My extracurricular activities were full of nerds (martial arts) with Play Stations and internet at home. So, as an owner of no inet or a console at home was pretty much hell from 2001 to 2005. Oh, and no cell phone until ~18.
The outcome? Really shitty social skills until I hit 27 or so. My dad really regreted what it did, and my mom become aware on how utterly shitty was to let a nerdy kid disconnected from their peers.
I've been there, but going to cybercafés instead of having an internet connection at home until very late. A simlar case with a mobile phone, having to use the one from my dad until I had 18.
I nearly ended up alone, as anynone would expected. Parents understood too late the value of sharing common culture points, up to the point to apologyze and feeling really desperate on the consecuences.
Cracking up wifi and such saved me up a little, but not much. I missed TONS of stuff and experiences. When I could finally got all the media and proper skills, it was really damn late.
Don't do this to your kids, then. Time doesn't roll back. Ever. Don't be a shitty narcisist parent and let your kids develop their OWN tastes.
I’m sorry this happened to you. However nothing in my reply implies cutting your children off from the world. Helping them avoid the harms of algorithmic feeds until they have developed the maturity to navigate them helps them be more connected to the world, not less.
With all due respect I think you are reading more there due to your own experiences, which sound like abuse, not parenting.
Indeed. But in the skills case, ahem, formally, in paper. When I did a finished and advanced trade (pre-University IT, syadmin role), I aced the results as I had plenty of time to even make small patches to BTTV to support my $ELCHEAPO Conceptronic TV card. Having no internet at home made me really 'roguery' on how to achieve stuff, from cracking cable TV to inspect DVB packets, hack cable modems and pirate wifi. No formal education, just by myself, and I could do a trade from age 23 to 27 being lazy as hell because everything was trivial as I could read tons of the bundled books in the Debian Sarge DVD's.
I became really competent on how to 'survive' offline and Unix skills, far more than even the best ones in the grade (and even some math skills from a first year of College, among Lisp), but with really bad social skills but better since I met my SO at age 23 which convinced me to earn a trade. But I'm still a bit depressive for what I suffered.
Parents, listen to your kids, listen to your kids instead of sending them to a therapist, that won't work. Help on their tastes, support them, don't be a hardcore Mc Scrooge Cheapskate.
Spoiled kids are bad, OFC, but the polar opposite can be pretty much as dangerous if not more.
I coudn't even spend the money I had on Christmas on my own preferences since age 14 to 18, and I had to return a Chinese Megadrive console clone I won in a holyday lottery bingo in 1997 because you had to actually buy a separate cartridge.
I coudn't even buy cartridges for a NES I've got from my parents' friends because that was 'wasting money'. So, yes, I played all the games my peers got... about 7 years later, feeling myself more and more disconnected from the world and having to do huge efforst to switch from PC gaming and such back and forth. It was tiring. That would really burn you because you are like having to swtich back and forth from totally opposite cultures, my parents' one and my uncle/aunts' one.
Kids under a walled garden until they hit adulthood. Enjoy your surveillance systems on everyone and no way to behave themselves with their own criteria. A recipe for a disaster and to get adults back to the consumer world of the 90's. No more MSN or AOL like networks for teen creating their own contents, nothing like MySpace or similar. Just tons of bullshit from corporatons to get their money stolen from.
Kids at 14 will be really good crackers and hackers in order to escape the media hell the late 90's and early 00's where across the world. In that era I suffered shitty movies, shitty music, even shitter console ports... until 2003 or such. We had no issues on PC's with P2P sharing good media and libre gaming, generating a semi-enlightened generation of people, something the corporate goverment it's really scared of.
When your content are good webcomics, indie music instead of the ones from Pentagon brainwashing machines called the Marvel saga from Disney, suddenly there are no more idiots joining the Army. Ditto with labor laws, or shitty famiy issues in Spain where everyone cheers them with a coat of dark humour in sitcoms, such as the -mandatory by law- care of the elderly from either their children or relatives (son-in-laws). Yes, TV's did brainwash us with tons of outdated Southern Europe lore as if it were normal, such as the RPG panic in TV and printed press -in the 90's they almost were The Gospel AKA the only valid source of information- while dumping ton of money on alcohol advertising for the young adult in mostly teen related series.
What's the point of this in Spain? Well, easy: they wanted to create a society built upon bars, cheap tourism and to slay down any IT based backgrund so Spain was the cheap source of shitty holidays for Middle Europe.
You know, the constructions lobbies in Spain among the tourism and restaurant/bar ones manage tons of money there. Remote work: no offices needed, estate and constructions companies losing billions of money.
The only CEO from a UK multinational against remote work was the Spaniard one. It was fired over months. Period. UK companies don't give a shit on Spanish mafias related to construction and such.
It's the exact same bullshit you are getting with Meta
wanting ID control everywere, so they can exploit age related media
with verified users instead of bots making FB/Meta useless for advertising.
It's all about money and controlling the society.
