pkdpic

Also playing through on Steam Deck. Steam QTE problems really haven't hindered my enjoyment at all. Kind of shocking how well it's aged overall and how different it is playing through as an adult.

I am waaay better at driving that forklift 20+ years later. The foreman loves me now.

I just coincidentally found my old dreamcast while cleaning out my dad's storage space... Guess I'll be buying some batteries for my VMU...

Also excellent write up and discovery, truly inspiring *clap_emoji *bow_emoji

That's funny my grandma had a similar story she used to tell me about how to enrich uranium.

Glad you drew this comparison. I have a 4yo who (TLDR) we didn't really push TV on and started reading on his own when he was two.

Before he was born I put a lot of thought into what he would watch before he was born assuming it would be a huge necessity to address. I torrented Mr Rodgers and Reading Rainbow and Eureka (amazing old science cartoon if anyone's encountered it) and I even started writing a script that would randomly select from these and automatically turn off after 1-3 episodes.

Basically I am shocked at how wrong I was. He had no natural interest in TV beyond a few minutes, even if we were watching something. We didn't have a reason to push it, when he did see newer kids media like Bluey / Cocomelon etc he would zombie out exactly as you described and then have noticeably crappier behavior for a while after we would have to have a minor battle to turn it off. Felt like microwaving his brain and we had no reason to push it on him so we didn't. After a few days he would never miss it. We let him watch stuff at friend's houses and still pop on old stuff that I downloaded once every week or two. Same basic behavior / problems. We always back off for the same reasons.

I grew up on TV and I don't judge parents who legitimately love watching TV with their kids or need it as a babysitter because of demanding schedules or absent child care assistance. It is an incredible tool in a culture that often separates extended families and discourages grandparents from playing active daily supportive roles.

But yeah for whatever reason our kid started reading independently when he was two, got really interested in languages, got his basic operators down while he was 2-3 and has never had any serious behavioral or developmental problems and other parents are always asking us what we did to accelerate his development and make him such a genius.

We didn't do anything unnatural, we just didn't intentionally push him to watch a lot of TV. He still watches stuff, we still watch stuff. It's just on a laptop and ends when he starts turning into a zombie.

With that said Bluey seems fine to me, my kids the one with the weird zombie reaction. And disclaimers all kids are different, I'm incredibly lucky to work from home on a schedule where I get to hang out with him all the time and I'm pretty sure regardless of zombie Cocomelon watching his generations problems are not going to be rooted in them zonking out on TV but who knows.

Absolutely fantastic, well done! I wish I encountered more scifi like this on HN or elsewhere. If anyone has any good general resource or reading recommendations please share them!

Just a side question but "while the rest of the world builds ai systems" makes me curious about what rough percentage of software engineers out there are working directly on building AI systems, even just on a front end level.

Assuming there's not an easily access exact percentage, just curious what people's perceptions are.

In talking about how they manage to keep it so drama / toxicity free with other alums all we can ever really do is speculate. But people being asked to leave seems to be very rare so we've often concluded it must be in the admissions process. Admissions interviews sound like they are very different experiences for different people but I know that in mine at least there were moments where I could have responded with toxic behavior but didn't. At the very least it seems like any pair programming interview gives ample opportunities to accidentally violate those rules so they might be naturally selecting folks who already organically follow those rules rather than having to artificially conform to them. All speculative though who knows.

Anyway to actually answer your question I think that unfortunately asking people to leave is the mechanism by which they enforce those rules after a few attempts to course correct. I believe I heard stories about that happening but didn't witness it personally and it seemed clear that they weren't interested in broadcasting those instances to the larger community.

The Connections Museum staff might be a starting point.

> the recurse center social rules foster collaboration and psychological safety, consider using them

> No well-actually’s > No feigned surprise > No backseat driving > No subtle -isms

There seems to be something really magical about the Recurse Center social rules. Or maybe their admissions process. Or both. I did a batch a couple years ago and I was stunned at how fun and drama-free people are there. I've heard occasional stories of negative experiences but nowhere near what Id expect for a group of passionate intelligent creatives working at vastly different levels of expertise.

Anyway glad to see the RC rules propagating and love this idea. I'm inspired to try to start a computer club at my 5yo's school! *crossed-fingers

Is this the sort of data that could be useful in training LLMs or in terms of demographic data that would be valuable to advertisers?

Agreed, super cool project. All it seems like it would need for a full pollock vibe would be a color palette selector. And maybe this audio track on loop and a transparent overlay of animated cigarette smoke. Great url.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzppQU-lqA

Before having a kid I never realized how powerful of a tool a TV or an iPad was in terms of (essentially) free babysitting.

Families where grandparents can afford to retire and / or move closer to their grandchildren are operating on an entirely different level financially. As are families where the parent or parents can work from home. As are families that can afford childcare which can easily cost as much or more than a mortgage in California at least. Even after public Kindergarten or TK becomes available these are mostly only half day coverage (again in CA) and you are completely on your own to figure out how to cover (pay for) the rest of the time if both parents work and there aren't other family members in the picture.

So in summary, I never would have realized that regardless of how much screen time you want your kid having the reality has shown itself to be that there is a direct correlation between relying on screen time and the financial standing of you and your extended family, for better or worse.

I was very lucky to have remote work when I had a kid, but my parents couldn't / can't afford to retire and that has had a huge financial impact on us. If I had an in-person job we would have had to rely a lot more on screens to fill in the gaps.

In any case no complaints I absolutely love having a kid and am glad to pay for good quality school / childcare and I don't really believe there's anything wrong with screen time anyway.

