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Free software scares normal people

(danieldelaney.net)
917 points cryptophreak | 7 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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f33d5173 ◴[30 Oct 25 20:07 UTC] No.45764711[source]▶
People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you understand exactly what you want, and correspondingly can manipulate a tool like handbrake to get it, or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works. A software that appeals to the weird purgatory in the middle necessarily has a very limited audience. In practice, this small audience is served by websites. Someone searches "convert x to y" and a website comes up that does the conversion. Knowing some specialized software that does that task (and only that one narrow task) puts you so far into the domain of the specialist that you can manage to figure out a specialist tool.
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1. latexr ◴[31 Oct 25 15:45 UTC] No.45773369[source]▶
> or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works.

That’s not always a possibility. See for example:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21262302/ap-test-fail-iph...

Those people didn’t need or want Photoshop or a complicated program with tons of options to convert image formats form anything to anything. Even a simpler app like Preview implies knowing where to look for the conversion part and which format to pick. They could have done instead with a simple window which said “Drop File Here”, and if it’s an HEIC, convert to JPEG. Could even have an option to delete the original, but that’s bout it.

There’s an Alfred workflow which is basically that. It does have some configuration, but the defaults are sensible and doesn’t let you screw up the important part of “detect this format which is causing me trouble and produce a format which will work”

https://alfred.app/workflows/alfredapp/heic-to-jpeg/

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2. jcelerier ◴[31 Oct 25 18:51 UTC] No.45775365[source]▶
> They could have done instead with a simple window which said “Drop File Here”, and if it’s an HEIC, convert to JPEG

But then you have to remember the names of 200 distinct software that all do this one thing, so you make a meta-software to manage and organize them, and you're back to square one only with more indirection

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3. f33d5173 ◴[31 Oct 25 20:16 UTC] No.45776224[source]▶
> That’s not always a possibility.

The solution in such cases can't reasonably be "everybody around the world learns to download one particular tool to fix things". In your example, the two reasonable solutions are either apple figures out how not to send image files to people that they can't understand, or the college board figures out how to convert heic into jpeg themselves. Otherwise, as in that case, most people will simply be left in a lurch.

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4. latexr ◴[31 Oct 25 21:09 UTC] No.45776729[source]▶
No, of course not. The point is that in the meantime (the problem was eventually solved) such a tool bridges the gap.
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5. fn-mote ◴[31 Oct 25 21:44 UTC] No.45777040[source]▶
LLM's exist now.

Google could do this years ago.

It might be a problem that you have to search for the solution to every time you have it, but you'll find the solution quickly because many other people also experience the problem.

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6. f33d5173 ◴[31 Oct 25 21:46 UTC] No.45777062{3}[source]▶
The people with the know how to use such a tool are more likely to use a swiss army knife tool than a specialized one off tool. The article mentions someone using windows photo viewer to do the conversion.
7. jcelerier ◴[01 Nov 25 00:34 UTC] No.45778220{3}[source]▶
> It might be a problem that you have to search for the solution to every time you have it,

as you say, it is a problem, and for many people an unacceptable tradeoff