And that is the thing about raising a kid these days. Those damn machines have replaced so much… because yeah Minecraft is like a souped up version of Lego where in creative mode you have every part you need. And you don’t have to dig for it or anything. And it has survival mode and a whole huge thing on top of that.
It’s so difficult to know the boundaries. People from older generations giving advice about screen time and stuff simply don’t understand… “screen time” for me growing up was broadcast tv and a limited set of video games. If you didnt like what was on tv, too bad. Do something else. If you were bored of whatever Nintendo game you had… too bad, do something else. But now… you can get literally anything. Plus the iPad gets used to make videos of playing with the cat, or she will have tea parties with her stuffies and make them tea using some weird cooking game. Etc.
No previous generation had to face this. It’s an order of magnitude or more shifted from when they raised us. Tablets basically can replace almost every single toy from growing up besides ones that require being physical (rc cars, bricks, digging in the yard)… but books, cameras, light brights, etc… all replaced.
It’s completely uncharted water us parents are facing. Anybody that claims to “know the right rules” for tablets and technology is lying to you. They don’t. Nobody does. All we can do is use our best judgement and try to give ourselves credit for doing the best we can.
Good thing with analogue toys like legos is you know your kid is playing with legos that is wiring X brain cells for Y skills, even if Y skills are deprecated in digital world. It's hard to say with current gen, there's screen time to try to shape behavior, there are occasional kids who are tech literate maestros which every generation has, but plenty of kids who rely on LLMs, can only finger type because they grew up with touch screens. We're in tech timeline where passive users, i.e. most kids are impressed by millennials who can write cursive and touch type, other kids build stuff that previously required teams of 100s of engineers.
Without a tangible feedback you won't get any digital skills for spatial memory and coordination, peiod.
And the kids you mention can barely understand files, filesystems and don't even mention them about O(n) notation. If any, these kids doing the jobs of 1000s of engineers are proportionally worse than the average secretary skills in the 80's.
Plenty of tangible feedback on screen, just not tactile. I'm bucketing 2 types, the maestros who have deep understanding and the ones who don't bother. The former are the otherwise top 1% talent who are better off playing with with LLMs/comptuers where ceiling is high vs lego. The latter are being distracted that yeah their personal skills worse than past, but fake floor is also raised so much that functionally they can fake junior work, they just lack critical skills to get past.
Sorting Lego is such a pain in the ass. I have like a huge stash from when I was a kid. Back then we just had it all in a few tubs and dug to find a part. But somehow now I feel I must sort them… but the “right way” is ill defined and kind of sucks the joy out of playing (especially disassembling)
And there is no “right way” that I’ve even found. Sort by color and now the little pieces fall to the bottom and are hard to dig for. The best I can see is part type and size… maybe… even then it sucks out the fun. I want to build cool shit with my daughter not spend every moment of Lego time sorting. There is no joy in sorting…
Maybe I just revert back to the “big tub” approach.
I dunno. Thanks for listening to my TED talk I guess.
Yeah go for it! I'll add a comment though, now we are working on automated shifting bins with stacks of different size grids to filter the littles to the bottom and still easily pick up the top bigs to see them. There was been a discussion (by my children) about something involving a Lego vacuum they saw online.
Why sort by color if human eyes (unless colorblind) are great at recognizing different colors? Back when I was a kid, I used the big tub approach (with the Spyrius base octant as my shovel).
Build with what pieces you can find, rather than plan the perfect structure ahead. Improvising keeps the creativity going! Wheres fun if sorting legos sucks all the Joy from it
> Build with what pieces you can find, rather than plan the perfect structure ahead. Improvising keeps the creativity going!
That's a valid perspective. It can be a lot of fun to dig through the bricks and build freely, letting things take shape.
But it's also valid to have a design phase, where designs are crafted (perhaps even very precisely) and to enjoy that part -- perhaps even using some manner of LEGO-oriented CAD. (Or SolidWorks; I won't judge.)
And then: It's OK to find pleasure in following a plan to build a tangible thing in reality. This concept is strongly reinforced by the fact that LEGO sets come with instructions that are organized into simple steps.
One of the joys of LEGO is that it's very inclusively all fine.
I mean, the person above complaining about it not being able to create a simple thing is absolutely holding them wrong! They aren’t feeding the right context, aren’t using the correct tools or harnesses, who knows. But the problem exists between keyboard and chair, so to speak.
I’m constantly amazed at the amount of scope I can now one-shot with Claude Code. It can crank out multi command cli apps with almost zero hand holding beyond telling what to generate… you know, the hard part. And then we’ll back and forth to refine the working thing it built.
I mean for one thing your garden variety LLM had been substantially trained to handle Django. That is less context for it to bootstrap every time you summon it.
