I think you should let kids be creative and TRY to make useful things, but the quality of most things I made in school when I was creative and developing things was rather low quality in general because I needed to have all the learning experiences. So I don't think in general kids should be trying to build quality useful things but maybe we can just let them take a shot at everything to see how to do it instead.

There is something pretty similar this called Project-Based Learning which tries to get there. Kids are tasked to find something that they're interested in, then the lessons that need to happen are modulated by their unique personal projects. It doesn't produce useful things, but it does produce things that they care about, which is nearly as good.

I agree, I mean to the kids (And some adults with nothing else to do) the digital items and such are "Getting Rich"

I wish there was always an option to user zero based graphs.

Amen, all the structures in the world are useless if it's not producing something useful.

I think office 365 killed it. Microsoft added enough value to be "why not?".

It didn't, OpenOffice hasn't been active for many years. Office365 (and its bundling with Teams) is however a challenge for LibreOffice, the actually active development branch.

> "why not?"

> Microsoft

...

This is probably a dumb question, but how do you dump the photos from your phone to your computer?

Not via a cable? I want to be able to use my phone while it syncs. Being tethered to a computer during syncing would be tedious.

I also don’t want to have the photos on “my computer”. I’m really bad at hosting large amounts of data, I let professionals do it for me for a few.

I’m sitting on my couch and my phone is syncing data to multiple cloud services.

I specifically updated my camera too so I could get photos off it via Wi-Fi instead of having to faff about with memory cards or cables.

Moi? I usually access my images via iPhoto or Google Photos in a browser and then download from there. Rarely have I connected a device to my laptop or MBP. Occasionally, I've used BT to transfer, but again that's rarely.

In theory, the USB C port should allow us to connect a docking station / monitor to a iPhone 15 but I'm not so sure Apple has that in mind. afaik, you need at least USB 3.0 to do that.

Most people don't do this these days; they use iCloud or Google Photos (or whatever that's called these days) or Dropbox or something. Assuming they want their photos on their computer at all, or indeed have a computer; for many the phone would be the primary doing-stuff-with-photos device.

I've had an iPhone since 2008 or so, and yeah, back in the day there were lots of cases where you'd want to plug it in. I'm not sure I've _ever_ plugged my current (4 year old) phone into a computer except purely to charge, though.

The photos are synced to the photo library on your Apple / windows pc in the background and appear there, thanks to iCloud Photos.

If you’re on Linux, install Jotta or Dropbox or Onedrive and the same thing happens.

Good point and it's where apple lacks - instant, potentially p2p sync or browse using mac. Wifi speeds are good enough. AirDrop is absolute PITA to use other than sharing few pics with friends once in a while. Waiting for icloud to complete uploads at ~10mbps is shit experience.

iCloud backup syncs to Photos on macOS. And then Time Machine backs up to a NAS.

While a small percentage of people will have things that can't be used, my IR camera also connects directly to the phone bottom and you specify what port you want when you buy it as it is flush with the phone. For most people however I doubt it will be an issue.

Ooo, we could use LED's that project an image as it goes around and sell that image space to advertisers. /s

Then we can calculate a literal cost per impression, and the unit is birds.

Actually sounds like a cool art project!

Or we think we do, giving ourselves a much needed boost to ego and letting the cycle continue and keep everyone happy. Always assuming that we have made things "simple" because we know our way and not someone else's etc. That being said there's a lot of progress in the end but we take a lot of steps backwards to get there.

It's the boring solution. It should also only be the default answer if you are not building a super critical system to life and limb. But it certainly gives a much lower total cost of ownership. If you don't have the resources for some big redundant system, I've too often seen the complexity added by the redundant system be the issue then focusing on simplicity. If you need to add a bunch of people to support complexity but both the money and the risk assessment doesn't call for it, simpler is much better. I won't say I haven't seen the issue where eventually it was only a huge project to go forward, but I tend to think sometimes even that is less then the sum of having dealt with complexity to that point, it's dependent on a lot about what you are building.