I can only imagine these reports must be completely trivial if they can be written without the use of a keyboard. Standards aren’t slipping they say...
I believe projects like Raspberry Pi were attempts to mitigate this issue too. Hopefully they gain more traction in society at large.
This is not a problem. If they're not smart enough to realize they are deficient in necessary skills for future personal prosperity then I probably don't want to hire them for my company anyway. And if for some reason I do, then they better damned well learn how to type in a hurry. It's not the most difficult skill.
Do you know where the real problem is with the damned smart phones and not knowing how to type and do your job? Managers. We've got a world full of people supposed to be managing and instead they're spending their time texting unintelligible and incomplete crap to their employees while they gallivant around.
WTF happened to actually working?!
And A level students in STEM subjects are not typically from poor backgrounds.
Keyboards suck and cause your hands to be in an unnatural position for a long time.
Also, smartphones have physical volume keys and sleep/wakeup much faster than PC.
And PCs still don't have dedicated keys to switch input languages.
But typing on a smartphone is a hell. I always make mistakes and hit the wrong button.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy...
Related story: My college roommate studied accounting and one of the first classes they made him take was remedial computing. Here's how Excel works, use alt-tab to switch windows, that kind of thing. I thought the class sounded dumb but maybe it's necessary.
But recently I tried typing on android keyboard with all fingers. It's hard (no tactile delimitation or confirmation) but doable. I wonder if kids these days consider this as normal pro use of smartphones. Basically cultural relativity.
People use keyboards all the time and submitting anything beyond basic on a smartphone does not happen here.
I was at our local library recently, during the time students were preparing for exams. Everyone had z phone to check messages. Almost everyone had a laptop. I did not see a single tablet.
Yes, us teens are on our smartphones a lot, but the majority of us know how to use computers... this article is pretty misleading.
I find it's the least limiting because you can draw anything, the easiest to use because you don't have to learn a GUI or a language, and the fastest -- yet software people will still wonder how they can GREP it. Another contra is legibility and possibly aesthetics.
I was like "WTF" internally... And she's writing her first CV and application letters like that.
>it is not uncommon for even would-be system engineers to ask such questions.
How the hell is it even possible?
Everyone around me can def use a keyboard. Not ten finger touch type but near enough
We were drawing with blood in caves, we were scratching stones with other stones, we were sculpting symbols on walls in Egypt, we started writing on papyrus, then paper, then started using typewriters, then physical keyboards and now virtual keyboards. Don't act like the generation that critiques the next generation because they see the world different.
Kids from today probably will be the ones communicating through brainwaves with the IoT or similar; a more efficient and higher throughput interface. Yes, it's important to learn how to use pencil and paper and how to type faster on a keyboard but move on.
I actually find it cumbersome to write on a keyboard on the phone, but also I feel that everything else is slow, interfaces are cumbersome, unintuitive and mostly just stupid.
If I search for a path on google maps, from point A to point B in a different country than I am now, and I forget to switch to car instead of public transport, then I don't get any result. And I am like how the fuck there is no path since there is an obvious big street over there, in the middle of the screen. Oh there is a small icon somewhere to switch the type of transport from public transport to car. What if they would check there are no results and suggest to change the transport type? Thanks for rounding the corners of the search bar, it makes a great difference.
Let me rant about search and reaching for an app on any OS. I have 120 apps on my iPhone 8, I use 5-6 everyday let's say. But once in a while I want to open an app that I don't know where it is because I don't use it often. I know how is called because is a well-known app and has the same name with their service or business or whole company. I use the search functionality on iOS, swipe down type 3 letters, wait, wait, fucking wait 2 seconds to get the results. It should be lightning fast, there are 120 strings to search through why the hell it takes so long. Oh, I typed last letter wrong, delete it, results are refreshing, write the correct one, wait again for results.
If I notice the lack of motion or changes then is too slow.
You will say that I can organize things in folders, after 3 months, oh is that app that connects to the camera in photos folder, utils, connectivity or "not often". Who cares? I know how the app is called, I can search for it, why is it slow?
Huge props for the fact that the text box gets focused when swiping down and I don't have to ("click?") touch on it to focus.
There are just 2 examples, but I use apps on my phone everyday, I search for public transport on my phone every weekend, multiple times a day. Why focus on making the 3 dots for settings as 3 dots instead of 3 lines from the burger icon? It's still unintuitive and the rest of the app is unintuitive. I could rant for weeks about other features or functionalities, on any platform you want.
God bless autocomplete!
Stop whining about small things, see the bigger context, meet people where they are going, understand their intentions, maker super usual tasks extremely easy and stop being stubborn. You will move on or other will move past you, sooner or later, worst case you will pass with your idea.
Context: I am working as a programmer full-time, participated for a long time in high school and university in algorithmic contests. I had multiple computers and used different OS-es. I am confortable with the CLI and I have a decent understanding how things work on the internet, what happens on multiple layers from when you type in your browser URL bar to when you see the website.
The prediction and correction technologies of smartphone keyboards are a very good match for kanji and hànzì input. As a second-language user of Chinese, I find it considerably faster and easier to input hànzì on a smartphone than with a physical keyboard. The context switching between inputting pīnyīn and selecting hànzì is much less expensive when the hànzì are presented directly above the on-screen keyboard. The prediction and correction algorithms seem to be far more intelligent on mobile, which largely compensates for the slower and more error-prone tactile experience.
It is my understanding that most young Japanese people prefer the flick input method, which is a refinement of the old keitai input method used on featurephones with numeric keypads; they are often startlingly quick at using this method, but it poses a far higher switching cost when moving to a QWERTY-derived physical keyboard. I find it entirely plausible that the flick method could simply be inherently superior.
I started looking for some example to show how bad iOS's IME is, and I found it for the first try: it returns a wrong candidate for the first suggestion for "かんじをにゅうりょくする" (to enter kanji), returning "感じを入力する" (to enter sense) rather than the correct "漢字を入力する". Note that "漢字" (kanji) and "感じ" (sense) have the exact same phonetic relization: Both of them are pronounced as kanji. It seems as if iOS's IME does not take into account any contexts at all. If it did, how could it have calculated entering sense (?) is more likely than entering kanji? This kind of absurd error would rarely happen with Microsoft's IME and it always stresses me out when entering long texts in Japanese on a smartphone.
But this is also why there is a large market in third party keyboards/IMEs, even on Windows. From the classic ATOK to the modern Google Japanese IME
SKK
What you are talking above is phrase-wise conversion. However, using SKK can easily distinguish "感じ" and "漢字" by "KanJi" and "Kanji", by explicitly specifying where the conversion starts and ends with Shift key. SKK can massively reduce the conversion candidates, so that people can faster obtain converted sentences.SKK is a good input method, but doesn't exist for smartphones.
T-Code (or TUT-Code)
We also have t-code input methods on computers but not on smartphones. It assigns 2 key strokes into one letter(kana or frequently used kanji) directly. For example, "kd" will type "の" and "is" will be "東". This input method is also very efficient and boost input speed, however it is designed for physical full size keyboard with 8 fingers. Its users can't do the same with software keyboard because they remember the key strokes with fingers.
I get it right on mine: https://imgur.com/a/83VCSwo
Bear in mind I use a mac wih the same icloud account, and have years of data on it. Part of it must be shared.
