In many ways, the silky-smooth convenience offered by modern computer software makes everything much harder to learn about and understand. For anyone that used zip files before this Windows feature, the problem is obvious - but for younger people it’s not obvious at all. Heck, a lot of people can’t even tell whether or not a file is locally on their computer - let alone whether it is compressed in some other file.

I like the meme - but the identity of the villain hasn’t yet been revealed. I’m sure lots of people are keen to see who’s behind the “Jia Tan” mask.

And so the microkernal vs monolithic kernal debate continues…

I’m sure its different now from when I started - because coding is very popular, and the internet is a thing… But I can tell you, that it took a long time before I knew what a programming language was, or ‘coding’… these words were just not familiar to me.

I learnt stuff by just opening random executable files in notepad to see what they look like… mostly it was just garbage that no one can understand - but some of them were readable, and I replicated and learnt from them. (they were .bat files.) I became a bit of an expert in making very fancy batch files. I made customisable menus, and a little adventure game. Then my parents helped me out by buying me a programming book. It was about programming in Visual C++. I was pretty excited - until I quickly worked out that Visual C++ was something you had to buy before you could use it.

Anyway, my point is that it is easy to see what you need from the point of view of an expert; but from the point of view of a novice, you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know which words are important, or what anything is called. The first steps are not hard except that you don’t know which direction you are meant to be stepping in, or where the starting point should be.

You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.

Mozilla has a very strong track-record though. They’ve been around for a very long time, and have stuck to free open-source principles the whole time.