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Regulation does add friction. And it makes it easier for a parent to say 'no, you aren't allowed that app' (which you can obviously say anyway, but it gives you a very solid and non-negotiable reason to say no). Some children will find their ways round things, but a lot, if their friends aren't using a particular app, won't bother, or they will be the type of children who won't try and break the law.

Most apps and sites are terrible in terms of the parental controls they provide - they tend to be all or nothing. E.g. I'd like to have a group for our family on WhatsApp but I don't want my children to be able to join random WhatsApp groups and there isn't any way to have the former and not the latter.

Homework requires internet-connected devices (I guess you can semi-supervise that, but it becomes harder as they become older as you don't want to sit there watching them do all their homework).

There is also a cost socially, which is hard to navigate as a parent. If everybody is talking about minecraft every break and playing it together in the evenings, then it's hard for them if they haven't even seen the game.

It already exists in the schools near where I live in the UK, but only came into place in some of them in the last year. I was surprised that they had been so slow about it.

The vast majority of research-level pure mathematics is never going to get used in science or engineering. Obviously it is hard to predict what will be useful, but for the type of mathematics that is unlikely to be, there is a question as to why we care about it, and that almost has to come down to beauty in some sense - some mathematics gives us a new lens to look at parts of the mathematical world and others chip away at problems in more mundane ways in the hope that they inspire or contribute to new parts of mathematics that are beautiful.

Games stuff for me too - geoguessr in my case. It'd never have been worth putting in the time to build them without AI but so easy with AI.

The employers will think it requires less skill, whereas in fact it might actually require more skill to do a good job of being the human-in-the-loop.

For example, my sister is a translator and she says that checking AI translations is actually harder in many ways than doing a translation in the first place, but the agencies pay less for checking than actual translation.

As a parent of teenagers, I feel like the sites make it hard for parents.

When they were young, you had a choice between YouTube being completely locked down with no option to whitelist channels or letting them watch almost anything (although I think this has changed since but it's too late now for those of us with children that age).

Now, there is no way I can whitelist contact/groups on WhatsApp or Discord servers/friends. Once they hit 13, pretty much any option to restrict anything feels taken away from you as a parent.

Luckily, I have sensible children (I think!) but it's really hard as a parent trying to both be reasonably responsible, but not deny all technology, it's really hard to navigate a sensible course.

Having owned a house for two decades (well two houses because we moved) and having two children, I would say that owning a home feels like a doddle in comparison :-)

I haven't done the sums to compare expenses, but when they are young childcare/lost earnings is definitely more than insurance/repair/maintenance costs (and tax, although in my country you pay tax as a tenant too).

Minecraft servers are full of teens!

In the UK if you sell or rent out a house it has to have an energy certificate with a rating (specified by a letter). I'm pretty sure that you aren't allowed to rent out properties with less than a certain rating and that rating which is higher than you might expect.

Perhaps the people teaching thec purses don't feel qualified to talk about the history?

I taught university-level computer science and I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. I know something about the history and might mention things in passing but I don't think I could legitimately teach it to other people!

I have been researching local history and Google's AI is a godsend at reading old handwriting so I can quickly get an idea if a document will be relevant or not.

It did, but I'm not sure it exists any longer. This was 15 years ago and I've just done a quick google and can't find it. It was called the Pelagios project and it used the Pleiades gazetteer.

There are actually quite a lot of these in the UK - I remember many years ago meeting a lady who had visited them all and written a book about them!

I'm curious as to how social media gets defined for these bans.

I presume text messaging doesn't count whereas Discord/WhatsApp do? What about Minecraft and other games? What about school platforms which they can post comments/messages on? Is watching YouTube included? When I've filled in surveys about our children's social media use, they have included YouTube, which makes it look like every child is on social media.

I'm in my 50s and British and I've only had it done once: by the police when the house I was living in got burgled and they wanted to rule out our finger prints. It was 30 years ago and I imagine I could have refused. I didn't really think about it at the time.

Same in UK - I usually use it when giving my postcode to people.

For a while I worked on a project related to mapping the ancient world (so you could e.g. click on a ancient city and then see items from museums from that city, references in ancient texts etc) and one of the interesting problems was not just that cities changed over time but that things like coastlines also did.

