[Any] task is much easier if you have the tools. Do/did you have a baby monitor? A technological tool, that allows you to "monitor" the baby while not being within an arms reach.
Do you have an A+++++ oven with three panes of glass? It's [relatively] safe to touch and instead of monitoring if a child is somewhere near the oven you have to monitor if the child does not actively open the oven. That's much easier.
I remember how my sister and I set up Google Family and fully locked down my niece her phone with app restrictions, screen time restrictions and a policy of accountability when we need to extend the screen time.
It worked really well up until she got a school managed chromebook for homework with no access controls.
Can't your router block by Mac address? Just limit the Chromebook to allowlisted sites. And also school-issued computers are known for Spyware and even worse. It should probably be segregated in a separate network or vlan.
over 10 years ago, I had an intern from Harvard CS tell me that privacy is irrelevant unless you're doing something that you want to hide. I was gobsmacked that someone would not cherish their privacy but since then I've realized many don't care at all and have the same attitude that "I don't have anything to hide."
Well that's your mistake right there. You hired someone from Harvard. Unless you are hiring that person to use their connections to market your product, there is no reason to hire someone from Harvard. They just bring bad ideology and STDs from Russian hookers to the table and nobody wants that.
PS This post is partly satire, I will leave it to you as to which part is serious.
Many of my school colleagues started smoking around 10-11 years old. All of us had tasted alchol by then, and some of them were definitely drinking the occasional beer. Older kids sometimes brought porn magazines in school and would show younger kids too (still talking about pre-highscool here). Now, this was childhood in Romania in the 1990s and early 2000s, soon after the fall of communsim, so maybe not so applicable everywhere else, but still - I doubt that there is any problem for a resourceful 8-10 year old even today to get some of these things.
The older kids are often the easy source for the younger kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.
There’s also a difference between “saw my first” and “saw a playboy once.” I need you to understand I was a good kid whose parents cared until they divorced some years later. And yet I had multiple sources of access to this stuff without looking for it. Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Again, if you occasionally caught a glimpse of a playboy, that’s not a significant problem.
If you were regularly smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and reading porn magazines at 8 yeas, your parents fell down on the job. An 8 year old doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide that from parents who are paying attention.
> Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Yeah a kid with the mind of an adult could access all kinds of illegal material.
Making it illegal to rob a bank doesn’t mean that’s it’s literally impossible. It’s about stopping enough people from trying that society functions.
The state of the world before the internet was that it was hard to keep a kid from ever glimpsing a titty, but it was relatively easy to keep a kid from having regular access to hard core porn-much, much easier than it is now. My take is that as a society we need to figure out some way to make this easy enough for parents to do that it becomes the default. Just like drugs, alcohol, and porno mags.
Another issue is that online porn and algorithmic brain rot is free (at least enough of it is). With IRL contraband, lack of money is a big limiting factor for kids. The IRL equivalent would be if the local liberal let 8 year olds checkout hard core porn DVDs.
Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.
All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.
I’m not using my adult mind to figure out how I could have gotten this stuff as a kid. I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.
I’m not throwing my hands up in the air and saying this is impossible or that we should just open up access. I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before and it won’t be effective in a world with easier access. Yet the cost of that is quite high. Scan these threads for actual ideas, I’m not arguing for any particular one but there are plenty of them and some I think are good.
>Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.
Were they accessible to you, or do you just think they were accessible to you? How many of these teenagers who would let you try a cigarette would have been willing to keep supplying you cigarettes regularly. How many would have been willing to keep buying you alcohol?
>All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.
No, it's glimpses, because it's about at the very least semi-regular access, not preventing every single child from having tiny amounts of alcohol. Look at my reply the other poster in this thread. There are dozens of studies that show conclusively that minimum age drinking laws reduce alcohol use among children, and reduce alcoholism later in life.
>I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before
But yes it was effective. Read the studies. Minimum age drinking laws have been shown almost universally to be effective. Not at stopping every child from drinking but at harm reduction.
>I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.
The level an effort an 8 year old would have to go through to get regular access to cigarettes and alcohol in the US, would require an enormous level of motivation which almost no 8 year old has, and it would be outright impossible to do without a semi-observant parent noticing.
That's the whole point of making it hard to do.
It takes much less effort for a kid to walk to the library and check out a hardcore porn DVD than it does for him to convince an 18 year old to buy one for him. Most kids just aren't going to go through the hassle of doing the latter, but they'd do the former in a heartbeat. All things being equal, greater motivation is required to overcome greater obstacles.
