5 ms·

I'm honestly shocked by the amount of restrictions some parents in this thread enforce. I had unlimited access to a PC since I was about 10 (no Internet until

by aeyes 3y ago

I'm honestly shocked by the amount of restrictions some parents in this thread enforce. I had unlimited access to a PC since I was about 10 (no Internet until I was 16). 3 years later I knew the operating system inside out because of course back in the day of DOS and Windows 95 stuff broke easily and I'd try to fix it. I'd just tinker with it endlessly, started to read books about computers and tried to find out how it all worked. I started coding when I was 14, just learned it on my own by having a book and with curiosity. I never would have made it in this industry if it wasn't for spending endless hours with my computer for years before I had less and less time when I got older. A few years ago my parents told me that the best thing they ever did for me is to buy me a computer. I agree. I'm no genius by any means but every once in a while young hackers with incredible skills appear out of nowhere. I'm sure that all of them have a similar story to tell you. I can get behind the idea of limiting social media and video time. But screen time in general - not so much.

basch 3y ago
You might not had made it if you spent all your time watching YouTube videos about things you can do with Prime TM.
- aeyes 3y ago
  And I agree with that, I get very little out of videos. I have to try on my own to learn. Books are much better resources.
alex_lav 3y ago
> I never would have made it in this industry if it wasn't for spending endless hours with my computer for years before I had less and less time when I got older. The amount of people that had the same upbringing but just became addicted to the internet/gaming instead of becoming a programmer is staggering though. edit I'll add, I don't think blanket rules do much good either. The amount of "I won't let my kid do ____", where ____ is a pretty normal and mostly harmless thing, in this thread, is pretty wild. You have to teach kids to be reflective and thoughtful people, not just afraid of everything and/or unable to assess when something's good and when it's bad.
Aeolun 3y ago
I think it really depends on the child, and the parents. My wife thinks games are invented by the devil (figuratively) and starts complaining after my son plays them for half an hour, but she’ll happily have him watch hours of youtube without blinking an eye. I’d rather have him do something that stimulates his mind. But I’d still not want it to be all day long. There’s slso the fact he gets incredibly cranky when playing them because he feels like he should always win.
- nunodonato 3y ago
  I'm more or less in the same place, but been moderately successful in convincing my wife that certain games are very good and much better than watching tv (or any other passive thing). My kids hates to loose, and especially in the beginning would have very bad reactions which would feed my wife's point that games are bad. I just started picking better games (low-level challenge, more fun and exploration)
- consoomer 3y ago
  This is one of those funny things... my wife will rant about Japanese anime being garbage and then watch Korean drama for an hour. You have to pick your battles, friend!
mixmastamyk 3y ago
It's not the 90s anymore—things have significantly changed. Be shocked at the sophisticated teams of PHDs at BigTech with million dollar salaries figuring out the best ways to create psychological addiction in their product... er subjects. Start with the docs "The Corporation", and "The Social Dilemma". If you are interested in some more of the history from the government surveillance side, "The United States of Secrets."
bayesianbot 3y ago
I was quite similar, asking just programming books for birthday/christmas presents since I was 10, but my parents took a different route. I'm neurodivergent so I behaved different from other people, and coming from small town conservative family they just wanted me to be "normal" and blamed the computer on my differences. For me it was crazy as it was obvious I'm different way before the computer and I just couldn't understand why they wouldn't want a kid that's spending his free time studying programming (and science). The constant stress of somebody coming to my room and whining that I'm sitting on computer (and behaving weirdly) made concentrating on programming really hard and my life really anxious and stressful. Some point at my teens I noticed that going to drinking with my friends was way more relaxing, even though I hated drinking and just wanted to study. The anxiety+stress+drinking really left a mess in my life. Now I have my own kid and I'm finding it hard to put limits on phone usage as her peers are on tiktok etc. all the time. But the most important thing I'm trying to do is have these discussions and then that's it, try to act on what we've agreed, but not arbitrarily whine about too much usage or anything else that would make her constantly stress about it. And try to guide her to spend the screen time in better ways, like spending time playing Factorio / Minecraft multiplayer with her so we get creative time together instead of her looking short videos.
andersa 3y ago
It was the same for me. I had access to computers for as long as I can remember, and they had internet access with no restrictions. For the first few years my dad made me use some kind of sandbox so I didn't brick the PC if I downloaded malware on accident, and we would talk about what I was doing and interested in, etc. Time on the computer would be spent playing some learning or creative games we had, eventually discovering online communities and programming. Programming stuck as the most interesting thing to do, I moved from games to modding to learning C++ and reverse engineering and now quite successfully working remotely as a programmer. But consider: we had no idea what YouTube or Facebook were, there was no Twitter, no TikTok, no Instagram, no Discord, no Reddit, there were no phones with internet in schools. Times really have changed since then, and I feel like our experience is not that useful to compare with anymore. Every second activity you can do on the phone now is some kind of infinite algorithmic doom scrolling funnel optimized to make it as addictive as possible, to make you view as many stupid ads as possible while learning absolutely nothing. Worse, social media makes you always available to all your peers so if there is any kind of drama or bullying going on you have no escape anymore, not even at home. I don't have personal experience with it, but I've heard Instagram is particularly terrible at this for teenage girls - due to it showing everyone who interacted with any post, it generates an insane amount of pointless drama and group pressure along the lines of "you didn't like my post in 30 minutes wtf", "you liked that person's post wtf", almost like some cult. I imagine most people don't want to limit the kids access to technology and learning, but are trying (and likely failing) to protect them from the latter. Even as an adult I sometimes fall for it and chain watch pointless videos or scroll Twitter for hours on end... if that had been available back then, oof.
- alex_suzuki 3y ago
  I grew up the same way as you and GP. I have two kids now (8 and 4 years old) and I’m sadly resigned to the fact that computers will probably never feel like the awesome mystery boxes that they were back then. I spent so much time with memmaker and HIMEM.SYS and had no idea what I was doing. In comparison, today‘s environment feels much more focused on content consumption/distraction.

