PebblesRox

I like it! I came back today after making a story yesterday and it had not saved my language.

Also, I’m using it in the phone and don’t see a way to get the translation of just one word since I can’t hover.

I find myself doing some of my most creative thinking in the middle of the night when I wake up and can’t get back to sleep.

The optimal amount of regret from decluttering is non-zero!

I’ve learned that yes, maybe 1 out of every 100 items I get rid of will turn out to be something I need again in the future. That’s a worthwhile price to pay for the benefit of not having the other 99 items in my life!

Donating to thrift stores is very convenient. And I learned recently that if I have stuff that’s not really nice enough for the thrift store to sell, I can just list it on Facebook Marketplace for free and people will come take it away from my porch! Makes me feel better about getting rid of stuff that still has some use in it, because I’m not just throwing it in the trash.

My mother-in-law and her friends use a system I call clutter laundering. Anything with too much sentimental value to give to a stranger, they pass along to each other. Presumably once the emotional distance is long enough, somebody can actually get rid of it for good! (That’s what I’ve been helping my MIL do with stuff that comes to her at least!)

"There’s status in a neatly tended space that conveys a message of respectable conformity and leisure. There’s also a strong cultural rejection of useful productive things because they’re useful and productive.

"My favorite example of this concept is the humble clothes line. Is it legal to dry your laundry in the sun where you live? In many parts of the country this is expressly forbidden by law and/or private binding agreement. This sort of activity is associated with rural peasants, impoverished slum dwellers, dirty hippies, white trash (or worse), and is at odds with the look and feel of a prosperous community. It might be a scorching day in August but everyone is compelled to operate a mechanical dryer in the house and crank up the air conditioning because anything else is shameful and verboten."

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/6/the-other-pitch...

The eigenprompt might have some helpful inspiration as well:

https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1846781283596488946?s=46

I was part of a faith-based health sharing program for a few years. When it came time to cancel my membership, I had to call in and speak with a rep. I got past several rounds of retention attempts and succeeded in cancelling. The rep offered to pray for me before we ended the call and asked if I had any prayer requests. I mentioned something about getting over a bad cold and she said, “you know, one of the benefits that we offer—“

I felt a little bit bad about hanging up but mostly I was just mad.

Related:

[A Brief History of Children Sent Through the Mail (2016) ](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24957499)

From my 8yo, Luke: Put a tornado on. Let us be other things. Mega Boss Battle with an extra-strong one. Maybe the extra-strong one can be the tornado. Maybe if you're another thing, you could battle the wizard.

Yes, being able to scroll down and check already entered guesses would be nice

Or maybe it could give some kind of extra credit for guessing a clue early. Or it could accept it, but still make you guess the interior clues, but when you get to the one, you already guessed, it shows it as already solved.

I like the background music, but I didn’t notice any other sound effects when I’m playing the game.

I love the new features! I also appreciate the details of what software you used to create the game. My kids have been building stuff in Scratch and I want to have something available for when they’re ready for the next step, so it’s nice to have all these ideas for what they can use.

I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.

If I were trying to do something like this I would sketch it out first with imperfect curves and then worry about making it perfect once I was at the computer. It would look slightly different but I don’t think it would make that much of an impact in the initial design process.

Ah, the SR-71 was new to me, thank you!

https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

I felt shortchanged my senior year at my fairly well-regarded university when I was dealing with depression and doing what I saw as the bare minimum academically. I still got straight A’s despite putting in minimal effort.

Desmos also produces curriculum for K-12 (Desmos Classroom) that takes advantage of the computer’s ability to give real-time feedback for student answers beyond just giving them a binary correct/incorrect. It shows them what their wrong answers really would mean in the little animated scenario. Good stuff!

https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/the-only-question-you-need-t...

Every so often I will have a dream with a joke or pun that surprises me. And they even make sense after I wake up! I always wonder how my brain manages to do that.

A similar time was when I dreamed I was reading a blog post about a game that was abbreviated WoH. I was trying to figure out what the name of the game could be, so I looked it up (still in the dream) and it was “Whore of Honor.”

After waking up, I pondered the fact that both of those words start with a silent letter - so I never would have consciously guessed them from the abbreviation, but somehow that’s what my subconscious brain came up with.

I had to look it up in real life to make sure it wasn’t a real game that I was just remembering - nope, not the case as far as I can tell!

I would be up for signing up for email notifications for events in my area.

I had a friend who used Excel to render blueprints for the dream house she was designing. As an architecture student, I was both impressed and horrified!

Your cube board is beautiful.

Yes, the studies tend to exclude the kids who aren't using the tools "enough," which can end up being 95% of the students! [0]

On the other hand, I know there are people who enjoy math but struggle to pay attention and learn from a "sit quietly and listen" lecture-based model. (My husband is in this camp.) I can see how the back-and-forth conversational approach of these AI tutors could be really helpful for students like this.

They're still a small minority of the student population, but maybe a different minority from the students who are already excelling academically. If Khanmigo helps only 5% but it's a slightly different 5% from the students who are best served by the current system, I see that as a win, even if it's not the educational revolution that is being hyped.

[0] https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/the-kids-that-edtech-writes-...

This video has some good examples of the nuances of door design:

Why video game doors are so hard to get right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEWsLdLmcc

I discovered that it's much easier to dip apples slices in peanut butter if I nuke the peanut butter for 30 seconds. Now I don't get frustrated by my apples breaking off in my peanut butter.

You could say the same for plastic surgery in general. Techniques developed to restore injured faces (e.g. of soldiers) are now used for cosmetic purposes.

This blog post [0] has a few more examples, and I like how the author's alligator calculator [1] translates from traditional notation into alligators.

[0]https://propella.blogspot.com/2011/09/yet-another-alligator-...

[1]https://metatoys.org/alligator/#!/(%CE%BBx.x)%20y

Thank you for sharing! I tried it out with my 7yo, who was interested. Unfortunately we had some issues with the toddler interfering so our session got interrupted.

I did find an online version here, for anyone who wants to try it without cutting out a bunch of alligators: https://tibordp.github.io/gator-calculus/

I am also on the search for more puzzles/challenges to do with it.

I have a short collection of ideas here.[0] The biggest thing I've done is tell bedtime stories (often collaboratively) that incorporate topics like functions, negative numbers, and debugging. Here's one where we did FizzBuzz together. [1]

[0]https://twitter.com/CBancos/status/1581662053189574656

[1]https://bancosparenting.wordpress.com/2023/02/04/pickle-and-...

This is a great new addition to my collection of low-budget screen-free ways to teach programming concepts to little kids.[0]

We don't have a xylophone but I might just have to get one so we can try out this game - I love it!

[0]https://twitter.com/CBancos/status/1581662053189574656

My kids are having a blast with these. Although my ear drums are feeling thankful that so far they haven't discovered the spectrogram one that makes a picture of whatever you sing/shout.