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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

The problem is people. Computing wasn't for everyone until it was. Half of all people are below average. A good chunk of people are just wandering through life and can't causally connect where they are right now to where they were when they woke up this morning.

The answer is to not use what they use. If you don't like what's made for them, what's made for them is not for you. Don't use it.

Android is a kiosk. iOS is a kiosk. Windows is a kiosk. These are not operating systems, they don't enable you to operate your property, they enable you to use services. They're kiosks.

(Side note: You can pry a little more functionality out of AOSP, but not all the functionality your hardware can deliver. I use it, but it's still a kiosk.)

Facebook and twitter are analogous to cable TV, people that use them are modern day couch potatoes. These people existed before them, the products and services they wasted their lives consuming were just different. You don't have to partake.

There are options. They just take a little bit work, because of course they do. That's half the point. The unwashed masses are lazy, you're not. Are you? Or are you flipping through channels while complaining that there's nothing good on?

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I love the fallacy in this thinking, complete with supposedly wise sayings (and in fact often false ones) like, "half of all people are below average," which if the person saying this was actually knowledgeable would know a statement as such requires knowledge of the underlying distribution (it will more likely be correct if the word "median" was used but even that could be misleading.) I don't know how one could ignore how much of the result of the "kiosk"-ness of modern tech is not because people are dumb and somehow, their dumbness willing kiosks into existence, but that it was a deliberate, somewhat one sided decision by computer companies because they knew they would make more money this way. Solitaire on windows used to not have ads. People (even the supposedly dumb people) were happy to play solitaire without ads. Now, they cannot easily. It's not because their dumbness made solitaire grow ads, it's because Microsoft realized their position and put ads into solitaire.

This really isn't a mystery, in fact, a clear mind and memory from even 15 years ago when solitaire didn't have ads is enough to demonstrate that this was clearly a move by tech companies chasing more profits and consumers not having many options.

I never said people were dumb. I'm not talking about how people are dumb.

The key word in your paragraph is "easily." People want everything to be easy. They want to be entertained easily. Yesteryear it was TV, today it's twitter. If that's not for you then the things they use are not for you, and it not being easy is a part of that, that's all I'm saying.

I can play solitare without ads right now. And if I can, they can. But they don't. And they're who all this stuff we complain about is built for. It's not built for me, you know how I know? Because I don't use it and it's continuing along just fine. They don't bitch about the difficulty of the things they don't use that I do, things that are made for me and not them, they just use what works for them. If you don't like the things made for them, use different things, that's my only point.

Those people existed in 2005 and Microsoft released solitaire without ads in it for them and me. Now Microsoft does not. As far as I am concerned, I could play solitaire without ads and I still do today but it's harder and requires more steps. Again, I don't know how non-technical people's existence influences the garbage IT companies now put out and have gotten appliance makers to put out because they always existed! The only thing I can recognized as changing is just a profit-minded decision by IT companies (and even there, the jury is somewhat out, but that's another discussion).

Talking about people who don't know to look harder is not even the issue or relevant. I apologize for being miffed about the "stupid people" talk because it is somewhat presumptous to me, but at the very least I want to submit that I don't understand how that knowledge helps me or anyone at all who has to deal with the garbage the tech companies put out now. As far as I can tell, things that were easy for me years ago are harder now. It doesn't mean I don't still make things work for me because I still do like likely most HN readers, but I did not have to do half of these things 10 years ago but I have to now. I cannot blame "stupid people" because "stupid people" didn't make my computer, my OS, or my air filter, but developers at IT companies did. That to me is the more interesting conversation is because they're the actual responsible party.

This might be spam, but I also like playing solitaire and hate ads, so I made solitairesport.com. It's simple and has some bugs, but plays well enough on mobile and costs me essentially nothing. Few people use it because buying ads cost money. Maybe a search engine that could remove hits that contained ads would help mobe things in the right direction.

Regarding ads in solitaire.

Due to the nature of investment, and the fact that rather than targeting the highest-quality product, Microsoft targeted short term revenue growth, so it is indeed possible to argue that dumbness made solitaire grow ads.

Rather than speaking up, and demanding an end to corporate stock manipulation through buybacks, people accepted the product changes necessitated by the targeted revenue trajectory.

If we really want to go down this route, here's what I notice. I remember almost every single time a website changes its design (namely the major ones, like twitter, facebook, etc), a lot of people complain almost immediately, then the complaints stop and people adapt. The reality is such small nudges are below the threshold of pain, so people put up with it and adapt, and the next thing we know after many nudges later, my air filter needs to connect to wifi.

