very little tactile differentiation on the buttons, at least you can use your Google Home or Amazon Alexa to tell that thing to warm up a plate for 3 minutes. Same goes for toaster ovens, rice cookers, water boilers, Sous Vide circulators, thermostats, locks, lights, etc. Yet another of the countless examples of why having things be open and have an API makes it better for absolutely everyone, especially since it facilitates use cases not able to be foreseen at inception. And, yes I do believe all of that can be done in a secure and sensible way. No need for security to be antithetical to inclusion, which is a pretty popular misconception. Speaking of whacky stuff to do to access Linux and text editing, I remember back wen Jaws and even NVDA had far worse cursor tracking in the Windows CMD window, so you couldn't be sure that when your screen reader said it was beside a certain character, that it actually was. This is something I argue no sighted user of a computer has probably ever had to deal with, and never for a duration of years. So what I would do is I would type 'z' and then route the screenreader's secondary cursor to make sure that the 'z' I added was added where it would/should have been, if my cursor was in fact where the screen reader said. Just imagine needing to text edit where you can't even trust the position of the system caret .... fun times!