I haven’t use MS’IME in a long time, but I remember it being only marginally better than Apple’s. The main differentiators for me where names (places, stations, peoples).
But one does not even have to go that far, autocorrect for Slovak is quite a disaster to the point where I'd like to be able to disable it on per-keyboard basis.
(I don't speak Japanese, sadly)
The flick keyboard removes the need for typing 2 Roman letters to make one Japanese letter, instead you just have a single flick. Almost all young people use the flick keyboard and I definitely think it is faster.
Cast your mind back to when you first encountered a computer keyboard. I remember hunting for seconds to find letters in this unfamiliar arrangement. This is where many Japanese young people are. There was never a computer in their house and now they are heavy mobile users. The qwerty keyboard is not everyday for a lot of people.
As to general computer literacy among Japanese teens: I teach a first year general English course at a Japanese university. The students are drawn from all different faculties so I feel it is a pretty good informal sample. I tried to get students to do an online survey by putting a web address on a slide. Over half do not know what a web address is and draw no distinction between search bar and address bar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_input_methods#/media/...
Does an IBM cardpunch keyboard count? :-)
Anyhow, I took a 2 week class in 8th grade to learn to touch type on a mechanical typewriter. It's paid off handsomely ever since.
I would say that is because the search and address bar have been the same thing in all major browsers for some time now.
How early did you learn to type? As an American born in 1980, I learned in first grade, and I don't remember it being a struggle. So maybe it's really important to learn early.
FWIW, I'm visually impaired, so looking at the keyboard wasn't a practical option.
As a native Chinese speaker I find the opposite.
>when the hànzì are presented directly above the on-screen keyboard
It's basically the same for most of "proper" PC IME. They start to appear when you're typing pinyin, and then you choose with numbers or space (for first one).
Showcase: https://i.imgur.com/gQGKw11.gif
So, IMHO there is no obvious advantage that smartphone's IME has over PC's here. And the speed of typing on physical keyboards beats smartphone by a mile, overally speaking.
---
However, I DO found that most of Japanese (which I'm a second-language user) IME on PC I tried having the problem that, you have to press some key (normally `enter` or `space`) to start "convert", and even another input to start choose between candidates, which is very tedious because you have to keep pressing `space` which IMO shouldn't be necessary
(Note: It was how most Chinese IME (Like Zhineng ABC) worked 10 years ago, but they got rid of redundant inputs later.)
Showcase (MS JP input, I knew it's not the best, so feel free to let me know how other IME function in these scenarios!): https://i.imgur.com/hwml1Sf.gif
Notice that I have to press space once first to enter "convert mode" (which breaks down your inputs to groups), and then press space again (for the first group) to make the candidates appear. I really don't get why it can't be like the Chinese IME.
This doesn't match my experience, and I just double checked on Windows 10 and OSX 10.13 - I do not believe this experience has changed in at least the past 7-8 years.
I switch to Japanese hiragana input, and type 'sake', and 酒 appears as soon as I hit space or escape. I do not hit space or escape or anything prior to typing 'sake'. If I type 'yoroshikuonegaishimasu' and hit space/escape/enter it becomes 宜しくお願いします, properly converting hirigana to kanji where it should.
I am using the default IMEs that come with Windows and OSX.
Have a Qwerty keyboard center, a flick keyboard left and mouse right? (Or personal preference of course)
You don't even have to bother with using the modifier button (for the ゛or ゜markers) because the prediction will guess what you meant. It's much easier than even typing my native English as far as phone input goes.
I do find the flick method to be significantly faster on a touchscreen, however, I'm still quicker with a regular qwerty keyboard.
I'm curious if we would see similar results if swype-style keyboards had as much domination among young people in countries that use Roman characters as the flick method does in Japan.
From what I understand, he's on the faster end of the normal range.
>Are they making choices that would take effort in a different system, or just clicking the next suggested letter?
With Japanese kanji or Chinese hànzì, there's no practical way to directly input such a large range of characters. Users type a phonetic spelling, then the input method editor presents them with a menu of characters with a corresponding pronunciation. Chinese mostly uses a system of phonetic transliteration based on the Latin alphabet (pinyin), whereas Japanese speakers use both a Latin-based system (romaji) and a native Japanese system of syllabic characters (kana). The flick method shown in the video uses directional gestures to input kana.
For example, if I'm trying to type the Chinese word for bread (面包), I'll input the word as it is pronounced, "mianbao". On mobile devices, a list of predicted characters will appear above my keyboard; on a computer, a numbered list will appear beside my cursor. I select the characters I was intending to input by tapping on mobile, or by pressing the corresponding number key or clicking on a computer. The choice of characters invariably requires some amount of human input, because there are many homophones (different words with the same pronunciation).
This method of text input can often be quite slow and cumbersome, so good prediction and correction algorithms are crucial. The input method is constantly guessing which characters you want; if it's not aware of context, it'll make bad guesses and require a lot more manual selection and correction. Good input method software can predict entire phrases and is very resilient to typos.
Granted, this is my very limited experience. Perhaps this could be a competing way to help communicate in foreign languages.
IME keyboards (for Japanese) has always confused me, since sometimes if you input hiragana or katakana it would translate to the kanji equivalent because japanese is kind of weird in that they have 3 written types. Thats just a quirk with Japanese itself though. I'm am glad that English doesn't have such an issue though. Then you have Romaji, the English - Japanese phonetic equivalent
Its also important to note when doing these comparisons, Japanese has a significantly lower information informational density than that of other languages. It also has a low reading speed rate too (informational rate), but very high speech rate (e.g. how fast you can talk with the language). English is actually very high across the board.
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-efficient-highest-infor...
The article here has an image of the table I am thinking of (its the first response) for the data, from lyons et al. But, it does omit certain languages that are of interest as well, namely arabic. The rate at which you can write arabic and achieve the same level of information by hand is very closely related to that of English shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand. This might not tie directly to texting, but its worth mentioning because notetaking efficiently requires quickly capturing information. Some people prefer by hand others by typing etc
I don't really know all the slang terminology in Japanese all that well, but in English we have things like brb lol btw lmfao roflcopter fam. I don't really know what the Japanese equivalent at all of this is, and I wander whether if you were to compare Japanese Slang to English slang / Ebonics, which input type method is superior on a phone? The japanese flick input method or a traditional qwerty keyboard. My bet is on the latter though (QWERTY)
Like I know instead of saying わたしは you could just shorten it to ぼく は (only if your male though). Which means "I am ..... {{doing something}}". You could just say instead "{{doing something}}" too, which gets the same point across. In mandarin you would use 我是 which is pinyin is typed "woshi" which is the equivalent.
I've found it helps with several things. For one, I've seen children accustomed to using touch interfaces blurring the line between physical and virtual, i.e swiping at physical objects like books, photos, even walls. I've not seen this behavior with those used to non touch interfaces.
Also, learning to use a keyboard while learning the alphabet seems like a virtuous cycle, at least in my personal experiences.
And it may sound old fashioned, but making things too easy for kids makes them less independent and less willing to put in the effort required for learning.
Compare for example searching for animal pictures using voice search versus going to the search engine, typing out the term, clicking on "images"... The first is much easier and teaches instant gratification, while the second teaches perseverance and comes with a greater sense of accomplishment.
