291–300 of 364 posts
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you don't write. people don't write in cursive around you?
Why would you write in cursive? If you care about WPM key board toasts it. If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not. Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
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>>It's print. With upper and lowercase letters. So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower? >>But of course this is HN where most people are technical. For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change th…
> not linking the letters together then? Correct. > Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower? Probably yes to both counts. However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand…
The thing that needs effort is learning to write, why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
I’ve noticed some of these kids can’t tell time on analog clocks nor read cursive handwriting.
This sort of thing is some of the weirdest pseudointellectualism I've seen. Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial. Because now we have Google Maps, ballpoint pens, calculators, and analog clocks.
I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".
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Any job position requiring intelligence and nuance which unavoidably stems from informing yourself.
But the same will inevitably make you hating the capitalism which eventually makes you not better candidate on the market but worse.
I for one think people still thinking socialism is a good thing, haven't read enough history books about the 20th century.
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> Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Literally buy books? What about ereaders? Install adblockers and de-shittify your OS? I don't have the problems you seem to have, and I'm on Windows.
Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it. Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices. Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goe…
Install Windows Enterprise IoT LTSC then, problem solved.
I never understand where these anecdotes come from. I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young. The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty. So whatever the problem is, if there eve…
You doubt there's a problem because you don't know of it happening in your rural town? In addition to teaching kids to read books, we apparently need to teach adults research and inference fundamentals.
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I’m a nerd, but we were never a nation of nerds and things turned out pretty well. The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squa…
> The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise. Outliers. You cannot come to conclusions…
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My daughter, at her very expensive deep-blue private school, learned that the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois—who didn’t have written language—but didn’t learn about the English civil war where the ideas behind the constitution actually had their genesis. In terms of being a citizen in America, it’s far more important to understand the English civil war, British history, etc. Those are the instruction manua…
> It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors. It does, because for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers. The politics and institutions turn out to be much harder than the scrubbers - few societies produce the latter, and it's generally t…
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You doubt there's a problem because you don't know of it happening in your rural town? In addition to teaching kids to read books, we apparently need to teach adults research and inference fundamentals.
I can infere all the facts and logic perfectly well! But thank you.
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It’s odd, I read ravenously as a kid/teen, as did my siblings. You need to read what you enjoy, and for it to not be forced. (For example, summer reading at the library gave out prizes kids cared about for reading books.) Plus, we didn’t have access to much digital media like TV/video games (though it was the early 2010s) because my parents were strict, so books were a solid source of entertainment.
I too read ravenously as a kid. Strangely, in the 90's we were never assigned full books in English classes, just short stories or chapters.