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"I really like Outlook, I can use it to talk to all my friends"

"That's a stupid attitude, Outlook is just one client, the underlying protocol is called email and it'd be useless without that"

"..."

@chris_martin I mean, it'd actually be extremely dumb if someone conflated Outlook with all of email, so you're not selling me on this

@sonya @chris_martin Talk to people who work front-line ISP tech support. Ask them how many of their callers think that the big blue E icon on their desktop is "the internet." This has been true at least since I was working dialup support 17 years ago.

@sonya @maradydd No, that's success. We work hard to build these abstractions and let people use products without thinking about the stack they're built on.

@chris_martin that is indeed why people can drive cars without knowing how the engines and transmissions work, and why we can live in housing with modern plumbing and electrical wiring that we use to do ~stuff~ without understanding how the pipes and wires work, let alone the vast network of pipes and wires that connect us all to sewage systems and electrical grids

@maradydd @sonya

Meredith L. Patterson @maradydd

@GinBaby @chris_martin @sonya It's good that people don't *need* to know implementation details. It's *important* that people continue to be *able* to know implementation details, should they choose to spend their attention that way. But these two values need not be in tension.

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@maradydd i agree, and can i just say that i love that we have users from at least three different instances just in this conversation.

@chris_martin @sonya

@maradydd @sonya Critical point - as you know these things are so often conflated, with tragic results. I don't want the source to everything because I plan on having hacked versions of everything or even ever plan to look at it. I want the source so that I know I have all my options. UX is a completely different question, where for the most part none of us want to see anything to do with the implementation.