We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Friction with old computers was how you knew them; AI assistants offer ease but no acquaintance.
Cyrus Lopez reflects on 1990s computing, where playing games required understanding autoexec.bat, boot disks, and interrupt settings. The resistance of the machine was the medium for knowledge. Modern AI assistants remove all friction, smoothing over challenge. Lopez argues that competence is safe, preserved in AI models, but acquaintance with a machine is dying. He describes a generation that will use tools without fighting them, missing a relationship they never had. The grief of this loss belongs only to those who remember the modem's shriek as two machines negotiating.
What commenters are saying
A dominant sentiment: the difficulty of old computers was never universal; in the 1990s most people also called someone to fix things. Commenters note that modding and DIY communities persist, and human curiosity cannot be extinguished. Some argue the shift is like earlier technologies (manual to automatic transmission) where convenience frees attention, while others stress that modern 'smart' machines impose control and enshittification. The scale of disruption now across all professions is unprecedented, warns one commenter. A few cite games like Zachtronics' and MiniMicro as new on-ramps to low-level understanding.