(Author of OP here.) I don't think computers are like appliances at all. Given the outsized effect that software infrastructure has on our lives, I think computers are more like laws. And my lesson from (a layman's reading of) Ancient Rome and the last 300 years of Western Civilization is that laws are too important to be left to legislators. This is a failure on both sides. We the masses have wanted to treat the hard work of law-making as an externality, and legislators have been happy to take control of them for us because it serves their interest. Both sides think they're pulling one over on the other, and both are being short-sighted.
To bring it back to software, it would be great to separate the user experience from the developer experience if we knew how. But we don't currently know how to make a program do precisely what the user intends it to do but not something else like dial home or spam a bunch of people in Vermont or encrypt my hard disk to hold it for ransom. I propose we live in the world we find ourselves in rather than the one we wish we had. This world requires us to invest in understanding computers if we want to use them.
> The Jobs "bicycle for the mind" line was about the user experience, not the developer experience.
I used the phrase because the conference alluded to it, but I spent a while researching it and would rather not have. You're right that Jobs used it in a blunt, superficial way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTRzYjoZhIY. But he was also using the phrase to refer to technology from Xerox PARC that he did not fully appreciate. I'm glad the term has taken on a life of its own and grown to mean something closer to what PARC intended.
To bring it back to software, it would be great to separate the user experience from the developer experience if we knew how. But we don't currently know how to make a program do precisely what the user intends it to do but not something else like dial home or spam a bunch of people in Vermont or encrypt my hard disk to hold it for ransom. I propose we live in the world we find ourselves in rather than the one we wish we had. This world requires us to invest in understanding computers if we want to use them.
> The Jobs "bicycle for the mind" line was about the user experience, not the developer experience.
I used the phrase because the conference alluded to it, but I spent a while researching it and would rather not have. You're right that Jobs used it in a blunt, superficial way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTRzYjoZhIY. But he was also using the phrase to refer to technology from Xerox PARC that he did not fully appreciate. I'm glad the term has taken on a life of its own and grown to mean something closer to what PARC intended.