nagonago

Same phenomenon for the game Satisfactory, lately I've seen so many vibe-coded tools that just do the exact same thing as already existing tools.

I appreciate the frustration and ridiculousness of having to use an app just to open a door, but over half of these steps are just things you have to do when you get a new phone anyway.

That seems overly optimistic to me. People who already distrust the government aren't going to change their minds. Even if the government releases everything, conspiracy theorists will just say it's a lie to hide the real truth. In fact, releasing information would probably just fuel the fire. Every document release is just more material for people to sift through and spin new theories.

When I got a Macbook many years ago, I was surprised how often little utility software like this cost money. I was just so used to the abundance of open source and freeware in the Windows/Linux world.

No judgement either way, I get that developers want to be compensated for their time. I just always found the difference in culture curious. I guess it's because if you're willing to spend the extra premium for Apple products, you're probably also willing to spend a little extra premium on the software too.

I appreciate your positive attitude and I hope more people will adopt it.

I am also part of some very niche communities on the internet, and although they are small they are certainly thriving.

I agree with your first statement, but raise an eyebrow at the second. The desktop already is the "friendly" version of the CLI.

I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".

"Google has prevented you from installing apps outside the Google Play store on your phone."

I also work for scientists and researchers, and it's a whole different atmosphere. Being research-driven instead if profit-driven makes all the difference. It's a great gig...at least until the funding dries out.

I found the stylistic choice to write in all lowercase so jarring that I could barely focus on the content of the article itself.

Now I realize I am going against HN Guidelines by focusing on style over substance, so to tie this into the content of the article:

The lack of capital letters makes me feel lost in a sea of stream-of-consciousness, much like an infinite stream of Instagram reels. Capitalization makes everything more readable. In contrast, social media doesn't want to be readable, it just wants to be absorbed.

Of course language is always evolving, and we are right to sometimes eschew outdated conventions. However, capitalization exists for a good reason. Capital letters mark the beginning of a sentence more clearly than a simple period. They stick out and give your eyes something to latch onto when scanning the page. In addition, capitalizing proper nouns sets them apart, drawing attention to non-standard words.

Capitalization smooths the reading experience with structure and boundaries...which it sounds like the author could use a bit more of in their life.

An easy trick is to take a common riddle that's likely all over its training data, and change one little detail. For example:

A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. The wolf is vegetarian. If left unattended together, the wolf will eat the cabbage, but will not eat the goat. Unattended, the goat will eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten?

I found that the overzealous AI moderation made it impossible to ask anything remotely interesting, such as the classic dilemma:

Would rather eat poo that tastes exactly like chocolate, or poo that tastes exactly like poo?

This was in Bangkok, Thailand, although the school itself was run by Indians. They had IT courses for both kids and adults.

Fortunately I think these days there are a lot more options for kids to learn programming, but back then the options were pretty limited.

Unrelated to the article, but this reminds me of being an intrepid but naive 12-year-old trying to learn programming. I had already taught myself a bit using books, including following a tutorial to make a simple calculator complete with a GUI in C++. However I wasn't sure how to improve further without help, so my mom found me an IT school.

The sales lady gave us a hard sell on their "complete package" which had basic C programming but also included a bunch of unnecessary topics like Microsoft Excel, etc. When I tried to ask if I could skip all that and just skip to more advanced programming topics, she was adamant that this wasn't an option; she downplayed my achievements trying to say I basically knew nothing and needed to start from the beginning.

Most of all, I recall her saying something like "So what, you made a calculator? That's so simple, anybody could make that!"

However in the end I was naive, she was good at sales, and I was desperate for knowledge, so we signed up. However sure enough the curriculum was mostly focused on learning basic Microsoft Office products, and the programming sections barely scraped the surface of computer science; in retrospect, I doubt there was anybody there qualified to teach it at all. The only real lesson I learned was not to trust salespeople.

Thank god it's a lot easier for kids to just teach themselves programming these days online.

I agree, but to be fair I think that point could have been made clearer in the post.

A similar but related lesson: the best way to teach something is to design a task that is just difficult enough that the learner can figure it out on their own.

When I was reading parenting books in preparation for my own kids, this is one consistent theme that kept coming up, sometimes called "scaffolding." The idea is that you provide a safe environment, design a task that is just the right level of difficulty, then let the child figure it out themselves. (For example, rather than directly holding a kid climbing up a ladder, let them climb it by themselves while you stand by to catch them just in case.) As a result, they develop more independence, self-confidence, and the lessons stick.

"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life." -- Jean Piaget