I think the lack of depth perception in a 2D photo is another big factor in why the magic of a forest can’t be captured. There are so many different layers that all get flattened!
In high school I was at a friend’s house. Half of the bookshelf was filled with books I loved and the other half with books I’d never heard of! I felt like a prospector striking gold :) Cool to think that we have something similar on demand now!
I don’t like multi-page forms when I’m not able to see at a glance all the info needed to fill out the form. Though I guess if my progress is durably saved that makes it not so bad. The worst is when I fill out a bunch of stuff and then realize it’s asking for info I don’t have, and after I get the info I have to fill everything out again from scratch!
We set up a “kid laptop” for our kids (ages 3, 6 and 9) that has a short list of allowed websites and a curated set of installed programs.
We treat it like any other toy: they can pretty much play with it whenever they want for as long as they want. Of course they have to share it between the three of them, so there’s a natural limit there.
Every so often we’ll add something new; most recently I installed SimAnt after we were watching ants in our backyard.
My impression was she just brings the typewriters into class as a one-day novelty thing per course, not that it becomes the norm for the whole semester. The goal is to give the students a taste of what the old-fashioned way is like, to get them thinking about it.
For me what puts Hacker News in the same bucket as Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook is that it’s a constantly refreshing feed of content that requires very little choice or initiative on my end to access. It’s always here, always novel, and I don’t have to think from a blank slate to figure out what I want to read, I just come and pick from the menu that’s been put in front of me.
I can contribute and participate actively by doing critical thinking and leaving comments but I can also read passively and barely even think my own thoughts. For me that passive version is the default.
I agree that social media is not the most accurate term. I wonder what a good alternative would be. “Mindless feed reading” could refer to the act of consuming it.
Yes, I appreciate the level of detail and the explanation of the thought process as he tried to break into the system. It really gives me a feel for what it's like and makes me think, "Hey I could learn how to do that."
I'd love recommendations for similar stories, if anyone has anything to share. I can't find it now, but I read a few blog posts by a guy who was starting to get into electronics (and helped out with the Burning Man Rainbow Bridge) and those posts have me the same sense of "oh, so that's how it works."