lapisnev

Don't squeeze me, I fart

Things that make you go 🤌. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!

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curiousquail
@curiousquail

A thing I've been thinking about a lot is that the shift toward phones and tablets has left a lot of what we'd consider 'computer literacy' behind for younger generations.

Old man yells at clout dot jpg about kids these days not knowing how to navigate file structures etc

but - are there any good resources out there to offset this? And not in a 'go into STEM, kids!' way, I mean just every day computer use.

Does anything spring to mind for 'If a parent wanted to give their kids some kind of tool or tips or a website or something about navigating computers as the computer gods intended as opposed to a closed off apple mystery box'

Would love some suggestions if y'all have them!!


PineappleAnna
@PineappleAnna

something that's kinda pokey in all of this (pun not actually intended, but i'll own it) is that... computers have come along away from, as Tom Scott once put it, "the home computer boom of the 1980s, when the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum made a generation who could code" (his point was very UK-specific, which is why it doesn't mention the Commodore 64, but that did a heap of work too... source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNm-b1UXGTY starting around 6:45. no embed but it's a relevant video to this conversation, even though it was made at a time when Flash was still relevant)

and while that generation learnt to live with computers, and to see them not just as little boxes of magic, but controllable little boxes of magic... some of that has been lost, and i wonder how much of that is because the compter gods aren't able to communicate with our new high speed technology (anyone got a serial connection?)... and how much is because other people of that generation (the ones that somehow ended up in charge of things) look at these little boxes of magic and think "actually, letting people be able to do what they want with these things is a Bad Idea" and have been slowly working against the flow and understanding and access of that magic and bending the world into seeing them as closed off mystery boxes...


ireneista
@ireneista

to assist humans in exploring creativity, discovery, and socializing with each other

we echo the original call for resources that genuinely still teach this stuff, we don't know any good ones


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in reply to @curiousquail's post:

I'm regularly bummed that the command line environment that both *NIX and Windows based computers ship with is such a poor onramp to general computer literacy - plenty of kids have learned it (including those of us who came up on DOS, i guess) but only after clearing several other somewhat difficult tech literacy hurdles. I think it's actually a step back from the C64, as primitive as it was, which booted directly into a fully functional programming environment.

For about a decade now I've had this idea for an interactive computing primer, an environment with very modest requirements that starts off feeling very much like a videogame (you start off controlling a Zelda 1 like top down 2D character, because that's easy to grasp) and gradually eases the user into the file system, the command line, basic programming and CS concepts, etc. And eventually the "endgame" is just full access to the system. I'd still like to make it someday. Done well, it would have enormous social value.

i sometimes see people who grew up with technology they liked to tinker with and learn from trying to replicate it pretty directly for today's kids, and if kids like that, it's great, but it feels like it can potentially be really self-indulgent

what i like about your suggestion is that it seems like you're taking what worked about the C64 and imagining something new, rather than being like, 'what if we built C64s again?' i wonder if you could borrow some inspiration from fantasy consoles that build in graphics and music editors as well as a code editor.

yep, absolutely that would be a primary inspiration. i've used enough different kinds of systems over the years to be able to see what was cool and useful about environments like the C64 (and what should be forgotten!) and i think the fantasy consoles are very much the inheritors of those ideals - and are much better, more direct ways to engage with a lot of the exciting fundamental computer things, like drawing graphics on screen and communicating with the user, than 1980s stuff was, by virtue of having fewer "non-designed" limitations to hit one's head on.

kind of... logo is closer to being a traditional programming environment, whereas i think of this as being essentially a game that teaches you some stuff, and eventually just grants full access to the engine running it.

Glad to hear it.

My CS undergrad degree started with Java and "Hello, World!" (Which was way too fast for some, and way too slow for a few of us.) I felt like it ignored so much of what many of the students needed to learn to do and use, like setting-up a dev environment, using the command-line, etc. Instead it rushed right into writing in a high-level language, and left behind too many of those for whom a TA waving her hand and saying "just install Eclipse and go" was insufficient.

maybe give your kids/niblings/etc. things like raspberry pis and other DIY project computers as gifts? If you give them a cool special little project that means they get to build and set up their own computer, I bet a lot of kids would be even more motivated to learn how it works, learn what linux is, etc.

You can even make it a whole thing with a little tiny raspberry pi gaming-tower styled mini case, and a little tiny monitor, and a tiny keyboard.... people making absurdly small gaming computers has even gotten popular on DIY/gamer youtube.

Pointing to this. As a teenager I had a lot of fun just doing a stage1 gentoo install on my personal machine. A RasPi (or less cop-friendly offbrand equivalent) is the sort of thing that's powerful enough to do some serious stuff with but is cheap enough to be a toy that's not the end of the world if it's broken for a bit.