I’ve told you that access was not a problem at all. All your questioning is because you can’t grasp my lived reality. You think I’m mistaken, but actually I just don’t care to try to convince you because you’re already so sure.
Disinterest was what really “saved” me from these vices but lacking that, it was my parents. I also had access to perfectly legal things that were bad for me that I actually wanted and it was my parents who helped me there too; no mandatory ID required.
You don't know that you had access though based on what you said. You think you might have had access looking back.
>I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.
You never tried it so you have no idea how well it would have worked. You really think those teenagers would have kept giving you cigarettes for free? You didn't even know what drugs were so I don't know how you could possible know there were teenagers you knew who would have just given them to you.
Again I'm sure you could have stolen a few cigarettes, or a few bottles of alcohol. But your parents would have smelled both on you or caught you quickly because 8 year olds are idiots. Then they would have cut your access to teenagers or locked up their liquor better. And because of age restriction laws, that's all it would take for them to keep you away from it.
It doesn't sound like you have kids and it's probably been a while since you were 8, but you are severely overestimating the ability of a 2nd grader to get away with anything.
>but lacking that, it was my parents
Of course it was your parents. Mandatory ID laws aren't going to stop terrible parents from letting their kid have a beer every night before bed time. They make it easier for well well meaning parents to do the right thing and keep their kids out of stuff they shouldn't have.
Again minimum age and ID laws have been proven to reduce access and reduce alcohol and cigarette use. Even if you were some kind of criminal genius 2nd grader capable of stealing a few bottles of wine a week, you would be an outlier. There's no room for debate that these laws have their intended effect.
There’s “no room for debate” in your argument because you’re basing it on false assumptions, trying to gaslight me, moving goalposts and you personally don’t care about the trade offs. It’s very easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. Congrats.
There are clearly trade offs with any law, but your argument was never that the benefits aren’t worth the price it was that minimum age laws don’t work.
There’s no gaslighting going on here. “As an adult Looking back to when I was an 8 year old, I belong that had I been motivated I could have acquired alcohol and cigarettes” is not a persuasive argument that most or even many 8 years olds have access to alcohol and cigarettes.
It’s not even a good argument that you had access because you don’t know that you did.
“I think that I could have got teenagers to get me cigarettes” is not good evidence that you had access to cigarettes. Maybe there were teenagers who would have given you enough cigarettes to feed a habit. Maybe the first 5 you asked would have told you to get lost and you would have given up.
We’ll never know because you didn’t try it. But again even if you had,
the evidence shows that minimum ages laws substantially reduce the number of cigar smoked by kids, and the rate of kids who smoke.
If you want to make the argument that the price of making people show ID isn’t worth that benefit then fine make that argument. But you can’t make the argument that minimum ages laws don’t have their intended effect.
you are writing this as if you were never a kid yourself... there is absolutely nothing I wasn't able to "get" as a kid - some stuff I had to jump through some hoops but end-result would always end up being the same. if I wanted to watch hardcore porn, there was a way, if I wanted to smoke a cigarette, there was a way. if I wanted to drink, there was a way. and make it "forbidden" made it ever more appealing for me to get it as a kid. I grew up in society where alcohol was not a big deal, I was buying alcohol for my parents when I was 6-years old, would get sent to the store to get stuff and among the stuff was always beer and sometimes wine if my parents were expecting some guests. most of my friends growing up never thought of alcohol as something cool, we had easy access to it so it was like a rights of passage or anything like that and it showed, just about no one was doing any drinking while we were teenagers. when I came to america junior year of high school I was stunned at home much effort my schoolmates were making to acquire alcohol - could not really understand what the big deal is until I realized that was because it was forbidden and acquiring beer etc for a friday evening chill made one a cool kid.
the only barrier I have ever had to doing stupid things was the wrath of my parents. the punishment(s) levied when I did stupid shit was always such that I would very seldom-to-never-again consider doing whatever stupid shit I did. it always starts and ends with parents. you can put in whatever "laws" you want (which will always get weaponized politically at some point either immediately or at a later time) but end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...
1. There is no scientific evidence that the "forbidden fruit" theory is correct. Studies of minimum drinking ages show a near universal reduction in drunk driving deaths, alcoholism, and crime rates.
