When I was a physics grad student ~35 years go, this was called "the birth control problem. I had every intention of going into industry. I described it to my dad who got his PhD in the 1950s and he said it was the same back then. But there's a perennial "this time it will be different."
It wasn't the same in the 1950s. When it became really clear to me how dire the long term job situation was when I getting my PhD in the 1990s I started combing through issues of Physics Today and noticed that the field and academia as a whole was explosively expanding from 1920-1968 or so and there was a sudden crisis in the late 1960s, with an echo in the late 1970s and also when I was in in the late 1990s. (Physics Today said I had 2% odds of getting a permanent job even coming from a top school)
I had one day when I'd posted a Java applet to the web that got 100,000 impressions and getting so much attention for that and so little attention for papers that took me a year to write made me resolve to tell my thesis advisor that I was going to quit. Before I could tell him, he told me he had just a year of funding for me and I thought.. I could tough it out for a year. People were shocked when I did a postdoc when most of my cohort were going straight to finance.
My mental health went downhill in Germany and I stomped away, in retrospect I was the only native English speaker at the institute and I could have found a place for myself for some time had I taken on the task of proofreading papers and I can easily imagine I could have made it in academia but heck, life on a horse farm doing many sorts of software development has been a blast.
I'm a long time user of the Arduino IDE for third party boards such as the Teensy. Recently I've switched to Platformio for coding. So I should be satisfied with never needing Arduino's cloud service.
But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?
I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.
Chromebooks and iPads are both completely unsuitable for digital education in my opinion. They can be decent tools for education using digital resources, but that is something different.
To "force" someone to develop on a Chromebook is like giving someone a bicycle to become a race car driver.
That said, I usually flashed my arduinos and used bare metal C. Ironically I think it makes many things easier to learn and understand, provided you have a programming device.
What does a "digital education" look like, specifically?
Having spent several years teaching kids to code everything from games to lightbulbs on Chromebooks, I can confirm that there are certainly difficulties - but they're tradeoffs. I could spend my time coming up with a way to work through the platform restrictions, or I could spend my time maintaining a motley crew of devices and configurations. Having done it both ways, they both have different pain points.
You really can't compare a Chromebook with an iPad. On a Chromebook that I bought and that I fully own I can enable the Linux system and install whatever I want on it (it runs in a VM and it is a full Linux system). The iPad is artificially crippled for programming by Apple.
School IT departments are unlikely to allow this. Even if they don't have technical restrictions, they'll have policies that prohibit it (at least my kids' school district would).
School-issued devices are generally intended to be similar to devices a corporation would provision for non-technical workers.
Honest question, if you buy (just a hypothetical, I assume most parents can't afford to buy one) a Chromebook for your kid that will be used in school, do you have to lock it down or can you enable the Linux system (assuming that you want to do that and that your kid is interested in learning to program).
I think an old PC would be more useful then a chromebook to a kid interested in learning to program; also it avoids dealing with a School District IT Department, which have to defend themselves from all kinds of attack from annoying kids and parents, so are probably more technologically conservative then the average IT worker.
So my advice would be: Don't bother trying to provision a chrome-book to connect to some school network. Use a school-issued chromebook for school stuff (if that's what they issue...), use a normal PC for extracurricular learning.
For the record: my kids are in elementary school, and are issued lenovo laptops running windows. They are locked down to the point where they might as well be chromebooks; kids have unprivileged accounts and are allowed to run very few programs. This is as it should be; those computers are for a very specific purpose, and are not general purpose toys.
> a School District IT Department, which have to defend themselves from all kinds of attack from annoying kids
Indeed, when I was in school, the WiFi networks were very poorly secured, so it was easy for annoying kids to get their own computers onto school networks if other students were using school-issued laptops around them. Annoying!
I never said they did a great job keeping the network secure, I only meant to imply that they tend to default to "no" when asked for any kind of technical permission.
