UX designers who eliminated the filesystem from user consciousness in name of simplicity ruined the world and are morally culpable for shriveling minds of children who are unable to tackle the challenges of today thanks to a choice sold as advocacy for the user but was ultimately motivated by control of a disempowered customer.
@SwiftOnSecurity Job Security. In a world there isn't any. It's fucked all the way down.
@SwiftOnSecurity Von Neumann knew what was best for children
@SwiftOnSecurity and kids these days can’t even write in cursive! Moral decay of society etc lmao

@danirabbit @SwiftOnSecurity Practically no nation besides Russia bothers, though I'm not sure it's all that dramatic of a loss.

Its purpose - fast writing - is rarely done by hand now and even then it wasn't anywhere near as fast as shorthand (also known as stenography) even in its day of prime.

@danirabbit @SwiftOnSecurity

I literally wish I could unlearn both vim and cursive.

OPs point, on the other hand, is a genuinely important one, having to do with "power in the machine"

@jrm4 @danirabbit @SwiftOnSecurity Don't write cursive and you'll forget how do to it eventually (in my case, "eventually" was about 6 months -- I came of age at the tail end of the whole left-handedness is evil era, so I had the double whammy of left-handed cursive leaving smear of ink/carbon as I scribbled, and my teachers telling me that it would be far easier if I did it with my right hand.) I presume that forgetting vim-isms would work much the same way, but you should be using berkeley vi like G-d themselves intended anyway.
@jrm4 @danirabbit @SwiftOnSecurity
iYou clearly don't know enough vim if you want to unlearn it!<Esc>:wq
@danirabbit @SwiftOnSecurity Cursive, I'd settle for file names in Proper Case...
@danirabbit You can tell by how they don't name their files in proper cursive like ℛℰ𝒜𝒟ℳℰ.𝒯𝒳𝒯 or 𝒯ℋℰ𝒮ℐ𝒮.𝒲ℛℐ anymore.
@SwiftOnSecurity

@SwiftOnSecurity

A vast everything-belongs-to-the-cloud conspiracy against private data so they can surveil it into the advertising industry's universal spyware.

@buermann
PKD was right all along

@buermann FWIW, the copyright industry definitely undertook a generational project to reshape kids into having faith into their version of maximalist copyright, and it has, sadly, borne some evil fruits.

@SwiftOnSecurity

@SwiftOnSecurity I prefer to think that number of people who understand how to balance a red black tree is fixed and finite and we can’t expect all people to learn how this stuff works.
@SwiftOnSecurity alternate take: the “filesystem” is a bad data structure. Directories are fine but subdirectories? Really?
@timzania what? How would that make any sense? Do you want thousands of files in a single directory?
@joshix @timzania this wouldn't be a problem if instead of directories, there would be tags on files, and files could be searched by tags (or combinations of tags and/or other attributes). Obviously files should be allowed to have multiple tags at once.
@LunaDragofelis @timzania no that would still be a problem. A tree is a great way to organize stuff, far better than to put labled stuff in a big list.
@timzania @SwiftOnSecurity subdirectories are so great I like each directory to have a subdirectory that is the parent of the current directory and then just for fun one that is the same as the current directory

@timzania The badness of the classic filesystem is excessive hierarchicalness. Symbolic links take the worst edge off that issue, though.

So, it's no wonder that Microsoft never implemented symbolic links properly.
@SwiftOnSecurity

@timzania @SwiftOnSecurity File systems are primarily user interface, not data structure.

@SwiftOnSecurity EXACTLY!

I'm shocked at the #TechIlliteracy of post-millenial #Kids despite them having easier access to #Documentation and #HowTos than I could've ever dreamed of, despite having #ISDN in 1999...

@SwiftOnSecurity when demonstrating chemistry practical classes I had to deal with 20 something students unable to save and find files on spectroscopy instruments.

Just staggering!

@pewnack They must have been ruined by iSpectroscopes.

@SwiftOnSecurity

@riley @SwiftOnSecurity some of the instruments weren't connected to the internet or printers so students had to use USB drives to save data and in CSV or similar format.

It was a f*cking nightmare.

@SwiftOnSecurity A little strident but, as a fan of knowing exactly what’s in all the directories, I like it.
@SwiftOnSecurity Could say the same about machine language and hex
@SwiftOnSecurity some people forgot the blood that was shed over interoperable document formats.
@SwiftOnSecurity if people understand folders they won't use proprietary search mechanisms that can let the OS return sponsored results

@SwiftOnSecurity Was thinking about this recently. Man, "sharing" on mac and iOS really is a horrible mess now.

