Live data from Hacker News

“This is not the computer for you”

samhenri.gold

111–120 of 390 posts

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#111
post #97

I'm sorry to say that those kids are a lot fewer and farther between than they were even 15 years ago, and much, much fewer than 30+ years ago. When I was working my most recent corporate job (as a people manager, natch) there were new hires even in 2019 that had never owned a computer that wasn't a phone, and just used whatever laptop or other system was supplied by their school or (now) work. This experience blackp…

Why do you think they're fewer and farther between? It's almost certainly at least partially because of Chromebooks and the save-the-user-from-themself design philosophy.

I would say it's primarily because their phone (android or iphone) does nearly everything they would ever want a "computer" to do, and so they never had a hook into real curiosity about computing. This will probably be exactly the same whether the school supplies a Macbook Neo or a Chromebook.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#112
post #99
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be the cool tech guy in school because I memorized the tutorial to jailbreak iPhone or to cheat in games with a memory editor. You know, stuff like "when you see this screen, click that icon", "find row 5 and change the second value to 0", or "open terminal, copy paste this command and hit enter". I don't think I learned anything useful from those.

Well, sure. Maybe you're the kid in the article who opened Xcode and Blender and Final Cut, but it didn't click for you. Of course not everything is for everyone, but it doesn't prove exploring the limits like that is a bad thing.

[deleted]

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#114
post #65

Sometimes I feel privileged for being in the generation that learnt to program BASIC on a C64 when it was the coolest thing around at the time. Being that much closer to the metal is a whole different experience of learning what a computer is and can do. Is that even possible now? Probably not. Years ago I tried to get my kids interested in playing with their own Raspberry Pi when they came out, that they could do wh…

Plenty of great tools for kids to start making games with if they're interested in it! Personally, I think running something on a Raspberry Pi isn't very interesting or inviting as a first thing to play with. Creating a game in Roblox, designing an outfit in Roblox, or building a game within Minecraft is more interesting. And people build crazy stuff in Scratch. But also, not every kid is interested in that anyway.

They used Scratch at school, but you might be right about the Pi just not being inviting.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#115
post #72
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of the iPhone 5C when I had a 5S, it's a beautiful colorful breath of fresh air that I wish I had but my needs are so much greater. But if I wasn't an engineer who needed a highspeced MacBook Pro I'd go with it.

I have a high specced MacBook Pro, but honestly I mostly use it for vscode tunnels to my actual dev machine. So the only real benefit compared to my MacBook Air is that the screen is a bit nicer, and I can keep more Firefox tabs open, because it has more RAM.

Bingo! IMO, laptops are best used as thin clients and you do the heavy lifting on servers or a box in a closet somewhere.

I'va been migrating my workflow to this approach and I'm an embedded dev! My closet does have hw strewn about but once you set it up that you don't have to touch wires it's super convenient.

My one gripe with MacBook airs up to m4 was support for only one external monitor. But m4 fixed this.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#116
I remember this period of my own life. I had taken over my father's old 486 and spent my days and evenings trying to learn the basics of programming in C. I was making silly text based games, dreaming I'd one day be creating the game of my dreams. I also modded games by opening every content file and trying to figure out what they did and how I could modify them. I was still years from realizing game development was a career and not just a hobby.

I had replaced all the Windows sounds and cursors to customize the system so it looked and sounded like a Sci Fi system. I even patched the boot screen to be a humorous screen of "MS Broken Windows". It also was quite broken from messing with system files I didn't understand.

It was a magical period and I learned so much.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#117
post #92
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bootloader isn’t locked. Asahi’s developers have written about how Apple specifically built support for third-party OSes into the bootloader.

The same Asahi developers also wrote about how Apple didn’t document anything and especially, Apple never talked in public about this. Apple betting Apple, If they had cared a single second about this, they would have called this Bootcamp 2. Honestly I’m pretty convinced that this « open » bootloader was just there to avoid criticism and bad press from specialized outlets when they presented the M1 because, for once,…

For them to call it Bootcamp 2 (a "product" per se), they'd have had to have another OS they could actually demo installing. Otherwise "Bootcamp 2" is just a mysterious empty chooser window.