Schools typically don't allow BYOD policies because of support costs and equitability between students. Assuming a school district even did allow this, they would only allow the student to use a managed Chrome profile and the school's device policy would lock out the Linux VM option and everything else that might become an in-class distraction.
If a kid wants to learn how to program, they're going to have to bring their own separate computer and it will be treated about the same as bringing their smartphone to class, i.e. not allowed except during very specific times, there would be concerns about liability of damage or theft from other students, and they probably wouldn't allow it on the school networks.
Can confirm no-BYOD policy is typical. I had to whine directly and without invitation to school principal to get an exemption for daughter. The trouble with no-BYOD is the kid must bring the school-controlled Chromebook home and connect to the home network for homework (which often requires Chromebook). Many US middle and high schools have an IT department of 1 or 2 people; it introduces abuse risk I think schools in general are not appreciating.
I see the problem with Chromebooks and cloud stuff more generally as being that it's difficult to see the productive use-case of programming outside just shuffling a bunch of data around. If your program's not actually doing something useful, it seems like it'd be difficult to imagine a career in it. -But if a kid can get a relay to trigger via button and then maybe via web interface and then maybe automate it, I think that opens the world of hacking up to them. You know, for $10, they can have a fully-solar (w/battery) thermometer or whatever they want -- the thermometer can feed a thermostat to energize a relay coil to start a heater or whatever.
-But I might be outlier, because in school we had robotics class a lot of kids were pumped for, but I was confused because we never did anything useful with them; it was more like an art class, except at least in art class we baked ashtrays for our parents. -But what am I supposed to do with a 5-watt robot that follows yellow tape?
> (just a hypothetical, I assume most parents can't afford to buy one)
It used to be that high school students were required to have a graphing calculator. These had to be purchased by the student (iow by their parents) and without factoring in 20+ years of inflation costed more than some Chromebooks available today. I suspect there were (and still are) financial assistance programs as i've known students living below the poverty line and they were able to meet that requirement.
Most larger school systems (if they allowed it at all) would end up "locking" the device as if it were one of theirs for the duration, just like some companies allow you to bring your own laptop or phone, but it becomes "as if it were theirs" while it is managed.
Support costs, mainly.
A small school that does its own IT is more likely to be flexible.
Your personally owned Chromebook isn’t comparable to a school issued Chromebook at all. They’re more locked down and useless than a stock iPad. Kids cannot install Linux on them.
You commented in context of digital education. The point is that your argument of Chromebooks comparing better to iPads doesn't apply in this situation. In fact they're often worse because schools deploy the cheapest, lowest common denominator Chromebooks with slow CPUs, horrible screen resolutions, inadequate RAM and terrible battery life. Kids hate them. The fact that good and uncrippled Chromebooks exists doesn't help them at all. A 5 year old iPad is likely a better experience and a more capable OS and device than a new Chromebook issued to students this fall, but the warranty and repair costs for schools dealing with careless kids don't add up to less so they get the cheaper option.
> On a Chromebook that I bought and that I fully own I can enable the Linux system and install whatever I want on it (it runs in a VM and it is a full Linux system).
Do you really own it ? Can you install linux or BSD _instead_ of ChromeOS ?
Yes[1], depending on the chromebook / chrometablet it will have varying levels of support for even swapping the firmware and running standard linux/BSD. Sometimes you will need to open up the laptop for a jumper/screw to adjust for enabling firmware flashing. Others its just turning on dev mode first.
Apple has long provided tools for teaching kids how to code. Including lessons targeted at kids in middle schools.
> young coders are asked to assist these characters achieving simple goals by coding simple instructions. As challenges become more difficult, more complex algorithms are required to solve them and new concepts are introduced.
Even then an ipad is not good. An Ipad is good for digital art and thats it. For the same money you can buy a computer capable of 3d modeling, digital art and a drawing tablet buy some paint brushes and clay to do real life art.