Watching 3-6 hours of TV a day after school while my parents worked and did whatever adults did in the 90's didn't seem to do as much harm to me mentally as I would have thought. It seems insane in retrospect.

Such an excellent context to put this in. Even just thinking more broadly about the unimaginably long stretches of relative stability / homogeneity in ancient and prehistoric cultures. The Old / Middle / New Kingdoms (c. 2,700-1,100 BCE), Aurignacian (c. 60,000-24,000 BCE) and Gravettian culture (c. 30,000-15,000 BCE) come to mind but the examples are basically endless.

I came for the article, I stayed for the domain name.

I may be missing something obvious but I'm not super clear on what this would be used for.

What kinds of projects have people done where this might be used?

[edit]

Or alternatively what would be a good first project that could justify getting one of these?

That's an excellent idea, sounds like it might be possible (ironically) as a chrome extension? Someone should make it but more importantly someone should come up with a good name for it ;)

Absolutely fantastic, please make a version for Playdate or gameboy DMG and put it on itch.io for $10-$100 so I can give you money for this case study in gameplay perfection.

It's so beautiful and inspiring that one lone coder can still make something with so much joy and playability in an era of multimillion dollar games that take the work of hundreds of people for years on end.

This is a tribute to humanity itself, well done.

Just in case anyone else was confused by the lead image of the Lascaux cave replica. This is about a cave near Lascaux, not Lascaux.

> The Bison Cave is named after the Paleolithic drawings of animals on its main gallery walls. It is considered one of the best examples of ancient wall painting along with the nearby Lascaux cave.

And not to diminish this but just for context the Chauvet cave paintings (also in France) have been estimated to be 37,000 years old, also using radio carbon dating.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave

Super interesting that most if the paintings in the Dordogne region used oxide pigments (if that's what the article is saying), didn't know that.

Yeah those old timey pedestrians didn't stand a chance. Seriously though good point I think, but what about crumple zones?

That's the smartest possible counterpoint to all this, nicely counterpointed.

This was a fun read and I agree in sentiment to the rage of all the crap from target that falls apart in 10 minutes but I feel like I've developed an ok sense if when I'm taking this risk and am less frustrated when something cheap fails. Essentially any time I buy anything but a book from Amazon or anything but cereal and vodka from Target. Ultimately I think the crapification of lowend consumer goods has just made me buy less crap, which feels good I think. I've also accepted a pretend scifi narrative in which the only kind of society that doesn't descend into anarchy is one where people are constantly buying and throwing away cheap crap.

And as an aside I have one of those crazy juicers but I stopped using it because it scares my wife and smells like burning / ozone.

Reminds me of the beginning of ghost in the shell in all the right ways.

Great read, but I'm wondering why this began in the 1920's? Or was it always an issue for human beings living in Switzerland?

Always a classic. My three year old was unfazed unfortunately.

Everyone else getting a 500 level error? Is this a Mastodon issue?

> The United States has more homeless people than ever since the country began measuring the size of the homeless population annually in 2007.

Pretty important seeming, and a little surprising.

So based on this wording the homeless population is higher than its ever been since we started recording it?

If only I could do something to fight this... at this job I'm at right now... writing code...

Seriously though if I ever had any concrete assurance that the code I was writing wouldn't get tossed on a whim it would be a lot easier for my team lead to defend the extra time it takes to write clever minimalist efficient code. Everything I write feels like its a mockup or proof of concept first-pass but if it works then its good enough and everyone moves on.

Software is weird.

One of the first things I did when someone showed me a pre-Chat version of GPT-3 was try to get it to speak in the voice of Borges. I had the same feeling of interesting but inappropriate.

I was really happy to see this pop up and I'm glad someone went through this as a thought experiment but you make a good point that didn't initially occur to me.

I feel like Borges' secular scifi-adjacent mysticism looses a lot of what makes it most meaningful when it's imitated or dissected academically.

That said it does feel like Borges would probably be into the idea of being imitated.

Glad to see this pop up, its been a weirdly big struggle for me as a new-ish parent.

For a while my ancient CD collection and healthy ecosystem of local used vinyl / CD stores had us in a nice routine in conjunction with youtube-dl and my posse of old Sony voice memo usb mp3 players.

Then youtube-dl wasn't a thing anymore (maybe it is again?)...

Then we had to get a new car (a Tacoma)...

No CD player, no aux cable.

I had really bad early experiences with apple music and Spotify not having stuff I wanted. Unclear artist support reputations also (Im no expert there). But it all had heavy Enshittification vibes early on IMHO.

Anyway somehow in my exhausted dad mental state I've concluded that buying albums on iTunes like a maniac is at least worth a try before augmenting my car to have an aux cable and / or peripheral CD player. I held off buying albums on iTunes literally until 2 months ago. Very strange but maybe working.

Anyway curious what other folks are doing as far as listening to music. This article was spot on but I needed a Solutions section...

I don't think theres one simple conclusion to this ongoing general question of pre-history vs modernity but I remember coming across the infanticide and geriatricide rates in pre-agricultural societies (not that they were / are all the same) at some point and having it complicate my thinking pretty drastically.

I believe it was in here, its a quick interesting read in any case.

http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scan...

Maybe someone can advise me here but what are you supposed to do with kids that start reading and doing math early?

My three year old is reading and doing all the math I can throw at him and I was a dumb kid growing up so I have no idea what I'm supposed to do (ie private school, tutoring, testing, music lessons, educational psychologists, just chilling out and hiking with him etc)

Anyway loved reading about this guys method but was hoping for more guidance. If anyone has any thoughts or advice Im super curious / feeling lost.