81–90 of 223 posts
I even x-ed it at https://xcancel.com/brajeshwar/status/1812149514632925525
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My dad was asking me a question about backing something up onto Google Drive, or saving space on some cloud storage account, or something. He was using the mental model of files and folders -- that files exist and refer to stored bytes, and that there can be one or several copies of a file. There can be links to a file that take very little space relative to the file. I had to tell him that I have no idea what sort o…
Google drive follows the files and folders model that your father was expecting.
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It's crazy how bad the mobile epidemic has gotten. There are kids coming into a Computer Science degree that can't figure out how to unzip a zip or even finding out where files get downloaded to. (Fwiw, those I know dropped out before 2nd year)
I'd say half of my first-year CS students don't know how to create a folder with files, at the start of the school year. To me, it's nuts. But on the other hand, lots of students are very curious and come to learn. You can't blame them for not knowing something.
I learned CS ~20 years ago and it was mostly the same. Half of the first year is people that are vaguely interested in computers, video games, or heard it was a good way to make money, and didn't really have any real skills going into it.
It is somewhat different now, because there are students that think they are good with technology but really have no idea how things work, they just think they know because they are slightly better than their peers at using phones and tablets.
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I try not to get overly-annoyed at this kind of thing too, but to me it just demonstrates an incredible lack of self-drive, or curiosity, especially in the CS domain. If the students are genuinely curious, there is nothing to stop them learning about pretty much any topic in CS - really. There are few university subjects where the entire syllabus is freely available online in almost every format imaginable the way CS…
To keep that line of reasoning going, what is the purpose of the university, if you're supposed to learn everything on your own?
It's not that you have to learn everything on your own though, it's that if you enter a program without having some understanding of the basics, you're going to have to pay to take a bunch of remedial classes.
It'd be like going for a mathematics degree when the highest class you took in high school was algebra, where the normal degree students would be starting with Calc 3 or Differential Equations. You might be ok in the major or you might not, but you don't even know enough to start on the path at that point.
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It can be even worse. I've seen younger generation only use Google Docs and streaming services (music/video) and not even understand what a "file" is, because everything is just on the internet.
Doesn’t Google Docs stores its files on Google Drive? What do they call the things they open to open an existing doc?
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It's crazy how bad the mobile epidemic has gotten. There are kids coming into a Computer Science degree that can't figure out how to unzip a zip or even finding out where files get downloaded to. (Fwiw, those I know dropped out before 2nd year)
At one point, every member of a CS program started without having ever seen or touched a computer. Everyone has to start somewhere. We do not reject new biology majors because they had never touched a microscope before entering the program.
No but you'd presumably make them take some remedial classes that the mainstream students wouldn't be required to take. Or maybe not, I'm not sure how it works in biology, but in the harder STEM majors, you're generally expected to have some basic knowledge beyond what the 'easy' track at high school required for graduation.
You don't ask anybody to learn XML tags to edit a Word document in a plain text editor even though it's technically possible. Similarly, HTML is not "just another type", but one of the many poorly designed (especially so if CSS is added) document formats that no non-tech "anybody" should be exposed to
WYSIWYG is for anybody.
HTML is not for people
There was a time when it was easy. Even Javascript was easy. All of this stuff was made for people, but we've abstracted it away so only machines ever touch it and what used to be easy is now a dark art.
I still remember creating my first html page back in the 90s. It felt really magical creating it with just Notepad - changing the bgcolor of a page to red or blue or whatever, was amazing.
I still remember creating my first html page back in the 90s. It felt really magical creating it with just Notepad - changing the bgcolor of a page to red or blue or whatever, was amazing.
Same here; I stumbled on HTML for the first time in the '90s. I started with HotDog from the CDs that came in the magazines. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/hotdog-sausage-software/