guy98238710

> Would that not utterly stratify social classes?

Not today. Schools no longer have monopoly on education. They actually prevent kids from learning by overloading them with the official curriculum, leaving no time or energy for informal education.

Don't be so cynical. There are serious problems with schools and there's no visible progress, so many people gave up. They concluded the problems are endemic and permanent and the only way to fix them is to dissolve the schools entirely.

Beware of unquantifiable words like "matures". It might just mean minor ongoing changes. Or it might even mean deterioration. In the end, performance is what matters, not morphology.

Fluid intelligence drops with age:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906299/

You weren't an idiot as a teenager. You were just uneducated and inexperienced.

Personally, my decaying mental performance over the years is almost palpable. I feel like I am half-dead now compared to who I was 20 years ago. Sure I was nuts due to the powerful emotions, but that just means I was alive, not a talking corpse that I am now.

Needs sorting by last post date and a way to add new blogs.

??? My kid loves it to this day. It's a major hobby. Never heard about anyone who would hate Scratch. Maybe it was a really poor presentation by the teacher.

> What exactly is so difficult to understand about a school being there for educational purposes, and the smartphone directly distracting from that?

Smartphone is a universal computer. You can use it for a variety of tasks, including education. Schools are supposed to teach that rather than throwing students back into the stone age.

Smartphones (and computers in general) aren't just any tool. If used properly, they are powerful cognitive multipliers. Removing them from schools is like giving every student a lobotomy, because they aren't using their brain the way they are supposed to.

> "Isn't allowing any kind of behavior the default in free societies?"

> No?

Err, are you living in a (relatively) free society? My country has this principle written in the constitution: people can do anything the law does not prohibit whereas the government can only do what the law expressly permits it to do. I would think that's the standard in democracies.

Children can be taught how to use computers in diverse and interesting ways since early age. I know, because I did it with my kid. And I did not exhaust the possibilities, so it can be certainly done much better if educational professionals invest themselves in the topic. As most parents aren't up to the task, schools are supposed to do it since kindergarten, but instead of offering positive and enjoyable examples, they choose to spread the sort of fear-inducing negative technophobic propaganda many people are repeating here.

As for what I mean by technophobic propaganda, just listen to yourself: "the belief that social media and smartphone games are addictive". People aren't stupid. Psychological trickery can get games and media only so far. People crave a variety of experiences. It's not that hard to keep students' attention either by offering an interesting subject, by listening and being honest (for a change), or just by being there as a parent or teacher.

> Computers as a tool for educational purposes is different than a TikTok stream.

But nobody is banning TikTok. All schools that do anything about smartphones are always banning smartphones as such. Nobody is showing the kids how to use computers properly nor is anyone expecting them to use them for anything but games and social. Schools are just giving up on the subject and closing themselves in 19th century world. The same TikTok justification would be used against school computers until they are locked down so much they cannot be considered universal computers anymore.

> Corporations locking down work terminals is legally permissible and morally correct.

And a reliable way to get rid of the best employees by optimizing the whole organization for the worst ones. This is schools we are talking about. Pulling everyone down to the lowest standard of behavior is clearly against schools' mission. Schools should be instead optimized for the best students and push everyone to be their best selves.

> It isn't totalitarian, I disagree completely with the use of that term and with the implication that teenagers should have franchise at any level above local.

This is a bit OT, but aren't teenagers smarter that pensioners in every way you can measure except vocabulary? Aren't teenagers emotionally, cognitively, and physically clearly closer to 18+ adults than prepubescent children? If so, what makes you think they aren't effectively adults? Anyways, prepubescent children don't get to vote for practical reasons, specifically because they don't care and because they are under strong influence of their parents. Neither reason applies to teenagers.

Why do you need reasons to allow smartphones? Isn't allowing any kind of behavior the default in free societies? You need a good reason to disallow something and especially so in case of a sweeping mass measure like this. I haven't heard any arguments against smartphones that wouldn't be shallow BS about "addictiveness" (seems everything is "addictive" these days) or "distraction" (as if there weren't other opportunities for distraction).

PS: I did mention some reasons: computer for every pupil, Socratic app (and others), maintaining high expectations, resisting technological regress in schools that are already backwards. Not that this would be an exhaustive list.

I am a very caring parent and I have an exceedingly well-behaved kid. I am always kind and I have very few rules. My kid has unrestricted phone time but still prefers other stuff like Scratch.

If you are thinking of children as prison inmates that deserve the totalitarian treatment, perhaps you are doing something wrong.

> Once you start to demand that schools become more entertaining than the most addictive thing the world's entertainment technologists can dream up, you've kind of lost sight of the mission of a school.

People aren't idiots. Kids aren't idiots either. They want more than mindless entertainment. A school computer with Scratch can easily compete with a platformer on the phone. School in general is in a good position to be empowering, but the system prefers to be oppressive instead.

Careful with generalizations. I have a kid with unlimited game time on the phone and he will prefer Scratch or book reader nearly all of the time anyway. He has been doing coding games since he was 4. Most kids don't do this only because nobody has shown them how to use computers for anything other than games and social media.

He deleted Socratic app soon after I have shown it to him though, but not because he needed space for games, but rather because "the teacher must not see this". You should have seen the panic in his eyes.

Also, the only social media he is using is classroom Whatsapp, which is effectively required by the school, because there is no other reliable source of information about missed classes and other school matters.

All those kids playing games and scrolling through social media might be just fulfilling teachers' expectations after all.

High-tech enforcement of 19th century teaching styles...

