[akira2501]

> being comfortable using interfaces and abstractions they don't fully understand.

I don't think it was an interface or abstraction that got the user in trouble here, they were using a pair of systems in ways that were fine on their own, but combined led to an emergent vulnerability that they didn't even know to consider.

It may be sheer pedantry but I really do see this as a unique "systems" issue, and this type of 'emergent' property between separate self-contained programs is fully within that domain.

[wwright]

I think it is an abstraction: the one underlying both of those components that combined to create the vulnerability.

The abstractions provided by the OS compose in very surprising and hard to predict ways for humans. This is why newer systems don’t use the same abstractions (JavaScript and browser APIs), or else sandbox them much more thoroughly (iOS).

Those newer tools have newer problems, of course, but I think a lot of the churn and reinvention of tech that we complain about is really about trying to find abstractions that combine in more predictable and useful ways.

[pdkl95]

> The abstractions ... [are] very surprising

From this[1] insightful video essay by Kyle Kallgren:

>> Metaphor Shear -- That feeling all users experience when you realize the metaphor you are working in is bogus. When the computer fails you and you remember that there are a hundred translations between input and output. Codes and translations we don't have the time or patience to do ourselves. Intellectual labor that we've surrendered to a device.

>> The joke at the center of Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is about metaphor shear. The answer to an important question lost on its long journey from input to output. A computer glitch so huge, so strange and so embarrassing that its programmers have to make a computer the size of a planet to file a bug report.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr9_DcO6G3A

[swiley]

I’m not sure I agree with this, there’s a point where you start infantilizing users and make it difficult or impossible for them to do useful things with their computers. iOS is still like this (although they may be headed in the right direction) and I’m fairly certain the web absolutely is.

I will say apple absolutely got the built in ssh client in iOS13 right.