I think maybe the big crime is appification.

Segregated tools working in walled gardens on their own private app owned data. Sold as a security cure! Which has turned in to a huge lever of corporate control.

I'm happy for any reasonably sensible fabric to wire individual "app" units. A file system is an option. Others are pipes, typed data, or a database.

Without that ability to plug together & combine, and **use your data anywhere**, the corps control it all.

@SwiftOnSecurity You should always know where your file is, as well as your towel.
@JackEastman That's why files used to be yellow, back in the day.
@SwiftOnSecurity
@SwiftOnSecurity
Them: I saved it.
Me: Where?
Them: …
@SwiftOnSecurity Same thing than removing viewing HTTP protocol on address bar : hiding things has no sense.

@SwiftOnSecurity
On the topic UX designers. Modern cars. OMG

try change the heat while driving and not hit another car, why put the heat control under a menu, a less then an inch plus and minus sign to try to target with your arm fully stretched, on a bumpy road on a 12” screen

Let’s go through this UX designers head. Hmm 20yo on his office, no glasses, yeah a menu to hide the heat would look nice I don’t want a screen with a lot of icons on it, let’s make the radio subtext for comercial big and have plenty of room for mowing pictures in there too. And yeah let’s swipe the screen for more functionality.

Great idea moron when it’s -20 deg Celsius, works like a charm. NOT

UX designers of cars should really apply for a new job. Every single one of them.

@SwiftOnSecurity Agreed this has annoyed me so much. It makes everything hard to find when there is no "filesystem"

@SwiftOnSecurity

Old Man Me: If these darn kids had to build their own computers out of sticks an wood like I did, they would know what to do in these situations!

Also Me: What's a Google Doc?

@geos @SwiftOnSecurity This. I use Google docs, but I don’t know what they actually *are*.
@SwiftOnSecurity does it matter that much? Abstractions are always happening and there’s always people that think each one is a step too far (eg LLMs, infra as a service) while many others see the benefits and exploit them immediately. If you need to know how a file system works, you can learn. Same as with if a service on AWS doesn’t fit your needs, you can learn to roll your own.

@oli_jens

You don't understand the abstract concept of abstraction, I'm afraid.
@SwiftOnSecurity

@SwiftOnSecurity Any de-skilling that masquerades as “convenience”.

Some tasks should be should require a trained mind, a skilled hand, and the operator is better for that training and skill.

@SwiftOnSecurity you can only truly appreciate the filing system as a tree when you delete recursively from c:\ only days after your parents get their first DOS based machine. #fail

@SwiftOnSecurity this is something I run into ALL THE TIME while training college freshers at certain companies here.

Never ceases to amaze me.

@SwiftOnSecurity I've deadass been asked what a file is in one of these classes before.

@SwiftOnSecurity and that's why I'm such a fan of android.

I mean.. I know, that android doesn't do everything right in that topic either, but it's still *way* better than... almost everything by Apple.
And well.. Windows (and I guess MacOS?) is still showing the user the real filesystem.

Please note that I've only used an iPad once, at work, for maybe 20 minutes or so. I don't know much about the internals of apple stuff.

@SwiftOnSecurity not sure if satire, but survivorship bias much?

Requiring “kids these days” to know filesystems (or CLIs, or machine code, or how to hand-wind core memory…) wouldn’t make any of them more knowledgeable users, it would simply prevent most of them (whether uninterested, intimidated, or lacking time or resources to learn) from using it, just like it did to previous generations.

@SwiftOnSecurity
I work with a frightening number of younger software devs that struggle to conceptualise any tasks that involve the file system and practically need spoon feeding solutions to file-based activity, yet they're not thick. I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this!

@SwiftOnSecurity PARKLIFE!

Yeah you're right though.

@SwiftOnSecurity I had to explain to someone today that you can go up to a parent directory :)

@thetacola

How do you know they weren't a time traveller from an era before directory uplinks were invented?
@SwiftOnSecurity

@riley @SwiftOnSecurity good point, don’t think I can rule that out 🤔
@SwiftOnSecurity i would love to see the percentage of drivers who know how an internal combustion engine or an electric motor work
@mikemc303 @SwiftOnSecurity File systems are not “how computers work”. They are an abstraction in service of the user. Abstractions can of course replace, or be layered on top of, current abstractions.
@ahltorp @SwiftOnSecurity my filesystem is my cpu and also my gpu and i will be taking no further questions at this time