If you care to google it there are dozens of additional studies that all say the same thing.
2. You're writing this as if you don't understand what it's like growing up in a country where 8 year olds don't have easy access to alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.
And you're writing this as if you don't understand what it's like growing up was a kid growing up in America specifically. My young children and the young children of everyone I now could not regularly drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes without their parents knowing about it. When I was 8 I couldn't have done either regularly without my parents knowing about it.
Again this isn't about stopping every single kid in the world from ever trying alcohol. This is about making it harder for them get and easier for parents to enforce.
>end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...
That's a completely unrealistic view of the world and it's just flat out wrong on the face of it because every study we have on the subject shows that minimum drink age laws reduce harm--they work. If it were solely up to the parent they wouldn't work.
The easier you make it for parents to do the right thing, the more of them will do it.
- they will honestly tell you that they'd be very happy to see you dead when you impose restrictions upon them (people who are older will of course possibly get into legal trouble for such a statement)
- they will tell they they wish you'd never have given birth to them (or aborted them)
- they will tell you that since they never wanted to be born, they owe you nothing
I raised kids. Never had to deal with anything like what is described. Sounds like someone read some questionable books on parenting, unfortunately followed the bad advice in those books and this is the result.
And this entire thing is about bad parenting. Its always easier to just give the kid a tablet and go back to whatever you were doing. Its always better to actually interact with the kid. That trade-off of time is important because if you mess up when they are young, you spend a lot more time handling issues later on. That time you gained by giving them a tablet will get payed back someday, usually with interest. That's what is happening here.
As a father of 3, one thing the wife and I had to learn over the course of the first two is that the modern world holds parents to impossible standards and a "fuck off" attitude is required for much of it.
We've had pediatricians shame us for feeding our kids what they're willing to eat and not magically forcing "a more varied diet" down their throats at every meal, despite them being perfectly healthy by every objective metric. There are laws making it technically illegal for us to leave our kids unsupervised at home for any period of time in any condition, even a few minutes if one of us is running slightly late from work/appointments.
Your not-quite-2-year-old is too tall for a rear-facing car-seat? You're a bad parent, possibly a criminal and putting them at risk by flipping the seat to face forward, a responsible parent spends hundreds of dollars they don't have on several different seats to maybe find one that fits better or have their kid ride uncomfortably and arguably unsafely with their legs hyper-extended up the seatback.
Miss a flu shot because you were busy? Careful you don't come off as an antivaxxer.
And all of this and more on top of changing diapers, doctors' appointments, daycare, preschool, school, family activities and full time jobs?
Yeah, when my kids are old enough to engage with social media I will teach them how to use it responsibly, warn them about the dangers, make myself available to them if they have any problems, enforce putting the phones down at dinner and and keep a loose eye on their usage. Fortunately/unfortunately for them they have a technically sophisticated father who knows how to log web activity on the family router without their knowledge. So if anything goes sideways I'll have some hard information to look at. Most families don't have that level of technical skill.
I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a whole other list of confirmations for that decision that I hadn't thought of before.
> Amazon is very good at bits but has repeatedly failed at atoms.
This idea of bits vs atoms was stolen straight from the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick. During the infamous Silicon-Valley-TV-Show-esque Las Vegas company offsite, one of his big talks was about how Uber had to not only deal with bits, ie. the virtual world, but also atoms, ie. the real world. That made it a bigger challenge than all the other companies like Google, Facebook, etc where they could dictate their own rules since they controlled everything, but Uber didn't have that luxury.
Just revert the code back to pre-26! This is ridiculous, it can't possibly be this hard and if it is, it just points to the degradation in the quality of Apple software! This is maddening!
This is already the pre-26 bounding box, isn't it? It's the new graphics that don't line up. (Not a great excuse, but the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while.)
> the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while
And that's the reason why I won't buy a new Mac.
Tahoe and Liquid Glass are so horrible that they're going to lose customers because of those. They should realize what they did and just backtrack: it wouldn't be the first time they admit they made a mistake [1].
The magic mouse have been there, almost unchanged, since 2009. That is a lot for a tech product, and retiring a product after 16 years is not admitting to a mistake. For example, the Logitech G5 mouse and its direct evolutions were among the most successful Logitech products, and it didn't last that long.
No, it is not just refusing to admit that the magic mouse was a mistake, it is considering that it is the best ever. That USB port on the underside is still one of the great mysteries though, maybe it is some quirk of evolution, because it is certainly not intelligent design.
