[HN Gopher] "Fun disabled by administrator" (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
"Fun disabled by administrator" (2015)
Author : splatzone
Score : 154 points
Date : 2022-12-25 01:15 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bugs.chromium.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bugs.chromium.org)
| asddubs wrote:
| >Nit pick about 'Dinosaurs are extinct' is that there's clearly
| an icon of the t-rex displayed on the page unless we switched out
| the icon with the asteroids one.
|
| so this is what working at google is like huh
| rzzzt wrote:
| I got a chuckle out of Edward, the frontend person learning about
| differences between the renderer and the browser process, which
| at this point is laid out for everyone in Electron's
| documentation:
| https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/process-mode...
|
| I was struggling with this as well the first time I wanted to
| look inside an Electron app.
|
| (Also that the change stopped the fun for Googlers that had
| enrolled devices as well. Is that still true?)
| rav wrote:
| crbug 462221 links to crbug 471738 [1] - in which they change
| it from a simple "is device enrolled?" check into something
| that can be controlled with some kind of policy (not sure about
| the specifics). I'm not a Googler but based on 462221#c18 [2]
| it seems like turning off the easter egg would lead to some
| small but significant pushback, so I'm guessing they have a way
| to set the policy (even if there's no UI for it in the Google
| Admin Console).
|
| [1]
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=471738
|
| [2]
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221...
| jtsiskin wrote:
| The attached commit:
|
| https://codereview.chromium.org/977323003
|
| is bad - because it gives an error message stating the owner has
| disabled the dinosaur game, but gates the game just based on
| whether the device is enrolled. The owner has not explicitly
| disabled the game, nor has any way to reenable it, as the message
| suggests; google has.
| trynewideas wrote:
| The bug report's thread's a fun glimpse into Google org
| politics on why that specific wording and that specific
| implementation happened.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Better link:
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221
| dang wrote:
| Ok, changed from
| https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-
| bugs/c/q.... Thanks!
| kodah wrote:
| > Also harmful for teachers that are trying to keep their
| students focused, not playing games
|
| I really regret the number of things we're allowed to casually
| refer to as "harm". That word used to be significant to me but
| now carries very little weight, manifesting instead as
| inconvenience, frustration, or, in this case, distraction.
| weakfortress wrote:
| This is certainly harmful. Advertisers et al. have taken over
| the internet. There are easy dopamine hits everywhere. For
| example, one my relatives has a 10 year old who is glued to
| their phone all day watching tiktok or youtube. In this
| particular case it's the parent's fault, but that is not my
| point. At school the kids are there to learn. If this is how
| many kids are at home if you give them unlimited access to the
| internet it _will_ harm their education. Arguing the semantics
| is pointless.
| kodah wrote:
| Right, but this is an assertion that the game harms
| education, which must be precipitated by unengaged students.
| Rather than ask, "why are students not engaged?" We instead
| gate their lack of engagement with boredom, which creates
| more problems.
| weakfortress wrote:
| School is boring. The skill to learn is how to deal with
| that and still survive. At such a young age you're learning
| the rules which is why it's hard to engage students. A
| classic example, using algebra to balance a checkbook,
| would bore students more. They don't have the ability to do
| any interesting geometry, no knowledge of physics (that's
| usually high school), etc. Chemistry is typically not
| taught before the middle of high school, etc. Keeping high
| school students engaged, from what I understand, is a
| different art entirely.
|
| The only class that might be able to be made more
| interesting is English. The Scarlet Letter and The Great
| Gatsby are both snoozefests. But for other subjects the
| idea of "creating engagement" is more difficult. People
| seem to think children possess the foresight they do even
| though they are adults. In middle school, most of the time
| you can just say "this will get better in a few years if
| you do well here". Children lack a sense of delayed
| gratification. Hence the popularity of PE as a subject
| (aside from the health benefits) or music classes relative
| to other classes. Funny enough, the modern adult (still a
| child) also tends to lack this ability. There's nothing
| wrong with these classes intrinsically. They just provide
| an "instant" dopamine hit a developing brain is hardwired
| to understand.
|
| Not everyone can afford to send their kids to a
| "montessori" school to have some avante garde teaching
| method keep them "engaged". For the rest of us, learning
| how to cope with something boring will be an extremely
| useful life skill the second you enter the real world.