by aeyes 3y ago

basch 3y ago

You might not had made it if you spent all your time watching YouTube videos about things you can do with Prime TM.

aeyes 3y ago
And I agree with that, I get very little out of videos. I have to try on my own to learn. Books are much better resources.

alex_lav 3y ago

> I never would have made it in this industry if it wasn't for spending endless hours with my computer for years before I had less and less time when I got older. The amount of people that had the same upbringing but just became addicted to the internet/gaming instead of becoming a programmer is staggering though. edit I'll add, I don't think blanket rules do much good either. The amount of "I won't let my kid do ____", where ____ is a pretty normal and mostly harmless thing, in this thread, is pretty wild. You have to teach kids to be reflective and thoughtful people, not just afraid of everything and/or unable to assess when something's good and when it's bad.

Aeolun 3y ago

I think it really depends on the child, and the parents. My wife thinks games are invented by the devil (figuratively) and starts complaining after my son plays them for half an hour, but she’ll happily have him watch hours of youtube without blinking an eye. I’d rather have him do something that stimulates his mind. But I’d still not want it to be all day long. There’s slso the fact he gets incredibly cranky when playing them because he feels like he should always win.

nunodonato 3y ago
I'm more or less in the same place, but been moderately successful in convincing my wife that certain games are very good and much better than watching tv (or any other passive thing). My kids hates to loose, and especially in the beginning would have very bad reactions which would feed my wife's point that games are bad. I just started picking better games (low-level challenge, more fun and exploration)
consoomer 3y ago
This is one of those funny things... my wife will rant about Japanese anime being garbage and then watch Korean drama for an hour. You have to pick your battles, friend!

mixmastamyk 3y ago

It's not the 90s anymore—things have significantly changed. Be shocked at the sophisticated teams of PHDs at BigTech with million dollar salaries figuring out the best ways to create psychological addiction in their product... er subjects. Start with the docs "The Corporation", and "The Social Dilemma". If you are interested in some more of the history from the government surveillance side, "The United States of Secrets."

bayesianbot 3y ago

I was quite similar, asking just programming books for birthday/christmas presents since I was 10, but my parents took a different route. I'm neurodivergent so I behaved different from other people, and coming from small town conservative family they just wanted me to be "normal" and blamed the computer on my differences. For me it was crazy as it was obvious I'm different way before the computer and I just couldn't understand why they wouldn't want a kid that's spending his free time studying programming (and science). The constant stress of somebody coming to my room and whining that I'm sitting on computer (and behaving weirdly) made concentrating on programming really hard and my life really anxious and stressful. Some point at my teens I noticed that going to drinking with my friends was way more relaxing, even though I hated drinking and just wanted to study. The anxiety+stress+drinking really left a mess in my life. Now I have my own kid and I'm finding it hard to put limits on phone usage as her peers are on tiktok etc. all the time. But the most important thing I'm trying to do is have these discussions and then that's it, try to act on what we've agreed, but not arbitrarily whine about too much usage or anything else that would make her constantly stress about it. And try to guide her to spend the screen time in better ways, like spending time playing Factorio / Minecraft multiplayer with her so we get creative time together instead of her looking short videos.

andersa 3y ago

It was the same for me. I had access to computers for as long as I can remember, and they had internet access with no restrictions. For the first few years my dad made me use some kind of sandbox so I didn't brick the PC if I downloaded malware on accident, and we would talk about what I was doing and interested in, etc. Time on the computer would be spent playing some learning or creative games we had, eventually discovering online communities and programming. Programming stuck as the most interesting thing to do, I moved from games to modding to learning C++ and reverse engineering and now quite successfully working remotely as a programmer. But consider: we had no idea what YouTube or Facebook were, there was no Twitter, no TikTok, no Instagram, no Discord, no Reddit, there were no phones with internet in schools. Times really have changed since then, and I feel like our experience is not that useful to compare with anymore. Every second activity you can do on the phone now is some kind of infinite algorithmic doom scrolling funnel optimized to make it as addictive as possible, to make you view as many stupid ads as possible while learning absolutely nothing. Worse, social media makes you always available to all your peers so if there is any kind of drama or bullying going on you have no escape anymore, not even at home. I don't have personal experience with it, but I've heard Instagram is particularly terrible at this for teenage girls - due to it showing everyone who interacted with any post, it generates an insane amount of pointless drama and group pressure along the lines of "you didn't like my post in 30 minutes wtf", "you liked that person's post wtf", almost like some cult. I imagine most people don't want to limit the kids access to technology and learning, but are trying (and likely failing) to protect them from the latter. Even as an adult I sometimes fall for it and chain watch pointless videos or scroll Twitter for hours on end... if that had been available back then, oof.

alex_suzuki 3y ago
I grew up the same way as you and GP. I have two kids now (8 and 4 years old) and I’m sadly resigned to the fact that computers will probably never feel like the awesome mystery boxes that they were back then. I spent so much time with memmaker and HIMEM.SYS and had no idea what I was doing. In comparison, today‘s environment feels much more focused on content consumption/distraction.