Disclaimer: purely anecdotal, take the preceding with a salt shaker...
As a kid in the 90s, I just took double clicking as a necessary evil. But after many many opportunities of trying (mostly successfully) to teach it to both the elderly and to kids, I've gradually grown to hate it. It's such a horrible gesture, difficult to perform, complicated to reason about and entirely disconnected from any real-world metaphor.
May double clicking die off and vanish, never to be found again, except for in the annals of bad ideas.
Many have stopped or at least severely cut back
> assuming that kids already know how to use them from their experience at home?
Partly this and partly budget cuts. Computer skills aren't on the standardized tests, so they are a "waste of time" like art and music and history and everything else that isn't on the test. So they are deemphasized.
Some schools with money for computers and a computer teacher will at least try to integrate it into their language instruction by doing exercises on the computer.
Would students really do this? I couldn't imagine trying to write an entire essay or a lab report on a smartphone. Maybe Japanese schools don't have to turn in longer things like that?
I don't think anyone is writing whole research papers or serious lab reports on phones. A two-page reading response is totally doable. Something with footnotes or equations, not so much.
> Lena-Sophie Mueller, of the German nonprofit Initiative D21, pointed out: “Timetables (for railways) are no longer available in paper form. More and more services are based on the Internet [...]”
This has been going on for quite a while. I distinctly remember being stranded in Düsseldorf a few years back. I was at the train station, looking for a train (I knew the destination but not which train I had to take). It was very late and since the roaming costs were horrendous (around 15 € per MB, I think), I had deactivated all mobile data on my phone.
I searched more or less the whole train station, failing to find some printed plan that told me which train to pick. You could see where the plans used to be, but they had all been removed. Luckily, a lonely waffle vendor still was around and helped me out with his iPhone.
I found a line/station map later on -- inside the train in question. How anyone can come to the conclusion that this is the place to look, is beyond me.
I've been to Stuttgart recently and had no such problems at the train station there. I just wanted to point out that this phenomenon is not all that new.
It is sad though, that young people appear to be less computer literate in terms of creating content (as an overall percentage of previous generations).
Forgot teaching kids how to code right away , teach them how to type first so they can "commune" with the machine (ideally with ergonomics and whole arm movement in mind so RSI is not an issue).
AI will not be able to make those people more efficient, it will replace them. AI can't help them to be more efficient since they don't know how to think on any fundamental level.
> “Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think” - Steve Jobs
Personally, it was kind of a shock to witness, especially seeing that it was safe to assume that there was less than a 10 year difference in our ages. It got me thinking about a near future possibility of keyboardless computers, and the dread of writing code without one. Though it's unlikely, it struck the fear of god in me haha
It's another digital divide. Yes.
The generation who didn't have a personal computer in their young age is starting to retire.
Current 30s-40s years old workers are varies on computer literacy but many had a personal computer when they were a student. I belong to this generation.
I was hoping that the next generation will be completely digital native and all of them has computer literacy. Just laugh us and obliterate us from work force for we can't stand a chance against such a gifted digital native generation at birth. Just like we get rid of those annoying old people who don't have a computer literacy.
The invention of smartphone make that dream not happens. The smartphone makes people stupid. There is nothing smart about that computer.
The smartphone is inefficient and restricted computer. You don't have a freedom to choose the OS. You don't even have a root access to that very computer you own. It doesn't have a keyboard which is the most efficient input device for text. The smartphone is designed for reading the text, not for writing. So the young generation starting to lose the ability to write the text.
What makes me surprise is, that current students use the smartphone to read the papers, to write the necessary essay and reports necessary for graduation.
The fresh young generations who has just graduated enter the working class without learning how to use the keyboard. But the real work which involve a lot of text writing requires efficient input device such as the keyboard.
So the current trending of smartphone reduce the effective good workers from already reducing younger population in Japan.
I refuse to own a phone. Smartphone is the worst invention of our time. It disrupt attention, reduce computer literacy, or even plain literacy for it makes harder to write the text for most of them.
One year later, he was typing over 100 wpm. Now a teenager, he types about 130wpm.
He started with a basic online course to learn the proper technique. Then afterward, he started playing an online game called nitrotype. Which made learning to type fast enjoyable.
I've seen kids type on their phones, faster than I can type on a QWERTY keyboard. So, give them a phone that mimics a wireless keyboard and let them use it to interact with a bigger computer.
As for learning things like Excel, the sad part is not that they haven't been taught the mechanical skills, but that those tools could enrich their K-12 education, e.g., in math and science class.
So I can believe in a few years kids will grow up used to smooth phone/tablet type keyboards and not the physical type.
Then I got a computer science degree and worked for almost two years as a programmer; typing by staring at keys using two fingers. When the time came it didn't take long to relearn 'proper' typing.
For some kids a little exposure to fundamentals at the right time is enough. And there is more to computing than input technique. So long as the kids are interested and motivated nature will find a way.
The main reason it's smart to go mobile first is the transition from mobile to desktop is significantly easier than going from desktop to mobile. It's very easy to design a desktop product that's almost impossible to make mobile and almost impossible to do the opposite.
How is this different from previous generations?
The examples listed (not knowing how to use a keyboard, not knowing how to double click and not knowing what a 'cell' in a spreadsheet is) were all extremely common among my classmates back in highschool (and this is talking about the 90's here, so computers were in fairly widespread use at this point).
The new digital divide is just like the old one.
But, now, these younger people, the ones who are increasingly called 'digital natives', are expected to be good with technology, to know how to type and use the basics of technology and stuff. When, really, all they're good at is downloading apps, and really have no clue what goes on/what they're giving up (cue the number of kids who just download the first free VPN program that works on their phone, without a regard to security or what it does to their phone and stuff).
In maths I had to write Excel macros and Mathematica scripts.
I know that education in Japan is probably a bit more disconnected from reality compared to the pragmatism we see here, but still, the goal of high-school is to prepare students for college no?
It depends on who you ask. In the school I work at, in the Rural South in America, many parents and students say the goal of high school should be to teach the students how to do a competent job and take care of themselves after school. So they complain about having to learn Algebra II and other "useless" stuff, while they don't even know how loans and interest and debt and such works. Or how to book a hotel, things like that.
School has, basically, become expected to teach students both job training and basic life skills that, a few generations ago, parents and companies would have explained. It's become basically free training, and, honestly, it defeats the purpose of education; universities are the same way.
Who knows maybe the traditional way of programming with keyboard will evolve to something completely different for the next generation of people.
I'd like to see how kids of this generation can manage using a franking machine [1] or even a photocopier.
Our currently generation 25-40 used floppy disks at some point, now it's just an icon on your software suite [2]. Will this be the case for keyboard in 10 years time? Will the physical version be needed?
[1] https://frankingmachinecompare.co.uk/what-is-franking-machin... [2] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14Ot...
I’m trying to remember the last time I saw this icon. Either what I’m working on has “save” as text, is constantly auto-saved or requires Ctrl-S.
A few programes here and there do still utilize a floppy disk as a mark to save something though.