| kodah wrote:
| This seems like a gross amount of individual perspective
| being passed unlabeled.
|
| School, as it currently exists, may be boring. I remember
| being bored out of my mind; that didn't necessarily need
| to be so though. Many teachers read out of our books and
| could explain little else beyond the content of the book.
| I hated maths and Spanish as a result. Many of the
| teachers attracted to these subjects aren't the kind of
| people who should be teaching kids. Meanwhile, when I
| learned Chemistry I learned more about maths than I
| could've ever dreamed and I was captivated.
|
| As an adult I relearned a lot of that math to succeed as
| a programmer and it was _fun_. I think, largely, we fail
| to meet students where they are with respect to their
| education. We shove everything down their throats on
| _our_ schedule rather than the pace in which they can
| build on these subjects. The result is boredom derivative
| of disenchantment.
|
| I'm not even sure what your point about Montessori
| education is. The teachers do not make it special. The
| method is what's special, which is that pace is dictated
| by the pupil.
| TheCleric wrote:
| I think this is harm though.
|
| One of the definitions of harm is: "actual or potential ill
| effect or danger"
|
| This does have a potential ill effect: students playing games
| instead of following along with the lesson.
|
| The teacher isn't being harmed, but the student's education is
| being harmed.
| alexvoda wrote:
| No, calling this harm is sadly laughable.
|
| If teachers can be so boring that the t-rex game outcompetes
| them for the attention of students then the problem is
| teachers not the game.
|
| I understand that not al teachers can be like Richard Feynman
| or Tatiana Erukhimova or Walter Lewin but surely we should
| expect them to be better than the t-rex game.
|
| Many schools have wardens instead of teachers.
| siva7 wrote:
| If you are more worried about your students playing some easter
| egg game instead of improving your teaching, you have already
| lost connection to the folks you're trying to teach.
| weakfortress wrote:
| Tell me you've never tried to teach children without telling me
| you've never tried to teach children.
| siva7 wrote:
| I did. Now what?
| IIsi50MHz wrote:
| Semantic'ly ambiguous. You did tell, or you did teach? (-:
| misterflibble wrote:
| You've typed exactly what I was thinking, in a far more
| eloquent way than I could have worded it. Reminds me of the
| constant battle between my high school's sys admin and those
| smart kids who knew all the Windows 2000 network commands!
| isoprophlex wrote:
| It is my instinctive reaction that if you think you can win your
| students hearts and minds by eliminating distractions like this,
| you don't belong in education.
|
| On the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this is the mentality that
| would ban pencils because they can be used to scribble drawings
| instead of paying attention to class.
|
| To butcher up a Montessori quote: it is an interesting piece of
| work that grabs a child's concentration. Not rules.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| In a weird way, maybe this is good. The only reason I learned
| what autorun.ini does, or what VB is, is because I used them to
| get around the school's network controls. Kids today will
| figure out how to enable developer mode, un-enroll their
| chromebooks, and play the dinosaur game. A world without
| challenges is a world without ingenuity.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The hardware is now locked down to the point that this isn't
| really possible anymore. Future generations will never get to
| have those kind of experiences like we did.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Indeed. A lot of bad teachers are ready to blame anything but
| themselves for their kids not paying attention in their
| classes.
|
| Too many schools just end up with this mindset that the kids
| HAVE to listen in class, and in order for them to, we just have
| to somehow force them by removing ANY alternative thing they
| could be doing, that way they will have no choice.
|
| And those same people wonder why the kids say school feels like
| prison.
| analog31 wrote:
| To be fair, the teachers are hopelessly outgunned here.
| They're competing with a deep pockets industry that can
| develop infinitely addictive, engaging content that is also
| designed to be de-educational.
|
| Trying to make successful educational media on the same
| playing field is hopeless. For one thing, the resources for
| doing that don't exist. For another, kids can instantly
| perceive that something "educational" is going to be slightly
| more boring than something purely entertaining and addictive.
| The playing field can't be leveled.
|
| Third, we're really not helping them by reinforcing that the
| only way to learn is to be saturated in addictive media
| content.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not sure education was ever all that great,
| but there were people sincerely trying to make it better.
| alexvoda wrote:
| TFA is about teachers being outgunned by the t-rex game. If
| they can not even outcompete the t-rex game they should not
| be teaching.
|
| A generation back this would have been minesweeper and
| solitaire. These are all boring games.