Just like rolling your shitty homebrew framework is a bad idea because only you understand it, the same is probably true with LLMs. Sure they’ll scan the bejesus out of your codebase every time they need to make a change and probably figure it out eventually… but that is just a poor use of limited context. With something mainstream, the LLM already has a lot about the universe in its training. Not to mention an ecosystem of plugins, skills, mcp servers, wizbango-hashers, and claberdashers. All there for the LLM to use instead of wasting tons of time, tokens and money perpetually relearning your oddball, one-off, rat infested homebrew framework.
There is much more engineering and testing (and probably AI training) in python and a web browser than there is in django. same with EG bash and linux vs ansible. that is what I mean by 2010s era frameworks - JSON/YAML easy wrappers with opinionated defaults and consistent interfaces.
AI has no problem going from programming language -> runtime without human-convenient middleware. So I am NOT implying to create your own django on the way to creating your CRUD app. I think you can make a CRUD app based by listing all the features you want. Including, if you really want an in-band administration feature like phpmyadmin or django admin, you could have AI generate something that pipes any system command to the web app.
Suit yourself really. maybe there's more training data for CRUD apps in python than C, but I don't think it's too hard to implement the fundamentals of a web app in any language if you're also using a web server.
Most webapps aren't that popular therefore don't use that much computation anyways, so theres a point of diminishing returns on making your CRUD as efficient as scientifically possible. some prefer a managed runtime so that a bug causes EG python to crash instead of the consequences of a bug in native code, but that can be mitigated easily enough as well.
But LLM will figure it out so why not take free speed?
BTW, also if we're getting rid of a web framework and letting the LLM write specialized code for the various CRUD operations, why not also get rid of Postgres/MySQL/Redis and let LLM also write specialized code for reading, writing, and querying the various business objects?
once all interactions appear instantaneous to a human, which is usually possible even with python et al, reducing CPU usage doesn't matter in 99.9% of cases that the app never gets popular enough that the savings in running the app would even add up to the cost of a LLM subscription.
Also, in most instances CRUD apps could run with their own data structures and filesystem data persistence. Not to say its a good idea,But I'd wager you could get on the frontpage with "show HN: I build a ToDo app that's 10x cheaper to run on AWS than Django".
In reality SQL databases, along with programming languages, OS utilities, webservers, crytography, and probably a few other technologies are basically bedrock technologies that LLM builds upon and have durable value, unlike Dev Tools / Frame Works / Simplified Human Interface wrapper projects, such as django ansible and the thousands of similar projects .
The more LLMs *CAN* code, human oriented coding tools and concerns become worthless.
I mean docs are largely written for an LLM-in-a-harness. That’s how it goes! If the LLM bootstraps with the right understanding of the universe and knows how to quickly build specific context flavors… life is good.
Assuming you mean crap like “school book bans”, climate change denialism, or some dude coal rolling… You realize that is actually bait targeted at you specifically right? It wouldn’t work as bait if it was shit you agreed with! It’s actually left-wing rage bait!
If you were immersed in the “right wing echo chamber” your flavor of rage bait would be about a school introducing a neutral bathroom policy, or some college student struggling to define what a woman is. Every Christmas you’d see articles about cities banning Christmas lights in town hall and Starbucks no longer using Christmas themed cups. It’s all fucking made up nonsense. No real human acts the way these algorithms portray us.
Honestly even ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are part of the trick. Real people don’t exist on a binary axis. We’re all a weird mess of values and experiences that don’t fit neatly into two boxes. But the algorithm needs two teams, because you can’t sell outrage without an enemy.
The first step to detox is seeing everyone as human not as a contrived label.
I actually mean the second kind of stuff - I don't know why it fed it to me except that the family connections I have on social media are all on FB and they tend to lean more conservative/evangelical.
Trolls do as well. Very often if a comment is "bad", it comes from a relatively new account. Then it gets banned and a new account is created. Technically it's ban evasion, but dang doesn't really want to change anything at this point.
That sort of rage bait is literally targeted to rile up people sitting on the opposite side of the kind of people watching that other media site that rhymes with socks. It’s all fake bullshit algorithmically optimized to divide.
Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff but it isn’t. It’s all the same nonsense packaged for different echo chambers.
At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn’t us vs them, it’s just us.
It’s so difficult to know the boundaries. People from older generations giving advice about screen time and stuff simply don’t understand… “screen time” for me growing up was broadcast tv and a limited set of video games. If you didnt like what was on tv, too bad. Do something else. If you were bored of whatever Nintendo game you had… too bad, do something else. But now… you can get literally anything. Plus the iPad gets used to make videos of playing with the cat, or she will have tea parties with her stuffies and make them tea using some weird cooking game. Etc.
No previous generation had to face this. It’s an order of magnitude or more shifted from when they raised us. Tablets basically can replace almost every single toy from growing up besides ones that require being physical (rc cars, bricks, digging in the yard)… but books, cameras, light brights, etc… all replaced.
It’s completely uncharted water us parents are facing. Anybody that claims to “know the right rules” for tablets and technology is lying to you. They don’t. Nobody does. All we can do is use our best judgement and try to give ourselves credit for doing the best we can.
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