But at the time there was nothing, because Apple Silicon wasn't a platform anyone but them was targeting, because they had just created it.

So they built the infrastructure, and then waited for someone to actually start taking advantage of it, before bothering to acknowledge it.

And because that "someone" isn't a bigcorp (i.e. Microsoft) wanting to do a co-marketing push, but just FOSS people gradually building something but never quite "launching" a 1.0 of it — Apple just "acknowledged" it quietly, at developer conferences, exposing it only via developer-centric CLI tooling, rather than with the sort of polished UI experience they would need if Microsoft was trying to convince Joe Excel User to dual-boot Windows on their Apple Silicon MBP.

> announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader

That's extremely unlikely to happen, as Apple's hardware and OS developers build Macs and macOS (and all the other hardware + OSes) using Macs and macOS. And those engineers (and engineers working at Apple's hardware and accessory manufacturing partners) will always need to be able to diddle around with the kernel and extensions "in anger" without needing to go through a three-day-turnaround code-signing process.

There's a whole proprietary, distributed kernel development and QC flow for macOS, that looks a lot like the Linux one (i.e. with all the same bigcorps involved making sure their stuff works), but all happening behind closed doors. But all the same stuff still needs to happen regardless, to ensure that buggy drivers don't ship. Thus macOS kernel development mode being just one reboot-and-toggle away.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#118
post #63

When I was sixteen I got one of the earlier digital HD cameras (Canon VIXIA HF100) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio for my birthday. It was a neat camera and I liked Vegas, and I was grateful that my parents got them for me, but an issue that I had with it was that my computer wasn't nearly powerful enough to edit the video. Even setting the preview to the lowest quality settings, I was lucky to get 2fps with the 1080i vi…

I had a similar experience but with design software (which I pirated at the time since I just didn't have the money to buy stuff from Adobe).

I'd install Photoshop and Illustrator on my shitty computer I put together from spare parts my dad didn't have the use of anymore from his business computers. It was horribly slow, but I kinda made it work slowly.

The thing is that I think this is what made me think a bit differently, since everything was slowed down and took more time than I would want it to, I had to make deliberate decisions on what to add/edit. I still work the same way today to pa point, but that's because I'm both faster, more experienced and the computers have gotten more performant (and because I can afford better devices sure).

When I look at my half-brother and his teenage generation I wonder if they can still have such an experience. The personal devices have gotten better and faster, most things are really convenient and you sometimes even don't have to think a lot to do something also because they're cheap to do... they probably won't have the experience of "grinding it out" just for the sake of producing something they like...maybe sports is the closest...no idea, but have been thinking about this quite a lot recently...

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#119
post #24

I hope they sell so many of these, because the Mac ecosystem is just better for learning about computers then what most young people use daily.

They don't have an open source kernel. You can't recompile the kernel or build your own device drivers. I'm not sure what you mean by "learning about computers", but I personally find being able to peek into the kernel source code to be more educational than anything in the mac ecosystem. The hardware here is incredible, but it's crippled by not adequately supporting Linux, BSD, or any other properly open source kern…

> They don't have an open source kernel

Yes they do in fact, it's called darwin XNU

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is AI! Or, at least, it's been run through it. (Staccato sentences; Not X. Not Y. Z...) It's a shame for a personal reflection. It's hard to imagine what the (I'm guessing) Claude-isms add that improve what would otherwise have been a nice unmolested personal essay.

What else is a shame is claiming that some single language feature supports a foregone conclusion that the writing's been 'molested'. It's hard to imagine what a constructive comment this could've been with the minimum of effort to know that the author has written this way consistently since at least 2021, before the first public release of ChatGPT.

Really? In that case I retract the statement and will ponder what AI has done to my ability to assess this kind of writing!
Post reply on HN