In addition to vertical scrolling, the Magic Mouse can do horizontal (or diagonal) scrolling, zooming in and out, and a couple of other tricks. This makes it worthy for the people who need this for their work. There are mice that can do horizontal or vertical scrolling -- but not both at the same time.
People who do their work on large documents (pics in Photoshop, videos, CAD, music, even Excel, etc.) use these capabilities every day, and they like their Magic mice very much. If you are not one of these people (software development, for example, can be done with vertical scroll only, for the most part), it doesn't mean it's a bad product -- all it means it's a product which is not for you.
I don't use Magic Mouse but am very far from expecting Apple to admit "the magic mouse was a mistake" though.
I am using Sequoia and the windows are definitely rounded! Though the radius is pretty small (the curved region is about a quarter of the mouse cursor area), so the fact you can drag it from outside the window doesn't look ridiculous.
How is it not pathetic that Apple can't fix this and bring it back to normal behavior? Who is fighting for this stupid behavior? It's driving me crazy as well.
If you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further.
I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away from me, so I adapted and am using AI now to accelerate my productivity. I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years so I've seen both sides and there is nothing that is going to stop it.
Okay, I use OpenCode/Codex/Gemini daily (recently cancelled my personal CC plan given GPT 5.2/3 High/XHigh being a better value, but still have access to Opus 4.5/6 at work) and have found it can provide value in certain parts of my job and personal projects.
But the evangelist insistence that it literally cannot be a net negative in any contexts/workflows is just exhausting to read and is a massive turn-off. Or that others may simply not benefit the same way with that different work style.
Like I said, I feel like I get net value out of it, but if my work patterns were scientifically studied and it turned out it wasn't actually a time saver on the whole I wouldn't be that surprised.
There are times where after knocking request after request out of the park, I spend hours wrangling some dumb failures or run into spaghetti code from the last "successful" session that massively slow down new development or require painful refactoring and start to question whether this is a sustainable, true net multiplier in the long term. Plus the constant time investment of learning and maintaining new tools/rules/hooks/etc that should be counted too.
But, I enjoy the work style personally so stick with it.
I just find FOMO/hype inherently off-putting and don't understand why random people feel they can confidently say that some random other person they don't know anything about is doing it wrong or will be "left behind" by not chasing constantly changing SOTA/best practices.
I try them a few times a month, always to underwhelming results. They're always wrong. Maybe I'll find an interesting thing to do with them some day, I dunno. It's just not a fun or interesting tool for me to learn to use so I'm not motivated. I like deterministic & understandable systems that always function correctly; "smart" has always been a negative term in marketing to me. I'm more motivated to learn to drive a city bus or walk a postal route or something, so that's the direction I'm headed in.
On one hand, the DOJ gets shit because it was taking too long to produce the documents, and then on another, they get shit because there are mistakes in the redacting because there are 3 million pages of documents.
What they are redacting is pretty questionable though. Entire pages being suspiciously redacted with no explanation (which they are supposed to provide). This is just my opinion, but I think it's pretty hard to defend them as making an honest and best effort here. Remember they all lied about and changed their story on the Epstein "files" several times now (by all I mean Bondi, Patel, Bongino, and Trump).
It's really really hard to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point.
My favorite is that sometimes they redact the word "don't". Not only does it totally change the meaning of whatever sentence it's in, the conspiracy theory is that they had a Big Dumb Regex for redacting /Don\W+T/i to remove Trump references
The zeitgeist around the files started with MAGA and their QAnon conspiracy. All the right wing podcasters were pushing a narrative that Trump was secretly working to expose and takedown a global child sex trafficking ring. Well, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that Trump was implicated too and that's when they started to do a 180. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
You should consider medication. I used to be against medication, but after talking with a few of my friends who have gifted children, things like ADHD are extremely common. Avoiding medication and letting them spin in the wind is not a good strategy and it destroys their self esteem. Get as small a dose as possible and then wean him off as he gets older and hopefully his prefrontal cortex will catch up and help regulate him.
My friend's child is profoundly gifted (160+ IQ). He is 12 years old and finishing Calculus and next year will be taking college math courses. His friends are a year younger than him and have qualified for AIME since they were 8 years old.
Giftedness is very real, and it's not just "maturity". Their brains are different. Seeing them squabble over math problems, it's like watching people talk a different language.