Still, however we want to analyze it, I still don't know why we need to go after consumers over the people who actually did the deed, no? Why are consumers who do not make the design and development decisions become who I should focus on instead of the people who implemented the actual changes? If someone stabs me in a park, sure it is a sad state of affairs if no one will call the ambulance, but surely the fellow I should be more upset with should be the stabber, no, and not aloof by-standers?

> If someone stabs me in a park, sure it is a sad state of affairs if no one will call the ambulance, but surely the fellow I should be more upset with should be the stabber, no, and not aloof by-standers?

More like, if you go to the park that's closed off behind a wall, with signs saying "CRAZY KNIFE STABBING BASTARD INSIDE" all over the place, and get stabbed... Yeah, the stabber is in the wrong, but what you did is still stupid.

It's a similar lack of foresight on the part of the public that allowed tech companies to boil that frog. That the companies act like batshit insane stabbers is obvious and expected. They could have been stopped at any point in the last twenty years. The fact that they hid the knife most of the time behind a fake smile and then stabbed the knife just deep enough for it to be "below the threshold of pain", repeatedly and consistently, should have raised alarm bells and sparked opposition. Instead, they were allowed to go all the way to AC needing WiFi connection.

Yeah, there's no argument that tech companies are the perpetrators, but giving them a chance to act that way for so long is a failure of society.

This is the contention of politics, if you accept to live in a society that voted to rip out all the psychwards, and hiked taxes on the mentally ill then you should expect this.

https://youtu.be/7eYcWpgCb7o

Concretely, investors over fairly short term demand differential risk, and convex return, and in the current season this means big tech works on decommodifying products, without necessarily improving bottom-line quality. It's also probably a fraudulent way for banks and financiers to extract cash from a large number of pensions and retirement funds, with the current constellation of made-up metrics like "user engagement", "ad revenue" and so on.

Laying the blame for programmers writing crappy software at the feet of the mythical "idiot" user who could never comprehend a "better" system is one of the core problems why computers today suck as much as they do.

While it is certainly true that many users don't share the enthusiasm for computers many of us have and they may often also be quite unwilling to learn complex systems for small productivity boosts, it is by no means true that they are all just to dumb to be empowered by computers. They do mostly lack the frame of reference what could even be possible with these machines (As do many programmers today) and thus seldom address the big issues they face.

Application starting up slow? They all do that and there are some even slower, so computers are just slow, right? Having to click through 15 Menus to activate an often used function? Nobody ever told them there was a convenient shortcut (And since they don't know it and thus never use it, it will get removed in the next version, hooray for telemetry!)

This also extends to programmers more and more. Processing 2000 Records takes 20 seconds? That's good! Have you seen this other app! We are fast! That UI is crap! No matter, I will never use it, lets install complexopensourcetoolnotfornoobs.

One difference the article also points out is that in the early days of computing, many of these today revered (or sadly forgotten) hackers actually wanted to bring computing power to the masses. They were not satisfied with dumbing it down or building it only for themselves. We need more of this sentiment today. If every developer would use the software they build, it surely would be much more performant, easier to use and powerful under the hood.

While it may seem impossible sometimes to get all these at once, we should always strive for better computing and ease of use != dumbing down!

It isn't that the software is crappy (though a lot of it is), it's that it's what people buy. They'll buy a TV that has hardware on it to overlay ads on what they're watching just because it has the YouTube app built in. They'll buy toasters that require OTA updates. The eternal September of the internet began with the invention of the iPhone.

I think the OG hackers were overly optimistic, call it solipsism, but we are talking about people who double right click. The address bar now almost universally integrates search functionality because lots of people just couldn't grasp the concept of clicking s different box or going to a search site first. And that's just the bottom of the barrel. There are plenty of smart people reading this right now with 6 figure jobs in silicon valley who have an Alexa in every room.

But my comment wasn't about the mythical idiot. It's not about how smart they are. People want what they want. It's not that they're stupid, it's that they're not interested. They'd be watching TV 5 hours a day in 1995, and they're doomscrolling Facebook right now. And if you're not like that, if you don't want to live the lives they do, then you should use other things rather than complain that things designed for them don't work for you.

I don't think your dismissive attitude towards people does you many favors and I wonder if it's a lack of empathy on your part or frustration from watching people doing the wrong thing over and over, which I also experience a lot.