Your work Chromebook is completely incomparable to a school issued Chromebook. It's doubtful that your employer locks you out of literally everything that would allow you to develop software on-device. See my other comments in this thread.
People of HN-age are assuming that school Chromebooks are anything like the Apple-IIe or other computers they had "in the computer lab". Those machines had a "purpose" - but they were wide open for investigation by those who wanted to.
They're not. They're locked down as hard as they can be.
> It's doubtful that your employer locks you out of literally everything that would allow you to develop software on-device.
In strongly regulated industries, it is not unusual that you are indeed strongly locked out of this, and you need to create special requests to get access to the specific functionalities (as an exception) that you need for developing software on-device.
Right, many people have to treat their local computer as a thin-client and do everything through a WebEx session or similar means, which makes the local device irrelevant. Or if you're regulated but have to be specifically exempted and allowed to work in a way that schools would never permit, then in that case you'd not be arguing in good faith that kids are able to learn to code and develop on a Chromebook since they can't.
> Or if you're regulated but have to be specifically exempted and allowed to work in a way that schools would never permit, then in that case you'd not be arguing in good faith that kids are able to learn to code and develop on a Chromebook since they can't.
No, I just wanted to show that your claim
> It's doubtful that your employer locks you out of literally everything that would allow you to develop software on-device. See my other comments in this thread.
simply does not hold in practice.
--
Addendum: Additionally, from my school experience, rather the attempts to circumvent "abitrary" restrictions on the computers which were set up by the school made you a good coder. :-)
I sense that your claims and suggestions here strongly suggest that your school experience is not a recent one where you were issued a locked down Chromebook.
I would encourage you to expand your lived experience here. Circumventing "arbitrary" restrictions today will burn a hardware fuse, brick it for actual school allowed purposes and cost your parents $170 to resolve. The age of innocently hacking on school property is long gone.
>
I sense that your claims and suggestions here strongly suggest that your school experience is not a recent one
Of course.
But nevertheless, I have a feeling that the central difference is not in "recent or not", but in the fact that older generations were simply much more rebellious in not wanting to accept the restrictions set on the school computers and willingness to do everything imaginable to circumvent them.
I recently had a great time developing on ESP-32 directly in VSCode/Cursor and using the Arduino CLI. I believe very similar in concept to Platformio. I've always hated being limited to the Arduino IDE.
> We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?
Why aren't we teaching kids vibe coding? I've been told that is the future after all, and junior devs will never be needed ever again. All they need a webpage interface to an LLM to provide data and customer demographics for AI companies.
Because typically we don’t leap to teach kids things that are speculative.
We in the industry might see AI progressing to where cube vibe coding is just as real as using spreadsheets rather than paper ledger books, but it is years out, and teaching kids on v0.1 tools would just be frustrating for teachers while likely teaching kids all the wrong things.
My kids are absolutely learning how to use AI: every syllabus has guidelines for when AI usage is acceptable (it's not a blanket prohibition against), and they talk about both the pragmatic and ethical implications of it.
A school lesson where the teacher babbles about wishy-washy AI topics needs a lot less preparations by the teacher than a school lesson where he teaches scientifically sophisticated topics.
Technically any recent Chromebook can run Linux in a VM if enabled from settings. Now, I don't know if most schools forbid this, but since it is running in a VM it is safe to use for sure.
The reason people use Chromebooks is because they want to minimally manage the devices. The Chromebooks being locked down is ENTIRELY the point of using them in the first place...That and because Google.
1. Vibe coding a microcontroller firmware project. I'm using "vibe coding" in jest here because I'm actually an experienced coder, but this was a chance to try using the AI coding assistants for a clean sheet project at minimal risk. I'm going on 63, and could easily finish my career without AI, but where's the fun in that?
One amusing thing I've noticed is that every time the AI generates code with a hard coded hexadecimal constant, it's a hallucination. My son suggested feeding all of the chip datasheets into the AI and see if the constants improve.
