As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea.
In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it even more when forced to write out an assignment on a keyboard as supposed to handwriting.
Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.
Now, some of these issues (like bad professors, smart kids getting bored because of slow pace of lessons) have always been present in every school all over the world but I do think that having tech in the classroom just makes things worse, as now even those who would have normally followed the lesson are tempted to just turn on their computer and pretend to take notes when really they are playing Candy crush. It's bad enough being a teenager and being bombarded with stimuli from your phone and social media, having that kind of distraction at school just makes things even worse.
So yeah, I think tech in school is one of those things that sounds great but usually just back-fires in spectacular ways (imho).
I think a lot of it started because of one of the better intended projects — the One Laptop Per Child movement that tried to give laptops to kids in poor countries. A key premise was that a laptop could be cheaper than all of the textbooks normally required, so the whole thing was really saving money.
But envy is one of the most powerful forces in politics, even when it doesn't make sense. So the idea that children in Namibia were getting laptops, while kids in Virginia weren't — even though it was a money-saving trick — that was just unacceptable. And unlike in the OLPC, schools bought laptops from a variety of vendors, mostly interested in upselling lots of unnecessary features rather than providing a lightweight textbook device. Anyone familiar with the history of the TI-83 understands that corporations selling technology to schools are the lowest form of life.
I can't say for sure that this is what caused it, but it was right around the time that laptops started showing up in schools, and also when the concept of the "netbook" was introduced. The early netbooks certainly seemed to be imitating that weird green blob-shaped thing that OLPC hoped would revolutionize education in the less developed world.
The idea of using electronics in classrooms to help education long predated OLPC. Obviously it took different forms but it has a very long (and mostly not very happy) history.
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Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.
I would not fault computers here. At my school time, when pupils were bored, they covertly played card games like Skat [a German card game] or graph paper games like Battleship, Racetrack, Connect Four, ... under the school desks.
I still remember this one girl who, when the teacher confiscated one deck of Skat cards, the moment that the teacher looked away, simply took out another deck from her school bag, and play continued (she played Skat semi-competitively, so she nearly always had, I think, dozens of decks of Skat cards in her school bag).
Another former friend had an insane creativity in turning stuff that one could find in a pencil case into contraptions for shooting rubber pieces.
The existence of pre-internet distractions doesn’t negate the potency and pervasiveness of post-internet distractions.
Yea bored kids have always found ways to entertain themselves in class. But this is a matter of scale.
Kids being able to covertly play battleship on pen and paper is many steps removed from every kid in the class being constantly plugged into a network where the wealthiest companies in the world are spending billions of dollars competing for their attention.
Kids with unfettered access to the internet in the classroom might as well be sitting in a casino.
It's not quite the same. I, a responsible adult, find myself fiddling with my phone when attending talks, even when I'm supposedly interested in the talk. Once I start, I missed the beginning and don't understand the rest of the talk even if I try to focus later. The level of temptation is quite different.
> Would the issue be resolved by a resiliant way to lock all devices into a particular mode?
In my experience, pupils are insanely creative in getting around such restrictions: pupils have a lot of time, and in each grade there is this one guy (nearly always male) who combines being knowledgeable in computer topics, and having subversive traits (if not in the grade, there exists someone who has a big brother with these traits who will have a lot of fun helping his little brother to destroy the digital cage). Once a way is found, in a few days it has spread around the schoolyward.
Fine if they control the devices, but it better be well working, otherwise it will be a huge distraction and potentially be taking time from the teacher<>student interactions.
> and those who didn't like using computers hated it even more when forced to write out an assignment on a keyboard as supposed to handwriting.
Whether they like it is not is secondary; did they learn to use the machine? Because some amount of ability to use computers is rather important in the modern world.
It’s amazing that laptops were the thing that introduced distraction to pupils in school. Not paper football. Not whispering. Not passing notes. Not staring out the window. Not sleeping. Not spending too much time in the bathroom.
Sarcasm is use of language, potentially caustic, potentially ironic or humorous, to mock someone or something, e.g. if I were to respond to your comment with "What a witty and clever response that totally adds value to the conversation".
What you did was reiterate the same point that @caldarons had already made themselves in the paragraph immediately following the one you are now quoting.
Also, it's hypocritical to mock @caldarons for your failure to understand what they wrote, while also blaming the people who reply to you for not understanding what you write.
I recall of epic battles with pens turned into blowguns. Making lessons interesting is a lost art, and uninterested pupils will always find a way to distract themselves with what they have at hand, laptops or not.
That’s a straw man. Nobody said that there were no distractions in classrooms before laptops, just that they made it orders of magnitude worse. Which they did.
maybe we should start thinking of payment infrastructure as a core public service if we move away from cash? Just like there is an official entity that can "print" cash, we should start doing the same with digital payments (I believe the EU is doing somethig similar). That way you don't have a duopoly taking a cut of every transaction.
Governments should be running their own digital counterparts to cash, but they need to add the anonymity of this cash into the constitution. Otherwise the security apparatus is going to ruin it for everyone.