But if you look at a single being as a person instead of just one sheep, their reasoning is, even if sometimes short-sighted, often sound for their circumstances. There are many pros and cons to decisions and many of the cons concerning surveillance, locked down functionality etc. are often pretty abstract and far away. The problem with many of these technologies is not really what they do today, but rather were it may lead when the become the number one choice and that is much harder for a single person to evaluate or care about.

Especially since choice often is an illusion and you can either accept the drawbacks (which in reality will rarely actually affect yourself) or stand out in the rain with your principles intact. The just as mythical market people like to uphold here on hacker news does not serve differences of sensibilities here. Either get a phone/tv/computer with tracking or ads, or get one which can not play online video. Either get a digital assistant that tracks your every move (though you probably will suffer no drawbacks because of this) or get none at all. Those are bad choices and as much as it aggravates me if people just shrug, I also find it often very hard to tell them of an alternative, because the alternative is more often than not not to play at all. (Or, if someone wants to mention the small subset of open source solutions, paying a hefty premium for years out of date hardware and buggy to non functioning software, of course only if you are even aware they exist!)

I find it really difficult to fault people for that, unless we take the broader view and fault them for the system itself.

I don't disagree. There's no lack of empathy. My only point is, things are made for people that will use them. If you don't like those things then that means they're not for you, use something else instead of complain about it.

And that is exactly what I try to argue against.

I think its a fair assumption here on hacker news, that most users are creators rather than consumers. And as such, the piece of software they "would never use" is very likely one they (or one of their peers) wrote.

I don't think it is a particularly good look to write adtech by day and run ublock by night, but even more than that it is also hardly sustainable. The custom solutions we run in our ivory towers and don't share with the plebes get harder and harder to create on bad, locked down platforms we help build for "them".

And I also think the assumption, that when it does not serve us, it serves them well, is also a false one. They may not know better, because they are not creators, but I think most folk have realized that computers and software often acts against their users interest.

So, who is supposed to change this, if not the people who have the knowledge and do actually build these systems? Just saying "I use something else and its their fault for not doing the same" does only make us accomplices in making the world worse for all.

"...but I think most folk have realized that computers and software often acts against their users interest."

Ehm, yes, but they still choose to use Facebook, Twitter and a Solitaire with ads. When I show them my Linux desktop and phone, they look in horror. And when I tell them I do programming, they think I am to blame for their garbage software.

"So, who is supposed to change this, if not the people who have the knowledge and do actually build these systems?"

The people building these systems are into this hellhole as well. Sure, advertising people run adblockers, but the people who build garbage software mostly use garbage software. The people that avoid this mess cannot unbuild Facebook, Twitter and Solitaire with ads. They can only build different things, while not being able to guide users towards it, since they mostly still choose garbage software. The people making unpopular choices have no real power to change things for better for the masses.

This all makes it somewhat of a joke when people writing articles online and speaking about computers refer to a "supercomputer" in everyone's pocket. The "supercomputer owner" has minimal control over how that power is applied. The kiosks serve their vendors and the vendors' data collection and surveillance systems more than they serve their users. Operating systems that stay tethered to commercial entities through telemetry, "services" and remote administration ("updates").

The problem is not people and intellect, it's the social contract. We agreed on consumerism as the way forward before anyone present in this discussion was born. The consumer computer being a computer is tangential. It is also a razor and blades, a supermarket, or a car-dependent suburb. These are all modes of orientation towards consumption. The involved goods and services have other ways of being delivered, but they are drowned out within this society because the primary way in which credit is earned is to devise financialization schemes and extract a little rent for oneself. Blaming the crowd for stupidity is merely a way of scapegoating what's actually wrong.

> There are options. They just take a little bit work, because of course they do.

These options took more work than they did a quarter century ago.

Yes, it was more difficult to learn how to use a computer back then. Yet, for the most part, it involved following written instructions until one understood how things worked. In the worse case scenario, the was troubleshooting. Yet even then the difficulty diminished once one understood how things worked.

The challenges today are far less technical and far more psychological. We are constantly being bombarded by messages of consumption. Some of those messages are easy to sidestep. You can run a community oriented Linux distribution. You can install an ad blocker on your computer/network. Other times it is more difficult to avoid. Consider how many articles end up being an advertisement for a company or promoting a book. Consider how much time we spend filtering out results from a major search engine when we do decide to look for something new.

