491–500 of 599 posts
This also means you don't have to be running this week's android version to use it, with all the increased surveillance consequences that implies.
But, as the article states, people who are actually paying attention are a small minority and an acceptable collateral damage to user numbers.
What most people dont get: Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18 For them: The "Smartphone is the internet", while for most of us the "Smartphone is an extension of the internet from our desktops" that we were used to (remember the years before dot com bubble, saying: "I will be down in the basement at the computer to surf on the net little bit" ? :-) But today, the very f…
The reason I mention social media is all the apps operate the same way: the user swipes up or down, left or right, double taps and moves on. A website or blog or interactive content requires interaction, it requires thinking, it requires the possibility of a mistake. Those things make most users never click more than once on a website. Once a website goes beyond the first page most users leave.
It's really weird how folks are conditioned to do the least amount of effort in everything and then we complain when things are confusing. Convenience is a disease.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pointers aren't hard, it's C/C++ that make them complicated. Addresses and indirection in any assembly language are simple and straightforward, easy and even intuitive once you start actually writing programs.
Tell that to the thousands of comp sci students who drop out every year because they don't like programming in C!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But today, the very first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens! I saw a tweet recently that perfectly encapsulates this: for most people over 30, certain things are "big screen tasks". I use my phone for a lot, but for some things I put the phone down and use my computer instead. I am most comfortable using a large screen and a keyboard…
> I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard. First hand from a couple of ~16 year olds I know. Definitely not a representative sample. Some know how to type at an acceptable…
Most people I know who work with kids agree that the majority of children nowadays lack basic skills that will really handicap them in life. From a lack of basic reading/writing/typing/math skills to an ability to handle any kind of confrontation. The anti-social stuff is really, really bad and it compounds as life goes on, where kids never learn skills as they need to. Avoidance is really prevalent in people nowadays and this leads to never learning or atrophying basic skill sets. Then it also leads to not learning how to learn, or asking for help, etc.
Kids also lack the basic ability to put a series of tasks together to accomplish a larger goal. Critical thinking is severely lacking. Kids have grown up being able to ask a search engine a question or have an AI do tasks for them. The ability to understand how things work, then manipulate those things to meet a goal is just not there for a large amount of kids. I think we really need to bring back things like shop class, home ec, etc to get kids using their hands more. Kids need to be able to have an idea and then implement it in the real world. This is a skill I rarely see in kids nowadays. Way too often kids are told to avoid making mistakes and to get someone/something else to do things for them. The agency is just not there.
I really feel terrible for a lot of kids nowadays. Luckily, since I work with athletics and STEM kids, most of my tribe are eager to learn and move about. This is definitely not the norm nowadays though. My teacher friends are really struggling to feel like they're making a difference or benefitting these kids. It's sad because the problems are mostly related to their parents, not really the school system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But today, the very first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens! I saw a tweet recently that perfectly encapsulates this: for most people over 30, certain things are "big screen tasks". I use my phone for a lot, but for some things I put the phone down and use my computer instead. I am most comfortable using a large screen and a keyboard…
I was somewhat shocked a while back when a coworker told me that they offered their kid a laptop for school work and the kid apparently said : Thanks but I’ll stick with my phone.
When I had trouble concentrating and learning 7x8 and random ones around there, my dad made me stand facing a wall so I would concentrate lol. Not in a forceful way, but it was his tool to make sure I concentrated til I got it.
I can't imagine him watching me make a major life mistake like trying to learn and practice my work on a phone instead of sitting down at a desk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardly. That would be analogous to two people having the same name _and_ the same spacetime coordinates; they would indeed be the same person.
But why are filenames equated with spacetime coordinates? That doesn't make any sense - reflect on why you leaped to that analogy. The spacetime coordinates are the disk ID and sector number. We've been using operating systems that work a certain way for so long that we think filenames are like spacetime coordinates.
That's my stance as well. Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web. With responsive design becoming mainstream I'm fine with using my browser for 90% of my internet work. In some cases like Google docs it's painful to use the web version so I just use the app. EDIT: I wish they'd add a console to mobile web browsers though.
It's kinda there. You just need to connect with adb and then use chrome://inspect. It's actually a really nice feature and I've used it quite a bit over the past two years.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/remote-debugging/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or look at the dogged adherence to Windows even to this day after decades of Microsoft abuse Or the people who absolutely refuse to give up Chrome, despite the whole adblock situation. "But I don't like the way Firefox tabs look!"
> Or the people who absolutely refuse to give up Chrome, despite the whole adblock situation. "But I don't like the way Firefox tabs look!" Or have yourself a learning moment and recognize that how things look matters to a lot of people. And It’s not wrong that they value it differently than you.
What most people dont get: Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18 For them: The "Smartphone is the internet", while for most of us the "Smartphone is an extension of the internet from our desktops" that we were used to (remember the years before dot com bubble, saying: "I will be down in the basement at the computer to surf on the net little bit" ? :-) But today, the very f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You cannot. An app can update just like a browser tab. In fact, a very many apps are just frickin' webviews.
Well, you can verify that the code that you downloaded is the same that everyone else downloaded. Even if it contains webviews. Now if it contains webviews, it brings the security issue of... the webapps, of course. Personally, I want an open source app. You can audit an open source app and even compile it yourself. You can't really do that with a website. And I don't mean just mobile apps, that applies to desktop ap…
Not impossible to do with websites, if the need to do it was there. It would take about 15 minutes to create a browser extension that could make a hash of all the files loaded, to compare with other users with the extension installed - but honestly that's just not needed because if you're connecting via HTTPS, then you're getting the files that are intended to be served, presumably not malicious if you trust the source. And if you don't trust the source, then why are you loading it to begin with??
>Now if it contains webviews, it brings the security issue of... the webapps, of course.
Web applications are sandboxed in the web browser. Very little issue with that, outside of browser bugs/exploits, but bugs and exploits are found in every system ever.
>I wouldn't run a web-based terminal, for instance (do people actually do that?).
AWS has a web-based terminal for EC2 instances. It's not a problem, a lot of people use it.