We are very much responsible for being on the wrong side in the war against general purpose computing.

The "user" not being able to change or understand any single program they use, being driven further and further away form the technology, in an almost comical way, that we have arrived to the point of "I dont know if i can plug a keyboard in my laptop".

She tried to save a file, which of course did not work due to some One Drive permission thing, then she uploads it to her teacher in Teams, and it gets automatically converted from docx to odt or something else, so what she sees is not what the teacher sees, and of course there were subtle differences in the order of the images and etc, so it affects her grade.

She got quite stressed until I just told her to make a pdf and upload it, but she was smart to double check and download the uploaded file and figure out its not right.

I just dont understand how did we end up here, but more importantly, I dont understand what to do to make it better, so I am just withdrawing, going into a world of riscv and 1.44 floppy drives and just live in a parallel tech universe.

> I just dont understand how did we end up here

The push to get children familiar with appliance computers as opposed to general purpose computers goes at least as far back as the 1980s with Apple.

So how we ended up here is basically nearly half a century of lobbying from computer manufacturers to promote proprietary computation appliances that children have limited or no control over.

> we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books... that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction.... We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America.

Steve Jobs, quoted in https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple

Without those Apple 2 donations, I would not be providing for my family in the way I am now.

Oh yeah, those kids don't understand the concept of a file, or where and how it is actually stored, or what the file format represents, or that they can even change anything. They don't care about storage, as everything is intangible in the cloud. Our children are dumbed down by the cloud and Google going out of its way to present everything the Google way.

We are decoupling our children from the actual underlying electrophysical reality by feeding them the Google version of computing, which is a lazy, stupid, point-and-click reduction of the actual processes.

None of this matters in real life.

Oh no, it does matter a lot. Would you want to grow up in a cartoon world with Google execs owning all they keys to your reality?

Believe me, it matters for Google and other big tech who create this layer of abstraction between the reality and their customers. Because it matters for their bottom line. Initially the motive may have been totally benign, like making things easier. But the fact that they are profit-oriented corporations incentivizes them to deepen the abstraction further.

The end result? Google execs owning your skills and your data - they pwn you. You don't know how reality works anymore. You want to find a job? Pay Google. You want to store a photo? Pay Google. Wanna call someone? Pay Google. Want to draw something? Pay Google. Want to develop an app so you could at least have this feeling that you could draw something without paying Google? Pay Google.

They are going to be your overlords.

My life is already owned by banks, insurance companies, my children, my spouse. What’s one more overlord?

Frankly knowing folks who work at Google, I do not have a lot of confidence that they will succeed at much of anything but selling ads and making money.

> My life is already owned by banks, insurance companies, my children, my spouse. What’s one more overlord?

Greater societal inequality.

> crime against our children.

Sounds a bit hyperbolic. How are kids being hurt by Google specifically?

Take a read here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-021-00599-4

Not specifically related to Google, but we are making our kids write less, which literally dumbs them down: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264763007_Handwriti... (You can find lots of research on this, there's no controversy here.)

Somewhat less of a profound problem is the extreme amount of pollution: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-churn-report-hi...

My kid has brought his third Chromebook in just a few years from school. We are all going to pay for all this, while the big tech generates billions of profits and the whole planet is marching towards tech feudalism.

This case isn't about whether kids use keyboards or not. It's about whether they use Chromebooks.

I did have tech in school in the 80s. I also did fine. Maybe it’s the school district and the parents and the community not a single tool.