Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Veronica Explains" channel.

@TassieLorenzo To be fair, I was 11 year old the year that all the media outlets were obsessing over the 11-year old computer geniuses. But, at that time there were still a lot of command line utilities in common use and the graphical ones were built with the assumption that the users would need to tie that into knowledge they already had. So, you had the desktop paradigm with things like folders, a desktop and either a trash can or recycle bin depending on the platform. There were even games like minesweeper and solitaire built in to encourage new users to learn how to use the mouse. One of the major changes I've seen over the last couple decades is the assumption that we don't need the handholding and moving away from a shared paradigm. Back in the '90s and earlier developers were a lot more hesitant to abandon the designs that others were developing unless there was good reason for doing so. These days, they'll do it just because it's aesthetically displeasing.
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I remember the DOS manual I got when my parents bought our first computer. It was massive.And there was so much useful stuff in there, along with less useful things like how to change the colors of the command prompt. I think a lot of why that stopped was simply the result of the internet allowing half-finished products to be shipped and as a result there wasn't the same kind of time to develop proper documentation. These manuals were often times being developed in parallelt to the later stages of development so they had a clear cutoff time just before the final touches were completed.
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To an extent that's the sort of environment that the commandline was originally intended for. Early on, most people didn't have direct access to the computer, so much of it would be over a dumb terminal to the mainframe.
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@jaykayenn The problem isn't the users at this point, the problem is the people designing these things to require manuals in the first place. Things that aren't actually involved in work should mostly just work with the features being discoverable on their own and requiring very little effort to figure out. Things like the popcorn button shouldn't even exist if they aren't going to work right. I'm lucky in that my popcorn button does seem to actually work correctly, same does the sensor reheat button. But, on many microwaves those buttons don't work at all. Anytime the majority of people are doing the wrong thing, it's worth considering why that's the case. You're never going to engineer something that's going to keep the "hold my beer" crowd from hurting themselves, but the interface should make typical tasks intuitive.
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IMHO, automation, is arguably the biggest advantage of the CLI. You can automate just about anything that has a CLI option with any language that you want to use, although Bash and PowerShell are probably the most popular choices due to just being on a bunch of computers already.
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@Bakamoichigei PS3 is vintage, there are still plenty of original PS3s out there and I think it still enjoys patent protection. If it's not old enough to have it's patents expire, then it's not old enough to be retro.
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Yes, although the DOS commandline was a lot less fully-featured as it needed to run on computers with far fewer resources than the ones that Unix was designed for. DOS was expanded over the years as new versions came out with newer computers being available, but it was never as powerful as the OSes that started out in academic institutions.
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These days, it's probably more common than you'd think. There are GUIs out there to handle basically any common task.
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That used to be the case, but it's been getting worse over the last 10-20 years. The commandline is plenty discoverable and all tools have some way of printing out every possible commandline argument. The hard part of the commandline is creatively thinking about how to combine different commands to do things.
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It's really sad that we seem to have peaked with the younger Boomers, entirely of Gen X and maybe a few of the older Millenials. Computers have been getting progressively harder to use because apparently we no longer care about the software working, it just has to look pretty. Even if that means that it doesn't actually work right.
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Keep in mind that there are only 5 places on a monitor that you can hit with a mouse without looking. The 4 corners and wherever the mouse is already located. With a keyboard, you've got 9 without even moving any fingers.
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@WillKemp To an extent that may have had some validity 20 years ago do to survivorship bias, these days, modern Linux distros are at least as easy to use as Windows is.
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If the battery is still good, you can always just wire a second battery in parallel to the main battery for a few minutes while you replace the main battery. That being said, it's far better to just use one of these units to backup the save ahead of time than to bother with that. Also, while you're at it, it's worth putting in a proper battery holder if the battery in there is soldered to the board so that the next time you don't need to. These carts just get more rare over time, so it's better to take the risk of redoing that now than later.
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It's worth noting, that you don't need to use a script to simply prepend a date onto a bunch of files. You can use sed, awk and xargs to do that. ls -d \. | awk '{print $0," 20240922"$1}' | xargs mv should add the date, as of this posting, to every single file in a folder. If you add grep, you can do a more granular approach and not hit all of the files.
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@VeronicaExplains Yes, although the wonderful thing about the CLI is that you can use pretty much any language you like. Bash is popular in large part because it's already on most Linux systems in the same way that Basic was usual an option for Windows and how most modern Windows versions have powershell easily available.
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@MrBearyMcBearface The usual way people come to appreciate the terminal these days is starting with things like that and seeing the cool stuff that can be incrementally added.
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Yep, but the optical discs are even more important. Thankfully, I think it's possible to dump anything from the PS3 and older at this point, some of them are really easy like the Saturn and PS that can be done in a regular computer from RetroArch. Some are a little harder like the Dreamcast where it's just a cheap SD card adapter and disc to dump any of them. The Wii and PS3 are a little harder as they require that you have the system jailbroken to do. But, once you've done that, it's not that hard. That being said, the carts can be damaged over time, even if you don't use them, so backing those up for posterity is also a good idea. It's not a bad idea to use a combination of checksums and something like quickpar to repari minor damage and just run that on some sort of regular basis.
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IMHO, the best GUI applications are basically just interfaces for commandline programs that simply put the necessary command together for you, so that you're not dealing with a super long command to type out, but can if you want to, or choose to save it for use again. Handbrake is kind of nice because it allows you to export the settings for use in the terminal or just use again in the future. That's super nice for things like TV series where you might not want to waste the space of storing the episode on your computer when you aren't planning on watching it again for another year and can just quickly tell it to do the conversion again while you do other things without reconfiguring things.
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Even without that it was still possible. My friend's Leading Edge computer forced Mario to jump into a pit. Nobody was even touching any buttons and there Mario goes to the nearest pit to end it all.
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It's a lot easier to do if you've got access to people that are completely ignorant of whatever system you're writing about to try the instructions. It's still not at all easy, but it greatly reduces the likelihood of missing things due to just assuming that people won't do that.
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