Filtering is probably the best description of the hard work we face today. Contrast that with a quarter century ago, when the hard work was learning.

It is also worth noting that we have less access to effective tools these days. A few weeks back, I stumbled across a web-ring. Discovering new sites was difficult 25 years ago. The problem with embedded links or bookmark pages was their static nature. The problem with search engines is that they relied entirely upon keywords (as well as their smallish index). One of the early solutions was the web-ring: a dynamic collection of links on a common topic. While some may have led to sites with advertising (e.g. the Angelfires and Geocities of the world) and consumerism (e.g. sites following television shows), most of these were also sites about creating things for other people.

To make a long story short: not only are the old ways hard, they are made more difficult because of the current environment. We need to find some way to make it easier.

I'm convinced you can only make it easier for yourself, not for other people. The way I do it is to not immerse myself in all this noise. I don't read book reviews. I don't have a TV or Facebook or Twitter. I don't follow the news. It sounds extreme, but it is easy, I'm losing less hair than people that don't do these things. But you can only do it for yourself.

As far as the software side of things, that's a learning problem, once you've learned it's as easy as what most people use is to them, easier even. I don't have to contend with Microsoft store or nested mouse clicks galore, ad banners on my phone while I'm using it.

These systems should challenge the users to better themselves. That they do not and waste potential, for centralized consumption, is a wasteful tragedy.

It's evolutionarily engrained in us to take it easy when our needs are met. Most people don't want to be challenged, they don't face challenges unless they have to. That's part of what makes them challenges. We face challenges because if we don't we will die. If there's no risk it's not really a challenge, just a hard thing. So why do the hard thing? It's easier to sit around and drink beer.

Twitter is a mirror of sorts. Denigrating it in its entirety says more about the subject than the object of their criticism.

>Android is a kiosk. iOS is a kiosk. Windows is a kiosk. These are not operating systems, they don't enable you to operate your property, they enable you to use services. They're kiosks.

For what it's worth, all of them enable me and everyone I know to achieve the things I need or want to get done.

Working on some paperwork? Office and Windows right there to get me through it.

Need to use some industry standard tooling for work? Windows more than likely (probably the only one) handles it.

Need a reliable workstation? Macbooks and Thinkpads can seemingly last the better part of a decade if not more, no matter how badly they're handled.

Need to do some important phone calls? I've literally never seen an iPhone fail to be a phone.

Want a nice and compact, all-purpose portable device on the road? Android phones and tablets can handle mostly anything nowadays.

If anything is a "kiosk", it's desktop Linux. They don't enable me to operate my property (because they literally can't outside of very specific niches), they enable me to bask in their ideologies (which IDGAF about).

Do you understand what I mean by "kiosk"? It's not entirely derogatory, it's not a meaningless insult. Just because you can use a piece of software to accomplish your goals doesn't make it not a kiosk. A kiosk is a type of interface that intentionally limits functionality to restrict user behavior to behavior desired by the actual operator. The Redbox at 7-11 is running kiosk software. It works perfectly when you want it to spit out a DVD.

So I've got a device in my hands right now, and I can make calls and browse the web and talk to my friends. But you know what I can't do? Change the default DNS server. Why do you think that is? My device is physically capable of this, the Linux kernel running on this device is capable of it, yet the system prevents me from doing so. What if I want to? It's mine isn't it? Why is it deliberately designed to prevent me from doing so?

It's a kiosk. Just because it does everything you need it for doesn't change this, it just means your needs are very limited.

You're wrong about Linux BTW. You can do anything you want with it, with as much ease as you desire. You sound like you feel insulted by what I said and are trying to hit back, which is childish, and you sound like you haven't used a Linux system since 1999.

It's not about ideology. It's about being able to do anything with my property that it is capable of doing. I don't like being kneecapped, would you buy a kitchen knife with a handle deliberately designed to only work when wielded with your right hand? If you're right handed it does everything you need it to. Yet most people would consider it inferior, and even consider it insulting to their intelligence if such a knife was on a shelf in front of them with a price tag on it.

>A kiosk is a type of interface that intentionally limits functionality to restrict user behavior to behavior desired by the actual operator.

So Debian? Who are holding a grand discussion on the merits of making "non-free firmware" more accessible? So GNU? Who insist everything must be free-as-in-freedom and open source and anything to the contrary is a cardinal sin?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world carries on.

>But you know what I can't do? Change the default DNS server.

