I have shared that frustration, trying to find that balance.

I try to get some basic wisdom through to them to help prevent something horrible happening later, but I don’t want to cause them pain now, either.

I have taken to asking them to take my hand in theirs, when I think they aren’t listening.

The younger kid appreciates the connection. The older kid practices their active listening skills to make me leave them alone sooner.

“We can’t all be robots, Truman. Because if we were all lying to you, I would be. I’m not a Robot, Truman.”

Paraphrased from Noah Emmerich’s fantastic delivery in “The Truman Show”.

Damn. I love this community. Lemmy goes hard.

“My kid can read now.”

“It’s never too early to teach them regular expressions.”

Edit: To be clear, I agree. It’s just great to be among like minded folks, here.

You can make an image of the / drive so it’s easier to restore if they break the system.

That’s good advice. I always meant to do that with computers my kids access.

Although I haven’t ever had my kids break a Linux Mint install. I set them up as non-sudo users and that was enough.

Of course, they grew older and have sudo now, so I should actually think about taking a drive image, now.

Teach them to launch Vim, and they can spend their remaining computer use time using Vim.

Unless they figure out how to exit vim, then please have them come teach me how.

Sorry. I will see myself out.

If they are ready to move beyond block code, Pyxel looks like a fun way to learn some Python.

You could do what my dad did and accidently delete some of the system files, leaving it for your kid to fix.

Now I assume this thread is full of folks trying to figure out if we found our siblings Lemmy account…

My kid was all in on Tux Paint for a good while.

He eventually settled in to make cars and cats, but at first he just enjoyed making abstract art with all the colors and paintbrushes.

We are actually watching Brooklyn 99 right now!

I hope you’re having fun. Because I specifically requested it.

(and Blackboard Monitor)

Still gets me every time. The best Dwarfs call each-other as each introduces themselves. And that Vimes introduced himself this way in an un-filtered moment implies it matters to him, deep inside.

One could argue Tetris could carry the whole competition alone, but it is joined by Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, Spy Hunter, and Gauntlet in 1985

I would leave it at that, except Pac-Man, Frogger, Galaga, Defender, and Donkey Kong make 1981 a contender

I’ve seen folks use certificates to get jobs more often than to get promotions.

Since you’re looking to land your first job in the field, relevant certificates sound like a promising place to start.

I’ve been impressed with job candidates who subscribed to a flat fee online service like Udemy, Cloud Academy or LinkedIn Learning for a year and worked their way through several courses - especially when the courses included labwork with virtual machines.

As an interviewer, I suspect that I usually accurately guess who did their homework, and who only watched the videos. Both approaches have merit, but folks who do the lab work tend to retain what they learned better.

Also - if you want to work in any computer field: Go make a website. Do it immediately.

Building your website will do a few things for you:

1. You’ll learn useful things. It’s not terribly hard, but a website has many more moving parts than you probably guessed before you started.
2. You’ll have some war stories to tell during job interviews. Nobody ever put a website online and kept it online without solving some stupid bullshit with either cleverness or persistent effort or both.
3. Try to use nothing but AI to make it. Try to use only AI to maintain and update it. It’ll be nice at first and then it will suck. Now you know why your work is worth money, and which parts of the work AI won’t be replacing any time soon.

Hopefully you’ll have fun some with it, and then get paid a bunch of money. Computers are sometimes fun and almost always a huge pain in the ass.

I once waited in line at a costume shop while two guys argued about whether getting hit by a ship voided the “no fault” deposit warranty on a moose costume.

I used to be worried about this.

Once when I was very young, I wondered if I could fix a moment in my memory and keep it for life - so I tried it.

Stupid result: I still remember that moment quite well, many decades later. It was a dumb boring moment. I’m sure I would have long forgotten, if I hadn’t tried to keep it.

Now it is a precious memory of how I have always bent toward scientific method.

All that to say: memory works better and longer than I expected.

That is, fundamentally, what some of us figure the long term plan is with Microsoft Recall.

It came with various guarantees of privacy, the first time they tried it.

But they know no one reads changes to terms of service.

The sad part is that I fully expect that to be the default reality in a few years: a Microsoft model training on every keystroke and click on every copy of Windows 11/12.

Yes. Or, they’ll get the thread with the awkward dog meme about a microwave. It’s beautiful to contemplate.

As someone “ordinary rich”, it is acceptable to also call me “useful idiot who turns over power and influence to the real rich in exchange for an empty promise of joining them”.

The tactics in Wolfenstein: ET were brilliant.

Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn’t being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking ‘intall’, all without enough permissions to harm her computer.

Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.

Makes sense. Google has been replacing skilled engineers with tail-eating AI regurgitation engines, which are getting progressively worse as they eat their own shit.

But I’ve been told those regurgitation engines are about to get really smart and replace all skilled labor.

So maybe it’ll be fine.

Or maybe, as we’ve already started to see, more and more useful stuff will only be available via the Internet wayback machine, until they kill it.