The thing that really bothers me is, as Alan Kay says: The ipad interface is designed for 2-year-olds and 82-year-olds and being forced upon everyone in between. See, eg: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
It is a de-evolution of problem-solving culture in the sense that people are discouraged from using more sophisticated tools to step up their game! "There's an app for that" culture implies that you don't need to learn to compose tools to solve problems -- sit back and consume somebody else's hard work. While that does simplify computers so that more people can use it in the short-term, it also strips away the whole purpose of computing, which is to empower people with a more advanced tool. That's what human cultural/civilizational evolution has been about -- from stone tools, to metals, to the industrial revolution, to the information/computing revolution. Forcing people to interact by tapping on graphical interfaces is to step backwards to caveman levels of communication: point and grunt. We're giving up on human language, writing and tool use, just so that people can avoid learning a little!
Not knowing to use a keyboard is not bad as such, if one's typing speed on a touchscreen can be as effective. But that's hard---at least for someone who hasn't grown up with touchscreens all over the place---and I had to switch from my phone to my laptop to type this long-ish comment! And the amount of typing, editing, reorganizing and adding links that I had to do would have been extremely difficult to do on a phone interface. Giving in to that barrier can so easily stop one from creating/contributing, and going into a passive consumption mode!
Back in Sumeria they used to go on and on about how this newfangled writing thing would destroy civilization because it took the personal element out of interpersonal communication.
Just because the majority of people don't concern themselves with learning the intimate details of how a computer works doesn't in any way imply their lives aren't "empowered" through their interactions with one. Having the world's knowledge at one's fingertips (or voice prompt) is arguably a lot more valuable than having the requirement to construct a complex query to find out where writing was invented.
You can lead a horse to water...
Why do you think this is a bad think? This is how kids learn how the world works, by trying the same thing in different contexts, like how small children put everything in their mouth. We don't criticize that, it's part of learning.
> Compare for example searching for animal pictures using voice search versus going to the search engine, typing out the term, clicking on "images"
I don't know, when I was a kid I was searching for animal pictures by opening an atlas picture book. Was it better, did I became smarter because I did this this instead of using Google or a voice search?
I don't think that making information access easier is ever a bad think.
Regarding looking things up in a book, it's a great skill to have, even from a purely enjoyment aspect, and I would certainly encourage kids to learn it. It doesn't mean not having access to the internet or voice search. Same way one can teach growing food or making fire with a bow, while still buying groceries every week and cooking on a convection range.
It's important in my view for kids to know where we've come from, to better understand the world as it is today.
Except when it decreases learning and perseverance, and deemphasises the benefit of careful thinking. The term 'spoonfeeding' is very relevant here.
I don't know, I have the urge to tap words in books to bring up definitions after using ereaders for the past ten years.
Also noting we're typing in English here on a Latin keyboard, however my 7y son's taken to his keyboard like a duck to water. We gave him a touch typing challenge to plant some seeds, and he greatly enjoyed it. I benefit every day from touch typing and want him to have the same advantage - I started far later, in middle school, on the good old typewriters. He's also fully figured out Windows 10 user interface, alt tabbing, using copy paste shortcuts etc; I'm pretty sure he'd figure out any GUI, as long as there was a reward at the end (start a game / movie).
He loves his mouse keyboard gaming, but in order to earn gaming time he's also got to do chores - and I'll also give him points for coding. I'm trying to get him used to Python now, it's a bit early and it can be challenging to find the special characters, but he's getting it rather than giving up - and we'll dive into it more later, with the benefit of the Cozmo SDk to make things more interesting. There's a challenge in making the understanding of code an intrinsic reward, vs the low hanging fruits of playing computer games, but I'm hoping it'll come in the next few years.
I also couldn't help but reflect on the fact that by doing this, he's getting experience with Visual Studio Code, the exact toolset I use for my own work.
Also, Python at age 7 seems pretty advanced. My 7 year old is pretty strong with block-based programming but I'm still trying to figure out when and how to transition to real coding.
A friend of mine in college once wrote date on a sheet of paper during an exam, expecting to find out what time it was...
When I was a kid (and by that I mean all the way into university), we had to go to the library (an actual physical place that wasn't our home), look in the card catalogue (an actual physical box of drawers with actual physical cards in them), then find the shelves with actual physical books on them. Then we had to look at the index in the book. Or just read it.
That took time and perseverance. There was no instant gratification. It took hours or days.
Are you advocating a return to that past and that much perseverance?
Typing a word into Google and clicking search is nothing. Trying to make it sound like it's so much better for character building is ridiculous.
Recently I started reading actual paperbacks again after a few years doing most of my reading on a tablet; I was quite amused to find that sometimes I'd try to swipe the pages instead of turning them.
I'm in my forties. My first computer was in 1981. I've got decades of interacting via keyboard behind me and this still happened to me. Habit is a powerful thing.
I find this comparison hilarious. I've spent my early childhood without a computer, so if I wanted to see a picture of an animal I probably had to open a book and maybe even go to the library to get one. So I really doubt any of those methods u mention really teach anything.
PCs were designed to be devices for people to create things.
Its largely a product of when the two platforms were created and the economic forces at play. I wonder what mobile devices designed to empower the user would be like?
I think you have an idealized view of how most people use PCs. Even during the first era of PCs in the 80s, most kids used them for playing games.
By the mid 90s, it was all about games and “multimedia” on CDs.
Then Facebook and social media games.
The geeks that looked forward to InCider, Nybble, and whatever the offshoot computer mag from 3-2-1 Contact were and typed BASIC programs in were the minority.
They’re currently not good at programming, which is a small subset of content creation. This problem plagued personal computers for a long while as well. For example, Apple’s Lisa could only be programmed by attaching it to a second Lisa (which was extremely expensive). Being able to program your computer with itself wasn’t always common.
These are early days still. Tablets will get there some day. It’s a techical problem, and technical problems have techical solutions. Give it time.
The instagram community would like a word with you.
Yes, agreed. We're building a generation where even pulling your parking brake when you park is seen as "hard", not having a discoverable, hand-hold, guided experience is "inconvenient". Netflix even have a hard time making people update their cards when they expire or are cancelled.
Life is not a Steve Jobs utopia. Some things require work and persistence.
My parents say the same thing about my generation.
When I used to work with Motorola in the early-to-mid-90s (it was an actual company, you know), we had some HUD A/R things, and my kids (3 y.o.? 4 y.o?) got pretty accustomed to flicking at books and objects in real space.
Motorola tanked. Kids grew up. Learned how to type. Everything is fine. It was just a weird thing for my wife to try to process at the time.
I wonder if this makes older programmers better learners. For instance, I learned BASIC and QBASIC before I had internet access. When I ran into problems I only had the provided language documentation to help me and I was largely on my own.
Now when I run into problems I have many resources to help me, but sometimes there is no answer on StackOverflow or anywhere else I can find and I have to rely on myself to find a solution.
Actually, a lot of people have trouble just single-clicking, so double-clicking is even more of a challenge.
A lot of people just can't get the knack for clicking twice in quick succession. And the inconsistency between when they should single-click and when they should double-click causes a lot of confusion.
I think it probably would make life easier to get rid of the double-click.
