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Kids can't use computers and this is why it should worry you (2013)
- corndoge 2y agoFortunately the kids not being able to use computers has been very profitable for us!
- piyuv 2y agoPrevious discussion (linked in the article itself): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730 Quite sad to see things have become much much worse over 12 years.
- tennisflyi 2y agoI definitely like to use folders and know how to use a printer, copier, or fax machine but rejected ad nauseam for jobs. I guess I should put it in my “skills” section. Being in “stride” appears to be most important part, i.e., straight from college with the experience of maybe working at the cafeteria/book store/whatever to that prestigious job lol
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoWhat’s the relation to the post?
- tennisflyi 2y agoThe bare bone use of computer related peripherals?
- seafoamteal 2y agoThe old family laptop's Windows 10 license is about to expire soon so I took the chance to install Linux Mint on it for my younger sibling. From what they tell me, it's perfectly usable, though I don't know to what extent they're using it. If it's just logging on and going straight to Firefox, there's not much difference from Windows kn terms of what they're learning. I've been thinking about what I can do to get them to engage more constructively with the computer, but no concrete ideas yet. Any suggestions from those of you who've done something similar for your siblings or kids?
- potato3732842 2y agoI haven't used anything but linux on a personal machine in a decade. When did Windows licenses stop being for the life of the machine?
- leipert 2y agoWindows 10 EOL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support Also a lot of very capable machines cannot run Windows 11.
- onemoresoop 2y agoI have a windows machine (windows 10) that I will never upgrade to windows 11, that’s the end of the line for me as far as Windows goes. I also have an old laptop that still runs windows XP, I turn on once in a while but I do keep it offline. At work windows reigns. Im not looking forward to but soon they’ll install windows 11 on our dev machines. I’m really not looking forward to that at all.
- Modified3019 2y agoWindows won’t stop functioning, it just stops receiving updates. Win10 machines will still work, and you can reinstall win10 if you like. In practice, what usually seems to happen is Microsoft will begrudgingly extend security updates for a few years after official EOS, because most people won’t switch over that quickly and having all those machines with unpatched vulnerabilities would be a bigger pain that potentially more expensive than just keeping on for a few more years.
- doubletwoyou 2y agoGet them into game modding or the like, fuzzing around to get a mod working delves into a good amount of computer-y things.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoadd a chat gpt to the terminal with a prompt. "I want to dowload pictures of cats and opening them in an image program." and it downloads cats and installs and open gimp. linux can be very star trek nowadays.
- thomasfedb 2y agoOften people believe that they are using the computer when in fact the computer is using them. My first computer was a DOS machine with BASIC. If I wanted to play games I had to write them. No ads. No algorithm. The key lesson is that computers are general purpose machines that you can bend to your will.
- deadbabe 2y agoThis isn’t really a lesson. Not everyone cares about computers or is destined to spend their lives tinkering with them. Most people are content with simply thinking of computers as a magic box that does things and going on with their lives. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everything needs to be bent to your will. In very old days kids would have had to build their own toys instead of going to a toy store. Is there some lesson there?
- thomasfedb 2y agoThe lesson is that you are not required to express yourself in terms of what’s been designed by others and placed on shelves in jewel wrap.
- bryant 2y ago> In very old days kids would have had to build their own toys instead of going to a toy store. Is there some lesson there? Probably, yes. People have a better appreciation for what they build[0] and seem to also be more mindful about the usage of what they build[1]. Wouldn't surprise me if this extends to tech, too, but I couldn't find anything that explored this. [0] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-018-9465-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-018-9465-6
- KMnO4 2y agoI remember being so excited when I found out I could get computer game books at the library. I would take one out, and spend the next hour typing out several pages of "Tour de France" in BASIC, then another hour figuring out where my typos were, so that I could spend the rest of the evening playing a primitive text based game. It was a simpler time.
- janetmissed 2y agoIt's kind of funny how far back this whinging about kids not being able to use computers goes, especially how condescending this blog is. Most people will only learn as much about computers to do their work and nothing more, because isn't it normal to only learn the bare minimum about something you don't care about?
- dhosek 2y agoThe kids these days don‘t know how to use their cars. They go to mechanics to do something basic like change the oil or replace the brake pads when they could spend a few hours doing it themselves in a half-assed way.
- onemoresoop 2y agoMaybe they have money. The kids who don’t have money and are somewhat more intelligent that the average learn that doing it themselves saves them some money they can spend on other things. There’s a cultural aspect of it that changes over time but that’s possibly influenced by changes in technology. When I was a a teenager you could comprehend how a car worked and have modest success debugging and fixing a car. I doubt that’s easy to do these days.
- asdff 2y agoIt should be said that changing oil does not take hours and however you half ass it, the average lube tech uses even less ass than that.
