Last night I was working through some shader tutorials, for instance, albeit on my laptop (I prefer laptop to phone when possible).
I also playtest one of my games (current one has a mobile version), or brainstorm and take notes for my game designs, or read up on something I want to do with one of my games, or go through my github issues list and sometimes even look at my code repos while I'm killing time while out and about (I mostly don't use my phone when I'm not out, I'll just use my laptop).
I try to remember I have a Kindle app with lots of informative books to read but I do forget about a little too often.
When I was younger, I would program text-based games all the time on my TI graphing calculator. I would even bring that instead of my Game Boy to my grandparents sometimes, because I just wanted to code more of my games.
I do think that capability is lacking on phones. It's technically possible, but the environment (at least on iPhone) is so sandboxed it's difficult to do effectively, or at least it was the last time I tried. Anything you're making on the device directly does not have access to the same capabilities as what you make from a laptop or desktop, and that's a shame.
I'd argue you're holding it wrong. The repository of all human knowledge absolutely does contain numerous "learn about the world" courses in all shapes and forms. HN, arXiv, Wikipedia, parts of YouTube, and dedicated learning platforms abound and each probably has enough content for a lifetime of learning. I agree it's not designed to make this easy, but it's also not particularly hard. Hit "random article" a few times on Wikipedia and you're off to the races.
And it's only explicit knowledge, not tacit knowledge. Nobody learns skills from browsing the Internet.
There's practically an undoable number of hours of free courses on Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, and others. Thousands of hours of interesting material on youtube.
How does the ratio of actually good to not really in the real world compare?
It seems pretty amazing that anyone, anywhere can watch a physics lecture from the multiple top professors at any time.
Good newspapers usually allow you to do that.
I have a list of links to read for when I have time to do so. But yeah, if I don’t have anything to do, I prefer just doing nothing than seeking engagement. Social media are a mind killer.
> I find it very difficult to queue up good content to read or listen to on a daily basis.
When I come across something that looks interesting, I add it to the list and stuff accumulates until I go through each link and read the page, usually during my 30 minutes commute. (or not, sometimes it is not as interesting as I thought it would be). For me it works quite well.
I've been testing https://brilliant.org/ and like it so far. Its scope is limited to STEM topics, but the thing I like about it is you can set courses to bite sized daily chunks as small as 5 minutes.
Rinse and repeat for anything you're vaguely interested in.
The problem is way too many interesting things to see, not too few.
In fact, all the stuff we’ve designed to capture attention is almost the exact opposite of a good use of the internet.
I find it very difficult to queue up good content to read or listen to on a daily basis. And I try. Imagine all the people without the time to discover enough good content.