4 ms·

It’s scarier, less ergonomic, and smells hacker-y. There is a significant difference between “just click on this”, and “open the DOS prompt and write these mag

It’s scarier, less ergonomic, and smells hacker-y. There is a significant difference between “just click on this”, and “open the DOS prompt and write these magical runes”

vbezhenar 4y ago
It was observed that people get attached to Ikea furniture because they assembled it and it contains tiny bit of their labour. May be it could work with software? Like you've executed some scary command to enable this software to work, now you attached to it.
- 0ct4via 4y ago
  That's not a fair comparison though -- if you screwdriver slips or you put the wrong screw in the hole, your sofa doesn't stop working -- but you could do real damage to your OS. IKEA furniture assembly involves very simple tasks and tools, and a guide that's purely pictorial -- and even then, there are an array of services where people will do that assembly for you, even offerings from IKEA themselves. Software neither has the same physical presence, nor the same relative lack of risk. The average person can appreciate something "made with their own hands," but lacks the specialist knowledge to appreciate a script or code deployment. Given how scared and how easily-scammed people can be by having someone open Event Viewer in Windows and claim this means their computer has viruses, opening some script and demanding verbatim typing of commands is more likely to lead to anxiety or unsureness than anything, and certainly not attachment. You're thinking as if the average person is the average HN reader -- they're not. At all.
Someone 4y ago
You mean that both are scary/require you to trust the person telling you to do it, but only the shell script also looks scary?
- einherjae 4y ago
  The shell script is abstracted, and can hide a lot of the ugliness to the average user, whereas “type this into your terminal” goes full arcane black magic to the average user. But any opening of a terminal means we’re not in Kansas any more, and can’t be relied upon for any average user flow.

It’s scarier, less ergonomic, and smells hacker-y. There is a significant difference between “just click on this”, and “open the DOS prompt and write these magical runes”

vbezhenar 4y ago

It was observed that people get attached to Ikea furniture because they assembled it and it contains tiny bit of their labour. May be it could work with software? Like you've executed some scary command to enable this software to work, now you attached to it.

0ct4via 4y ago
That's not a fair comparison though -- if you screwdriver slips or you put the wrong screw in the hole, your sofa doesn't stop working -- but you could do real damage to your OS. IKEA furniture assembly involves very simple tasks and tools, and a guide that's purely pictorial -- and even then, there are an array of services where people will do that assembly for you, even offerings from IKEA themselves. Software neither has the same physical presence, nor the same relative lack of risk. The average person can appreciate something "made with their own hands," but lacks the specialist knowledge to appreciate a script or code deployment. Given how scared and how easily-scammed people can be by having someone open Event Viewer in Windows and claim this means their computer has viruses, opening some script and demanding verbatim typing of commands is more likely to lead to anxiety or unsureness than anything, and certainly not attachment. You're thinking as if the average person is the average HN reader -- they're not. At all.

Someone 4y ago

You mean that both are scary/require you to trust the person telling you to do it, but only the shell script also looks scary?

einherjae 4y ago
The shell script is abstracted, and can hide a lot of the ugliness to the average user, whereas “type this into your terminal” goes full arcane black magic to the average user. But any opening of a terminal means we’re not in Kansas any more, and can’t be relied upon for any average user flow.