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Your idea that if you give people space and resources they will explore and learn and do creative things is talked about in regards to many issues. I don't tota

Your idea that if you give people space and resources they will explore and learn and do creative things is talked about in regards to many issues. I don't totally buy it. Smartphones and computers in general are a pretty strong example of the opposite. Sure OS's are more restrictive than in the past, but anyone who has a laptop and smartphone has access to programming tools and device sensors that would have been sci-fi 20 years ago. The reality is the average person when enabled will flow down the path of least resistance, and consume whatever requires the least effort. An endless scroll of meme videos and pictures of friends is going to beat out learning a challenging new skill for 99% of kids, and most adults as well unless they are consciously avoiding it.

thomastjeffery 3y ago
Have you ever tried to create anything with a smartphone? That path has an incredible amount of resistance. More importantly, the arbitrary hurdles cannot be moved. On a desktop PC, I can install whatever Linux distro I want. That can give me much greater access to a serious development environment than even Windows could dream of. Android feels like a toy in comparison, and iOS is like one of those fake laptops they sell to toddlers. Even when my Android phone has an unlockable bootloader, it's still unlikely that I will be able to run a desktop-equivalent Linux distro on it. Chances are, I'm left with a less-restrictive flavor of Android. That's the best case scenario, and it's absolutely worse than the average case I grew up with. It's not entirely about resistance, either. People follow their interests within a reasonable amount of effort. At the end of the day, they balance the two. What opportunities to mobile computing users have to follow what interests? Social media provides the least resistance by several orders of magnitude. We can and should change this landscape. We should be minimizing the opportunity cost of creative computing, instead of trying to convince billions of people to throw the entire thing out the window.
aio2 3y ago
I partially do. I was given these tools with unlimited access and encouraged to explore and learn and was able to ask about anything. I would say my case is different though, reading from these commonts.

thomastjeffery 3y ago

Have you ever tried to create anything with a smartphone? That path has an incredible amount of resistance. More importantly, the arbitrary hurdles cannot be moved. On a desktop PC, I can install whatever Linux distro I want. That can give me much greater access to a serious development environment than even Windows could dream of. Android feels like a toy in comparison, and iOS is like one of those fake laptops they sell to toddlers. Even when my Android phone has an unlockable bootloader, it's still unlikely that I will be able to run a desktop-equivalent Linux distro on it. Chances are, I'm left with a less-restrictive flavor of Android. That's the best case scenario, and it's absolutely worse than the average case I grew up with. It's not entirely about resistance, either. People follow their interests within a reasonable amount of effort. At the end of the day, they balance the two. What opportunities to mobile computing users have to follow what interests? Social media provides the least resistance by several orders of magnitude. We can and should change this landscape. We should be minimizing the opportunity cost of creative computing, instead of trying to convince billions of people to throw the entire thing out the window.

aio2 3y ago

I partially do. I was given these tools with unlimited access and encouraged to explore and learn and was able to ask about anything. I would say my case is different though, reading from these commonts.