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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Has he never copied a file to a usb stick? Or emailed an attachment? I don’t understand how this is possible.

I can answer for my kids. Everything they do is in the cloud and accessible on any device. I'm not sure they'd understand why anyone would want a thumb drive.

As for attachments on emails, they don't (even for a 100% online highschool). To turn in a paper they can just hit "share" and select their teacher.

Files and filesystems are almost dead to them. There is a little hope... My son googled to learn why a game was going slow and answers indicated he should delete the temp files. That was his first experience needing the file explorer.

As someone who grew up with DOS and turned in CS homework on a floppy disk, it is almost hard to watch.

The death of the floppy disk has been nice to watch though.

We'd better rectify that. The future we're headed to where everyone is a slave to several massive IT corps is not one we should wish on anyone.

(Cue Doctorow links to enshittification and war on general purpose computering.)

Phone and Chromebook. Kids through highschool might never see anything else. Assignments are in google drive, etc.

I can't speak for iPhones, but Android has a file system and the ability to create directories. I think it would be weird if Apple products didn't have that as well, even if it's a bit hidden. I don't have any form of evidence to back this up, but I think that this has more to do with apps, not the device that kids use. Having everything be an app makes it seem like you have multiple independent things on your device, and the device itself is nothing more than a way to connect to those apps.

Gdrive still has a concept of files and directories. It is kind of primitive in that way.

It does, but using it is really optional. It works equally well if you leave everything in the default Drive directory and use search to find whatever you need.

If you're not used to thinking in terms of files, it just looks like a list of your most recent documents, with a search bar to find anything else.

I just read through the circa 2010 retrospective on how the Drive team tried to come up with their brand. 99% of the concepts were very based on the traditional physical idioms of files, mechanical hard disks, etc. iCloud was released midway through the project and so then they started making “cloud file” and “cloud disk” concepts. It was nearly an accident they ended up with an abstract shape like Chrome. But ultimately Google Drive icon has stood the test of time while files and disks have faded in to history.

Kids (almost) never use Drive. They access everything though apps like Doc, Sheets, etc.

Source: was until recently a classroom teacher for 7-10 year olds.

Kids don't really use email these days, or usb sticks. They share more than we ever did, but directly via apps or mobile which doesn't work with "files". It seems reasonable in this case the thing missing is the abstraction of a "file". Think of how your phone works, you share pictures, video, text, posts, etc. but never files. Sharing to email is my phone's 5th or 6th priority option. It comes after a boatload of social media options, messaging, online storage, even some sort of AWS application I've never even launched.

If your whole computer life is using Safari or clicking apps, then yes, you might not ever see a "file".

Course they have. But to them they see it as sharing the state of the app rather than saving and loading data.

I haven't used a USB stick in years as a tech person and virtually all my day to day document processing is in the cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if the person in question does know what a file is, but doesn't work with them enough as files to really get it.

It’s probably my paranoia but I assume something will go wrong with the network at the conference where I’m presenting. I usually have multiple types of backups.

I gather most of his use was on his phone and a school-issued chromebook

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