- Amezarak 2y agoYeah, on most cars, changing the oil consists of: loosen/remove one bolt, drain oil, unscrew oil filter, put new filter on and bolt back, fill with amount and type of oil specified in manual. (Some also have a little plastic shield you have to remove first.) And yeah, you’re likely to care a whole lot more about your car than some average lube tech. (This is why I change my oil now: I found out how little they care when the lube techs at two different places reattached the plastic shield wrong causing it to fall and drag on the road. Saving money was just a bonus.) I’ve notice people seriously overestimate how complicated really simple maintenance/mechanical tasks are generally. I remember hearing an NPR story about a plumber shortage where the person being interviewed had just paid some thousand dollars to have their PVC drain line repaired. I was shocked. They could have done it themselves with a shovel, a hacksaw, and $5 worth of PVC and glue in maybe 10-25 minutes, well within almost anyone’s capabilities if they had thought to look into it before calling someone. We really are very rich that we can not think about these things.
- uqual 2y agoA few years ago I was doing some tutoring at a school and a student mentioned "Computer Science" class. I was impressed that fifth graders at this school with generally low performing students had access to Computer Science classes at that age. Then I discovered they were learning how to use Word. The students really thought they were taking a "Computer Science" course. I would have liked to meet the teacher - I suspect they wouldn't know how to write a binary search in the language of their choice to save their life, let alone discuss if a problem was NP Complete.
- wrs 2y agoThis sort of thing used to be called "Computer Literacy", which was a much better name. The equivalent of (and I suppose including) what was called "typing class" in the 80s.
- dhosek 2y agoSo I stopped at the bit about the proxies because seriously, I’ve had to care about proxies almost never in the last 11 years. If your network is set up to require some special proxy setting, it shouldn’t be a network that people sign into with some random device and I would expect the IT staff to manage the proxy settings when setting up the devices that are meant to go on that network. As for being able to join a wifi network, yes, the kids know exactly how to do that and they do just fine. Maybe a handful of people who take a learned helplessness approach to anything technical might be flummoxed but the kids can do it. And spare me the recollections of the old days when your computer booted up into a BASIC prompt. I was there, Charlie, it wasn’t all wine and roses. You had a computer you could program, but that most people didn’t have much use for and frankly right now the ability to program your computers is way better than it‘s been at any time in my 50+ years since you’ve got world class compilers, interpreters and development tools available for free along with all the documentation you can eat on the internet as opposed to having to have your uncle visit half a dozen computer stores looking for the book that describes the undocumented entry points into the ROM that let you do cool stuff.
- sras-me 2y ago>right now the ability to program your computers is way better than it‘s been at any time in my 50+ years since you’ve got world class compilers, interpreters and development tools available for free along with all the documentation you can eat on the internet... Sure, but all that is useless if motivation is missing. A BASIC prompt, or even a terminal into which type commands, is infinitly more motivating w.r.t programming than a desktop filled with "Apps".
- Animats 2y agoThat's 12 years old. You're not supposed to understand how computers work any more. On some machines, you can't re-install Windows any more. You're pretty much a slave to the cloud with Office 360 or Google. Chromebooks are total slaves. Phones get more locked down each year. Even on Linux, you're often now slaved to some remote system which keeps installing new stuff.
- mass_and_energy 2y agoWhat is this "remote system which keeps installing new stuff" that you speak of?
- Animats 2y agoUbuntu's Software Updater, of course.
- iwd 2y agoMeh. My 16 year old writes shaders for her own games, writes for her VR headset, programs her graphing calculator, etc etc. The next generation will have plenty of self-taught SWEs, just like ours. Most kids couldn’t use computers in the 80s or now, and it wasn’t a disaster either time.
- feznyng 2y agoThe issue is it probably won’t be your daughter who creates and passes the legislation that dictates how she and the rest of us get to use our computers (net neutrality, encryption, etc). In a democracy, the majority of the population needs to be computer literate enough to vote for candidates who will support these things.
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- eucryphia 2y agoYes, kids should come into school a month early, form self selected groups to, unsupervised, build their own desktops and re-cable the entire school network following instructions on the internet, on their phones. The end of school term, they carefully disassemble everything.
- davidclark 2y agoYou’re making fun, but I’d send my kid to this school.
- HappMacDonald 2y agoTo be fair, this kind of sounds like how Japanese schools handle cleaning tasks.
- hindsightbias 2y agoI’m shocked the “What’s a computer?” Apple ad is only 8 years old?
- mass_and_energy 2y agoThis reeks of insecurity
- johnea 2y agoAmazing poster child for HN comments having nothing to due with original post. Almost everything in here at the moment is about changing oil in a car 8-) Which avoids the obvious issue that modern tech users are just another new exploited consumer class. And if anyone points out the obvious: "Maybe you're just dumb as a rock?", of course they're just being condescending. I mean you're an expert in "Call of Doo Doo, The Final Genocide 18"... Or, you know how to type really smart things into an LLM prompt... p.s.: It should be pointed out that "dumb" is almost never a physical disability, it's almost always a willful lack of mental discipline.