2. Finally converting my home semi-hobby electronics business (something like a guitar effects pedal) to machine assembled circuit boards.
As I mentioned in an adjacent post, I've been playing jazz for nearly 50 years, and have not experienced gatekeeping, except on rare occasion from mediocre players. I've played with pro's, academics, and amateurs. The overwhelmingly predominant attitude is simply love of music and an interest in a challenge.
I think that playing any kind of live music requires a bit of a two-way accommodation between the needs of the audience and of the musicians. I don't think it needs to be difficult per se, but there needs to be something in it for the musicians.
This might sound self centered, which is a frequent stereotype leveled against jazz musicians, but on the other hand, why bother? There are other things we could be doing with our time. And I don't think that playing "difficult" music is incompatible with delivering a high quality performance, which is always my mission.
I think it’s worth distinguishing “difficult to perform” and “difficult to listen to”. Something like hard rock or metal with lots of flashy solos can be technically impressive, but it’s not difficult to “get” -- when done properly it just gets you in the gut.
The accusation usually levelled at cutting-edge jazz (fairly or unfairly) is that it’s so niche that it is difficult to get; that it’s left behind any pretence at being popular music. Many listeners would even go further and sneer “they’re just playing notes at random!” or “you’re just pretending to like it!”
I do wonder whether good-sounding, easy-to-get music is purely a matter of fashion (being just different enough to be interesting, but conventional enough to be accessible), or if to some degree there’s another axis of skill/difficulty in great pop music, of making it catchy and universal.
I think that since at least from the time jazz began to mature, like maybe in the 1940s, there has been a back-and-forth between crowd-pleasing and dance-able music, and more exploratory and artistic music. The Stan Kenton Orchestra traveled with two separate "books," one for dance gigs and another for concerts. Ellington's material, of which there was a lot, is quite imaginative.
To me that's OK. When jazz ceased to be responsible for forming the backbone of popular music, it triggered a more experimental period, including some ventures that were pretty far out, such as free jazz and free improv. Jazz also experienced a shift in focus -- not uncontroversially -- by becoming an object of academic study.
I think we're in a period right now when bands are seeking more audience friendly material. Now, the big-band I play in is in some sense "enthusiast" music. We have a small but loyal audience of people who happen to like this kind of stuff.
But in another of my bands, two of the players are actively composing new material, and it's arguably listen-able by any standards. Maybe we're in a third era, where we're free from responsibility for making popular music, but also free from responsibility for establishing the stature of jazz as a "serious" art form, and can return to the business of pleasing ourselves and our audiences.
Gioia even touches on this in some of his writing. One factor that's often forgotten is that Black musicians often couldn't fully capitalize on their own music, or compete effectively, because of Jim Crow. There was a lot of resentment as a result.
I've been playing jazz as a bassist for nearly 50 years, including with several big-band groups. Today my main band is a big-band, though I also play with a number of smaller groups.
Finding repertoire is a perennial challenge. Adding new material takes more effort than just a quick agreement on the bandstand and flipping through the fake books. A lot of material is unpublished, out of print, surreptitiously Xeroxed, etc. But there's a lot of exciting material spanning an entire century.
And the west coast is well represented.
Of course big-band is unique in that it involves improv soloing but is much more about the arrangements, especially the newer stuff. It's like playing chamber music in that way, but of course people still love chamber music. It's never hard to fill an empty seat in our band.
I suspect more people worked on solving quadratic equations in what I estimate to be the 1000 years since the problem was formulated, to when it was solved. The ancient Greeks knew that they could solve some quadratic equations but not others, and Al-Khwarizmi came up with the general solution. And then it was even further generalized with complex numbers.
This isn't much more than a factoid, but notice that many of the useful semiconductors are made from elements that straddle the column containing silicon and germanium. Making compounds whose outer shell electrons add up to be silicon-like lets you make semiconductors, but with electrical and optical properties that you can tune. GaAs is another one, and the LED's are made by choosing particular combinations that have specific bandgap energies corresponding to colors of photons.