I set up all the requisite things, and since it was his first time, we went through a few common desktop workflows tailored to his needs. There I noticed: he was single-clicking where he needed to double-click—e.g. while opening a directory. I briefly explained the differences between the two and we tried again. He got better, but still struggled. I biked back home wondering if he'll continue to struggle with the double-click. :-(
There's a lot of anecdotes about how uneasy/annoyed/bothered it can make you feel when watching someone unfamiliar with a scroll wheel instead mouse over and slowly click+drag the scrollbar, but the big one for me is seeing someone double-click on a hyperlink...
(Jobs also stuck us with the invisible fragile clipboard in place of the Star copy/move pattern.)
It makes sense to me.
Now, I don't think there's anything sacred about using a traditional computer - the paradigm of moving a mouse and QWERTY keyboard is kind of strange, when you step back and think about it. What's concerning is that touchscreen-enabled apps tend to be more consumerist, and less conducive to creative endeavors than traditional computers. Maybe I'm just tooting my own horn here, but I think it's more important to reason with spreadsheets, write posts, and even make a video with graphics than how to use Amazon Kindle/Fire/Whatever nonsense tablet they've decided to push out there.
Even just making a site used to be this creative endeavor, something you figured out by looking around at source code on Geocities' sites. Now we (myself included) just type text into fields, who's html/css/backend has been configured by someone else.
I've seen some serious art been made using ipads and even mobile phones alone. Hang out with creative teenagers and you'll see it too. There are entire video editing suites on ipad that can create slick videos entirely with touch gestures.
https://www.imore.com/why-i-love-editing-video-ipad-it-can-s...
The BBC now routinely use iPhones for TV and radio newsgathering; they have developed an in-house app for capturing content and directly ingesting it to their media asset system. Many radio stations use the LUCI Live app for remote contributors.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201604201...
I blame the duration of modern education. It has made newer generations less flexible. Institutionalization. It's a paradox because the Internet has made the pollination of ideas more likely - but we are less likely to do new things, we stay in our boxes.
This shows up in the productivity and entrepreneurship statistics.
It may be true that wages are poor and rents are high - but also we're really not helping ourselves. Rates of self built homes should be increasing among young people but I don't see that. Usually over the years a generation gets richer but I suspect many young people with 'careers' are waiting for a golden goose.
If you are aged > 30 and rent in a major city and earn less than 40k-60k per year - you need to wake up and get out before you become a poor middle aged person. Most people my age from university are living like students a decade after leaving the university. Having to live with your parents or live in a house share cannot be half your adult life if you have a successful career, nor can forking most of your income over to a landlord.
HN's residents are an anomaly in the broader economy and their experience is alien to most of their generation.
It's also true of any generation that grew up with manufactured items.
Really, our ability to create has declined with our need to create. Who needs to make their own clothes these days?
Previous generations? How many generations back do you imagine widespread computer use to go?
Jerry Pournelle was considered cutting edge for using a word processor to write as early as 1977. Adobe Illustrator is from 1987 and Photoshop is from 1990.
There haven't been a whole lot of generations in the 41 years since the Apple II was released (about 2 generations, given 20 years per generation).
I can tell you that kids from my generation (baby boomers) had almost no computer literacy. Most of us never even touched a computer until adulthood (if then).
I can give you an opposite anecdote from personal experience. I learned how to program at 12 not learning how to touch type correctly. Guess what? I’ve been programming for 30 years and still can’t “properly” touch type. I’ve typed with one hand all of my life (not by choice) and it hasnt slowed my career down. With modern IDE’s and autocompletion, my typing speed hasn’t been a hindrance.
(I have had mouse-related RSI. Mice cause grip issues.)
Better still is to give them a real keyboard, i.e. one with key travel, not a crappy laptop keyboard. I learned on an Apple II, plenty of key travel. Typing on a MacBook over the course of three recent years nearly destroyed my typing ability due to what I can only describe as something like the yips. Switching back to a real keyboard has helped.
I have tried to Learn To Touch Type multiple times in my life and every single time I could feel my wrists starting to ache from holding them close together and angled. Dealing with that's just not worth the increased speed and ability to never look at the keyboard that touch-typing would give me.
It's worse than this. The smartphone is such a complete abstraction with "apps" that modern teenagers don't even have a correct concept of "computer".
The fact that an "app" is actually a recipe and that something (aka a computer) needs to execute that recipe is a revelation.
I think I don't need to remind you this. But most apps are nothing but browser wrapper for their specific URL. Most of them doesn't require a special purpose user-agent at all. Just standard web browser should suffice.
These days, when people hear there exits a new fashionable web service, they immediately search the "app" for that from locked-in app distribution platform offered by Apple or Google. Install the top result(hopefully the official app) without the doubt, and use that web service via the app even though that app is straightforward browser wrapper and nothing requires to be an app.
So in order to reach the mass, web services of today has no choice but to release the corresponding app even though their web service is 100% usable from ordinary web browser.
The smartphone makes people stupid.
In this case touch screens are simply vastly inferior for the vast majority of all tasks. At best, they're something different. At worst, they're a textbook example of artificial demand [1] for a mediocre technology driven by highly effective marketing.
PCs are (almost) open platforms, with control, and oriented to create content. While Phones are closed, made for content consumption, and frequently don't even have a file browser.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg7snecRoMs&t=43m35s
You're not more progressive if you slide back from the above, just because the date in the calendar has increased. You're certainly not more progressive if you can't slide back from it because you haven't even realized it yet.
If a majority of people follows a pied piper into a mountain, then a majority of people will be lost. It will not magically transform a trap, a dead end, into "the new way forward". You're just demonstrating how completely oblivious, and how recklessly bold because of it, so many are.
Last but not least, with "evolution" come watershed moments, it's not just smooth sailing from peak to peak -- that's a movie, not evolution.
> If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
-- George Orwell
That is all that matters. You can write well with a touch screen, you can write badly with a keyboard. But to the degree things get reduced to references or icons, thought does end up suffering.
https://blog.usejournal.com/making-of-a-chinese-characters-d...
I made my own input method for Chinese Hanzi, which decomposes the characters and lets me find characters based on their IDS codes. It also predicts words both forwards and backwards (in case you don't know the first character, but do know the second).
* You type in "sake"
* Press space once, it becomes "酒"
* If you want to choose OTHER candidates (such as "鮭"), you have to press space again to show the numbered candidate list.
Please see this showcase: https://i.imgur.com/rXxjMRs.gif
>I do not hit space or escape or anything prior to typing 'sake'
I don't mean you need to hit anything prior to typing Romajis. But you need to hit it twice afterwards to get the numbered candidate list.
To be fair, on Win10's default IME, it does provide a predicted suggestion list before you press any spaces, which is nice; but for some reason this list is different from the formal candidate list, that it is not numbered and you have to hitting tabs repeatedly to choose from them:
Yeah, but my typing class was only 10 days, one hour a day. It was a marvelous return on investment.
Also, it was on mechanical typewriters. You had to physically hammer the keys to make it work, making for a very positive impression on muscle memory.
I find the flick/tap-and-drag gestures to be vastly more comfortable and natural than trying to use my thumbs to peck at a QWERTY soft keyboard and relying on predictive algorithms to make up the speed loss.
An additional benefit is that this approach provides more room for additional symbols and layers that are more of a bother to reach from standard soft-keyboards. For example, I can have a full set of programming symbols with Ctrl/Esc modifiers available without explicitly mode-switching the keyboard, it's extremely helpful when I'm ssh-ing from my phone.