|
| Further back students would just be doodling in their
| notebooks. And they still do.
|
| These are not highly entertaining activities with which you
| can't compete.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| Dawnyhf2 wrote:
| "My instinctive response" is to just declare something
| controversial and imply that other people are stupid. Well my
| instinctive responses personally involve fucking and shitting,
| so maybe we should keep them to ourselves.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I learned networking on my own so I could make a multiplayer
| game in programming class for my friend and I.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Most people you'll meet on HN are of the kind capable of self
| motivation to a high degree that makes long and involved
| projects possible if there's interest in something, even if
| it takes substantial extra learning to get there.
|
| Thing is, I suspect most people in general aren't like that.
| They just sort of exist, not knowing what they even want to
| learn or try to avoid learning if at all possible. You can
| see this very clearly in university students that pick prof
| given bachelor thesis titles by what seems easiest vs. those
| that come up with their own. Or just school project work in
| general.
| trynewideas wrote:
| I never programed a game onto my TI-8x but I somehow got a
| few dozen installed on there. There are different degrees
| of self-motivation, especially when the motivator is how
| boring school lectures are.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I suspect most people in general aren't like that. They
| just sort of exist, not knowing what they even want to
| learn or try to avoid learning if at all possible.
|
| There is a saying about this: You can lead a horse to
| water, but you can't make it drink.
|
| So what if there are people like that? It is not like
| everyone must learn. If they don't want to they don't have
| to.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well believe it or not, primary education is mandatory by
| law in most of the world. So they sorta have to and the
| system must be designed to cater to all, unfortunately.
| krisoft wrote:
| Now we are just talking by each other. Previously you
| were talking about university students picking easy
| thesis topics. I reacted to that, and now you are talking
| about primary education.
|
| These two are very different contexts.
| atoav wrote:
| As someone working in an educational context on the university
| level, I certainly agree for young kids.
|
| But at some point people need to learn how to put themselves
| through boring mindnumbing stuff as well, because this will
| sometimes be part of what you need to do if you wanna reach
| your goals (e.g. reading the datasheets, reading some
| specification, looking at some source text that hasn't been
| simplified to digestive bits by someone else, gather boring
| data that is needed, ...).
|
| In my subjective observation students over the past 10 years
| have become less willing to put in mental footwork themselves
| if there is not an entertaining youtube video that lays it out
| for them. I work in art university, so most of the topics
| people will work on are _entirely_ their own choice. But if
| e.g. a student wants to work with electronics, they would
| rather try to mimik what some guy in some youtube video did for
| a year (without understanding it at all), than grabbing a
| foundational book and work through it over the course of a
| month.
|
| The latter is less instant reward and more boring work, but
| pays off for a long time and will allow them to judge what
| makes sense and what is bullshit. The former feels like the
| direct solution, but will leave you coming back for help
| whenever you deviate from that precise solution someone else
| made.
|
| I have nothing against entertaining education at all, I just
| think that for many being able to go through the boring stuff
| (on their own terms) might be a valuable ability as well. And
| this is not about the media at all. The above example with the
| foundational electronics book would have worked as well if they
| have chosen to watch a foundational series of youtube videos as
| well. But these videos are not leading directly to the result.
|
| I have seen single students who have fooled around for years
| with try and error in electronics without ever having the idea
| to learn the basics..
|
| Do they have "boring week" at Montessori's?
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree that learning to work through boredom is an important
| skill. But I also think the internet has made it
| substantially less important because so much more knowledge
| has been made available in non-boring ways.
|
| I work through boredom not because I like boredom and not
| because it's "foundational" to somebody else, but because
| that's the only way for me to accomplish a goal. So to the
| extent that somebody's particular work still requires it, I
| think we're going to have to find new ways to structure
| things to bring that experience forward in time for them.
|
| I think the other option is to restructure things so that
| being bored is even less necessary. For example, the common
| way to think about "foundational" concepts is to structure
| education with a lot of boring and apparently pointless stuff
| up front, the promise being that it will pay off later. To me
| that looks like privileging the convenience and perspective
| of the instructor over that of the student. Can we instead
| swap it around so that "fundamentals" are taught in slices in
| close relation to purposeful activity?
