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mixmastamyk

Tech banned in my house :D

- Windows and telemetry-based apps. I do have a VM for a work VPN however.

- Google, except the school district forced an exception.

- Youtube, unless supervised on a shared anonymous tablet.

- Double-click and other advertising sites.

- Third-party cookies, and most third-party javascript.

- No giving out information to any site, make it up if required.

- Alexa etc, wife uses Siri.

As you can see, outside entities have forced a number of exceptions. Other additions:

- Screen time

- dnsmasq whitelist for kids

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Maybe the internet is a different place now but if these restrictions were placed on me as a kid I never would have grown up to be who I am today.

There is a chance that OP doesn't want his kids to end up like you though.

Fair enough, obviously OP has the right to parent as he pleases. I think that my tinkering intuition has led me to many of my professional successes, and this talent was garnered by experimentation with computers as a child.

Eh I sometimes wish parents weren't basically given ownership rights over their kids.

Yeah. Different people have different values.

In the same way people see "free speech" as being a good thing, "free parenting" is similar, both in concept and result.

Clearly, some people talk shit and some people parent shit. And the results are as per expectation.

But without the mixing pot of variation we wouldn't have the better ways either - and we try as a society to have education(for parents and kids, for speech and parenting) make up the difference.

And worse come to worse, there is the unfortunate need for Child Services, however that works out...

They aren't, most developed countries have some form of Child Protection Services for cases of abuse.

No disagreement from me. Without gaming on Windows systems I would may never gotten involved in programming in the first place. I'm currently watching what looked like my nephews Roblox/Minecraft addiction turn into some real amazing content creation utilizing youtube as a very real learning source.

Kid has Linux, every programming lang available, Minecraft, ebooks, wikipedia, educational websites, etc. We live a block from the library. No shortage of quality learning materials basically. Perhaps ya'll've misread the list.

It's a preference for quality over quantity.

Everybody has their parenting preferences based on their experiences. I believe educated parents making an effort have favorable results. I can't imagine anyone with your lists of rules not raising intellectually stimulated and curious individuals either.

> Kid has Linux, every programming lang available, Minecraft, ebooks, wikipedia, educational websites, etc. We live a block from the library. No shortage of quality learning materials basically. Perhaps ya'll've misread the list.

Yes - because every kid wants to program purely for the fun of it. There's never an end goal in mind - they just learn functional programming for the fun of it! They all enjoy finding ways to chain esoteric commands together in a terminal.

There's a place for kids who aren't into that shit.

It's called "Outside".

What's your point? The programming languages reference was due to comments above that tech folks wouldn't have become who they are without the ability to program.

> Without gaming on Windows systems I would may never gotten involved in programming in the first place.

I'm just the opposite. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 -- with no games! As far as I was concerned, all it could do was BASIC. It did come with a helpful instruction guide to teach you the rudiments of programming.

I got later systems and games for them later on, but my experience with the VIC-20 put this bias in my head that computers were meant for programming, like pencils were meant for writing with. If it is difficult or impossible to program a digital device, I have trouble considering it a computer at all (even though it technically may be).

Me too. Here's a blast from the past I recently came across:

https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20...

Personally I had the most fun with the sentence generator, but I did find a game somewhere. Something like Missile Command. Had to type it in from a magazine I believe. It never worked quite right however. Had a few obvious bugs which I corrected, and a few I wasn't able to.

The manual is amazing from today's perspective. On the first few pages it has cartoons and teaches you how to use the shift key and such rudimentary things. A dozen pages later you are learning how to PEEK and POKE memory locations. It assumed you were intelligent. I miss that.

Recently I've read there was assembly language book and modem addon, that I never knew existed, a shame really.

I think I'll submit it.

This is a false premise. It looks at it from the perspective of what you would loose now. But if other things had happened in your life, that would be the you that is. There would be no comparison because the you who is now wouldn't be and never would have been to consider not being.

What percentage of these technologies were available when you were a kid? Chances are addictive nature of these engagement driven websites would have sucked up our curiosity and autodidactism to an extent that there wouldn’t be much time left for actually doing hands on experimentation, self-directing our research, coming to our own conclusions and experience inventiveness that come from boredom. I think this downside is more important in comparison to the information they make available.

All of those existed 9 years ago, there are adults today who grew up with them.

I don't think you can compare the addictiveness of sites today to those of a decade ago. The algorithms are very different. It should be unsurprising that in the last decade that they have gotten better at engineering ~~addiction~~engagement.

okay but have you ever played elf bowling? snood? chip’s challenge??

1. "Back in the day" people actually were forced to work on computers to get anything to work (much like boomers had to work on cars to have them run). Now for many kids it's a passive learning experience, they can just say "Siri give me Youtube" and then hit whatever recommendations it has. They don't even need to learn how to spell, let alone configure a modem.

2. More broadly, while children (and young adults) resent restrictions and rules, was Rousseau really right about nature being best? Rousseau was a guy who put his own children into a French orphanage (it's unknown whether any survived) rather than raise them himself, not sure if he's got a lot of real-world experience. And even cultures that have had time to get things right (unlike our rapidly developing society with lots of scary new risks that we aren't evolved to handle) generally seemed to have a lot of rules to avoid behaviour that was risky (either in the short term, or creating long-term bad habits).

3. The internet is a distributed race to create the most "engaging" content possible, powered by evolving AI. Letting kids play on it unrestricted these days is like letting them loose in a red light district with drug dealers on every corner giving them unlimited money and thinking it will end up well.

Thanks. Finally a voice of reason drowned by the cacophony of "I roamed the internet as a baby and look at me now!" bozos. Facebook, YouTube and whatever SnapCrap of the week is in vogue these days employ hordes of PhD's whose sole job is to ensure you get addicted to their pulp feed as much as humanly possible. Stories of internet addiction among kids involving serious sleep deprivation and complete social withdrawal are everywhere to be found. Yet the people who grew up with Geocities as the biggest site on the web think they understand the magnetic pull of the modern sites highly tuned for stickyness.

The internet didn't exist when I was a kid and I became a software engineer. "porn" on my computer consisted of a random sentence generator loaded from cassette tape on my Commodore and given profanity as input.

Turns out constant surveillance is not a necessity for learning.

>Turns out constant surveillance is not a necessity for learning.

Didn't you just make a post above this one about how much you surveil your households tech usage?

No, the problematic stuff is blocked automatically. There is no manual tracking done by me, that's the point.

Besides, you know I'm talking about government and corporate actors. Although I have assigned screen-time to myself. ;-)

Which restrictions? YouTube is about the only one that I could see having an impact. Having your information tracked doesn’t help you grow to any better than being anonymous.

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