Same here, except I took it further and was calling out of state BBSs to download the latest warez. First phone bill after getting the modem was $250, in around 1984 (or about $800 in 2026). Parents were pissed. That's when I learned about phone phreaking.
Me too! With Sendkeys and some Win32 API calls, I wrote an AOL add-on (available through Keyword: addons) called AoLOL!. It was my first software business.
Q: How do you identify the AOL window?
A: Look for an app with titlebar = "America[space][space]Online"
That one of the floppy disks I had for installing VB4 got corrupted due to my idiocy was what got me into Linux and Java, perl, and PHP at the time. Still nothing as good as original VB for GUI stuff.
Roblox studio. My son is a sound designer for some of the top games there. He's also learning programming in Lua for Roblox platform.
It is a small community of mostly kids aged 15-25 as far as I can tell. It doesn't seem like any professional adult game developers are part of the community (I got an inside view when I took my son to RDC this year).
The top game developers are making millions of dollars per year (they're paid in Robux and converted to USD).
In short, thriving ecosystem with lots of kids having fun doing creative work including creating games, writing code, designing graphics, designing sound effects.
I’ve read about these concerns but my kid is 11 and on there all the time, often with me over her shoulder, and I’ve never seen any sign of it.
It’s a huge platform for kids so I’m sure there are some creeps but there are plenty of controls in place to deal with that and even so, again, I’ve never seen it.
The creeps are only part of the problem. The platform itself is deeply exploitative and harmful. It's full of "you can make games and get rich" messaging that's just a lie. To say nothing of even if you are successful, they will take a staggering cut, and may not pay at all.
tldr; teenagers on the internet. Nothing here described at Roblox doesn't happen to teenagers on the internet as a whole; Discord, IM. At least the people learned a valuable skill in Roblox.
When I heard about how Tesla was training it's AI - without describing objects but instead through direct observation - it reminded me of Heinlein's "Door Into Summer" (1956). Heinlein's character teaches a multipurpose robot how to do any tedious human task through direct observation.