|
| As to the Montessori question, I think it depends on your
| understanding of boredom. My understanding is that as the
| student gets older, they take on larger and larger projects,
| so they learn how to deal with the sort of boring that comes
| from purposeful hard work, but not the sort of boredom that
| comes with blindly following authority. To me those feel
| pretty different, and I might more accurately call the first
| "tedious" rather than boring.
| tomxor wrote:
| > at some point people need to learn how to put themselves
| through boring mindnumbing stuff as well, because this will
| sometimes be part of what you need to do if you wanna reach
| your goals
|
| Framing is important, and there is a huge difference when
| approaching something with the attitude of "toleration"
| compared to "determination". The value in the skill of
| _determination_ , is the realisation that with it, many
| things can become intrinsically more interesting and
| rewarding the more work you put in. When you find something
| that clicks and try hard at it you can end up in a feedback
| loop, and this is the sweet spot you want everyone to find in
| life.
|
| Suggesting that hard work should only be tolerated is not a
| fruitful path to put people on - sure some things in society
| like filling out paper work are inherently boring, and
| unfortunately the realty of current systematised education is
| kind of similar, but ironically nether match the reality most
| real cognitive or skilful work.
|
| Perhaps this sounds more like a romantic ideal than something
| practical - I get that in the reality of current school
| environments it seems like a hopelessly subtle idea to convey
| in the hurricane of the massive curriculum you are trying to
| get them to absorb - However, ideas and wisdom can have a
| much longer lasting effect on a student's life than what may
| as well be ephemeral knowledge at that age. I think the least
| a teacher can do is to encourage students whenever they see a
| spark of interest, it doesn't matter whether or not it looks
| "useful" or is even tangentially part of the curriculum,
| because you can learn the value in the skill of determination
| by learning to doing anything substantially difficult, and
| it's a surprisingly transferable mindset.
|
| ... But regardless of this framing, to be fair to the rest of
| your comment which I agree with, the real contender is the
| new reality of the short attention span, ruined by
| entertainment. Even as an adult who has long learned the
| rewards in this skill find it being eroded if I am not
| careful.
| ascotan wrote:
| I feel like boring to some extent means that poor
| communication is happening. What you're learning when dealing
| with a boring subject is how to deal with something/someone
| that is unengaging, dense or confusing. Although this is a
| skill, I feel like learning the material isn't really taking
| place.
|
| For example I read many, many scientific papers in college
| and they were all very boring. I feel like the big take away
| was how to deal with this type of communication medium which
| was dense, verbose and contextual. I guess this is an
| important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it
| really has to be this way.
|
| What is the alternative? Only learning from curated, well
| crafted sources?
|
| It would be great to raise the floor of educational
| material. Ultimately though people will need to grow beyond
| well trodden paths, so they'll probably need to work
| through some noise to find the signal.
| LocalH wrote:
| Some people are physically incapable of focusing on things
| that bore them. Not because they don't want to, but because
| they _can 't_. What for them?
| rurban wrote:
| Not engineering then, simple as that
| rnd0 wrote:
| Ritalin? Therapy?
| LocalH wrote:
| Really, _Ritalin_?
|
| The substances that I feel have the most promise
| unfortunately have an uphill battle in terms of
| acceptance. Quite hard to find material about how
| psychedelics relate to ADHD.
| Kye wrote:
| Any inquiry in the genre of "Why not try [obvious
| thing]?" is generally going to lead nowhere. You don't
| know what you don't know, and it can be exhausting to
| explain to the nth person asking too-obvious questions
| that their obvious question is missing experiential data
| or any effort at research, and then filling in those
| gaps.
|
| Medication and therapy are expensive. It doesn't always
| work. If it works, it might not work well. If it works at
| all, there are often side effects. Getting into therapy
| is _hard_. Finding a therapist you click with once you
| get through all the hoops is even harder. Sticking with
| each step of the process when you have a disorder that
| makes sticking to things hard is hilarious once you think
| about it.
|
| And so on.
| wincy wrote:
| I dunno, I'm 36 and Adderall is the difference between
| "low performance dev about to get put on PIP because he
| doesn't do his work" and "software engineering team lead
| being congratulated by higher ups on your teams
| performance". Which is literally the last few years of my
| life's ups and downs.
|
| People hearing the same thing over and over can be
| annoying to some, but for others it's the only thing
| that'll really get through a lot of our skulls and get us
| to try something different.
