• 1 Post
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle
  • Here’s the thing: as a parent you had a high amount of control over what your children consume. Yes, there is peer pressure, but you can just decide to make your kid uncool or weird or quirky. My child basically doesn’t see ads. She travels with her own tablet and hotspot with ad-free services and ad-free mobile games. Tiktok and YouTube shorts is almost totally banned in my house, but she may watch a few videos specifically on my devices under my supervision if she wants to see something her friends send her. I don’t really have a problem with tiktok per se, more how it zombifies kids with constant dopemine hits. Youtube is a whitelist since don’t trust that algorithm at all.

    You get the picture. I won’t say that my kid is watching things wholly appropriate for her at all times, but my mission as it stands is to keep her attention span solid and teach her moderation, so some games get banned before she ever get to play them (roblox), some get banned after me seeing the impact on her cousin (fortnite) and some get banned for impact on her (mobile games are evil). The fall out can be severe, but in this respect I’m an authoritatian parent. My word is law. Your feelings don’t matter. You’ll thank me later. Or not. You have a long adulthood play videogames.


  • Do we though? Alcohol the most commonly used addictive drugs is allowed for adults and even children in many states as long as the adults approve and do it in in private residences.

    Parents need to be better about paying attention to games. I remember telling my aunt about a game my 10 year old cousin wanted. She was horrified and said absolutely not. She bought it for him when he asked when they were in the store because she doesn’t take any time to pay attention to game They’re for kids. Even though games are clearly marked with any objectionable material. She “blindsided” by what was in the game when her son booted it up dispite the game be rated as mature, marking objectionable things and me giving her a play by play.

    There are a lot of additive things that we expect parents to use their judgment on. Sugar for example. Until someone is talking to me about how we need a bad on soda and BS like that because parents can’t be expected to parent their kids about it, I don’t really care about the most optional of activities that is games. Children have extremely limited access if their parents don’t allow it. Theu buy the phones/tables/game consoles and robust parental controls have existed for a while.

    Kids can be addicted to all sorts of things and it’s still on the parents. Because it’s technology we for some reason stop believing parents can do a thing. Oh however would the person who controls the internet ans the devices control their child’s access to social media (another one I see whining about) and video games. As a parent myself, I’m just under the impression that at least watching in my circle, the parents who don’t aren’t paying attention or don’t actually care that much, they just don’t like the outcome judgment.



  • I’m 100% in agreement. I think that our school system fails deeply in expressing the point. What I liked about college was what even if it was tedious, etc my professors took the time to explain why I needed to do it this way first and what the dangerous of not having some of these skills were. Did I always believe them? No, but now that I’m out in the world working I definitely know they were always right and I’m glad I did it anyway even if I didn’t always believe them.

    Grade school is a different beast and I spent so much time frustrated and bored and not knowing what the point was. If it wasn’t for the fact that I just really wanted to be a roboticist and there was only one school in my state I could so that at, I probably would have done the least effort thing all the time.

    I did appreciate my calculus teacher who gave us word problems. It really helped me understand the point of calculus. Those words problems showed me there were scenarios where algebra was not gonna cut it. I wish more of my grade school classes explained the point of it all after it became less obvious from middle school onwards.


  • I say history is for analysis because honestly anything that would let you truly understand today isn’t taught. Yes you will learn about segregation, but my history classes barely touched my grandparent’s time, so it’s hard to connect that middle missing period to today. Sure. I’m the mind of person to go fill in that middle period, but many people aren’t.

    What was useful to me was the analysis part. Seeing how bias was in sources. Seeing how different people had the same sources, but different conclusions. Yes, seeing how a past event caused a future event.

    But, I don’t think many people in the US connect US history with why we have many things going on today. Grade school history isn’t going to give that. My college history lessons did though. I had a whole ass history class on nothing by lobbying and I really gained an appreciation for why lobby should exist, how Americans are ridiculous, and how writing laws to keep the good of something, but not the bad is really hard. But no, I cannot tell you anything about the history of lobbying to day I spent 3 months studying and debating about it.

    Back to math for a bit. I think that the logic part of math needs to be brought more into focus again. I think that programming is only going to become more and more important and it’s a shame we’re not teaching any of the fundamentals to allow people to even do things by make fancy excel formulas.



  • This is fine and all and you have a point, but in the current system many times the subject isn’t about the subject it’s about the auxiliary skills you pick up along the way. My history classes in high schopl weren’t really about history. I mean if I retained those facts, fantastic, they were more about analyzing given evidence and multiple references to make a point. I’m an engineer and I use that skill all the time. Facts about the Civil War not so much.

    Even in college I had classes like that. It’s why just programming the answer wasn’t always allowed although literally everyone in the university took a programming class freshmen year. That wasn’t always the point.

    To always allow AI is like never taking the time to teach kids how to do arithmetic by hand. I mean, sure, we could do that, but learning arithmetic is not really about memorizing times tables and more about understanding the concept of a number and internalizing counting and so much stuff people don’t realize they use all the time the existence of a calculator or not.

    I think there is some value in not allowing AI usage sometimes. Before you use a calculator you should learn how to do it by hand so you can have a sense of when you’ve keyed something in wrong. AI has entered my workplace and it’s so annoying. People who never knew how to write the things they ask AI to do can’t vet the AI output and the result is somehow worse to me than if they’d bumbled something by hand. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of in the future. I don’t think that AI is ever going to be perfect and kids have to know what output they’re looking for before they’re taking this shortcut.



  • on his deathbed will regret only spending 2 hours a day with his family. That’s really sad.

    I don’t know if you work and have kids, but honestly 2 hours of focused quality time with your kids is honestly amazing. I get 5 hours with my kid in the afternoon and that’s because I’m privileged and I can pick her up exactly when she gets out of school. I still don’t get to really hang out and just play with her those whole 5 hours because I still have to do things like cook and clean.

    Sure on the weekends I manage more, but honestly 2 hours of just nothing but you and kid time is pretty normal for a working parent that isn’t working insane hours. That guy will regret not going to recitals and stuff, but he won’t be disconnected from his kids. I sure didn’t get 2 hours a day during the week from my exhausted parents.



  • Nope. Because I know I’m going to be a complete purge and I know that no one has uploaded any media, I just nuked the folders after being reasonably certain nothing bad would happen. I think that I’m going to end up writing a periodic proper purge script that is going to directly talk to pict-rs and will be awful for me to do because I know fuck all about docker, so some experimentation will be necessary.



  • That’s a good point. I’ve just been assuming that the media is the issue, but perhaps it’s just the pure database 🤔 Does doing a truncate purge the media? If not, wouldn’t I just be orphaning all these pictures, etc that have been downloaded? Also what about the fallout of your own users? I don’t really want to drop the content that was created on the instance itself





  • I don’t believe this will last. AirBnBs are crashing in non-tourist towns because people don’t have money. I firmly believe the remote revolution will push people out from cities and build up small towns so that work that has to be done in a physical location can thrive too. Small towns have the opposite problem of city centers where they have too much housing.

    I picked up a house in one of these areas. It was I’m the 3rd ring of a metro and thus too rural for most. I bought right when the first Starbucks got finished and now they have expensive “luxury” apartments like crazy. I’m pleading with my sister to take a house one more ring out because she has a chance to get a house before they’re too expensive. I got my house for 200K, but it’s worth over double that and it’s only been 2 years crazy.

    To say I’m within an hour’s drive of a big city I rarely go’s because this city was a small town first not a suburb, so it has all you need really and they build responsibility knowing that most of the population has no taste for going more than the next small town over.

    I feel like movement back to these small towns is the future. The internet will let us keep jobs there.