I understand why people are like “But I figured out how to populate my
autoexec.bat so why can’t everyone else do that same work too?” but
one reason why I’m always harping on usability is that the great thing
about FOSS is that it enables sharing solutions.
I hung out adjacent to a hacker group in high school and the mindset there was always like “Don’t ask questions! Don’t answer questions! Just tell people to RTFM! I did, and I learned things better and more thoroughly that way” whereas I was more like this:
“If it takes me 4 hours to learn something on my own and you 4 hours to learn something else on your own, and then we can have two ten minute conversations where we help each other, we’ve both saved 3h40m each compared to if I had to spend 4 hours to learn my thing and then 4 hours more to learn your thing.”
And this goes quadruple for the world of software where we can share not only knowledge but actual running code.
We can share ready-made, polished, usable tools. We can learn so that not everyone has to learn.
Like in the real world I can just buy a pair of scissors and use that to cut things without knowing how to make scissors or even work metal. Not everyone needs to do every thing from scratch literally all the time. Doing some of the things from scratch some of the time is really good because it’s correctly observed that that is a good way to learn. But 8 billion people all doing the same work is just a waste. The typing monkeys will never get to Shakespeare if they’re all stuck typing the same quick brown foxes.
Now, we need dialectics about that so that in every generation there’s at least someone who can fix the machine that fixes the machine that fixes the machine. We don’t wanna stack the house of cards so high that it’s built on nothing.
There are two different reasons why people get into hacking.
One is that they love picking things apart and making them from scratch and seeing how they work and what really makes that clock tick.
The other, and maybe this is more my jam, is that they get frustrated with redundant tasks, with doing things over and over again where doing it once would’ve been enough.