'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
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.
landdate · · focus · HN ↗
schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
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.
landdate · · focus · HN ↗
True. Even as an adult it's tiring having to keep all my accounts sorted, and that's with a password manager.
There are a few websites that I can of off the top of my head that don't need an account or you can choose to log in through google/github: <a href="https://codepen.io" rel="nofollow">https://codepen.io, <a href="https://editor.p5js.org" rel="nofollow">https://editor.p5js.org if that'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's abysmal and such a loss. And I just found out glitch.com is also no longer a thing anymore either.