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Retro-Tech Parenting

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Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#61

Post by myky22 »

lifty wrote: post #51
myky22 wrote: post #32

Glad to see this. As an Child and Adolescent Psychiatric, expert in screen time and soon to be father. I found myself thinking more and more about this. I thought about resurrecting my old game boy advance to introduce my little boy to the tech world. The long loading times, no auto-save, no in game purchases... I think It Will help him develop a healthier relationship with the machine in his more vulnerable youth.

At what age are you planning on introducing it?

0-3 electronic toys (piano and cuase-effect toys), 3-6 simple electronic but short Loop, 6 onwards Game Boy Advance like.

But my opinion will change with the ongoing and future scientific proof.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#62

Post by postscape »

With 3 kids - CD's and DVDs are a hell no for me. Dealing with skips and getting through DVD menus to get to the actual movie is insane.

I have gone to VHS for movies - you can still get all the classics at your local thrift store.

I think this direction https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li... using physical NFC cards is also a fun way to go.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#63

Post by nostrademons »

hx8 wrote: post #58
nostrademons wrote: post #29

I'm not quite going back so far - IMHO the pinnacle of technology was around 2011, enough that you had smartphones and could use them as a tool but before engagement-hacking got so good that everything became an addiction. I am sitting here using Claude to get Proxmox and Debian up and running with my ~50TB of local hard drives though, so that I can get most of our digital life hosted locally and independent from the…

What age were you in 2011? I'm willing to bet 14-21. I think the pinnacle was 2003, right when the internet was becoming good but before World of Warcraft launched which changed how the attention economy worked by introducing the subscription model for digital content to millions of people. I happened to be in that 14-21 range. It's an age range most people have rose tinted nostalgia glasses for.

I was 30 in 2011, and working on building that Internet future.

2011 was the first year that I got told "No, you can't build that feature because we're renegotiating our contract with Twitter and they want too much money." It was also the first year I got told "We're killing products beloved by users because we need to compete with Facebook." And it was the first year I was told "How can we appeal to users' egos to gather more data from them?" by management.

I guess 2010 was the year we found out our employers were stiffing us with anticompetitive agreements. But up through 2011, there was a feeling that we were actually building things for users because they wanted them, and not manipulating them against their will. It changed after that, first gradually, then suddenly.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#64

Post by lubujackson »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #18

Some of the things my wife and I have provided for our kids: - lots of bookcases with probably >1500 books (including lots of kids/picture books) - what we've collected over the years - a family laptop (2012 MacBook Pro) with no internet connection, pre-loaded with Pages, Sheets, Affinity Photo/Designer, a few small games, and some coding tools (Python, Ruby, VSCode, Scratch, etc.). - Lego Spike and Spike Prime robot…

The CD player is the big hit for my 10ish y.o. kids. Physical ownership and control of music is a huge boost for little kids and really suppirts musical exploration.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#65

Post by kraquepype »

Bratmon wrote: post #54
japhyr wrote: post #45

This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school. It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young a…

I don't think enough parents have internalized that if they're the "I don't let my teenager have a phone" parent in 2026, that also means they're the "I don't let my teenager have friends" parent.

There's a line to toe - each kid is different, but with my daughter she went from a flip phone in middle school, to a smart phone in high school.

We didn't turn on mobile data for her smart phone (hand me down pixel) until about a year ago.

She is very responsible with it and it hasn't been much of an issue. She had no problems making friends, and if her phone was filtering shallow people out her friend pool a bit that probably wasn't a bad thing.

Now, my oldest son is dying to have a smartphone but really he just wants to use it as a tablet. I installed lineageOS on an old D821/Nexus5 and it can run some mobile games, and we have a chromebook.

We'll try the same flip phone in middle-school route for him. It fulfills the basic needs of emergency contact, and is a good test of responsibility with lower stakes.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#66

Post by alnwlsn »

It's a different category, but I can't tell you how much learning programming in BASIC and learning hardware on Z80 got me to understand how computers actually work.

BASIC is just plain approachable - turn on the computer and it's there. Also I had the paper manuals manuals that came with the computer and all the old BASIC books that my school library never threw away to learn from. When you're young enough that "install software" or "download" look like scary words that will get you in trouble for "messing up the computer", an old computer with BASIC (which your parents wanted to throw away anyways) is fair game to explore. More of a thing when households only had one main computer, I suppose.

By the time I was old enough to start learning hardware, the Arduino had already come out. I learned some things on that, but as soon as you have to go below all the abstractions it does for you things get cryptic. I actually didn't get into Z80 stuff until a few years later, but only after that did I actually feel I understood what was going on with the Arduino. Being able to poke at things with a scope which aren't embedded inside a tiny plastic brick goes a long way.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#67

Post by floren »

jjulius wrote: post #49
japhyr wrote: post #45

This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school. It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young a…

>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities. How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?

"I'll be done with marching band practice at 6:30"

"Ok, I'll come get you then"

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#68

Post by kraquepype »

jumpkick wrote: post #6

Ironic, the picture on this article appears to be AI generated. I thought the Sony CD player looked neat, and I'd never seen one like it before. I thought I might try to buy one on eBay, that's how cool I thought it was. But Google says "Digital fingerprints embedded within the file verify that this is an artificially generated rendering."

Yeah that is a bit of a disappointing mislead with this being an article about retro-tech.

I was hoping it was a display of some of the mix tapes or other peripherals they were using.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#69

Post by mystifyingpoi »

nkg22 wrote: post #57
jjulius wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities. How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?

We used to use payphones and call collect, then say a quick message when the collect service asked for your name. "Who is calling?" "Hi mom practice is over come pick me up!"

Ah, beautiful times. I remember that me and my friend abused Orange's feature to send voicemail messages directly to the voicemail inbox, without calling the other person at all. Since it was billed by the second, if you spoke very fast, it became much cheaper than SMS.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#70

Post by picofarad »

alnwlsn wrote: post #66

It's a different category, but I can't tell you how much learning programming in BASIC and learning hardware on Z80 got me to understand how computers actually work. BASIC is just plain approachable - turn on the computer and it's there. Also I had the paper manuals manuals that came with the computer and all the old BASIC books that my school library never threw away to learn from. When you're young enough that "ins…

I'm not a new Hacker News user. I just had surgery and I don't feel like getting up and looking up my password.

I've always heard that learning ANSI BASIC or any basic, Q basic, Microsoft basic, any of them, first; usually leads to a lifetime of bad programming habits.

So of course I learned basic first, but then I was like, oh, I'll just learn Fortran, and then C++, and then I got completely lost and never found my way back.

Until Python, technically.

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