| Kye wrote:
| Okay. The experiences (mine and others shared with me)
| that informed my post are still real.
| pksebben wrote:
| however, it might be that someone who would actually
| benefit from such remediations hasn't thought of it
| seriously or recently (very, very common with ADHD).
| Stories about such things working could be useful to
| these folks and aren't necessarily meant to undermine the
| difficulties you mention.
| Kye wrote:
| There are some newer medications that show promise for
| people who've had little/no effect or bad side effects
| from the usual stuff, or who had trouble accessing
| Adderall. Suggesting _that_ could help. Yet another
| "Ritalin? Therapy?" floating in the void will not.
| machinawhite wrote:
| Imagine people telling you that you're fucked in the head
| and putting you on speed because you don't like listening
| to incompetent cretins in a prison like environment
| [deleted]
| hatenberg wrote:
| Most of your reasoning was just murdered by chatgpt.
|
| It can take care of most of the mindnumbing work.
|
| let's file a bug to get the dinosaur back
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Eh, chatgpt also kinda murders the content it processes.
|
| It's very easy to construct examples where its summaries,
| while they look correct, either miss some crucial point or
| are outright incorrect.
| ben_w wrote:
| Sure. But, IMO, it (chatGPT) is about the quality of a
| first or second year uni student right now (albeit in
| every subject at the same time), including being
| confidently incorrect.
|
| (I've not done a systematic all-subject study; this is
| based on the comments I've seen from experts in a mere
| handful of domains, plus my own knowledge in my own
| domain).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That's sort of the worst archetype you for summarizing
| anything for you. Make a bot that's like Socrates
| instead. That would be genuinely educational.
| ben_w wrote:
| Well, Socrates would definitely hate ChatGPT:
|
| """Thamus, however, replied: "O most expert Theuth, one
| man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only
| another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who
| will use them. And now, since you are the father of
| writing, your affection for it has made you describe its
| effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact,
| it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those
| who learn it: they will not practice using their memory
| because they will put their trust in writing, which is
| external and depends on signs that belong to others,
| instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely
| on their own. You have not discovered a potion for
| remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students
| with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your
| invention will enable them to hear many things without
| being properly taught, and they will imagine that they
| have come to know much while for the most part they will
| know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along
| with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of
| really being so."""" - https://newlearningonline.com/lite
| racies/chapter-1/socrates-...
|
| It would be an ironically Greek tragedy, if the end of
| human civilisation were to be caused by a (written)
| language model, especially given how many Kassandra-
| analogs we have had from (given this hypothetical
| outcome) Socrates to Yudkowsky.
| js8 wrote:
| I think we should gamify education. Give the students a
| challenge who will complete the difficult electronics theory
| exam the quickest and you will see them making an effort.
|
| In general, I would split the current volume of basic
| education into smaller subjects (with many optionals) and
| finer levels, and have students to make a choice how fast
| they want to complete them (as long as they would work
| towards one of these goals).
| number6 wrote:
| Not necessarily gamify but make it fun. I recommend 'Code'
| by Petzold. This book explains how computers work and has
| some methoids how to add numbers or build an adder yourself
| and it is super fun to read.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| How then will these kids have any sort of ability to do
| things that are not fun? That's a fairly essential life
| skill.
| number6 wrote:
| There is still PE for this. /s
|
| OK, really, do you want to be stuck with boring and bad
| textbooks and teachers to drive home the lesson, that
| some things are just not fun and have to be done anyways?
|
| This can and will be done at home: brushing teeth,
| bathing, put on clothes, bring out the trash, wash
| dishes. I have a whole bag of not fun things for my kids
| to do, that are not fun but have to be done anyways.
| Turst me, they don't need it in school too. Let learning
| be fun.
| lewdev wrote:
| I recall a teacher creating an RPG-like learning system
| that tracks numbers that help them "level up" by "gaining
| xp" through activities that help in their weak areas.
|
| Sorry to be lazy to not look it up, but I thought it was an
| interesting take on gamifying learning.
| jdesmond wrote:
| My HS CS class in 2014 was like this. It was wonderful
| because it took away the incarceration feeling of normal
| public school. If I did the work faster than everyone
| else correctly, I could go and do what I wanted in the
| school, which motivated other students to finish and
| motivated me to finish first. I wish other classes were
| like that.
