Project 2025 includes a detailed plan about how to dismantle the entire Federal government and replace thousands of government managers with alt-right extremists.

Project 2025 matches most of his campaign promises and is written largely by former Trump administration staffers.

The ultra-wealthy are terrified of reprisal from Trump. And they control the media (Bezos/WP) and social media (Zuck).

Democracy in America may fail next week. Terrifying to watch.

“Family first” is unidirectional. Parents put their kids first. That’s the job. I signed up for it, and I’m going to prioritize then as much as I can.

I worry that age verification will backfire spectacularly; users can just tunnel their traffic through a VPN and then once on a VPN, they would also miss all harmful content blocking. Middle schoolers can figure out how to get around school web filters, and they, and everyone else, will figure their way around age verification just as easily.

… Or pay them for it!

There’s a prolific open-source dev that makes many plugins and themes for a widely-used OSS platform. He’s quite open when asked for new features if it’s something he’s already planning on doing anyway (with no guaranteed timeline) or if it’s not. But if it’s a reasonable ask, he’ll always mention that he can prioritise its development if they fund it. He even posts his current contractor rate; it’s quite transparent.

I think more OSS devs should be more open like that. “Yes, I can do that feature request. Sounds like about 2-3 hours work. My hourly is $120 for contract work. Email me here if you’re interested and I’ll send a contract.”

Fake news. Harris had a high conviction rate for nonviolent drug offenses because she was allowing them to complete a program instead of serving time for a guilty plea. She had great results for reducing recidivism rates.

Sure, the war on drugs itself is a problem, but Harris wasn’t locking people up for nonviolent drug offenses; that completely flips and mischaracterizes her work as a DA.

But you’re just sea lioning anyway. I look forward to seeing how you move the conversation to another Russian/Chinese talking point in your inevitable reply.

Edit: 4 autocorrect fails

Canada uses gc.ca for federal government sites, and I think every province gets their own, too, like .bc.ca (but I don’t know if they all use them.)

Sure, but long-term climate risks definitely factored into my family’s most recent move to a new city.

Previously, we lived somewhere it was too cold to go out in winter (–50°C during a polar vortex) and too smoky to go out in the summer, from the constant bushfires and forest fires. And also had massive hail storm risks, drought/water insecurity, and if you lived closer to the river, flooding.

Now, we live somewhere where we only really face mild water insecurity from aquifer depletion. This close to the Pacific, we rarely get significant fire smoke, even. The Big One earthquake would suck if it happens in our lifetime, but that’s mostly unrelated to anthropogenic climate change (the tsunami would be higher from water levels rising.)

So, sure, yeah. We’re all affected by climate change. But the effects are definitely not equally dispersed.

Wireless game streaming is another reason to upgrade WiFi. I couldn’t stream anything from my wired desktop to my Steam Deck on WiFi from the ISP-supplied router. I just finished upgrading to a WiFi mesh network partly because of that… but I haven’t tested game streaming yet.

I expect it should do great, though. My Fire Stick used to occasionally buffer even with ~1.5GB/hr content, but I just tried a 1080p remux at 15GB/hr and it worked great.

You can get a cheap mp3 player for literally $5. Digital textbooks can be viewed just fine on a laptop, and schools have hundreds of those.

Smart phones are addiction machines. I’m very glad to see schools banning them. Hopefully, parents take note and realize how harmful they are for child development and start buying them dumb phones instead until they’re older (16+).

I can’t speak to the US, but that’s not what’s happening in Canada, generally. I hear the UK public system is having difficulties, too, but idk the details.

There are some places in Canada that are struggling, particularly in remote rural areas, Indigenous or not (but even moreso for Indigenous schools for historical inequity issues that we’re working on meaningfully addressing with national Truth and Reconciliation work.)

Teacher:

Myth: The job is mostly about delivering lessons and grading tests and assignments, so once you’ve done a course once, you can coast forever.

Reality: designing and delivering a lecture is just about the easiest thing in teaching. And also very ineffective teaching, so it’s not done very often.

Myth: School is the same as it was a generation ago, when parents were in school.

Reality: There have been huge shifts in education, with research-supported practices replacing a lot of old, ineffective strategies. The teachers who are “old school” are usually ignoring educational research out of arrogance and/or laziness.

I recall hearing a story about law enforcement identifying an otherwise-anonymous phone by other phones that pinged the same cell towers at the same times. Essentially, the person had two phones on them, so they were able to uniquely identify the individual based on the shared location history of the two devices.

So there’s that, too, assuming my memory isn’t just some CSI bullshit. (It seems reasonable that this attack vector is technologically possible, though, and it may not matter if it’s legal if the identification technique isn’t used as evidence in court.)

The actual analysis itself makes it clear that the research specifically on cell phone bans is lacking. In particular, of the 1317 studies, only 22 were relevant, more than half of which were Master Degree research projects, not peer-reviewed studies. It’s fair that the evidence for cell phone bans in schools is inconclusive, but that’s because there isn’t enough quality reach yet to draw conclusions.

I was actually referring above to studies on cell phones in general for task success, non-specific to schools.

You’re missing the point entirely, I think.

If you want to learn about the research, Jonathan Haidt’s book includes links to studies on the effects of cell phones. I don’t have time to find the sources for you right now, but you can look there if you want to learn more.

It’s a shame your child’s teacher used the tool incorrectly. That was unprofessional of them.

If it helps, there are people like me running training sessions for educators to let them know what LLMs are (and are not) capable of. The main point I was pushing this year was that LLMs don’t know or understand anything. “The I in LLM stands for Intelligence.”

By age 16, there’s reason to think that youth can handle the addictive nature of phones, with support. Same for adults.

That said, yes, we probably should make dark patterns illegal, in general.

Smart phones in pockets being a problem is supported by robust psychology research. People do the worst at tasks when phones are on the desk in front of them, worse when phones are in their pockets, and best when phones are left in another room even if the devices are turned off, in all cases. It’s even worse if phones are on even without any sort of notification, like vibration. (And, obviously, notifications make things increasingly terrible.)

The research is not at all unclear or anecdotal; it is very strong. Phones are damaging to attention, task completion, and learning. This is established; the only disagreement is to the degree of the effect.

Re: phones in “class”, I think we’re misunderstanding each other due to terminology. Here, “a class” means a single instruction period. I thought you were for banning use during instruction time, but against phones being fully banned at school, but if you mean “class” to be the entire time from first bell to last bell, then we’re in agreement. No smart phones at all during school hours would be a good step.

Hopefully, that might also make parents more aware of the damage smart phones are causing and support a societal move away from giving youth addiction machines.

You’re only considering one narrow use of LLMs (which they’re bad at). They’re great for things like idea generation, formatting, restructuring text, and other uses.

For example, I tend to write at too high a writing level. I know this about myself, but it’s still hard (with my ADHD) to remain mindful of that while also focusing on everything else that crowds my working memory when doing difficult work. I also know that I tend to focus more on what students can improve instead of what they did well.

So ChatGPT is a great tool for me to get a first pass of feedback for students. I can then copy/paste the parts I agree with for praise, then “turd sandwich” my suggestions for improvement in the middle. Or I can use ChatGPT to lower the writing level for me.

For tests, it’s great to get it to generate a list of essay questions. You can feed GPT 4 up to 50 pages of text, too, so the content is usually really accurate if you actually know how to write good prompts.

I could go on. LLMs are a great tool, and teachers are professionals who (I hope) are using it appropriately. (Not just blindly copying/pasting like our students are… But that’s a whole other topic.)