Needless to say though, vendor lock-in still sucks, and the switch store is pretty terrible.

"Securely signed/verified devices for accessing your bank" or "increased surveillance and tracking of criminals" sound like splendid ideas and direct solutions to immediate problems. Now, how to actually implement them and how it will affect society in the long run might seem less important when you've got increasing crime rates, a slowing economy, displeased voters or whatever looming. In short, some dilemmas have very clear answers when you (willingly or through unawareness) only concern yourself with a subset of the effects of a decision, and this goes both for politicians and special interest groups. That being said, I'm very pro-privacy and it's the job of policymakers to know the details of what they're deciding on. Reality is however usually very complex and nuanced with several things being true because they all contribute a part to what's going on.

e: what am I doing, speaking like I actually know how things work? Nothing is absolute and nuance is important, but sometimes it is also very useful to simplify and generalise to get things done. If no one had any conviction, not much would ever happen. But moderation in all things.

As I said however, it depends on when in the timeline we’re looking. For 3-year bachelor’s programmes, there’s significantly more focus on producing graduates who can move straight into the industry, having already learnt the tools they will use. For theoretical 5-year master’s programmes, knowing specific hardware or software is secondary to the general reasoning, maths and planning that’s expected in research or R&D industry work.

Using more limited or restricted tools, if thought out well, can force students focus on the parts that matter. I haven’t actually used the Playdate, but for first-year students I would think the most important thing is to actually get to designing games. The core ideas you’d want to teach do not require fancy graphics or platform support, rather, that’d just be a time sink. Learning industry tools can be done in later courses or on the job. While being able to work efficiently is important - I don’t want to discredit the handiwork of the process, learning what buttons to push in eg. Unreal is arguably much less ephemeral than learning ”game design”.

However, using limited tools in teaching must be well motivated. Forcing old, obsolete tech onto students might be a learning experience just as well as a time sink.

Touchdesigner is more popular and I suppose declarative, but vvvv is more general purpose and similar to the processing workflow. It’s a very weird tool I’ve used for everything between MIDI instruments, live installations, escape rooms, VJ rigs and, well, proc art.

Adding this type of rep system would destroy a lot of what is so cool about the internet though. There’d probably be segregation based on rep if it’s very visible, new IDs drowning in a sea of noise. Being anonymous but with a record isn’t the same as posting for the very first time as a completely blank identity and still being given an audience. Making online comms more like real life would alleviate some problems but would also lose part of the reason they’re used in the first place. I don’t see much any other way to do it besides maybe a state-provided anonymous identity provider (though that’s risky for a number of reasons), but it’s going to be sad to see things go.