At least it could theoretically be. Anything outside of that would definitely not be. And at that point the digital cash equivalent will not be considered private. The government has to go above and beyond for people to believe the digital cash would preserve their privacy.
I would also add Brave search. It returns decent results and has a very nice way of displaying reddit posts relevant to the search (saves you from having to type reddit at the end of the query :) )
I got off Instagram and Facebook about 2 years ago and never got on Tik-Tok and I can safely say it was one of the best choices I ever made.
I am still on Twitter which I check about once every few days for about 10 minutes.
I realized how my peers (umivesity students) are affected by social media, most of them are endlessly circling instagram and tik-tok every time there is a spare second. Once I got off I discovered how much time it frees up for thinking and/or doing other activities. I get the feeling that people are losing the joy of being alone with one's thoughts.
The hard part of being off social media is the fact that it is such a central part of our social interactions, sometimes I feel "out of the loop" and I still get A LOT of weird looks when I say to people that I am off social media.
All in all I am still convinced that being off social media is a net positive and I definitely advise people to try and see how it works out for them.
can you elaborate ? This has imho nothing to do with social media. I check hackernews daily, I pick articles (or discover new tools ...) that spark my curiosity and I read them, period.
Sometimes I engage and exchange with other people, leave my opinion etc ... This is nothing close to what Facebook, Instagram and co are up to ...
If you like it (HN for example), then it’s not social media.
I mean just look at what you just typed. You talk about a site you check daily for new content and interact with other people on. That’s social media — which in this case you just happen to like.
You're correct in some sense. But the kind of "social media" we're actually talking about is the one that tries to hook you up and manipulate you. I mean, this is what I am talking about here.
In that sense, everything is social media. A blog post is social media, because the strict definition of social media is something like that :
"Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks"
Social media’s addictive nature is driven by a personalized feed using every trick in the book to maximize the time you spend there.
Nothing about HN falls into that category. The UI is as unaddictive as it can get. The feed is not personalized. There are restrictions on how much you can post. You cannot follow anything. You cannot express interests (beyond the broad interest you’ve expressed by visiting HN in the first place). There is no endless scroll. Heck, even the pagination with very limited options is almost designed to ensure you don’t go beyond a couple of pages.
And it’s obviously not social media because there is no friend/follower/connection graph
I think we're all correct in some sense. The thing is @paulcole is taking "social media" in the strict definition of the term, when most of the people here are talking specifically about a bunch of social media.
Which makes sense to me. Because ask someone on the street to provide the names of 3 social media platforms, they'll in 99% of the cases mention Facebook, Instagram etc ... And none of them knows that a blog post is social media ...
Indeed. Most of the time I don't even bother to read the usernames of people I'm interacting with — or just glance at them briefly to separate the voices in any given thread. The comments here, for me, are about their content and their place within the context of the article linked and the following discussion, not who wrote them.
Social media is all about following people or interests and having the platform tailor an algorithm for you in order to present you with a unique view of their data. Hacker News has none of that.
> Most of the time I don't even bother to read the usernames of people I'm interacting with
This is interesting because I never really noticed that I have no idea who wrote what unless somebody else points out "hey, look, John Carmack just replied!" or whatever.
Whatever is written on HN stands on its content alone. It is meritocratic in the best way.
I agree with what you just said. One cannot compare HN with Facebook for instance. Even though I understand what others are saying. We need a better definition for "social media" I guess. Or we might need a new definition to target specifically those you mentioned.
"Social media is when u talk" has to be one of the worst internet revisionisms in recent times. The term describes big, massively centralized (micro)blogging platforms attached to your social circle and real identity. Forums are not social media, chatrooms are not social media, content aggregators are not social media.
it seems to me that you’re confusing this idea of “harmful social media” - i.e. facebook, twitter, etc - with the concept of social media itself. HN avoids dark patterns and tries to circumnavigate the engagement trap, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an online medium through which people - including you - communicate
- War against humans and AI commences. The AI content farms will destroy everything by reducing the signal to noise ratio so that all content is worthless regardless of who wrote it.
Honestly, since the release of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion this Us something I have been thinking about a lot. I we thought that what we saw in the last 10-15 years was an explosion in content available online, we cannot even imagine the quantity of content that will come. I am actually surprised this has not happened yet, although I think that we will see more and more articles with contributions by ChatGPT. Short to mid-term I hope that this will not lead to a decrease in content quality/lack of diversity. Long-term I think we will see mechanisms arise to distinguish human writing from AI generated content.
I am aware that this might sound pessimistic, I am actually excited to see where his things will evolve!
But can’t you whitelist/blacklist signatures? Then use a web of trust to determine the probability of trusting non-listed signatures. Filter content by trust probability and spam should disappear.
I think that when it comes to projects on github the key is in distinguishing between the "I want to be hired" projects and the "I'm doing this because it's interesting and fun" projects. The latter tend to be much higher quality than the former and they're also more fun to work on (because you don't have the pressure of what a recuiter might think about it). Although, as you said, it's not always easy to tell which is which at a first glance.