So, I'm tired of this crap, really tired. I'm fighting at 39 the same crap
I fought at 19 with software freedom and non bullshit media.
To hell with these nuts. They want to drive the lifes of teens to create controlled adults. Dear Austrialian media CEO's, you are doomed.
There's a difference between the internet in the 90s and today, though.
If those of us fortunate enough to have experienced the early-ish days of the internet grew up using 5 platforms, we probably wouldn't be so nostalgic.
Beating back big tech and their grip has to be priority number 1 into reclaiming the intenrnet.
Nobody bats an eyelid at how gambling sites block out kids. We should be pushing for a world where big tech ad platforms have to play by the same rules as them. Create -EV in society, and get severely regged.
The issue is going to be when draconian rules filter down to the smaller independent sites. i.e. iris scan for 4chan, or get a few rubber stamps across gov departments to open a message board, etc.
Responsiblity has to increase with scale. We can't let nation state tier entities run algos on the youth, it's just madness.
The changes are happening, and shouting 'noooooooooooooo' isn't going to help anybody. Let facebook et al burn under regs, fuck em. The battle is in trying to protect and support the independent internet.
I'd like to plot 'quality of government' vs 'quality of ISPs' on the market. Do the most anarachist/libertarian nations have OP tier internet with 0 censorship? Do the usual suspects in the top 10 of every quality of life measure push for censorship at every step?
Wonder what the outliers are.
Think I might like the idea of 'youth' simcards which have to be bought by parents. No censorship by parents, but they can sign away censorship and data limits/DNS blocking for kids? Is it even possible to enforce this is parents don't have similar restrictions?
In hardware Prolog/Kanren/expert systems? That would be possible with libre microcode for Intel, and not this spyware corporate shithole we are living it.
We would be able to switch microcode at boot and set one for security, another one for C performance, others for Lisp performance and so on.
Most corporations in the US are legalized mafias. Well, and in Spain and the rest of Europe, almost literally, with bribes and such. Don't ever talk about some practices from El Corte Inglés, La Liga, estate companies, construction sections and tourism and the like. Basically we don't have proper remote working "thanks" to the construction and estate lobbies.
And from media/TV corpos, ahem... Mediaset and Atresmedia, there have been internal wars too. Sometimes even with death threats.
And as I said, not just Spain. Germany, France, the Netherlands, even Iceland has tons of shaddy corporate stuff.
Do you know what you get when corporates do what they want with no consecuences? The South of Italy. Because I'm pretty sure the North of Italy it's a gem... polished with the misery of shaddy business from the South.
For sure they must be tons of money laundering down there. Ditto with some barber shops, smartphone cover/case shops, some laundries, kebabs, TONs of bars and pubs in Spain. I have more than 10 bars around me in less than 100 meters around. Think about it, all of them can't be as profitable except for a major main street where everyone hangs out. On average 1 in 10 or 20 bars in around must be selling more than spirits...
If the common folk has to this to survive, just imagine what a billion based corporation could be doing. And the CEO's, welll... pure psychos and OFC with the profiles you would find around Epstein, and not just with pedophilic tendencies -which is power related, not sex-. The small CEO's will resort to cocaine and night clubs with prostitutes. The big ones... just run away from these people. Seriously.
It's in Spanish, proof based, but not as hard as Spivak. If he is good at programming he must be good at logic and thus if he understands Math as something to apply rules, he we will ace the book.
He can use Maxima to locally solve the equations. Forget LLM's, these will just make him dumber. Maxima to test the solutions, pen and paper:
The Windows version comes with everything in the installer.
Linux distros have it in its repos, install "wxmaxima" and "maxima-doc"
for documentation. It's weights very little, less than 100MB. Install Gnuplot too for plots/charts/graphs (altough it might come preinstalled for Windows).
And a Math background, even a basic one will be extremeley helpful while coding.
Most schools in Spain thaught us Math as methods to blindly apply formulae based on rote memorization and everyone was just clueless.
Without Spain everyone up from Po Valley would be pretty much bankrupt trying to spend cheap money on Holidays and half of South America woudn't be able to commerce well with the EU and ditto with cheap gas from Argelia and the like. Crap out Spain and Center Europe collapses tomorrow.
And not just the Lutheran Europe. South America, USA, and tangentially Russia and China too.
Spain is a hub between Atlantic and Mediterranean countries and South America and a good chunk of the US. Trade against Atlantic countries isn't something alien to us (just ask the Brits in the Industrial Revolution) and the Mediterranean, well, since Iberia, Carthago and Roma...
Spain sucks because the economy can't compete with North Italy? Well, it's miles ahead against South Italy, even the South of Spain hasn't a second world vibe like Italy down from Rome. We are more balanced at least and South with companies like Airbus are thriving.
The outcome? Really shitty social skills until I hit 27 or so. My dad really regreted what it did, and my mom become aware on how utterly shitty was to let a nerdy kid disconnected from their peers.
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