I was booting Linux while sleeping in a car, and in and out of motels, eating from food banks, with drug addicted parents, as a teenager. There was something to "the internet" back in the day as a way to cope when faced with that sort of situation. The author is not alone. We were blessed to have a computer through it all.
I hope "kids these days" have the same opportunity with their phones.
Spoiler: They don't. The phones are hostile to experimentation and the social media apps they will use to kill time are designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible.
> designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible
Wouldn't TV have been the equivalent in the era OP is talking about?
Going on the internet and seeking out coding tutorials, as the article describes, is a choice most people didn't make back then; it's the most nerdy of kids doing this outside of school. While an addiction takes that choice away or makes it much harder, most kids are not addicted (~90% aren't in UK, ~55% aren't in India, for 11- to 14-year-olds per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problematic_smartphone_use#Pre...)
If you have a credible source on phones in 2024 providing fewer learning opportunities than computers in the <2000s, either anecdotal (kids who you observe are otherwise curious but don't seek out non-entertainment content) or by looking at a large enough sample to have some measurable difference in the population, I'm interested. It sounds like an assumption based on the (justified) negativity around social media as a concept rather than an actually observed effect
Yeah. This hurts how true it is. I’m an early-mid millennial, very modest social class so I got some access to dial-up at age 14 and broadband at about 16. We were just explorers back then. The sophistication aimed at us was no fancier than that of the Saturday morning cartoon ads. I’m sure the people at Yahoo and AOL wanted us to use their IM program and watch some of quaint banner ads. But most of the Internet then was exploring knowledge and fandoms, and connecting with those around the globe who spoke your language and also loved what you love. Most of the most fun social activity back then for young people spun out of places like music chat rooms and music/band forums, because 14-year olds believe their music taste is the deepest and most personal thing about them.
Contrast to today: kids now, many from near birth, are test subjects in a million experiments every day, designed by hostile bots and even more hostile humans to addict them and feed obsessions all in service of revenue optimization. The biggest experiment of all is the meta one: what will happen to this generation raised in this unprecedented way?? Btw — nothing would make me happier than Gen Alpha being super successful. So I hope I’m Old Man Shakes Fist At Cloud here.
I haven't been impressed with the GPT for X thus far but having it filter search results sounds excellent. If it could figure out which results are not SEO junk then Google would be fixed.
Does this post not provide the list of books at all? I would think with a title like that the list would be there. Instead there are illegible screenshots with confusing graphs... I think your site would get more hits if the list was there to reference.
In evolutionary terms, "fit" means like a piece in a puzzle and doesn't an ethical connotation or anything like that. More like a model fits, eg in the above game related to ML.
I've thought about building something like this for a while. There is definitely a need.
I've found a huge problem with products is that their quality changes over time. So, a product may be named the same but the SKU changes or the products from a couple of years back were much better made for whatever reason while the company has gutted them and continues to sell on reputation. I've wondered if there's a way to track product changes (user reported maybe?) between revisions of products on a wide scale. Can you convert the "years owned" to a purchase date somewhere? Are you tracking SKUs?
The latency metric seems baked. As a long time PC FPS player where latency is king, I'd like to know if there is a real advantage versus USB or 2.4/5ghz dongle and a PC/console connected to the streaming server. I'm imagining a lot of thought went toward the back end architecture for the service and will definitely be giving it a go. Was not impressed by Google's attempt. If the latency issues with streamed games can be overcome through a direct device connection to streamlined infrastructure at Amazon, something like what Riot has done on their backend for League and Valorant, then it would be a real game changer (haha) for these services.
The power to be had offloading rendering could totally kill console and PC one day just from a technical angle. Imagining a Pixar like experience coming soon, straight from AWS. Can a home PC or console ever compete with a render farm?
I hope "kids these days" have the same opportunity with their phones.