For reference, with a physical QWERTY keyboard I average around 95 wpm, with messagease on my phone I run around 60 (without autocorrect/suggestions).
You probably use a different technique.
I changed how I did things a year later when I started typesetting papers in TeX.
This may be a bit of a tangent, but that reminds me of what is, by my guess, a core flaw of the US Constitution - it is deliberately written in a difficult to follow style (most notably, double inversions are slammed in everywhere). Even if the intent is to cause people to more carefully consider the subject matter, in the hopes that they come to a more accurate understanding, the literal effect of making information harder to access is that more energy is spent trying to access that information. In turn, the likelihood of errors in the course of accessing that information increases.
addendum: It's good to make things less error-prone.
Spoonfeeding kinds of assumes no human agency.
If you let yourself be a leaf in the wind, yes, you'll arrive wherever the currents take you.
Young people don't know what a VHS or vinyl player is and that is fine
Another thing is to think everything is solvable with a phone app, that everything is on Google or that everything is learnable through a step by step YouTube video and requires no effort.
That causes frustrations as well.
The days when you could compile an exe without any kind of signing and distribute it with nobody getting a warning about an unknown developer were the days when everyone was bluescreening monthly; hardly a coincidence.
I also see people use the arrow buttons on the scrollbar. But they just click the button repeatedly instead of holding it down. Which means that for a very long page, it can take them a long time and hundreds of clicks to get to the section of the page they want to see.
They also routinely report "someone said something on Twitter" as if it was actual news. It doesn't mean it's a good idea.
You can get _actual_ excel. Google Sheets is also pretty decent. I don't think there's a libreoffice implementation, unfortunately.
>the shell
On Android, at least, actual shells are available. Most useful if you have root, but even without they're still shells, just ones without elevated permissions.
>or programming environment
There's, surprisingly, actually a few, though I don't think any are really competitive with x86 environments. There's plenty of good ssh clients if you're happy to remote somewhere else, certainly.
Notably, all of the above options I find basically intolerable on any touch device without an active stylus, and the latter two without a physical keyboard. Such devices certainly exist, though. A galaxy note with a bluetooth keyboard is surprisingly useful in a pinch, though you're always compromising with something that small.
So while it may have been a struggle for me back then, it was for an entirely different reason. I too don't remember it, though.
This is actually why I use DVORAK now, the only way I could force myself to learn was to completely disconnect the letters on the keycaps from what they actually represented. It was the most grueling two weeks of my computing life, but it was worth it in the end. Actually, I've since lost my previous typing skills entirely - whenever I'm forced to use QWERTY for some reason I end up typing at a glacial pace, so there's the one downside (thankfully this isn't often, mostly when I pull up the console of some server through iLO/iDRAC to get networking back up so I can just SSH in instead...)
I could type around 60wpm using two fingers, I know where they keys are... Just not how to use every finger!
Now I touch type 'properly' I can get close to 100wpm. My speed has kind of plateaued now though unfortunately.
I remember reading an old rant by someone (I want to say letter sent to a newspaper) who complained that the grammophone will destroy music.
That said, I'll still take Spotify and access to all the music in the world over random neighbors playing the fiddle any day.
I grew up in a family of musicians and I really miss the social element of just plunking down next to someone to share in performing a song. Closest experience I’ve had to it is couch multiplayer video games, but it’s still not the same. Still do see the occasional person with a guitar on the porch, but I can’t help but think it would a lot more common and a lot more fun without recorded music.
I'd like to highlight that synthesizers are very easily available now. As for physical instruments... it hasn't really improved or worsened significantly in the last few decades.
There being less easily available music wouldn't lead to more people learning how to make it. Just people coping without it.
IIRC you can swap out (or add) any of the side/minor triggers, but I don't recall if it's possible to change the big nine major keys.
It is great though, I abhor word prediction when I'm trying to write (the smarter the predictions, the more viscerally disturbing I find it), and ME has been the only way I can keep up a comfortable pace.
Optical recognition of Kanji can be though, but with stroke direction it is easier.
See for example : https://jisho.org/#handwriting
In particular, tube replacement was pretty common DIY and even nonspecialist corner stores would sell tubes and have self-service testers:
http://travelphotobase.com/v/USOK/OKCH66.HTM
In similar analogy, I wonder how many people today know how to replace a lightbulb and will do it themselves, and what that would be like in a few decades...
I'm not friends with how you casually throw the word "wrong" in there, as if it was an unquestionable universal agreement.
Transport yourself (by vessel of imagination) to a future where this toddler is 30 years old, and both you and this toddler-no-more are bidding for a project: a customer is going to write a neat piece of software dealing with technical spec sheets, but they need someone to do the interaction design for it. Of course, it's going to run on the next-next-next-next-next gen touch surfaces which is what is available at the time.
You both present your solutions to the customer, and after a few weeks they call you up to say, "Please don't get us wrong. Your interface was really good. We decided to go with the ex-toddler anyway. They had similar ideas to yours, it's just that yours felt a bit tied to the Newtonian laws of physics. The toddler seemed to think more freely about the medium and used that for good.
"We fear that, given your age, you have gotten a wrong first impression of digital interfaces. You seem to have problems distinguishing the difference between what we call a book these days, and one of those old objects made from dead trees."
I'm not saying it's good either, I'm saying it's different. And while the toddler perspective may look wrong with your 20th century eyes, it could very well be that your perspective looks wrong with the toddlers 21st century eyes.
But, after a basic introduction to the fundamentals of modern web design, the guy has come up with some great ideas, elegant and easy to navigate... And can still do posters flyers etc.
He is now even getting into 3d stuff for animations.
Point is, learning is incremental, and it's always possible to extend what one knows in new directions, if one is of curious mind and willing to change.
Now, concerning toddlers and tablets... the thing is, we are governed by the physical world in which we live. It's very important on a mental but also motor level to have a good understanding of that. I mean things that adults take for granted like balance, dexterity, hand eye coordination, a subconscious understanding of gravity, etc.
These are actually learned by trial and error, if you've ever seen a toddler stack blocks or learn to throw you'll have seen this in action.
During this period of learning about the world, having regular interactions with objects that do not follow the same rules is confusing to very young children. This is not just my opinion but something which many child psychologists agree on.
Again I'm not against tablets, but better not to introduce them earlier than 3 or 4 years old at the earliest.
I think that still gives them plenty of time to assimilate 21st century technology and think of the next big thing in 20 years. Which I probably won't understand ;-)
...and yet if I had a child, I wouldn't expose them to tablets at a young age, just because that 10% is scary.
E.g. it's probably quite bad to just let your kids watch random youtube playlists all the time.
By this logic, "cartoon physics" are also a big no-no, because they teach kids that gravity only acts if you look down and notice that you have no support. Next thing you know you'll have kids running off ledges and expecting to float.
And I don't see how a mouse is more "physical" and "logical" than a touchscreen. On a touch screen, the pointer is right under your finger where you touch. The mouse is this strange thing which does action at a distance, through the intermediation of this "cursor" which has no correspondent in the physical world. Which is why I presume it's easy for a toddler to understand a touch-screen unlike a mouse which requires some pretty advanced hand-eye coordination and mental models.