The first ever night train I went, about 25 years ago, on was from Berlin to Malmo. Early morning, I woke up to the feeling of my bed swaying and looking out of the window realised 'hang on, they've put the train on a ferry'.

I had no idea that trains got put on ferries, although I had been puzzled by the way the route on the route map crossed the sea but had assumed it was just to make the diagram simpler. It was quite a surreal thing finding myself unexpectedly on a train on a ferry. It was nice though as you could go and wander round the ferry and it was quite fun seeing it go off the ferry which had special train tracks on it onto the normal train tracks on the land.

I've definitely seen an NHS comment on a planning application near here along the lines of 'for this number of new houses we need this amount of money to increase GP provision'. I guess it feeds into Section 106 stuff?

Surely name, email, phone and date of birth aren't enough to do this at any bank? That's not quite public info but near enough. I've filled that in on hundreds of forms during my life and it's info that any of my friends have.

When I saw this originally on The Guardian website I thought 'has the Guardian really sunk as low as clickbait titles?' and didn't click, not realising that is was a self-referential title!

If you're travelling with young children being seated together isn't a luxury, so it's basically a tax on travelling with children, and a fairly expensive one ($100 easily for a return flight perhaps for four seats?) when you've paid it for all the seats for your family.

Though when we had young children, we seriously considered not paying and enjoying having somebody else looking after our four or five year old for the flight :-)

Given it is a necessity, I feel it should either be a compulsory extra cost if you have children below a certain age or it should (ideally) be free to be seated together, so that people who do pay for particular seats know that there won't be an unsupervised child allocated to the seat next to them.

It's pretty much impossible to find a school in the UK that doesn't use phonics. One of my sons learned to read mostly using phonics, whereas the other one I think learned through a mixture of phonics and whole word recognition (not necessarily taught by the school - he just seemed to remember and recognise words and not really need phonics so much).

It was interesting seeing how our particular school did teach reading using phonics. They used something called a 'Thrass chart'. It had 120 boxes, each one containing a letter or combination of letters that could make a particular sound and an example of a word containing that combination and sound. So, importantly, some combinations of letters appeared more than once on the chart.

It looks rather complicated when you first looked it at but obviously they introduced it all very gradually. So if somebody was stuck on a word, it would be 'Let's find those letters on the Thrass chart and see what sounds they could make'. I can't find a good image of it online, but you can see a slightly blurred one on this page: https://www.thrass.co.uk/

I wonder if there is also a problem where if you are too 'rational' then it's easy to dismiss other people's emotions as invalid - you see them as cognitive biases and look down on people who want to listen to or express those emotions in some way. Not all rationalists do this of course, but I think it's an easy trap to fall into and perhaps tolerated in the rationalist community in a way that it might not be elsewhere.

Looks like it was removed in 1827. I don't actually remember having to say anything at any of my graduation ceremonies there (BA, MA, DPhil), just walking on to the stage. I do wonder if at matriculation we all had to make some oath together but I think I would have remembered if that had been the case. I have a strong feeling though I might have had to make an oath when I became a scholar - there was definitely a ceremony we had to go to - but that would have been college-dependent.

I have a very different sense for the size of countries since starting to play Geoguessr as the number of points that you get depends on distance. You start to appreciate things like how big Brazil and Indonesia are and other things like how far the Atacama desert stretches. You can guess in the Atacama and still lose a lot of points!

The schools here I have experience with are stricter about smart watches than phones - you can get everybody to turn their phone off all day or keep it in a locker, but it's much harder with watches.

I've learned a massive about the world in the process - before I started playing I wouldn't have had a proper image in my head for what certain parts of the world were like really. And there's lots of weird and curious things you learn along the way - it's an interesting mix of so many different things.

And it's just fun which is the main reason for playing. I probably spend about half an hour a day playing and I don't intentionally spend time learning stuff like car meta - I try and mostly go on what places actually look like. I have learned a few things that are fairly useless but nothing that has been too arduous to learn, and e.g. when I was learning the names of provinces of different countries, I was trying to learn stuff about the province at the same time so I know something about the culture, food etc. too.

Haha, I do still need to get better at my different shades of red!

(Actually I can actually recognise some areas from soil/vegetation but I can still have rounds where the area that seems feasible seems huge to me).