3. Never give a student a solution to a problem they don’t have.
This reminds me of when I just started high school and realized, "school is just a bunch of answers to questions nobody asked."
It's not that I didn't want to learn, nor even that I didn't want to learn those exact things -- just not have them fed to me at arbitrary intervals with total disregard for my actual state of mind.
(The original Dalton school mine was inspired by did this right, over 100 years ago, but most of the methods -- ie. letting kids learn what they actually care about, when it interests them most -- are illegal in my country.)
As for presenting the question first, at university this was often done, they would present us with some real world problem -- but then they would spoil the fun by instantly revealing the solution on the next slide! I like figuring things out, so in those moments I'd usually cover my ears and try to figure it out on my own.
Somebody else's solution only becomes interesting to me once I've invested the effort to make my own, and then I can compare and contrast.
However, Gemini does not exist in a vacuum. The web will be there. There will be social media platforms, multimedia, awesome webapps and all that. And Gemini is just text.
When you have the choice between easily consumable infinite multimedia and just text, you only pick the latter when you really care about the quality of text content. It's not sexy so all the spammers, content marketers and ego boosters have nothing to gain on Gemini. And so there can be this esoteric little corner of the internet, with down-to-earth text content written by ordinary people.
The separate protocol for everything is essentially what things were like prior to about 1994.
There was a protocol for searching documents, a protocol for looking up someone's email, it was all partitioned out.
The web was seen as just another fish in the pond.
After the web became big, these things still lasted for a while
However spam and crooks changed it all. Usenet became useless, DNS full domain lookups (you used to be able to get a list of all the subdomains of a domain through the command line and you could just browse then out of curiosity), using whois for email (you could just query for a name and get an email address over whois), it's all gone because there's too many snakes trying to scam people and flood the network.
Things used to be much better tools but it turns out they were too good and had no defenses. The dream of everybody connecting has sort of been retracted a bit. RMS, TBL, Torvalds, I could just send them an email in the 90s and they'd respond, it was pretty remarkable.
It's not the case any more. Not even minor players in history (such as an author from a 25 year old book) respond to my questions. People just don't do that anymore.
Spam, harassment, criminals, ill will, this all has to be a big priority if we want to try it again.
The future should be the dreams of our better angels, building better tomorrows...
It explains what the difference is between state and value and why most (almost all) programs actually have very little state and can be written mostly stateless. It was a big eye opener for me.
This reminds me of when I just started high school and realized, "school is just a bunch of answers to questions nobody asked."
It's not that I didn't want to learn, nor even that I didn't want to learn those exact things -- just not have them fed to me at arbitrary intervals with total disregard for my actual state of mind.
(The original Dalton school mine was inspired by did this right, over 100 years ago, but most of the methods -- ie. letting kids learn what they actually care about, when it interests them most -- are illegal in my country.)
As for presenting the question first, at university this was often done, they would present us with some real world problem -- but then they would spoil the fun by instantly revealing the solution on the next slide! I like figuring things out, so in those moments I'd usually cover my ears and try to figure it out on my own.
Somebody else's solution only becomes interesting to me once I've invested the effort to make my own, and then I can compare and contrast.