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Is this the right attitude to have to kids who we want to get into reading?

get gud @ reeding

Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.

If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.


> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading?

I nearly did to me, or atleast the continual assignments did. It took a long time for me to pick up a fiction book again. School never assigned me technical writing and encyclopedias, so I continued to enjoy those, thankfully.


They're great works to you, and a slog to them.

They can read Minecraft strategy guides and Yahoo auction fan fics for all I care, since that's a lot better than nothing. I remember not wanting to read what school assigned me and how that killed my desire to read most fiction writing, and would prefer that not happen to more kids.

Art is a matter of taste, and if you go counter to your audience's taste, don't be surprised if they disengage.


I don't think it's a stretch to call it the UI language of 95, while 2000 just adds more functionality within the bounds of that framework. Add in the Win7 search bar in the start menu, and the OS not crashing, you haven't really done anything of note with the UI beyond staying within its framework. It'll still be a Win95 UI.

Meanwhile, WinXP started to fiddle with the foundation of that framework, sometimes maybe for the better, sometimes maybe for the worse. Vista did the same. 7 mostly didn't and instead mostly fixed what Vista broke, while 8 tried to throw the whole thing out.


Also, holodecks are limited in number. Voyager had two, and during one episode where the plot point was that they were in an area of space with literally nothing, the holodecks were in such high demand they had to schedule time there so everybody got a bit each. With Voyager having 150~ people onboard, I can easily imagine that sucking. The Enterprise had more holodecks (4-6~?), but with around 1000 people onboard, if they were in the same situation of there being nothing to do, the Holodecks would probably have been equally crowded.

People who got into software development not because they enjoy working with computers, but rather because it pays well. Outside of work, they're the same as any other casual who's got a phone as their primary computing device.

Also people who now have other commitments, such as family, or became tired of computers over their career and don't want to fiddle with them outside of work anymore. I feel like an outlier in my office, even the nerdiest of my developer colleagues sold his PC in favor of Steam Deck and phones.

> any other casual who's got a phone as their primary computing device.

I tried to use my phone as a "computing device", but i mostly can use it as a toy. Working with text and files on a phone is... how to say nicely ... interesting.


I feel the same way, but if you're a person who doesn't deal with files outside of work (photos are in the photo app, notes in the notes app), and don't deal with text beyond messaging and short notes, having those things be easier to work with is a bit like selling fridges northern Canada.

If it's something I want people to read, I'd never dare write it in cursive, because if I did, I wouldn't count on them being able to read it.

I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.


I grew up in a world where everyone knew cursive, and until this sort of discussion became popular in recent years, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me that there were many people who didn't know. But I guess they had to cut some things out of the curriculum and it's not as useful as it used to be.

I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.

> I convert that to digital time in my head

What? They are the same thing.


Not to other people I've talked to.

I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.

[1] https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag


Totally agree. I do the same.

The only reason we have analog clocks is because digital ones were much harder to build. That time is of course over for good. It was a compromise imposed by limited technology.


Not really, analog clocks are readable over a much longer distance, because seeing an angle needs much less information, than parsing glyphs.

> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.

It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.


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