When I was a kid, hacking was a means to an end. If I wanted to play a game on my Commodore 64 or an Apple ][, I had to learn some basic skills on the computer,

When I was a kid, hacking was a means to an end. If I wanted to play a game on my Commodore 64 or an Apple ][, I had to learn some basic skills on the computer, not tap an icon. Before I had a disk drive, I typed BASIC programs into the C64 from Compute Gazette, and learned programming via osmosis. If I got stuck in a game, the world wide web and gamefaqs didn't exist yet, so I figured out how to hack the savegame file. I'm not a natural hacker. If I was a kid now, I'd just play games on an iPad and effectively learn nothing because there's no friction. This isn't a slam on the ipad or misplaced nostalgia, just a recognition that sometimes you are forced to learn things out of necessity, and if you're born into plenty, you never are forced to grow. On the other hand, for anybody who's a born tinkerer, the fact that iPads are locked down and super easy to use is irrelevant because you have a thousand other cheap hackable devices like Raspberry Pis or Arduino. For someone who's not a born tinkerer though, they may never pick up a hackable device, and will miss some opportunities for growth.