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Google and advertising killed everything off. Google is directly responsible for making tech and the world shitty. They started the whole making money of your a

Google and advertising killed everything off. Google is directly responsible for making tech and the world shitty. They started the whole making money of your attention thing and then everyone sort of just followed it. Not to mention the whole SEO industry that pushed off smaller, high quality websites for gargantuan mess of word salad articles. And finally now the present generation of developers are slavishly solving leetcode to get a high TC (total compensation). We need a whole new generation of hackers to take us out of this mess. There are some clues, in the Patron, open source, community. I just hope kids make useful software for them and their friends.

genewitch 2y ago
my 8 year old (then 7) used to spend a lot of time in the roblox creation tool, whatever that's called. in 3rd grade we had access to Apple ][e and c in the school library - and i learned basic on an atari so it was relatively straightforward to code silly things that impressed other children - fill the screen with random characters (random colored characters on the c!) draw lines, make the printer buzz. windows 3 and/or 95 included abasic and qbasic (iirc). if you held down shift while booting, you'd drop to a prompt and could just write code. I'm not sure where that leaves today's kids - there's nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements; further, nearly no-one will be impressed with filling a screen with random characters in the same way adults and kids were impressed back when there were 9 computers in the entire school and 4 didn't work. I know there's projects out there that attempt to capture that magical spark of all of those 6502 and 808X machines just had by merely existing.
- tim333 2y ago
  >nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements Well you can do ctrl shift J or similar in the browser and start typing javascript, or open the terminal. It is all a bit more complicated than BASIC in the old days though.

genewitch 2y ago

my 8 year old (then 7) used to spend a lot of time in the roblox creation tool, whatever that's called. in 3rd grade we had access to Apple ][e and c in the school library - and i learned basic on an atari so it was relatively straightforward to code silly things that impressed other children - fill the screen with random characters (random colored characters on the c!) draw lines, make the printer buzz. windows 3 and/or 95 included abasic and qbasic (iirc). if you held down shift while booting, you'd drop to a prompt and could just write code. I'm not sure where that leaves today's kids - there's nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements; further, nearly no-one will be impressed with filling a screen with random characters in the same way adults and kids were impressed back when there were 9 computers in the entire school and 4 didn't work. I know there's projects out there that attempt to capture that magical spark of all of those 6502 and 808X machines just had by merely existing.

tim333 2y ago
>nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements Well you can do ctrl shift J or similar in the browser and start typing javascript, or open the terminal. It is all a bit more complicated than BASIC in the old days though.