Heck, you can go the opposite end from mini tower and have it be a mini console--let a kid play with stuff they make on the living room TV just like a nintendo. (SLightly projecting my 90s kid desires here but i'm sure there's at least one or two kids out there now with similar dreams)

As long as there are games to mod. I mostly installed stuff for The Sims 1-3, GTA 3/VC/SA and stuff on Source engine.

Recently i only experimented with BotW and Inscryption. It really depends on what one's playing and whether that's moddable (and uses old-school "put files where they belong" methods rather than just mod manager like Steam Workshop etc.).

this convo is raising a corollary question for me which is "what does filesystem literacy look like in a future where the filesystem is materially irrelevant to non-hobbyist laypeople?"

like, what are actually the fundamentals? in what order do people usually need to acquire those concepts? how can they be made developmentally appropriate?

people who had the innate interest and skill set to self teach a thing often have a hard time figuring this out, which I think is really interesting! if you look at how e.g. computer science curricula have spread and evolved over the past few decades, you can see this in action

i really wish i knew. like, when i worked in science education, we did more about programming fundamentals (ranging from "the robotic mouse will follow a path in the order you press the buttons" to scratch programming) than about practical everyday PC use.

hobbyist approaches for kids aren't a great solution. like, when they work, they work. there's a few places near where i grew up that would teach kids programming by helping them mod minecraft, for example. but imo, these target kids who are already like, a foot in the door by even having a passing interest in something tech-related. i dont really have an answer for something that could effectively teach a kid who has zero interest in learning, and those are the ones that need it the most imo. the types of kids who already want to mod games or program, they'll find the resources if they're curious enough. i dont know how to reach other kids where they are.

So, I’m young enough and femme enough I was inactively discouraged from learning anything stem —

When I was young, like 10 or 11, I got really into writing code… but of course, no one told me code didn’t need to run in the browser on khan academy’s website… so I gave up on it after the lack of decent compiler errors, and inability to spell (shout out that learning disability) left me frustrated. I think probably if someone had wanted me to use a computer not as a mystery box, they would have just had to have helped me learn the basics and research the rest.

I didn’t really understand what a file system was doing until three things happened. I started writing websites (and then other code) while running MacOS and then Debian… and I realized this was A) exactly like google drive, and B) I realized every person ever saying this stuff was complicated, was frankly wrong, and had a vested interest in me not making stuff.

Honestly, I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to making kids get this stuff. At the end of the day they have to be interested and feel like they’re competent. I think probably helping them build a project they care about would be a good start…

in reply to @ireneista's post:

we do, however, need to be careful we aren't just clinging to bad abstractions. Users have found an easier way to relate to the machine. It's part of why they use it over a laptop or desktop. Is that a bad thing? The bigcorps own the UI paradigm for now, but how much of that is just because we force everyone in the hobby and industry to learn the filesystem because that's where all the tools live?

The interfaces they're used to still have a filesystem under them, the filesystem has just had another abstraction layer added to it, making computers more accessible to everyone. Our tools just haven't caught up.

Except, I guess, they have. VSCode can load a repo as directories, but you're doing it through a search interface, and the only filesystem you interact with is the structure of the code. Linters, etc are launch-directory-aware such that you don't actually need to know where you are. etc.

And your photo gallery app is just creating a directory structure and not being explicit about it -- different albums, galleries, by-month, etc.

I agree that it's a problem for people wanting to jump into the field, but I'm starting to wonder if the problem is clinging to the old ways, not the new ones being bad. In some ways it's like they're using hypertext instead of LaTeX, and only use LaTeX where they need it. Which is how it worked out in the 90s.

and the difference between how a phone OS works and a desktop is sorta getting erased. Silverblue and other immutable/impermanent OSes end up having the same paradigm, if you squint -- especially silverblue, with it's dependence on flatpak.

we are all for change when that change is positive. many elements of search-based UI are in fact positive; nobody has time to explicitly organize every damn thing.

the game modding example is precisely when it becomes disempowering to have search as the only UI. it's a culturally important use-case that many game publishers would explicitly prefer to discourage or prevent. in adversarial scenarios, the only way you win is by knowing how things "really" work.

right, but I'm not sure that's not an indictment against the games themselves and how they think about modding as third-class even as it is the only thing powering, say, all the hype around skyrim re-releases

the fact that there are scenarios where publishers get to decide what we do with games is, like, bad

not NEW - copy-protection goes back a long, long way, and is not inherently tied to filesystems - but the ability to modify software is important

GNU:

“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.

You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.

while we're not huge fans of GNU as an organization, in this context we think it makes sense to cite them due to the history and all that

we're not trying to suggest that commercial games are, or even could be, free software. we do however think that it makes sense to talk about degrees of freedom, even with commercial software. mechanisms that make it harder for an aspect of freedom to exist are things to be very skeptical of.