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Teenagers pick free software because a) they're broke, and b) there's way more videos about the free software on Youtube. 10 years later they pick the same software at their job


The Linux (and LAMP, etc.) adoption happened before YouTube, Stackoverflow, ChatGPT and the other recent ways that people decide what tools to use, when they have a choice.

Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.)

Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.


Apple's Classroom says it allows locking to a single app

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/classroom/id1085319084


Then it can't work. Textbook, website for the problems, notes app, etc. Multitasking is required when the answers are input online (which is a problem itself).


Agreed, tax based on damage to road, and then tax fuel the amount it costs to clean up the pollution the fuel causes, and then use the money to clean up the pollution it causes. Then who cares if you fly your private jet, or giant car, you just pay for it.

Side effects include: reduced pollution, and cheaper ways to clean up pollution



Try explaining files to a kid these days


In Windows 11 you're only 3 clicks away from a Windows 3.1 dialog box:

ODBC Data Source Administrator (64-bit)

Configure > untick "Use Current Directory", Select Directory


I wonder if the Add Fonts dialog survived to Windows 10: https://notebooks.com/2011/09/12/how-to-working-with-fonts-i... - during the time Microsoft had 2 designs for settings/control panels, making the OS look like a mess coded by drunks...

Gotta love that the disk and directory picker survived 20-30 years.


Well, it's not that the latest Office is that much different in this sense... just open Word, add a tab stop, double-click on it and you get a dialog box that probably was almost identical in Word 6 on Windows 3.1. Not that it looks bad or anything, it's perfectly appropriate IMHO. I still dream of getting back menus in Office, now some functions are so hidden that if you don't use them often enough you always lose ages to find them once again.


Clicking the "100%" next to the zoom slider gets another Word 6.0 refugee, complete with nice pixel art 4:3 CRT.

In Windows 10, Wordpad and Paint can both bring up the classic Windows 3.x colour picker Window, complete with the inscrutable Custom Colours bit. Although Wordpad is gone in Windows 11 and I don't think the Windows 11 Paint has the classic picker. It still (IIRC) has a colour arrangement in its new picker that is based on the classic pickers default colour set. Which were chosen because they dither nicely to 16 colours with the Windows 3.x dither algorithm.


Custom word widgets in that zoom dialog, the scroll wheel doesn’t even work in the spinner box.


Great, didn't know this one, thanks!


Is it worth getting disturbed by a subreddit of 71k users? Probably only 71 of them actually post anything.

There's probably more people paying to hunt humans in warzones https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3epygq5272o


Now I'm double disturbed, thanks!


Agreed, the Gutenberg method is preferred:

1. Assume printing press exists 2. Now there's no need for a teacher to stand up and deliver information by talking to a class for 60 mins 3. Therefore students can read at home (or watch prepared videos) and test their learning in class where there's experts to support them 4. Given we only need 1 copy of the book/video/interactive demo, we can spend wayyyyy more money making it the best it can possibly be

What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely changed


> What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely changed

From my extensive experience of four years of undergrad, the problem in your plan is "3. Therefore students can read at home " - half the class won't do the reading, and the half that did won't get what it means until they go to lecture[1].

[1] If the lecturer is any good at all. If he spends most of his time ranting about his ex-wife...


4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand.

Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught.

You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something


I really believe this is the way forward, but how do you make sure the AI is speaking to the student rather than to another AI impersonating the student? You could make it in person but that's a bit sad.


You make it about the student and the material in all ways. There are teaching frameworks and methedologies that help.


> 4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand

Personally I don't believe that any of the problems caused by AI are going to be solved by "more AI"


Technology doesn't solve the problems created by technology on it's own.

People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them.


> People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them

How is this working out in practice? Every piece of technology is absolutely adversarial nowadays and people are getting ground to bits by it.


> Tests were created to save money

I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.


Both can be true at the same time. You outlined the objective, the money is an extra constraint (and let's be honest, when isn't money an extra constraint?)


Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized.

The lesson of how to swim sometimes only comes in applying the learning.


> Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized.

Some tests require memorized knowledge, like what is the stall speed of your airplane. Some tests require reasoning skills, like what is the stress in this beam.


These are different levels of learning.

There are learning frameworks that explain it all well enough.

Learning what something is, vs applying what you learned has different terminology in the learning world, but not everyone might use that.


You were also asked to write an essay because to learn to write you have to ... write.


That's why you phrase it as "woke liberals turning your children gay!"

In USA K-12 education costs about $300k

350 million people, want to get 175 million of them better educated, but we've already spent $52 trillion dollars on educating them so far


The people most vociferously for conservative values are middle class, small business owners, or upper class, though the true upper class are libertine (notice who participated in the Epstein affair). The working class is filled with all kinds of very diverse people united by the fact they have to work for a living and often can't afford e.g. expensive weddings. Some of them are religious, a whole bunch aren't. It's easy to be disillusioned with formal institutions that seem to not care at all about you.

Unfortunately, a lot of these people have either concluded it is too difficult to vote, can't vote, or that their votes don't matter (I don't think they're wrong). Their unions were also destroyed. Some of them vote against their interests, but it's not clear that their interests are ever represented, so they vote for change instead.


> Their unions were also destroyed.

By policy changes giving unions less power, enacted by politicians that were mostly voted for by a majority, which is mostly composed of the working class. Was this people voting against their interests? (Almost literally yes, but you could argue that their ideological preference for weaker unions trumps their economic interest in stronger unions.)


If your choices in an election are pre-selected, was it democratic?


"Thus, a caste system makes a captive of everyone within it."


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