You can do this on both Windows and Android. I have no direct knowledge on iOS/MacOS, but I presume they also do it because why wouldn't they?

Perhaps a better example was called for, but DNS servers configurations an example ain't.

>It's a kiosk. Just because it does everything you need it for doesn't change this,

Your definition of a not-kiosk was, quote: "they ... enable you to operate your property".

Windows, Android, iOS (and MacOS) let me (and the vast majority of people) operate my (and their) property. Desktop Linux can't (or won't). OS market shares are an objective evidence of this.

>it just means your needs are very limited.

My "needs" are my need or desire to operate my property. What I do with my property is none of your business, unless we're talking ideologies (and it would still be none of your business, really).

>You're wrong about Linux BTW. You can do anything you want with it, with as much ease as you desire.

Sure, I can do anything I want with it; if it's something the distro devs are concerned with. And yes, I can do it as easily as I want; so long as I don't step outside the command line.

I give many flavors of Linux a shot every few years, and every time I fail to find a practical desktop use case the machine could serve me that something else wouldn't do better for much less effort and stress.

>It's not about ideology.

Far as I can tell, this is all about the ideology. You said it yourself that my "needs are very limited". Why do you care about the nature of my needs? I need a kitchen knife, I bought a kitchen knife, and I argue for the kitchen knife. You're telling me I'm wrong because the kitchen knife has a handle of a shape you don't like. The kitchen knife suits me, what's it to you?

Also, why would anyone left-handed be pissed off at a right-handed kitchen knife? If they don't like it, don't buy it. No need to get insulted over it. There are plenty of other, valid things to be insulted over in life.

> You can do this on both Windows and Android.

Tell me how then.

It's nothing to me that you're happy with a kiosk. I'm not. That's the whole point of top level comment.

For Windows, it's mostly the same as always even on Windows 11. It's under the IPv4 (or IPv6 as applicable) properties of whichever connection you're using.

The exact way to get to it varies slightly by Windows version, but it's somewhere under the vicinity of Control Panel -> Network and Internet -> Network Connections (this particular example is from Windows 7).

For Android, this also varies slightly by each device manufacturer's own flavor of Android, but it's usually somewhere under the section to do with device connections (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.) and is called "Private DNS".

You need to give it a hostname (usually a domain name, eg: dns.google for 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.) rather than an IP address, presumably because it's DNS Over HTTPS? I'm not quite sure why it doesn't take IP addresses.

I was asking specifically for android, should've clarified that. I was fully expecting this exact answer btw.

Switching to DoH or private DNS in Android does not change the default DNS. How do you think you get the IP from the hostname when you enable DoH? 8.8.8.8 is hard coded and there's no way to change it without hacky stuff. Every time you request a record from your configured DoH server, it queries 8.8.8.8 to get the IP of that server hostname. I chose this example specifically because I'm extremely familiar with it, a good example it does make.

Are you still unsure why you can't enter an IP address instead of a hostname? There's literally no user oriented reason for this, the developer had to go out of their way to prevent it. This sort of deliberate restriction is why I call it a kiosk. Why wouldn't they indeed.

And it's not the only one in android, and it hasn't always been there. It was introduced in a later version, early versions of android left the DNS server configurable. Another good one is tethering reporting to your carrier. Look into how that works, it's ridiculous. Why is my device doing things I don't want it to do and preventing me from stopping it? Is this thing mine or not?

I actually don't make use of the Private DNS feature myself, because one time I had it set and it somehow broke connections to everything. Probably some catch 22 nonsense going on, since it wants a hostname but you need DNS to know where the hostname goes.

Also, apologies, some of that beer I had for dinner must still be in me because I forgot another way to set DNS servers on Android, at least partially.

Under whatever connections (Wi-Fi, etc.) is called again, going into all the various Wi-Fi connections I can set a specific DNS server (actually two servers) to use with the connection. Basically kind of like how Windows configures it. Of course, it doesn't apply to the mobile data connection, which is annoying and definitely a mark against Android...

Not to get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, but the reason you can't enter a plain IP is because the H in DoH stands for Https, and there's no way to validate SSL against a bare IP. A false sense of security is worse than a bad one!

At the very least, I should be able to specify the DNS server used to query for my DoH hostname.

> I've literally never seen an iPhone fail to be a phone.

OTOH, I literally stopped using my iPhone when it randomly decided to take a break from being able to make calls. Except as a beer opener

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