I took an IQ test about twelve years ago and I also got 160 on the Stanford–Binet [1], so if we are going to use that as the metric I was a “prodigy” as well (though no one ever called me that). I didn’t take calc when I was twelve though, that would have been cool. I had to wait until I was fifteen.
Anyway, if that’s the scale, it still can fit with the “doesn’t lead to exceptional outcomes”. I am a perfectly competent software person, and maybe I even understand some of the mathematics behind it better than the average programmer, but I am still basically just an “adequate” worker, and honestly I am afraid that I have more or less peaked career-wise. I am sure that some prodigies do great but the article seems to indicate that they’re rarely exceptional at adulthood.
[1] honestly I think that IQ is stupid and that it’s dumb to try and distill something as complicated and multi-faceted as intelligence to a single dimension or even a couple dimensions is pretty reductive.
You, my friend, are profoundly gifted, especially if you scored that high as an adult. That said, it only describes how your brain works, it doesn't describe how high achieving you will be. That is an amalgamation of all your life experiences and things like opportunity, perseverance, etc. The tools you have to understand complex things are much wider than a regular person, but it doesn't mean a regular person can't outhustle you. I don't know how old you are, but it's never to late to dust off your tools and give it a go at something more aspirational, if that's something you've always wanted to do. If you're happy as you are, then there's no point because happiness is what really matters in the end.
To be fair, I knew I would be taking the test well in advance, so I took dozens and dozens of practice tests over the course of two weeks. They like to say you can’t study for an IQ test but you can.
I like to think I’m pretty clever, but I almost certainly would not have gotten 160 if I hadn’t gotten the practice test.
Sorry, I meant to add more but got distracted and I can't edit now.
I'm in my mid 30's. I'm happy enough where I am now; my biggest issue has historically been focus and apathy more than understanding concepts, much to the frustration of my teachers in high school. I was that frustrating kid who clearly understood the concepts perfectly fine, and was even fairly active during class, but I wouldn't do my homework so the teachers would be forced to give me bad grades.
I obviously don't blame the teachers for this, they're doing what they have to, but I do sometimes think that the system is a bit too one-size-fits-all, even still. I took advanced classes in high school, I got very high ACT scores (36 in English, 34 in math), but I still have always had middling academic performance because the teachers would be stuck giving me crappy grades.
For reasons slightly involving skill but mostly involving luck, I managed to cobble together a successful software career even after dropping out of college the first time around, worked without a degree for almost a decade, and eventually worked as a practicing software engineer at the senior level at BigCos. I have a bachelors now, and even a masters, and some graduate PhD work (though I didn't finish that, too time consuming while working full time), but these all came after I had established a decent career.
I think that being a little clever [1] certainly helped me through this, but what I think helped me more than anything was the fact that a) I had a geeky hobby of learning how to program when I was fourteen or fifteen that never really went away and that I was able to fall back on and b) dropping out in 2012, which just happened to be the year that pretty much everyone got a smartphone and consequently there was a huge demand for programmers and they were willing to overlook a lack of credentials.
My life has turned out fine; not perfect but certainly better than most people on this planet or even this country so it's hardly worth complaining over. I do wish I had taken school more seriously as a teenager because then I would likely be able to have move into a more mathy-theory-based role, which I seem to be unable to do as of right now [2]; it feels like I'm playing a game of catchup, which isn't impossible but it definitely is harder than if I were able to focus on school full time.
Dunno why I decided to dump my life story at you. Just one of those days I guess.
[1] Though as I said in the sibling comment, probably not nearly as clever as the tested IQ suggests.
[2] No matter how many I apply to, it seems. It doesn't help that every researchey role now is for AI/ML theory which is cool but pretty far from my expertise or the kinds of math I've studied or have any expertise on.
They understand things the first time. I remember taking calculus in university and hitting my head against the wall because I couldn't understand the concepts.
This kid and his cohorts, they hear a concept for the first time, and they just get it. Then when it comes to doing the problems, he might struggle a little but then he gets it. He is getting 95% in calculus and the only reason he lost marks is because he made sloppy mistakes.
> LLMs hallucinate and make all kinds of hard-to-predict and sometimes hard-to-detect errors. AutoGPT had a tendency to report that it had completed tasks that it hadn’t really, and we can expect OpenClaw to do the same.
Ah, so a bit more useful than my teenage son? Where do I sign up??
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