Part of the "magic" involves finding ratios of elements that have relatively little mechanical strain, because the atoms "fit" just right, which introduce defects that degrade the semiconductor behavior.
In the same way literally is defined as "not literally", yes. Dictionaries are descriptive and capture colloquial usage, but "factoid" is a recently defined word with a specific definition that can be traced to a specific book. The alternative definition in the dictionary is simply recording common misuse.
Dictionaries are descriptive and do not prescribe what definition is correct. I am basing my definition on Norman Mailer's definition and I am defining "incorrect" as differing from a word's explicit definition. From the original definition: "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper". I can think of no clearer "factoid" than to justify a meaning that didn't exist until a dictionary published it.
In a broader sense, I am always entertained at how Americans will literally change dictionaries before admitting they used a word incorrectly. Sometimes it is tedious, but sometimes when they do it to scientific jargon, it risks muddying the waters of discourse about scientific phenomena with that from "pop science" definition. Psychology in particular is prone to this, with "learned helplessness" and "trauma bonding" being two phrases used incorrectly probably 9 out of 10 times I see them, to the extent that the fake meanings (which are always just the most literal interpretation of the phrase) are incorrectly being treated with the scientific basis of the originals despite having no real clinical evidence.
Additional factoid: these are known as III-V semiconductors after their columns in the periodic table / number of valence electrons. They all have different bandgaps and lattice constants, and interesting things happen when you modulate composition.
Also, you might actually want to introduce a lattice constant mismatch because the strained lattice has useful properties.
Cadmium zinc telluride is a II-VI semiconductor, not a III-V semiconductor, because Cd & Zn belong to the 2nd group, while Te belongs to the 6th group. (I find the habit of some modern authors of calling the group 2b as group 12 and the group 6a as group 16 extremely stupid, even if with the traditional approach it is debatable which should be group 2a and which should be group 2b, because for many properties Zn, Cd & Hg are more similar to Mg than Mg is similar to Ca, Sr & Ba. However this defect of the classic numbering is not solved, but it is made worse in the modern numbering.)
Both the III-V & the II-VI semiconductors, and also the few existing I-VII (made of Cu or Ag with halogens) and the few IV-IV semiconductors (e.g. silicon carbide) semiconductors, are compounds of chemical elements whose number of external electrons averages to 4, i.e. the same as in diamond, silicon or germanium, so they can form crystal structures of the same kind.
There are many other kinds of semiconductors, but those which have the cubic or hexagonal structures of diamond/lonsdaleite (more symmetric) or zinc sulfide (less symmetric) are much better understood than the other semiconductors and they are much more frequently used.
For those unfamiliar with this, when a semiconductor has a direct band gap that means that it is likely to be suitable for devices that emit or detect photons, because when photons are absorbed, they generate electron-hole pairs, and when electron-hole pairs combine, their energy is released as photons.
In semiconductors with indirect band gap, when electron-hole pairs combine they usually just heat the material, instead of emitting light, which is why silicon, for instance, is not suitable for making LEDs.
While a direct band gap is desirable in LEDs, lasers and photodetectors, an indirect band gap is preferable in other applications where you do not want electrons and holes to recombine easily, e.g. in bipolar transistors or SCRs and in many kinds of diodes.
True. All MOS transistors used in the modern CMOS processes used for instance to make CPUs are doped with germanium in their gate regions, in order to produce a strain in the silicon lattice.
While a little strain can be beneficial in some cases, the large strain caused by the mismatches in crystal lattice cell size between various semiconductor layers that must be deposited one over the other in order to make some semiconductor device can cause great problems during manufacturing, by generating various defects that may make the process yield unacceptable.
Because of this, when researching new semiconductor materials a lot of effort is dedicated for finding compositions that can have matched lattice cell sizes.
reply