[kjkjadksj]

You use your imagination. I had a tub of random parts from a bunch of old 80s and 90s sets that were since put into the blender that is a family of small children. I would build space craft. Big freighters with internal bays to hold smaller ships. Huge bases and compounds for my other toys. Various other vehicles and structures. I was basically constantly building for 10 straight years of my life. No sets. No plans. No eye strain from screens. Just pure creativity and imagination.

[maxglute]

My point is lego has ceiling on imagination. Different in analogue world where most of building was physical. I grew up with buckets of mismatched lego and lots of technic sets, it was more interactive relative to other toys at the time, but now snapping bricks vs running server for minecraft city seems like baby mode.

[cruffle_duffle]

And that is the thing about raising a kid these days. Those damn machines have replaced so much… because yeah Minecraft is like a souped up version of Lego where in creative mode you have every part you need. And you don’t have to dig for it or anything. And it has survival mode and a whole huge thing on top of that.

It’s so difficult to know the boundaries. People from older generations giving advice about screen time and stuff simply don’t understand… “screen time” for me growing up was broadcast tv and a limited set of video games. If you didnt like what was on tv, too bad. Do something else. If you were bored of whatever Nintendo game you had… too bad, do something else. But now… you can get literally anything. Plus the iPad gets used to make videos of playing with the cat, or she will have tea parties with her stuffies and make them tea using some weird cooking game. Etc.

No previous generation had to face this. It’s an order of magnitude or more shifted from when they raised us. Tablets basically can replace almost every single toy from growing up besides ones that require being physical (rc cars, bricks, digging in the yard)… but books, cameras, light brights, etc… all replaced.

It’s completely uncharted water us parents are facing. Anybody that claims to “know the right rules” for tablets and technology is lying to you. They don’t. Nobody does. All we can do is use our best judgement and try to give ourselves credit for doing the best we can.

[maxglute]

> completely uncharted water

Good thing with analogue toys like legos is you know your kid is playing with legos that is wiring X brain cells for Y skills, even if Y skills are deprecated in digital world. It's hard to say with current gen, there's screen time to try to shape behavior, there are occasional kids who are tech literate maestros which every generation has, but plenty of kids who rely on LLMs, can only finger type because they grew up with touch screens. We're in tech timeline where passive users, i.e. most kids are impressed by millennials who can write cursive and touch type, other kids build stuff that previously required teams of 100s of engineers.

[anthk]

Without a tangible feedback you won't get any digital skills for spatial memory and coordination, peiod.

And the kids you mention can barely understand files, filesystems and don't even mention them about O(n) notation. If any, these kids doing the jobs of 1000s of engineers are proportionally worse than the average secretary skills in the 80's.

[maxglute]

Plenty of tangible feedback on screen, just not tactile. I'm bucketing 2 types, the maestros who have deep understanding and the ones who don't bother. The former are the otherwise top 1% talent who are better off playing with with LLMs/comptuers where ceiling is high vs lego. The latter are being distracted that yeah their personal skills worse than past, but fake floor is also raised so much that functionally they can fake junior work, they just lack critical skills to get past.

[anthk]

The ones with LLM's lack introspection, researching skills, analisys and who knows more. They are doomed and worse, they aren't even aware of it.