> A computer to use in the school as a means of education is not the same of letting kids use a cellphone in class

It is the same thing if the computers are uncensored as they should be. Kids are supposed to be taught responsibility since early age. If it can be done for computers, it can be surely done for smartphones.

> Because they are adults not kids

As someone else detailed in comments, this is aimed at secondary education and up, i.e. young adults (teens and tweens) rather than children.

> Totalitarian policies? This has to be a joke

Think again what would happen if your government tried to enforce this against adults. Wouldn't you call it totalitarian?

> it's a about kids not using a cell phone while in the classroom

It's about kids not using any computing device in the classroom. 19th century education. As I have said, this is technophobia all the way through.

In your example, you are asking GPT-4 to rewrite code from one public style to another public style. I was saying that LLMs cannot reflect your personal style, because they know nothing about it. Even when instructed at length and provided with short examples (that fit in the context window), they always gravitate to the public average.

This is so wrong in so many ways.

- There's supposed to be a computer in front of every kid since grade one. Schools are instead banning the little computers kids smuggle in.

- Hypocrisy. Smartphone bans are pushed by people who use them all the time themselves.

- This is the same thing as with corporations locking down employees' computers. It's a policy designed for the worst behaving kids to the detriment of the best behaving ones. Poor use of time and poor self-control become expected and even the best kids will slide towards these low expectations.

- Totalitarian policies like this get passed only because teens and tweens are disenfranchised. Democratic government trying to enforce similar population-wide ban wouldn't last long.

- It's not about games or social media. Those are actually tolerated far better than apps like Socratic, which are treated like criminal level of cheating. This is technophobia all the way through.

I could go on and on about this. Contrary to people nitpicking details (health, parent contact, practicality of enforcement), I think this is fundamentally wrong.

Isn't this largely solved with links (including fragment links) and comment sections? Webpages are much shorter than books. There's no need to use anything like page number.

> take this codebase and make it look like my code

That's exactly what LLMs don't do. In my experience, there is no way to convince ChatGPT (even v4) to follow any conventions or obey any rules. It might try a bit, but it always ends up writing everything its own way, usually as verbosely as possible.

Bloody fools. They don't know what beast they are waking up. Certain portion of ad blocker users are zealots. These people are insane and quite a few of them are quite resourceful. Just a few problems that are going to hit YT:

- torrents and other piracy

- rapidly evolving ad-blockers

- undetectable ad-blockers sitting in a new page layer invisible to page scripts

- visual ML ad-blockers detecting ads no matter how they are loaded

- new ad-free P2P video sharing websites

- influential users discouraging everyone from using YT

- popular content creators moving off YT and advertising other hosting options

It's not their content though. Most people upload stuff without any intent to monetize or otherwise control it. YT, like other large sites, was built through mass-scale theft of what was supposed to be public domain works.

Sure it's their servers, but then it's their fault they don't allow redistribution via third party channels.

Engineers have created it and lawyers have ruined it. It's interesting how whole professions can be inherently constructive or inherently destructive.

The more I keep thinking about this the less I am inclined to do any optimizations. This is operating system problem. OSes are supposed to implement proper sleep modes for apps instead of mindlessly restarting them.

Don't throw this on devs. Attempting to fix the problem on dev side would cost billions of dollars worldwide and it would probably fail. Meanwhile, proper app sleep modes across all OSes is a comparatively small million-dollar project.

Personally, I am not going to invest a single second of my time into optimizations of app launch if I can avoid it. If you are bothered by app launch performance, go hack app sleep states into Linux or other free OS instead of shouting at devs.

Perhaps what's needed is hibernation for apps? Just let all apps run forever and swap them out to disk when not in use. Hibernate the whole system instead of shutting it down while at it.

Root cause is that startup path is more crowded these days with JIT, dynamic linking, app initialization, filesystem/DB scans, sandbox initialization, subprocesses, etc. It's a natural consequence of the apps (or underlying frameworks) growing in size and complexity. Optimizing it all by hand is unreasonably expensive if not impossible.

What we need instead is a way to persist the process or even whole sandbox to disk and then fork off new instances from that. That's much less work and much more effective than piecemeal optimizations (AOT, native code, etc.). Unfortunately, existing platforms and frameworks do not support forking, let alone forking from persisted app image.

It's the contrast. Like with impossible/imaginary colors. People are apparently comparing themselves to others.

That sounds positively scary. Also, there will be no eye contact unless both sides are willing to maintain it.

While this sort of general self-help advice is deservedly ridiculed*, it does have some application in education. Kids often have no idea what they want or where they are going. It's too personal and subjective for schools to teach. Parents find it overbearing and invasive. Nevertheless, just asking kids to come up with ideas can get them thinking. Short-term plans that are followed through give them confidence that achievement is something they can systematically work on.

* If you are wondering why people laugh at this, it's because goal-setting and high-level planning is so much easier than actually doing something, which is where it all fails. See also TODO bankruptcy.

> 1. Putting things on the web means your words are public, so they can be archived forever, and anyone can look at them.

> 4. Most people don't want to put the effort into writing/posting anything beyond basic food/vacation photos or whatnot.

Nobody cares about opinions of some dipshit. There are literally millions of experts in the world. We want to hear from them.

> 3. If you don't want to bother with hosting your own site, you are at the mercy of platforms...

Wikipedia & sister sites. StackOverflow. I am pretty sure there is space for more open-content sites, especially ones run by non-profits.

> 5. It's lonely running a website!

Comment sections help a lot. Blogs can also have multiple authors.