|
| The only thing close in college was profs who would let
| you test out of classes, and work on a self study project
| for the class, I loved that.
| lights0123 wrote:
| My college offers a similar program, and I've heard good
| things about it from other students who have taken
| courses with it. https://gradecraft.com/
| Eleison23 wrote:
| [dead]
| TheCleric wrote:
| To be fair, reading the initial bug reports, the focus is
| heavily on "students disable the wifi and then the next class
| has to turn it back on, and they may be too young to understand
| how to do that".
|
| Which is a completely fair point.
| greggarious wrote:
| >instinctive reaction
|
| I had my septum deviated for doing similar to the above in Word
| 97 in the 2000s.
|
| Must be nice to do things the way you describe, but
| unfortunately the process you go through in America to become a
| K12 teacher basically snags the sociopaths too intelligent to
| be cops and gives them a steady stream of narcissistic supply.
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
| jrockway wrote:
| I'm glad that we didn't have "enterprise enrollment" back when I
| was learning computers. (I had a Tandy 1000 with a BASIC
| interpreter.)
|
| The whole thread seems a lot like "concern trolling" to me. Every
| ChromeOS administrator knows kids can go to a website to play
| games, or type one into the Javascript console, but act outraged
| that there's a tiny easter egg in a web browser. "They're going
| to make us get rid of the Chromebooks if you don't turn this
| off!!!!11" Uh huh. I'm sure the taxpayers will want to throw away
| a couple million dollars worth of laptops because if you turn
| WiFi off you can play with a little dinosaur.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| If you're a teacher and your teaching is less interesting and
| compelling than the T-Rex game then maybe it's a sign.
| kortex wrote:
| It's not necessarily the teacher's fault. They could be
| perfectly adequate (not extremely boring as a baseline), but
| you have students that may have ADHD, ODD, etc, and just the
| temptation knowing the hidden game is there is enough to jack
| up the excitement level of an otherwise rather boring game
| enough to detract from classes.
| samtho wrote:
| I suppose the irony here would be that if "Fun" had not been
| disabled by the administrator however, the ADHD kids might be
| playing the dinosaur game and actually able to listen better
| (rather than wasting class time attempting to bypass it)
| josephcsible wrote:
| I don't like the Googlers' trend of "make the policy message
| sound like a fact of life, rather than blaming the people who set
| the policy".
| Wicher wrote:
| I've noticed that way of framing too, and once you see it, you
| see it in many places, not just Google products.
|
| Basically, portraying rules (that are to your disadvantage) as
| some kind of laws of nature. So for instance:
|
| "To continue, you need to install the app".
|
| Instead of
|
| "We're not letting you read more of this since we think you're
| webbrowsing this on mobile and want you to install our app"
|
| Quite often we're indeed being lied to as if we're little
| children.
|
| But in this exceptional case, the "Fun disabled by
| administrator", it's frank! That must be because its this third
| party, the "administrator", which is to blame for the
| restriction. Were it google themselves setting the rules of the
| game, they would probably not frame it in the same way.
| randac wrote:
| This looks better in the app -> We're too inept to design a
| good mobile interface and/or we would like more of your data
| please.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Usually it's
|
| > We've actively worked on making the website a worse
| experience than the app
|
| e.g. by constantly nagging you do download the app
| tylerag wrote:
| Fun fact: this is a common technique when dealing with
| children.
|
| > No, you can't leave the table until you eat your vegetables.
|
| > No, you can't go play until your chores are done.
| watwut wrote:
| I think this is more of the case of not turning on
| playstation or tv while they do homework.
|
| The ticket is literally about distraction - the kid intends
| to do work, the game is literally placed in the middle and
| the kid forgets what was original goal. 100% normal for kids
| and I would not blamed neither them nor teachers.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Which is a reason why I don't like it here: they're
| infantilizing the adults who use their products.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| When some of your users are kids and some are adults, it
| seems like a situation where there really is no happy
| medium that will make everyone happy. Kind of tricky to
| deal with users who have diametrically opposed goals.
|
| It's interesting how strongly people feel about a basic
| little game.
|
| (full disclosure, I work at Google but I've never had to
| deal with upset teachers and upset children arguing in bugs
| assigned to me)
| astrange wrote:
| Presenting policies as facts of life (like Meta also
| does) is usually done to keep the abuse teams away from
| those angry customers and so they don't have to reveal
| their anti-spam techniques. Security by obscurity does
| work for a while.
