Comment by kiba

Comment by kiba 2 hours ago

4 replies

To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.

Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".

phantasmish 2 hours ago

I can assure you that plenty of people who were using computers before smartphones, and who have used them every day at work for decades, also do not grasp what we could consider the very basics of file management.

p-e-w 2 hours ago

> To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.

I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.

  • ben_w an hour ago

    So I don't know your specialty, but I'm going to make a wild guess and assume that it isn't stage magic.

    State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal.

    To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious.

    To the general public… a significant percentage have problems with paged results and scroll bars. Including my dad, who developed military IFF simulation software before he retired, and then spent several years of retirement using Google before realising it gave more than three results at a time.

    Would he, with experience working with the military, have made this soecific mistake about redaction? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the level of ignorance was well within his range. (I'm not better, it's just my ignorance is e.g. setting fire to resistors).

    *Our* "common sense" isn't universal.

    • p-e-w 16 minutes ago

      Your analogy fails because the purpose of stage magic is concealing what’s going on. That’s not what happened here. Someone just made a really stupid mistake that even non-technical folks can accidentally discover.

      There are undoubtedly some people who would be fooled by this, but you don’t have to be technical in order to not be one of them.