alt Hacker NewsI guess my buddies using laptops in electrical engineering 10 years ago also got dumber? Ought to have done programming and CAD with pen and paper.
I wish I had a laptop earlier - or even better, a tablet with a good pen and attachable keyboard. I’m struggling to think of a disadvantage vs dead tree [note]books. Doodle right on the pdf textbook, dump things to remember into some flashcards app, have notes as searchable files / the ability to share them with everybody, or just a calendar of what’s happening when so you’re not surprised by a test that was announced when you blew off school for a day to do stupid teenager things.
The only actual issue is that computers are excellent slaves but terrible masters, and it’s a lot easier to get distracted by doom or tiktok when you got a computer you’re actively using. Yet surely this is solvable? Given how annoyingly locked down the average company-given dev machine is, surely it’s possible to restrict it for students during school time? It should certainly be much easier than to control private smartphones.
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I thought at first that you said its easier to get distract by Doom as a comment to how this problem is quite old
Did you read the article?
When I first started learning C in uni many years ago, we were forced to use vi and command line, despite there being functional IDEs.
The argument then was IDEs cause cognitive offloading and you don't actually learn to the fullest extent. By forcing us to do everything manually helped us understand how the compiler works, how to debug errors, etc.
This is what current systems are doing. There is a good article that explains it much better
https://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Memory%20Paradox_%20Why%20O...
> Oakley, B., Johnston, M., Chen, K.-Z., Jung, E., & Sejnowski, T. (2025).
> “The Memory Paradox:
> Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI.” In The Artificial Intelligence Revolution:
> Challenges and Opportunities (Springer Nature, forthcoming).