|
| There are ways to get companies to actually pay attention
| to you; a good place to start is sending registered mail
| to an executive in a way that looks like you might be a
| lawyer. patio11 has more advice on this.
| graderjs wrote:
| Ugh...disgusting.
|
| But anyway I thought it was going to be some hitherto-unknown
| Linux command line tool called `fun` that was sudo only.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think the wording of the error message that was eventually
| implemented is still off because in many schools parents are
| supposed to buy the Chromebooks that then get used during
| lessons. Your administrator is not always the owner of the
| device!
|
| I doubt the effectiveness of turning off this game, kids will be
| distracted either way. Does it really matter if they play the
| dinosaur game or stare out of the window?
| josephcsible wrote:
| > in many schools parents are supposed to buy the Chromebooks
| that then get used during lessons. Your administrator is not
| always the owner of the device!
|
| Which should be illegal. If the parents have to pay for a
| Chromebook, then the parents should have final control over it,
| not the school district.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I'm not sure this policy does anything but make the admins feel
| better.
| lewdev wrote:
| Nah, I'm just imagining the stickler teachers being like, "A
| game? Fun? In school? That must NOT be allowed!" And being
| satisfied when it's removed.
| silvestrov wrote:
| A much better (and mature) approach would be to ask google to
| turn the game into something educational.
|
| Nothing is better for education than pupils thinking they are
| gaming when they are really learning useful stuff.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember having an absolute blast playing
| Number Munchers off a floppy disk on a DOS computer.
| notRobot wrote:
| Or you could just let them play a damn game.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I know a teacher who regularly sent in help desk tickets of
| the form "site X has a game on it, so please block it at the
| firewall".
| askiiart wrote:
| They _did_ make the image for this a surprised T-Rex with the
| asteroid raining down behind it, and it looks great, so I 'm not
| even that mad...
| aflag wrote:
| At the moment that what you have to say sounds less interesting
| than playing the trex game, you know you've failed.
| buttocks wrote:
| All the armchair education experts in this thread who say it's
| not the distraction, it's the poor teaching, (1) have never set
| foot in a k12 classroom as an adult; (2) completely forget their
| own experience as k12 students. You can have the most engaging
| lessons and any small distraction will kill the momentum.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| When I was in middle school, I discovered that the content filter
| proxy server could be bypassed: it ran on port 8080, but outside
| of the school's firewall. So if you found another proxy running
| on 8080, you could use that instead.
|
| I found an RSS feed of proxy servers and their addresses. So I
| wrote a VB6 app that would pull it, set the registry key for a
| proxy server, open the embeddable browser in the background, and
| time how long it takes to load a bunch of popular sites. It would
| iterate through the list of servers, and finally settle on the
| server that had the fastest load times. When you closed the
| program, it would set the registry key back.
|
| At the time, autorun.ini was still a thing. All of my friends had
| flash drives that would "turn off" the firewall when they plugged
| them in.
|
| I was a young teenager. If you think you can stop a determined
| kid from bypassing your rules, you're fighting the wrong battle.
| weakfortress wrote:
| A child determined to do this (I also did it) is not the target
| of such a program. If you're smart enough to do that, you're
| probably smart enough to pass classes without much effort.
| Especially given the innate drive to not only discover a new
| way to bypass the system but also to automate it. Chances are
| you did well in school, especially in subjects you enjoyed,
| because being challenged drives you to innovate.
|
| "If you think you can stop a determined kid" is trivializing
| the matter. Your average child will spend 24 hours a day
| melting their brain on TikTok. Not reading the ancient tomes of
| programmers gone by on how to better automate their bypasses.
| Your example actually demonstrates in a roundabout way that
| it's not there to stop determined adversaries who are likely
| self-driven enough to learn anyway. A certain, largely average,
| cohort of students do not have this ability, will never possess
| this ability, and will likely with _much_ effort pass with
| middling grades. These people are highly susceptible to failing
| when distractions are introduced. Stopping them should be
| priority number 1 in any school district worth their salt.
| worldmerge wrote:
| While the topic of teaching has come up, are there schools that
| do project-based learning in high school-ish settings? Like
| teaching kids geometry through wood shop class?
|
| Seems like a fun thing to teach, at least for a few years,
| teaching kids skills via projects.
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