[–] 2 points 8 months ago*

I think the trouble young people have with using desktop computers is overstated. It's a bit of a satanic panic situation. You can learn it pretty quickly. A common complaint is that "they don't know hierarchical file systems" because the mobile devices have only flat file systems presented to the user or something. A tree structure is not a challenging concept and the basic things you can do in a file system you can count on 2 hands. Open a file, save a file, rename a file, delete a file, move a file, copy a file, create a directory, enter a directory, move up a directory. The physical interface is the mouse with 2 buttons, a primary and a secondary for opening context menus; and the keyboard which has the characters printed on them. There's a bit more to it, but it can be explained in, like, a page of text. And the rest you can learn through experimentation. Touch typing is another thing entirely, though. That takes dedicated time to learn.

I wonder if ineptitude with tech shared between the young and old are different kinds. Maybe the old are just completely inept, but, for the young, it's just temporary. It's a shock when we find out they don't know something, but, after explaining it, they're productive within minutes. A 20-year-old still has plenty of mental plasticity. Having to teach somebody the desktop metaphors isn't a huge bottleneck.

I'll end by contending that I don't think schools should not be teaching computers. Rather, they should be teaching computers in more depth. Teach students basic programming and they will have to learn the desktop metaphors along that journey anyway. Computers are way too important to leave the future stewards of the Earth in the dark about how they work. I had to learn how the energy of a photon relates to its wavelength and I had to read and analyze the Canterbury Tales. Not entirely useful. But it's at least a little interesting. Kids are very capable. They won't all be programmers. They should learn it all anyway. Don't let Silicon Valley have it all to themselves.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to "learn to use a computer and the internet." It's a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it. You don't even need to read a manual. I wonder if this is all a holdover from the 70s when the computer interface was likely to be a paper teletype which is naturally difficult to use without instruction. We're living in the future. Teach the difficult stuff. The teachers need a wetware update.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    Also, other sites on the Net can collate links posted to reddit and the users and times that they were posted with users accessing pages on their own site. For example, if you've posted a sufficient number of youtube links, youtube can possibly link your reddit account and youtube account, say, as belonging to the same person. Just about any popular site can link your reddit account with your IP address. And your facebook account with your IP address. Etc. And thereby link reddit accounts with facebook accounts in cases with long-lived IP addresses. If X is a scrapable site on which users with fixed pseudonyms can submit links and Y is a site popular enough and has enough content, then Y can collate user accounts on X with IP addresses. This is not to say anyone is doing this. There are not many sites that meet the criteria to be a Y. I would say it includes mainstream news sites. The authorities could compromise some of the Ys or create their own through astroturf and thereby link users on the Xs with IP addresses and then with location.

    These days, this might be a bit harder because reddit closed up when the AI companies started scraping. I don't know the situation with Facebook with regard to scraping. If it's scrapable, they've got your name linked to your reddit account.

    What I've said about reddit equally applies to lemmy, even more so because lemmy is open by principle.

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    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/31690173

    I found this to be a particularly excellent and insightful seminar. Scott does a great job of getting you to see UX from a different perspective, and was able to keep me engaged throughout the whole seminar.

    Bonus link to Dynamicland, which is mentioned in the talk.

    Video description:

    This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecessarily pit programmers against designers, but it also limits our vision of what we could be doing.

    In this talk, Scott Jenson gives examples of how focusing on UX -- instead of UI -- frees us to think bigger. This is especially true for the desktop, where the user experience has so much potential to grow well beyond its current interaction models. The desktop UX is certainly not dead, and this talk suggests some future directions we could >take.

    About Scott Scott Jenson has been a leader in UX design and strategic planning for over 35 years. He was the first member of Apple’s Human Interface group in the late '80s, and has since held key roles at several major tech companies. He served as Director of Product Design for Symbian in London, managed Mobile UX design at Google, and was Creative Director at frog design in San Francisco. He returned to Google to do UX research for Android and is now a UX strategist in the open-source community for Mastodon and Home Assistant.

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