> Nguyen, who is 10, said she has used one before - once - but the clunky desktop computer/monitor/keyboard/mouse setup was too much for her. "It was slow," she recalled, "and there were too many pieces."
> "Human hands and voice, if you use them in the digital world in the same way as the physical world, are incredibly expressive,"
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/th...
> Why the explosion now? For decades, attractive, interactive graphic interfaces have been available on home computers. But young children’s access to these was limited by both their cost [with the cost of hardware, software, and home internet contributing to the “digital divide” (Norris, 2001)] and by the fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination required to manipulate a keyboard and mouse. With the advent of touch screens on less expensive devices – smartphones and tablets – these financial and developmental barriers have been reduced: By their first birthdays, most children can become adept at touching, swiping and pinching on the screen. As a result, children’s access to touch screens has outpaced what we know about its effects – for better or worse – on early development.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.0107...
I'm not saying we should be giving tablets to toddlers. I don't know about that. But not doing this because of concerns about being able to distinguish between physical and virtual seems pure speculation at this moment, especially when we have as precedent fantastical stories that parents typically say to kids, which are also full of physics defying stories.
Right now you know one script: whatever scrawl you learned as a youth. Pick up something else, preferably a print hand rather than cursive.
There are a ton of options! Here are some examples: http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/scrindex.htm
A print hand lets you focus on correctness. Once you have some confidence, if you like, you can tackle another cursive hand, such as Spencer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
I'll dig up the app name when I can find the iPad, presently everyone's asleep and the iPad was hidden somewhere. I think it doesn't matter so much which one you choose though, as long as it tells you what fingers you are allowed to use for what keys. The challenge that we set for him was to perform the exercises and getting the fingers right.
He's at the absolute beginner level with Python yet, which we do on the PC, but I figured it was the next logical step as I'm questioning the engagement with e.g. Tynker. He's quick at dragging the blocks across, but the way they template a lot of the lower levels makes it too easy to blindly drag things across until he suddenly hits a wall with something he can't understand.
I'm struggling with the curriculum part of this myself, how to best get his interest and how/when to introduce concepts. So hooking up the Cozmo robot and getting it do simple things is neat way of doing loops for example.
I started my kid with Scratch. Then had him do some of the Hour of Code challenges on Code.org and then some of their courses (recommended). Did a couple Arduino projects programmed with ArduBlock. Now we are working with a VEXIQ kit from Vex Robotics and working our way through the RobotC course. All graphical programming so far. Want to start looking under the hood at the actual code soon.
The honest and unfortunate answer is, in my personal experience, that editing and re-organizing text doesn't often happen in students' papers regardless of the tools available to them. Not knowing how to type well is one thing, but a _lot_ of students get to college not knowing how to write a half-decent paper (and then still don't learn squat in their freshman composition class).
Don't be like these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
People (professionals with a lot of experience) would open orders or product sheets twice (two new tabs) and it created issues. So now, you can't double click.
Once you click something, it is disabled for a few seconds.
I still hear double clicks, but now it doesn't create any bugs.
It’s human nature to feel like the next generation is coddled, of course. Maybe the real problem is that the current generation isn’t as capable of instruction as previous ones.
Funny this is the problem. One of my major life lessons was learning not to always persevere, and to ask for help as soon as possible. Solves more problems faster, teaches you more ways of looking at a problem and smoothly scales to delegation.
My professor's use cases are quite simple: writing articles in Libre Office (he's already familiar with it on Winblows), YouTube, and a browser—only one tab at a time; he was blissfully unaware of the concept of tabs until we walked through it!
Thanks for the idea.
We're not even building Tiny Houses. That movement has faded away as the land permission issue dominated over their advantages.
Meanwhile: https://youtu.be/M73r32vK7C4
That's not a joke - there is a steep decline in being 'handy' - I'm doing everything I can to learn how to be but it still feels a bit unnatural. That lack of adaptability is like an extra tax.
I don't think my parents are more handy either, but that's a generation that bought their houses at 5x-15x lower prices so millennials like me could really do with being more hands on.
To put this in perspective, my father bought his house for 40k 20 years ago and now it is valued at least 250k. I earn about the same as he did 20 years ago and I suspect I earn more per hour than my university peers. Bluntly - they're poor - the most sensitive subject you could talk about is how much you earn. That's private.
It's not the cost of equipment that's the problem. The cost of good power tools is lower than before and they're more effective. Materials prices are higher but not that much. The big constraint is psychological, possibly followed up by permissions for building.
There's a weird psychology with this subject - weird to hear it described but it's there.
Somehow not having a house is believed to be less impoverished than going and building one. Count me out! I don't think forking over half your earnings to a landlord is sophisticated. I remember talking to people about the Tiny House concept and I got the strong impression that living in a modest self built dwelling was an admission of poverty.
> Somehow not having a house is believed to be less impoverished than going and building one. Count me out! I don't think forking over half your earnings to a landlord is sophisticated.
I've never heard that belief - unless in the form of "land rich money poor" self-descriptions. I happen to think forking over money to a landlord is about as unsophisticated as its gets - despite it sometimes being the only tenable option. For many indebted that's certainly true.
That's fixable, you're experiencing that yourself. The Net makes it easier than ever before to learn new skills. It's glorious. My biggest challenge is finding time to pick up all I want to learn. Physical space is also a consideration.
> ...a generation that bought their houses at 5x-15x lower prices so millennials like me could really do with being more hands on.
In the US, and to a certain extent in other developed nations, this unfortunately is much less fixable by being more hands on. You'll tinker at the margins of affordability to be sure, so by all means become more handy because it vastly enhances your house-owning opex costs, and capital improvements can be made with sweat equity. But the core problem space is the dirt is expensive relative to median wages. Fire insurance to replace buildings hasn't grown nearly as fast as the dirt the buildings sit upon; that's your tell that the Millenial cohort is getting completely screwed by the price of dirt.
Staying mobile in your single years with van dwelling is a viable strategy. So is co-op and intentional community living, or extended families. Remote tech work in small villages. Lots of other strategies depending upon personal situations. But you will likely have to ditch lots of conventional aesthetics and sensibilities along the way. This can make it challenging to find romantic partners (4-6' thick insulating walls scream "I'm different" in a not-so-good way to a majority of the population), so there are trade-offs.
> ...The cost of good power tools is lower than before and they're more effective....
If the tool has any life or limb-threatening characteristics, stay away from picking up the cheap stuff made in China or third world countries. Hand power tools can be okay, but for example any tool that expresses a Safe Working Load Limit (WLL) you should only buy US, Japanese, or EU-made for now. Go talk to a few rigging companies in the US, or find a test company and grab some made in China/India rigging gear from Harbor Freight and test to failure yourself, and observe that safe WLL should be about 3x (ideally 5x) less than breaking point.
Plan on a logistical tail of about the the cost of the original tool itself (twice the cost if you are buying used tools) if you are getting into a new tooling area as a rule of thumb. I got a chainsaw last year, and the safety chaps, safety shirt, helmet, face guard, gloves, maul, wedge, fuel cans, sharpening tool, funnel with water filter, etc. are about 150% of what I spent on the chainsaw. Generally, this is the weakest area of information gathering on the Net in my experience. If you are a noob, then plan on digging around a fair bit to find out what else you need to pick up to stay safe. If you are on HN, then you likely depend a lot upon your fingers and your eyes to make a living; with many kinds of tools, those body parts are awfully easy to damage to the point where it is hard to do work in our fields, so take safety around tools seriously, and invest the time into reading up on the right way to work with the tools you pick up.
maybe it's just me, but at least sometimes brevity pays off.
