5 ms·

Well clearly. Almost everyone alive today is an "electricity native", but it's only a very small minority that can safely install wiring and the like. Everyone

by WJW 7y ago

Well clearly. Almost everyone alive today is an "electricity native", but it's only a very small minority that can safely install wiring and the like. Everyone else just interacts with the consumerized version of it where everything interesting but potentially dangerous has been abstracted away. There is no reason to believe that younger people are more savvy about the workings of digital technology just because they grew up with consumerized versions of it.

microcolonel 7y ago
If anything, there's kinda a middle ground age right now where you can expect greater general understanding of computing concepts, with both people young and older than that being more ignorant.
- rjbwork 7y ago
  Yep. When I was 2 my parents got an old computer from my uncle's business that he was replacing and set it up in their living room for me. I was learning the command line as a toddler. I'm certainly no guru, but that kind of formative experience was certainly a big part of my choosing this career path. Kids of today grow up with ipads and iphones and have no cause to go poking around and experimenting with the basic functionality of their computers.
  - DBYCZ 7y ago
    Same here, some of my earliest memories are of an old ms-dos mickey mouse game, where you were required to look through a booklet and enter in codes to perform actions.
    - xnyan 7y ago
      Learned how to spell quite young to use a CLI, first word was "DOS" lol.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fastball 7y ago
That's a great point and something I've never thought about. I think it's something that would be helpful to think about when I'm raising my kids.
- Eldandan 7y ago
  I'm under 35 and consider myself very 'digitally native'. It wasn't until I helped my 19 year old niece set up her laptop that I realized exactly the same thing. They're fine with youtube and spotify from a tablet or phone. She could pick things up fairly quickly for school assignments (Office, etc.). I think it was her hunt-and-peck typing that made me realize my assumptions were off. (I don't think typing classes in middle and high school are much of a thing anymore in my region.)
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    Is this in the US? I thought absolutely everyone was taking typing.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Watching professionals hunt-and-peck all day drives me mad. I took a 2 week typing class in the summer after 8th grade. We learned on big heavy mechanical typewriters where you really had to hammer the key to get an impression. It was time well spent, as it has paid off for me continuously ever since. For example, I wrote this entirely with touch typing (not looking at the keyboard).
    - Avamander 7y ago
      I saw a lot of kids using caps lock to type capital letters, that is even more painful. Thankfully they quickly utilized the new knowledge about shift key, I like to think I changed the way they use computers, but who knows if they actually have the motivation to learn further.
    - beefield 7y ago
      I have occasionally thought to time to learn proper touch typing. But I never seem to get over the idea that my bottleneck is not in the fingers, but in the brain trying to figure what to type in the first place... Can someone prove me wrong and make me motivated to learn?
echelon 7y ago
It's worse today than it was in the 90s and early 2000s. Back then the web was an indie experience. If you wanted your own blog, you had to host it. Or if there was a platform you could use, it let you customize the HTML and CSS. An entire cottage industry of websites hosting code snippets sprung up, and all the kids were using HTML and tweaking it. If you wanted a video game forum, you needed to host it. You had to learn how Linux servers worked, what MySQL was and how tables and migrations functioned, and might even need to write a little PHP on the side. When I was a teenager, I had a PHP website that did game matchmaking, lightweight article publishing, and custom (non-phpBB) forums. I put this under Subversion source control and let several of the members that were code literate contribute. We built a lot of stuff and had a whole thing going. Multiple websites. And then we stood up an IRC server, which gave way to bots and log ingestion and archival. We ran a MediaWiki instance (http://strategywiki.org http://strategywiki.org), we knew the folks that wrote the Gamecube LAN adapter tunnel. When it came time for college, I was way ahead of the curve. I blew through all of the upper level courses before my electives, and I was a TA in my freshman year. (Second semester!) This let me take a lot more biology and chemistry classes (something I wasn't previously skilled with, but had a deep interest in learning). This isn't as widespread anymore since there are platforms that do everything. Even though the learning curve has dropped and the barrier to entry is lower than ever, the barriers of interest and necessity have been raised. Kids don't need to hack around as much, and it's sad.
- bsanr2 7y ago
  It's also assumed that anyone not using the "low barrier to entry" platforms is a professional (or else, trying to make a professional product), which, ironically, raises the barrier to entry for anyone trying to get out of the sandbox.
- eropple 7y ago
  > If you wanted a video game forum, you needed to host it. InvisionFree started in 2002 and was incredibly, bonkers-popular.
- alexpetralia 7y ago
  I initially sympathized with this line of thinking, but someone recently convinced me otherwise. The logic is as follows: * Do programmers still fool around with Cobol or Assembly or Fortran? Not so much * How important is C nowadays? Yes - everything runs on it - but that is because for the most part it is rock solid, and we need fewer and fewer C developers * The set of "primitives" required has moved up a layer of abstraction. New skills include: website builders, data pipelines, infra-as-code, cloud infra, web frameworks, etc. If people are still hacking the same way as they were 20 and 30 years ago, that is a problem. Yes, the hacking today surely looks different than it did decades ago - the primitives are larger and higher leverage - but there is hacking all the same.

