I love the argument about c having type safety with the little side-swipe at rust. “AcTuAlLy C does have type safety! You just have to jump through the following 50 hoops to get it!”. I’m an outsider to both C and Rust but it’s still funny.
Most people just want a thing to work though. One member of my family has issues with her iPhone at the moment where the signal is just all over the place. Sometimes not able to receive calls, sometimes not able to make them, sometimes inaudible when the call is made. She’s googled and gone to apple tech support who have given her a list of basic troubleshooting tasks to do, stuff like checking settings. She said to me “I don’t want to go hunting for these things I just want to hand it to someone and they can make it work!”
Linux and computer enthusiasts are happy to assemble things as we need them because the problem solving stuff is satisfying to us, for other people it’s just a slog.
Is there any sort of cognitive dissonance happening on a national level around this? America and it’s media have been touting the “land of the free”, “home of democracy” slogans for decades, is there not an identity crisis happening amongst those who believe it? I understand the left vs right, democrat vs republican arguments most of the time but surely no matter which side you’re on this must be a shock?