espelhamento de
https://codeberg.org/cyrneko/pages.git
sincronizado 2025-11-10 10:38:24 +00:00
80 linhas
5,5 KiB
Markdown
80 linhas
5,5 KiB
Markdown
---
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id: 05nyO49tHYo
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title: Give me more "bare" systems
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description: I don't want those damn abstractions everywhere!
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author: Alexia
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visibility: public
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created: 2025-08-06T01:14:08+00:00
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---
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Computers nowadays are ubiquitous. They are everywhere, used by everyone, and we've made them efficient to the point that they fit in our pockets.
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And especially since 2020 ([you know why](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic)) we've been exposed to these devices and digital services more and more. You would think that those which were born into this, right in the midst of it, would know how to navigate this new world, right?
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<p class="large">I must disappoint you.</p>
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Truth is, most people my age (at the time of writing 19), and basically everyone else that is a part of Generation Z really doesn't know much about computers at all.
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Many do not understand what a filesystem is, and if they do then they still fail to use it. If they don't fail to use it, they only know an abstracted version of it that is presented to them by phones or most modern operating systems.
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The point is, the software that we all use – primarily our operating systems – is becoming more and more abstracted away. "Like magic!", without letting you look inside or understand the system.
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And filesystems are just the beginning of this, it's everywhere!
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Many know vaguely what "inspect element" does but have no idea what a "HTML" is. Most know roughly what a file is but struggle to find their downloads folder. Put these two together into "you upload an HTML file to a server" and they think "oh like a discord server? I can do that"
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**But I don't even blame them.**
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Honestly, it's not their fault that they're part of a system in which the fundamental way that our technology works is abstracted away. And that is why I want more education, and so much less abstraction.
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Our operating systems and the tools that they ship should not abstract away their functions to make it harder to trace and understand what is happening for to "make it more accessible".
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I argue that being more transparent and using less abstractions is actually crucial in being accessible to the user as it avoids weird interactions between different abstractions and components.
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Sometimes abstractions are useful, like abstracting filesystem or sandbox permissions away into App Permissions like most operating systems do nowadays, but that is so far removed from i.e what iOS does to the filesystem structure, or what social media companies have made everyone believe a website is.
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## By example: What is a website?
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Most people, when you ask this, will have no idea what to succinctly answer. Closest you'll get is "an app that sorta does everything and lets you get everwhere on the internet"
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Which isn't wrong, but misses the point of what websites were *intended* to be.
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Websites were intended to be these spaces where people share information between eachother, and also personal digital homes. Nowadays these homes are owned by others, and said "others" have lots of money, one might say too much.
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They abstract away the idea of writing your own content, styling your own website, all for it to fit into one neat format. ~~Twitter~~ X, Instagram, even the site I work on, [wafrn](https://wafrn.net), does this.
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Instead of writing your own site and layout you are forced to conform. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Instead of organic discovery, there is blackbox algorithms.
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Yeah sure, some of us let you play around with the way things look. But only within our framework of what we deem 'user-friendly'. The stylesheets that make your site what you are abstracted away by a click-'n'-drag editor that tells you nothing about how to replicate this without their tools.
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You are locked in. Their ecosystem, their rules. A walled garden of proprietary tools. Tools that when they disappear, will leave you stranded.
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Some people still rely on Adobe Flash Player for this reason. They were left stranded. Their software unstandardized. Their tools abstracting away the truth of how our technology works.
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Their websites broken, only to be viewed with a flash emulator.
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## One of many
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These tools keep coming out, flash player and the web is just one example of how things can go wrong should you decide to build tools that abstract away how things truly work for 'user-friendlyness'.
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Take how any EXE installer works, or take how Flatpak works.
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These systems aren't transparent, they don't let the user just peek inside and, by their design, it'd be cumbersome to inform the user all the time of where and how they can peek to see what's going on.
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Meanwhile, and I hate to be glazing apple of all companies, look at `.app` on macOS:
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- Can be distributed as any kind of archive but most commonly a .dmg
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- Has a common place to be moved into to be recognized as an "app"
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- Just lets you peek inside, from one place, transparently.
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<small>No need to `--appimage-extract` or `cd $(flatpak info -l org.signal.Signal)` to keep inside, it just lets you.</small>
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And honestly, as much as I fault macOS for other things, this is one thing that I believe they got right. Let the user look inside and fuck around with the software. Let them *see* how things work.
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## Wishes.
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I wish for software to be open and free, but most importantly I wish for software to be transparent.
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I wish for software to not hide the truth in abstractions in the name of 'user-friendlyness' that ends up hurting us all in the long-run. No one knows how to use computers anymore.
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---
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That's it, thank you so much for reading! donations are appreciated, as I already said <3
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