Skip to content

Comment on The Slow Death of the Power User

Comments

Mobile Platforms Did the Most Damage, and They Did It on Purpose

So true, but this has been going on for quite a while. Phones accelerated it and I have seem many of the concerns come up in IT where I worked.

A couple of examples:

1. My favorite, about 10 to 15 years ago. A user said this finance report always had 2147483647 in the total. This was looked at for weeks by another group.

After a few weeks our manager's manager called a meeting with everyone to look at the issue. Everyone had no idea what to do. When I saw the number it look real familiar to me. I then released it was the max value if an int. I told them the issue was its variable could was too small. A simple change fixed the issue.

Another old programmer who was not at the meeting asked me what happened. I showed him the report and he know instantly what it was too.

2. hex dumps, no one can read them now. About 25 years ago I was looking at a dump to see where a packed numeric value was, people who saw be thought it was magic. I had to explain how that number was read and what the hex represented.

I fear what will happen if AI becomes a real thing.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.