I don't agree that it's one or the other. He obviously clever and driven with stamina and a desire to make his mark. He can do great things with an education also.

In an ideal world that's true, but a lot of really bright kids wind up becoming educationally restless, and fall into traps of not seeking higher education because of how slow it is. Also due to them being quite gifted, they develop some of the worst study habits due to the rest of the classes holding them back. When push comes to shove and they actually need good study habits they tend to opt for dropping out or drugs to push through. Lots of gifted kid papers about this phenomenon.

Thankfully there are some programs now where kids like that can still thrive under a job+degree hybrid (and no I don't mean that one co-op semester). The work gives them real experience and a faster pace, the degree secures a stable foundation to provide that work context. So maybe when OP is of age the programs will be less limited and accept more students.

> In an ideal world that's true, but a lot of really bright kids wind up becoming educationally restless, and fall into traps of not seeking higher education because of how slow it is.

in our real world, most of the people making cutting edge breakthroughs in math and science were gifted kids who got a great education through graduate school.

True though some ended up underemployed as patent clerks along their journey to the cutting edge. In an ideal world, those years would have never been "lost".

ah, the youth tax

I'd wager most folks who know about wpa_supplicant didn't learn about it in school. Hacking around wifi on laptops wasn't a school thing, it was often the same sort of thing this is... self-exploration.

Just depending on age you might refer to it as "a tool called wpa_supplicant to manage its wireless connections, which is not uncommon on older android versions" vs "wpa_supplicant, an old standby Linux wifi management program" or somesuch.