The parent comment does sound like verbal communication. Even so, I understand the point. I type 120wpm and, when writing, I form paragraphs mentally, then dump them via keyboard. If this second phase could be faster, I'd write faster.
Therefore, yes, I benefit from >60wpm typing. Not all the time, maybe not even that often, but it definitely does happen.
In programming, my thoughts are usually slow enough and I only need to type in bursts, but sometimes it takes a lot of code to represent a small idea and I need to turn it into code asap before my mind drifts and the house of cards gets shaken up.
(The above makes it sound like I lack focus, that’s not really true and my mind doesn’t always drift, but in this world of noisy open plan offices, it’s not hard to get distracted in some small way, enough to be detrimental)
(edit autocorrect)
But if you look at the PC magazines from the late 80s/early 90s, magazines not even oriented at "developers" but more "power users", you'll find huge chunks of content devoted to programming --- not just BASIC, but Asm (DOS's DEBUG command was the preferred method of creating small utilities), undocumented features, controlling hardware, and the like. Programming was viewed more as a progression/spectrum from novice -> power user -> programmer, with the result that a lot of users knew the basic concepts of how computers worked and would not have much trouble making little modifications to the Asm listings they found in order to customise them to their needs.
Contrast this with the locked-down walled-garden ecosystems where you can't even easily control the behaviour of, much less write programs for, on the device you bought!
What was the reach of those magazines? When I was young I was the only one in my high school class with a computer. There was some self-selection going on.
Today, with $300 (inflated dollars, so much cheaper than in the past) you can get a very nice laptop and program your heart away if you so want.
Those people who would have read those magazines are now on various internet programming/forums, hacking minecraft. It's only the magazines which disappeared because now there are better ways to disseminate technical info. The absolute numbers of hackers probably remained similar, it's just that now there are a ton more computer users, so they get diluted.
But you are right, in high school, I was one of the few with a computer and even in college in the early 90s most students didn’t have computers.
Nowadays it's even easier to learn how to program without paying anything.
I don't think that he has an idealized view per se. It is rather that people who bring up such arguments often are surrounded by similar minded people, which is some kind of echo chamber. So people who bring these arguments actually have observed lots of people using their PC/smartphone. Unluckily this "lots of people" sample is strongly biased towards their echo chamber.
There are also apps that let you program robots.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HK962VC/A/ubtech-jimu-rob...
Amazon announced an easy way to program Alexa.
https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/alexa-skill-py...
There is also Swift Playgrounds.
Yes, I know Apple wants to police their App Store, but writing something for your own personal use (and maybe to give some copies to friends) shouldn't be a huge bureaucratic hurdle.
(Android has smaller hurdles but still not insignificant --- when the first step in the tutorial is "download and install this gigabyte-sized piece of software", you can be sure a ton of potential users have already been put-off. Compare with early home computers that booted to a BASIC prompt, or PCs where DEBUG was there and ready to create tiny/small "apps" immediately.)
+I would rather spend 40€ on a raspberry PI than a smart light bulb or anything like that.
People who are good at something tend to ask for help when they need it. Asking for help is a way to get better. Blindly persevering wastes time and tends to force one into dead ends.
It's not blindly persevering. It is, however, giving up an opportunity to learn from and interact with a colleague. Whatever you were working on related to the query might have additional context filled in or expanded upon through conversation. Some of my most productive and unexpected insights came up as a result of such banter.
When you ask "what does this mean," you're asking for a definition. You're also communicating the problem and hinting at your angle of attack. Possible valuable and unexpected responses include "you're approaching it wrong" or "why are you working on that problem when X looks more lucrative"
I don’t think it’s an indication of anything troubling. Sometimes you just get lost in what you’re reading and momentarily forget what device you’re using. If anything, I’m glad teens are so absorbed by reading. It was a struggle to get the teens of my generation to read anything!
I remember how when I was a teen and coding a lot inside the Turbo C IDE, it became second nature to press F2 frequently (to save).
Around that time, while working on math homework (on paper), I'd occasionally experience brain farts, where I would think of pressing (not reach for) the F2 key.
FWIW, I have decent handwriting today, and even exchange correspondence with some friends using pen-and-paper.
I do agree that touchscreen usage should be restricted for toddlers.
I’ve also caught myself yearning for Cmd-F when hunting for something in large chunks of printed text.
We have some older machines for getting train tickets and some newer ones. They probably didn't want to scare anybody off, so the interface still looks almost the same. It used to be buttons next to the screen, now it's a touch screen.
Of course you see people trying to touch the old ones. There's no signifier on the new ones (except the lack of buttons) that shows that they're different, so without a bit of thinking you don't know which affordances there are.
So the on-screen text says "touch here" or similar. Took me a while to realise it meant "press inside the screen-printed rectangle in the panel below the screen" ...
You are making quite an assumption here. People of many centuries ago would also say that we raise our kids in a wrong way, because we don't teach them how to survive in the wild or how to work a potato field.
How I do this without a trackpad and without moving, I don't know. I only notice when it doesn't work.
But that is all just my own personal opinion, not something we need to argue about. However, the idea that toddlers should not have that much screen time is an official recommendation: https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/21/health/screen-time-media-rule...
A funny thing to say, given that today a lot of content requires computers to produce, even abstract art.
> Many people will die having used computers for 10 hours a day but not being able to really act with computers and create with computers
How is that different from people who voraciously read countless books, or watch countless movies, yet never produce anything at all, in whatever domain.
Not everybody wants to be a producer. Some people are perfectly happy just consuming, or partying all day.
Actual ability to create is in the brain of the creator. Anything else is just media ant tools.
Programming with Swift playgrounds or doing an Automator action that can control smart home devices will hold kids interests way more than “real programming”.
I was excited in 1985 at 12 just to be able print something on the screen. More recently I was asked to give a presentation to some kids during career day. Knowing that they wouldn’t be interested in a talk about doing yet another SAAS app, I recommended that they talk to a friend who does game development.
If they were younger, I would definitely recommend a presentation on automating smart home devices activated by Siri or Alexa.
https://www.lifewire.com/best-workflows-ios-app-4153797
The current integrations between third party apps are based on x-callback-url. Third party developers have been using it for at least 5 years.
Never heard the term "bookworm", it's a mild pejorative leveled at people who read books a lot.
But you can use a computer without knowing how to create for it _at all_.
Coding is significantly harder than writing or pressing two buttons on a video camera, which is also visible in salaries - basic journalist vs. basic camera operator vs. basic coder
Journalists your right - there is a lot of young people who have the dream of being the next woodwood and Bernstein - and so news paper publishers take advantage.
And most computer usage is creating tons of valuable information to feed into the googlebrain.
> "You have to be very sure you want to do it because it involves years of long hours, challenging conditions and low pay."
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/mar/12/how-become-tv-...
I doubt there are minimum wage software developers.
