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.

That’s because someone can easily track your address via a phone number. This is why I have a burner VoIP number to give out until I trust people.

Public school? You mean that place that children are mandated to be? Also you forgot government. It was a whole thing. So if you’re a Muslim and you want to be a part of the French government, then I hope you don’t have any attachment to those head scarves. There are other religions ornamentation, but the head scarves one was the last one I saw. And whether school or a DMV clerk, it’s dumb.

Also noticed I used two different labels for France rather than China. I think China is fascist with what they’re doing. France is xenophobic with what they’re doing.

Honestly, I feel the same about both: it’s absurd. With France I get the “freedom from religion” spiel from some Frenchman, but it’s veiled xenophobia to me. When you ban a kind of clothing but only for one group of people, that’s basically the definition. Here, it’s just fascism. At least the Chinese people are speaking out.

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.

Oral would suck for the transition students. It’s a completely different style and skill set of answering questions and no kid would have training or the mental framework on how to do it. It’s great if you’re the kind of person who can write a mostly perfect draft essay from start to finish no skipping around or back tracking, but if that’s not you, it’s gonna be a rough learning curve. This is before we ask questions like how does a deaf person take this exam? A mute person? Someone with verbal paraphasia?

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.

Let’s just be simple about this: pensions and oth3r old age support. Who pays for those? Young people. If young people have to support a lot of old people, you’re gonna have a bad time. Everyone. The young people have have larger amounts taken out of their pay and old people who get less support because there are just literally not enough resources. And because old people outnumber young people young are pressured more and more under democracy to give more to older people.

That is only one terrible thing from demographic collapse.

Honestly, if everyone woman only had 2 children that would still reduce the population without causing demographic collapse which is what Japan is undergoing. A rapid decline in population creates misery for everyone. You really what a birth rate that hovers around 2 for gentle population decline.

I hear you, but I’m just saying that he probably won’t have any regrets about his kid’s childhood or literally everyone would. He’s spending a typical amount of time with his kids.

Could he spent more? Yeah. Will he have regrets around his life? Yes. That man will die of a heart attack or exhaustion, but his children will know him. And worse still, they’ll know that compared to most super rich parents, their dad paid them more mind than others in their peer group. Wealthy parents tend to offload their children onto others.

I get it. I have a kid and kids really eat into living your life even if you love them.

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.

Football? American Football has no restrictions on gender, it’s just that no woman can compete after puberty truly sets in. What that guys says is true about physical sports. Women can’t compete and never could. I can’t think of a single sport where a woman could outcompete a man in a physical sense. Even something like gymnastics, I think men still overcome the natural female advantage that comes from being small.

Chess from what I recall created a woman’s division because of the systematic biases and pressures girls faced. However, if I’m recalling correctly, it’s not particularly weird for a woman to complete in the open division. It’s just not a welcoming place for woman, so beginners often start in the women’s division. With that in mind I don’t see why transpeople shouldn’t be allowed. They wouldn’t be welcome much either in the open division, but also I’m not sure they’d be welcome in the women’s division either, so it’s kind of a wash.

I don’t know anything about Singapore besides what a friend who grew up there said. She came here to the US as an adult. Tried very hard to stay and worked very hard to bring her parents over to the US. Very confusing given that she had nothing but great things to say about the place and got very mad if I said that the US might be better in any small way. She had a lot of complaints about the US and many I found unfair even if many were totally fair.

So then I asked her: do you think that I a black woman could do what you did here in the US in Singapore. And she skipped over my question and continued her rant about how great Singapore is. That’s all I personally need to know. Singapore probably is great, but only if you’re the right kind of person, the acceptable person. I get the feeling that she and her family weren’t those kinds of people and that’s why she left and she’s pulling her family here to the US.

Firefox literally used to be a significant browser before Chrome showed up. Users have to download Chrome. It’s not like it default. It’s just a matter of changing habits. They swapped from Firefox to Chrome they can back. They’ll do it for thr same reason so many people left IE for Firefox: it sucked.

When ads get overbearing and scammy, your favorite neighbor IT guy will install Firefox for them or something and tell them to use it. A child or grandchild will do the same. So it has always been. That’s how adblock even became so big. People didn’t use it before.

Ads are so bad now, I actually went out of my way to install Firefox on my phone. My less technical relatives just refuse to use anything but apps.

Thank you. I hate it when people say Twitter wasn’t profitable. It was profitable. It just wasn’t an infinite money printing machine like people (investors) wanted. Twitter didn’t need investor money or loans to pay all its bills unlike say Tumblr.

Twitter was the victim of the same financial BS as Toysrus.

Because it’s inescapable. Web development is by far the most common type of programming work and even if you’re a backend developer you tend to have to touch javascript at some point, so everyone knows the pain of javascript’s foot guns and javascript has a lot.

The fact that it’s mandatory to do your work invokes bitterness in people. For backend, you can kind of switch around until you find a language you like. For frontend, it’s javascript or nothing at all.

Javascript as a language is very out of sync with other commonly used languages. Its footguns are very easy to run into. As a result you have a lot of rituals around just not shooting yourself in the foot. The rituals, libraries, and frameworks around avoiding Javascript’s foot guns have been very shifting and changing. Of course, because the javascript ecosystem changes far faster than other languages, there are a lot of rakes for developers to step on to add to the naturally existing foot guns.

Javascript as a language probably shouldn’t be the sole language of the internet for a variety of reasons. It’s a very hateable language because of how easy it is for newbies to make new terrible code and how common it is. Until something like WASM takes off, the downpour of hate for javascript will continue.

I had such a raw disgust reading that headline. I wondered what fucking state would do that. Then I got to the end. So Italy is just speed running to open fascism. That sucks.

They really decided that Naruto was right and kage bushin no jutsu is a fantastic defense against rapid attacks lol. That’s really fascinating. From the POV of a normal character cheaters are like storm troopers missing their shots over and over again and opening themselves to be sniped. From the POV of the cheaters their opponents are really dumb grouping together like that. I wonder when cheaters will get savvy to this technique and just move house when they see too many targets in a space.