by WJW 7y ago

microcolonel 7y ago

If anything, there's kinda a middle ground age right now where you can expect greater general understanding of computing concepts, with both people young and older than that being more ignorant.

rjbwork 7y ago
Yep. When I was 2 my parents got an old computer from my uncle's business that he was replacing and set it up in their living room for me. I was learning the command line as a toddler. I'm certainly no guru, but that kind of formative experience was certainly a big part of my choosing this career path. Kids of today grow up with ipads and iphones and have no cause to go poking around and experimenting with the basic functionality of their computers.
- DBYCZ 7y ago
  Same here, some of my earliest memories are of an old ms-dos mickey mouse game, where you were required to look through a booklet and enter in codes to perform actions.
  - xnyan 7y ago
    Learned how to spell quite young to use a CLI, first word was "DOS" lol.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

fastball 7y ago

That's a great point and something I've never thought about. I think it's something that would be helpful to think about when I'm raising my kids.

Eldandan 7y ago
I'm under 35 and consider myself very 'digitally native'. It wasn't until I helped my 19 year old niece set up her laptop that I realized exactly the same thing. They're fine with youtube and spotify from a tablet or phone. She could pick things up fairly quickly for school assignments (Office, etc.). I think it was her hunt-and-peck typing that made me realize my assumptions were off. (I don't think typing classes in middle and high school are much of a thing anymore in my region.)
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Is this in the US? I thought absolutely everyone was taking typing.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Watching professionals hunt-and-peck all day drives me mad. I took a 2 week typing class in the summer after 8th grade. We learned on big heavy mechanical typewriters where you really had to hammer the key to get an impression. It was time well spent, as it has paid off for me continuously ever since. For example, I wrote this entirely with touch typing (not looking at the keyboard).
  - Avamander 7y ago
    I saw a lot of kids using caps lock to type capital letters, that is even more painful. Thankfully they quickly utilized the new knowledge about shift key, I like to think I changed the way they use computers, but who knows if they actually have the motivation to learn further.
  - beefield 7y ago
    I have occasionally thought to time to learn proper touch typing. But I never seem to get over the idea that my bottleneck is not in the fingers, but in the brain trying to figure what to type in the first place... Can someone prove me wrong and make me motivated to learn?

echelon 7y ago

It's worse today than it was in the 90s and early 2000s. Back then the web was an indie experience. If you wanted your own blog, you had to host it. Or if there was a platform you could use, it let you customize the HTML and CSS. An entire cottage industry of websites hosting code snippets sprung up, and all the kids were using HTML and tweaking it. If you wanted a video game forum, you needed to host it. You had to learn how Linux servers worked, what MySQL was and how tables and migrations functioned, and might even need to write a little PHP on the side. When I was a teenager, I had a PHP website that did game matchmaking, lightweight article publishing, and custom (non-phpBB) forums. I put this under Subversion source control and let several of the members that were code literate contribute. We built a lot of stuff and had a whole thing going. Multiple websites. And then we stood up an IRC server, which gave way to bots and log ingestion and archival. We ran a MediaWiki instance (http://strategywiki.org http://strategywiki.org), we knew the folks that wrote the Gamecube LAN adapter tunnel. When it came time for college, I was way ahead of the curve. I blew through all of the upper level courses before my electives, and I was a TA in my freshman year. (Second semester!) This let me take a lot more biology and chemistry classes (something I wasn't previously skilled with, but had a deep interest in learning). This isn't as widespread anymore since there are platforms that do everything. Even though the learning curve has dropped and the barrier to entry is lower than ever, the barriers of interest and necessity have been raised. Kids don't need to hack around as much, and it's sad.

bsanr2 7y ago
It's also assumed that anyone not using the "low barrier to entry" platforms is a professional (or else, trying to make a professional product), which, ironically, raises the barrier to entry for anyone trying to get out of the sandbox.
eropple 7y ago
> If you wanted a video game forum, you needed to host it. InvisionFree started in 2002 and was incredibly, bonkers-popular.
alexpetralia 7y ago
I initially sympathized with this line of thinking, but someone recently convinced me otherwise. The logic is as follows: * Do programmers still fool around with Cobol or Assembly or Fortran? Not so much * How important is C nowadays? Yes - everything runs on it - but that is because for the most part it is rock solid, and we need fewer and fewer C developers * The set of "primitives" required has moved up a layer of abstraction. New skills include: website builders, data pipelines, infra-as-code, cloud infra, web frameworks, etc. If people are still hacking the same way as they were 20 and 30 years ago, that is a problem. Yes, the hacking today surely looks different than it did decades ago - the primitives are larger and higher leverage - but there is hacking all the same.