Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.

I’m absolutely with you on the typing, the problem is (as far as I’m concerned) that learning typing takes a ton of time that I don’t want to spend just on that, so I’ll instead provide them with resources on how to improve typing skills if they want to.

I planned on letting them build cheap, old desktops in groups so they are not as afraid of opening their devices (I find this to teach a different relationship to your devices in general) and so they don’t inherently see computers as a black box.

Thank you for your recommendations!

Especially the “don’t be afraid to break and how to troubleshoot” part seem very important to me, I will definitely do that. Thank you!

Yeah, I will generally do a lot of “how to use the web correctly”, from basic privacy stuff (no, you don’t have to have something to hide; why care; no, it’s not too late…), ad blocking, using search engines correctly, evaluating sources etc.

I will have to teach some explicit security consciousness as well, basic and maybe not so basic stuff, maybe even spice it up a notch and do an intro to opsec to interest people (probably not gonna fit for time reasons, but will do basic security in any case)?

Yeah, I will definitely start with scripting first, although I think Python scripting or similar is better for getting used to actual programming/loops and variables are just better and more intuitive than in scripting languages.

I actually only have programming on the list because I felt like I somehow needed to teach it, which is definitely true, but not at the very beginning.

You’re absolutely correct about the PATH thing, I think I should teach about how filesystems work in general (like, most people use devices that only have “apps” and have never used a file system/directory structure)

apart from ne not having that much money laying around a the moment I’m not a fan of people having to pay for their search engine, as I’m of the opinion that such a fundamental tool to use the web should remain free

Yeah, I’ve recently switched to SearXNG instances on some devices, definitely seem to be getting better results

it sometimes seem to, most advanced searching still works, at least on DDG

Oh my god, I feel this so much… Also, I think that recently got even worse, as I recently found myself switching between DDG/Google and finding both extremely bad for my query

“it’s called free software, but copyleft licenses restrict what you can do with it, therefore it’s unfree!!1!” or so they say

I, too, don’t love the use of AWS/Cloudflare, while I get that you can simply replace AWS S3 with something else for backups, this server setup is innately based on using Cloudflare.

Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.

There was a race to the bottom for SSD prices that ended roughly in July 2023, leading to losses with manufacturers having to sell under production cost; this is why NAND/SSD prices increased since then and will probably only slowly start to decrease at the end of 2024. At the same time, there is very interesting technology in the making, I just read about SSDs with up to 1000 storage layers coming in the next few years. Same goes for HDDs, although less so and prices seem more predictable there; my focus for the next few years would be completely new storage methods competing with HDDs/SSDs, but I don’t think any of this will reach consumer markets at competitive prices until 2028. My prediction: HDDs will decrease like in the past years, SSDs will start really decreasing in price with the start of 2025 and it will take a few years for completely new storage methods to arrive.

As others pointed out, having the feeling of knowing (about) things without actually having experienced them yourself is a core feature of what one might call intelligence, and as such not insane.

I would argue instead that the problem isn’t with arguments over stuff you haven’t experienced yourself, but rather people caring too much about their fixed opinion and not about actually trying to find the truth (e.g. though argument) as they might proclaim.

(I am relatively certain of this point as I’ve seen seemingly good counter examples to this provided by the LessWrong community, where people often discuss topics they do not necessarily have experience with, but rather try to find the truth and therefore not have a fixed opinion beforehand.)

because it’s insanely difficult to get along completely without YouTube. Or if you happen to have some kind of business it’s easier said than done to “just not optimize” for Google products or “just not use Google services” like having a Google Maps entry. On a side note, even getting a privacy focused smartphone without using Google services and products is near to impossible (e.g. GrapheneOS only works on Pixel phones…)

Logseq, it’s a lot like Obsidian as it also has knowledge graphs, tags, is markdown-based and self-hostable but, in contrast to Obsidian, it’s fully open source

1940, as there are crazy things that will be going on in the world of computer science (and science in general) over the course of the next few decades and that would be really cool to experience. Kind of sad though to not be alive once we achieve human-level artificial intelligence, would be interested in seeing how that will turn out. I would probably chose America, as I wouldn’t want to spend WW2 in Germany where I live in the present.

Alternatively I think I would very much enjoy visiting Ancient Greek, although I’m not too sure when would be the best time for that; maybe at the peak of Athen.