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.

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.)

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.

I’m excited for this. I just got my wife a Deck used to play Escape Simulator together, but this will make it a lot easier for her to play most of my other games, now, too.

Sadly Dragon Age 3 can’t be shared, which I should have added to her account, not mine… But we only had 1 Deck at the time! (On the other hand, I’ll be able to play most of my library on her device while she’s playing, so not a big deal!)

I think you can Steam Remote Play Together with non-Steam games, but that’s the only way to “share” them that I know of.

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+).

You could also try booting something from MicroSD so it’s easier to revert.

Seconding contacting Valve support, too.

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.)

To add to your last point, academics aren’t even the biggest problem: it’s youth mental health that’s in a crisis right now. Focusing on academic “success” itself is a problem. Academics will come if students have mental health and resilience.

Yes, that’s why I specified above that “home schooling” usually comes with lots of extra funding.

In my jurisdiction, an autistic student gets ~$30K of funding, half of which is earmarked for education specifically. In a public school, that gets maybe 45 min of EA time + being on a learning support teacher’s caseload. With “home schooling”, that $15K can pay for enrollment in a specialized small-group part-time program for academics.

The other $15K funding can pay for respite workers, if parents need more time for work, or lots of other things.

Also, parents are much better equipped to follow their children’s interests with authentic experiential learning than any public school can be. Schools can’t afford 1-to-1 attention, and parents know their children best. With academic support covered, parents can focus on following their children’s interests.

These students are also followed by a teacher (like me) and a learning support teacher to help coordinate resources, support workers, and other planning. There are layers of support.

It’s an incredibly effective educational model.

I don’t know if something similar is available in the US. I imagine it varies by state, and I would not expect Red states to support programming like this.