Yeah, a lot of this is about personal preferences, and preserving them across time and space. It's not always a bad thing. There's always a trade-off between convenience, automation, predictability and security.
Another good point spolu brings up:
The chrome/ subdirectory of the chromium project (all
that makes up the Google Chrome experience: tabs, settings,
sync, omnibox) is made up of 5,343 C++ implementation files,
adding up to 1,449,451 lines of C++ code (as of 2013/09/11).
It's hardly tractable by one person, and hints to the fact
that it's probably impossible for a one guy to modify it
alone to come up with a profoundly different experience.
This detail doesn't get a lot of discussion, but I think it's sometimes an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the
ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option.
Lots of modern contraptions are simply too complex for any individual to ever claim a hope of gaining an honest understanding of their inner workings, nevermind an unskilled layman. At least, not without living like a cleric, cloistered away in the library of some convent or monastery for most of one's life. Sometimes I feel that the real hazard is that we gloss over the idea that we're trying to exert control over a massive arrangement of billions of transistors, however small they may be. If we were confronted with an elaborate array of ordinary light switches, and told to conquer the same tasks, I think it'd be easier to realize the true scale of some of the things we fiddle with on an everyday basis.
Another good point spolu brings up:
This detail doesn't get a lot of discussion, but I think it's sometimes an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option.Lots of modern contraptions are simply too complex for any individual to ever claim a hope of gaining an honest understanding of their inner workings, nevermind an unskilled layman. At least, not without living like a cleric, cloistered away in the library of some convent or monastery for most of one's life. Sometimes I feel that the real hazard is that we gloss over the idea that we're trying to exert control over a massive arrangement of billions of transistors, however small they may be. If we were confronted with an elaborate array of ordinary light switches, and told to conquer the same tasks, I think it'd be easier to realize the true scale of some of the things we fiddle with on an everyday basis.