I bet not many of us would be here now if we hadn't had our own computers before age 16.
reply16 is a bit steep but I do generally agree with your sentiment. I wish there were more educational home computers like there were back in the day like the BBC micro. I have a startup idea to make something like that (mostly as a dumping ground for my plethora of OS-software and computer education ideas) but don't currently have the resources and have doubts on how successful something like that would even be in this day and age. I'm only 18ish (Not giving my actual age for privacy reasons but it's within a 5 year margin) and feel like my peers would rather be locked to platforms and consume than learn to create and actually use computers despite there being a very obvious need (I once had a 20 year old look at me like I had 2 heads for asking them to move something into a folder)
reply> Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.
replyIf you make such a restriction, they'll secretly buy some cheap "unrestricted" device like some Raspberry Pi (just like earlier generations bought their secret "boob magazines").
Parents should have an allowlist of devices to be able to join their network. And then they can require root certs or something for access outside of a narrow allow list. There's a host of ways to solve both problems. Just remember to check for hardware keyloggers on your (the parents') devices, as kids could use them or try evil maid attacks, etc. if they feel totally encaged.
replyThis will only work in practice if one of the parents is a network technician. :-)
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replyI've said it before but prohibition works, if the goal is to reduce usage. I don't see this as a realistic problem.
replyThis is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while. They shouldn’t have connected game systems either?
replyNo, because those devices have little or no controls and those controls are easily bypassed and/or not honored by the platform.
replyI think they should. Theres a fine line between beneficial and detrimental. I had a 3DS growing up and could browse the web with its very gimped browser, and I think something like that is actually very good for a child (able to access the internet and view simple and informative sites while being too limited to access social media and the like)
replyThe problem is unrestricted access to mobile devices. A game console or desktop PC isn't as big of a deal.
replyWhat’s the difference? They all reach the same internet
replyHave you ever visited any game store and turned off nsfw protection?
replyI love gaming, but I hate all the smutt games. It discredits the medium, essentially what has also happened to anime.
I'm kinda baffled about the Switch store's quantity of dating/whatever adult-ish games.
replyI don't really want to turn on age-based filters (to the point that I've never investigated if they even exist) but at this rate, there's hardly anything worth looking at in the recent feed.
The target demographics for Nintendo products have shifted from kids to.. kidults? Most kids nowadays play on phones or in rarer cases PC/Xbox, Nintendo's lost much of their cache (in my visible experience) save for children parented by the "mindful milennial" types
replyMakes sense but there's just... so much of it. That and all the shovelware.
replyIt's just hard to imagine that's anything close to what Nintendo wants users to experience, but I guess they need the money.
They really could find a niche in making phones for kids that have walled-garden internet access, they were so good at doing so with the ds but alas..
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replyToday's young people are already technologically retarded (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the problem significantly worse.
replyI hope they do pass a law like that, because it'd give my kids a gigantic advantage over the kids who had no access modern technology and the free flow of information until the age of 16. If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.
reply> If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.
replyYour kid is screwed either way. Unless he moves to India.