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'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us

216 points · 323 comments · YeGoblynQueenne

  1. schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
    My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:

    Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.

    Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.

    He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.

    I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.

    If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.

    1. egeozcan · · focus · HN ↗
      Not to be taken too literally but, everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file. You don't need a server. Yes, many clipboard/camera/mic/etc. APIs and other sensitive stuff are restricted but it's great for starting.
      1. schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
        And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.
      2. qsera · · focus · HN ↗
        >everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file

        Oh yea? give me the equalent of PLAY function. Or the PSET function to turn individual pixels on and off on the screen. Give me the function to read the color of any onscreen pixel (admittantly not QBASIC but some C variant)...

        FFS you can't even draw something delayed on screen without having to deal with the setTimeout, setInterval madness. That alone would kill any interest that a kid might be starting out with!

        1. egeozcan · · focus · HN ↗

          [dead]

        2. qsera · · focus · HN ↗
          >Regarding your examples: PSET corresponds to `ctx.fillRect(x, y, 1, 1)` on a canvas, reading a pixel corresponds to `ctx.getImageData(x, y, 1, 1)`.

          What is a `ctx` and why do I need that? These are all hacks. Graphics programming in bolted on HTML in the form of canvas. It is a horrible platform for doing fun graphics programming when compared to qbasic.

          >For delays, you define "sleep" (one line) and write "await sleep(500)" inside a loop, just like with "SLEEP" in QBASIC.

          Kindly provide the code for this sleep function and tell me how a beginner who is trying draw some graphics on screen is supposed to figure that.

          1. egeozcan · · focus · HN ↗
            I think if you could figure out how QBASIC works, you can easily figure out how to draw in a canvas: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.devtoolsdaily.com&#x2F;canvas&#x2F;playground&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.devtoolsdaily.com&#x2F;canvas&#x2F;playground&#x2F;

            For sleep: const sleep = (ms) =&gt; new Promise(x =&gt; setTimeout(x, ms))

            then you use like, for(;;) { console.log(&quot;hello&quot;); await sleep(1000); }

            The extra you get with this is the awesome dev tools. You can try it in this very page.

    2. thearn4 · · focus · HN ↗
      In a similair boat with my 11 y&#x2F;o. My observations leave me still optimistic that what comes out the other side is generally positive, despite a lot of reasonable dread that a lot of us also (justifiably) feel about the current era surrounding generative models.
      1. schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
        Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.
      2. empyrrhicist · · focus · HN ↗
        Counterpoint: one could say the exact same thing about the internet, but social media has (IMHO) proved... sub-optimal at a societal level.
    3. epihelix · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s.

      i.e. it sucked. I learnt on Apple BASIC also, and I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d wish that experience on anyone. It was so bad you had to print out your code on a dot matrix printer to debug with a pen! Anything complex took forever to execute. I remember plotting the mandlebrot set in full screen resolution (192x192 or something! whoa, crazy times ...) with 100 max iter, and it was an overnight run!

      Give me a linux box and today&#x27;s HLLs any day. Learning to code, and learning to code well, is so much easier now. Any language you want is just a package manager command away, there are amazing and free IDEs, and everything is just a million times more conducive to coding than it ever was back in the 80s.

      1. schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
        Oh absolutely. The resources and features these days are incomparable to the stone tools of the 80s and 90s. I’m just saying that specifically getting started was much easier. My friends and I could trade disks of BAS files and not have a single comment or README to explain what your dev environment needed to look like. We didn’t have to have GitHub accounts. I love GitHub, but trying to help kids manage a million accounts just to get some sample code is a nightmare. It mostly works unauthenticated but thanks to bots the limits are low and abrupt. Ironically getting AIs to just make up similar content is far easier!

        Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.

    4. landdate · · focus · HN ↗
      There are tons of online editor&#x2F;compilers requiring no installation or configuration.
      1. schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
        We do love Scratch but account management is almost worse than something to install. If there’s no accounts, where does he save his work? The easiest option he’s discovered is copying and pasting it into a Google Doc because if he uses his school account he can access it from school or home.

        What a terrible experience compared to a floppy disk! Sure disk failure was common and crushing, but the UX was simple and ubiquitous. I guess I could get him a thumb drive, but I don’t know if his school allows them.

        1. landdate · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt; account management is almost worse than something to install

          True. Even as an adult it&#x27;s tiring having to keep all my accounts sorted, and that&#x27;s with a password manager.

          There are a few websites that I can of off the top of my head that don&#x27;t need an account or you can choose to log in through google&#x2F;github: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;editor.p5js.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;editor.p5js.org if that&#x27;s of any use.

          On a side note, in school I loved repl.it, supported ton of languages and worked despite all the blocks and filters on the school devices. Unfortunately, a few years ago they pivoted to I have no idea what, something to do with AI, but it&#x27;s abysmal and such a loss. And I just found out glitch.com is also no longer a thing anymore either.

    5. sras-me · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup.

      I am making a programming langauge and environment to address this. My target is to match the QBasic experience. A video screen capture of the old Paratrooper game running in the IDE..

      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;835347764" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;835347764

      Linux executable: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sras.me&#x2F;releases&#x2F;spade.run" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sras.me&#x2F;releases&#x2F;spade.run

      Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackage.haskell.org&#x2F;package&#x2F;spade" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackage.haskell.org&#x2F;package&#x2F;spade

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