Comment by sourcepluck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sourcepluck | Hacker News Reader

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Scheduling, and homework assignments, and textbooks [0], and handing in homework, and communicating absences, and asking the teacher a question later in the day in a groupchat, and the teacher sending an extra thing for everyone to read outside of class even just out of general interest, and communicating with peers about something in another class groupchat where the teacher isn't present, and...

Some kids have zero interaction with pen and paper for at least some homeworks, where they'll receive the assignment in a class group, do it on the tablet, send it back there as a PDF, and get back an annotated PDF with the corrections.

Not all schools are doing all of that. Some schools are though, and most seem to have implemented some subset.

While doing this, the kids are not necessarily taught the basics of what's going on on their devices. They tend to not know the difference between, say: a browser and a search engine; a window and a tab; a menu and a tool bar; an operating system and a desktop environment [1].

Source: students of mine, telling me about their schools and how things work.

[0] if there is a textbook. It could just be PDFs of lessons, which could be all from one source or various sources.

[1] until I keep pestering them until they start to see a bit clearer, even though we're not doing computer subjects :)

Isn't it good they don't know these differences? The fact we know is mostly due to poorly designed UX, not some high level concept that needs to be known. Modern phones are a much better UX for most people.

No, I think it's debilitating, disempowering, wholly unnecessary, and that it would be easily solvable if there existed a will to solve it. It's a cultural issue, not a technical one, I mean.

I didn't mean in the first message simply knowing the difference between tabs and windows and a few other GUI bits and bobs, those were meant to be an example of a larger point. The larger point being the notion that it's fun and possible to be a combative, pro-active, "liberated" computer user.

The empowerment of computer users is diametrically opposed however to the interests of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Amazon, etc etc. The ideal computer user for them is one who knows nothing, except exactly what they need to know to keep clicking, commenting, sharing, liking, spewing out their personal details, and fishing out the credit and debit cards.

Everything is an 'app'.

No need to understand where the data goes, where it is stored, who owns it, what they know about you and what is shared with third parties, what is costs to provide such a service (even though none of its users seem to pay anything), how it is monetized, how dark UI patterns nudge you, how algorithms manipulate you, why you can get addicted to them.

Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.

> Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.

That’s the exact amount knowledge most users want.

> That’s the exact amount knowledge most users want.

Back when I was young I was completely astonished by that mindset... but now that I'm older, I kinda get it. When you gotta juggle 8 hours of work, 2 hours of commute, 1-2 hours of chores, and completely forget about kids or a sane sleep schedule... you don't have the time dealing with bullshit, you need something that works. And you got money to pay for that, too.

Yeah, most of my friends that don't work programming or building computers couldn't care less. I think we try to reflect our own beliefs on what computers should be and how people should interact with them but that is not the reality for most people, they just want to do a thing and click a button, anything else is too much work.

When i was getting a new computer to my father in law the main requirement was that it would be hard for him to do stupid stuff, like install a virus, so we went with a mac. It makes a lot of sense for him to use a very limited device because all he does is browse, watch youtube and listen to music, why does he have to understand all the details of how all of this works at all?

> Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.

Systems evolve until they reach the maturity of elevators. Press the button, it goes to your floor. Some users might wish they could change the button LED color, make it blink to the elevator music's rhythm and swap the scheduling algorithm on the fly with their custom choice... I guess they are all here !

My mom doesn't want to be a "liberated computer user", she wants to use her phone to watch youtube, see pics of her grandkids and listen to music, she doesn't even care about having social networks. You're projecting your own personal interests into others, the world contains multitudes, not everyone wants to understand every little detail of how computers work.

For most people computers are like cars, they couldn't care less about how they work, as long as they can use them to take them from place A to place B.

This comment is mildly ironic because the same kind of argument has often been used around cars. Do you want to be merely a car driver, or do you want to be a car "operator", who understands (to some level of abstraction) what happens "under the hood" when you manipulate the levers and wheels in your car?

Different strokes for different folks, but never forget, knowledge is power.

Jesus, no. Computer illiteracy is a growing problem, kids and teens nowadays have trouble understanding even the basics of what's going on in their computers apart from "swipe here for the next addictive depressive 5-second slop". That's very very bad at a time when these devices are more and more important in their lives.

When I was a kid, general understanding of computers was so basic that "my computer was struck by lightning and now it is sentient" seemed like a reasonable plot device.

In more practical terms, this extended to things like not understanding why an Acorn-formatted floppy disk, or Doom for Windows, couldn't be read by a Mac.

Naturally, another memory of those days was my dad complaining that "these days" people couldn't understand the electrical circuits because everything was getting replaced with ICs where the only thing you could do if it failed was throw the entire chip away and replace it.

Do you pull or push the choke knob before running the starter?

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