I can’t help feeling that giving some of my grandkids a BBC micro, and cassette player, and the BASIC manual would help them learn so much. Sadly I’d have to lock them in a sealed room for a year as well, they would get so bored these days I bet. They just don’t appreciate quite how much happens behind the scenes on their gadgets. The layers and layers of code and hardware. Shame…

@revk This is absolutely true and very concerning. I think that by and large *most people* haven’t the first clue about how *anything* works any more. I worry who will be the STEM graduates in 10-years time; but mostly I worry that as a society we’re so dependent on something so few people understand. The lessons from SciFi are that that seldom ends well. 🙁

@ImpossibleUmbrella I suspect I am unusual (perhaps not here with my followers) in having a reasonable grasp of computers from the transistor to the web browser and all in between. I say reasonable, but some of the tricks compilers do these days, and some of the stuff with caching hardware, are just mental. And crypto (the maths, not the concepts) makes my head hurt. But I know it is all there and the place it has in the grand scheme of things. How many know that these days?

@revk @ImpossibleUmbrella I'm not sure whether crypto is intrinsically incomprehensible or whether it's just that "people who understand crypto" and "people who can write clear documentation" are, for some reason, disjoint sets.

@TimWardCam @revk I can’t help but think that applies to most of mathematics. It’s a subject that’s all too often taught (and explained more generally) quite poorly.