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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I’m going to go a bit further and say that kids today are not worse than in the past. It’s been 20 years since I taught computers but the doom and gloom here could have easily been posted in 2002 with only minor rewording.

    GUIs got good with the launch of the Mac in 1984, and by the launch of XP & Mac OS X in ‘01 good GUIs were cheap. This brought computers into way more homes and exposed them both to kids who liked them for their own sake and to kids who saw them primarily as a tool.

    I think people like this handwringing about kids not understanding computers on a deep enough level for their taste are just being obtuse.

    I write software now instead of teaching and I write the kind of software that people should be able to just use as a tool.

    We’ve had 20 years where the vast majority of computer users understand latin better than they understand their computers. It’s fine. It’ll continue to be fine.









  • It’s not widely shared because the actual facts of that story don’t help the “Facebook will kill activity pub” narrative.

    Before Google Talk and Facebook Messenger adopted XMPP it was an extremely niche messaging protocol only used by nerds. After Google Talk and Facebook Messenger dropped XMPP it went back to being a niche messaging protocol used only by nerds.

    The standing of XMPP was, if anything, better off after it was abandoned by Google Talk and Facebook Messenger than before those platforms adopted it.

    So then for somebody trying to scare monger about Meta, this story doesn’t help. It hurts that narrative, and that’s why people panicing about Threads aren’t talking about XMPP.