> we can, hopefully, move past cookie-cutter education solutions and recognize the need for more hands-on, engaged education.
I'm not convinced children need "hands-on, engaged" education at the age of 10. At some point there's no shortcut to being socialized that patterns in numbers are interesting (which is one of the national goals of maths for 3rd graders in my country). 10 year olds won't find that stuff "engaging" on their own, they must be informed by authority figures that it's a thing worth paying attention to.
Too much of this "fuck the schools" mentality treats children as perfect little beings that must only be supported to grow into wonderful adults, when the reality is that socializing children is a brutal exercise in fitting them into norms.
They certainly can find things like patterns in numbers interesting. I just found a blog post I wrote when my daughter was a few weeks short of seven that says she found simple sequences interesting. "She was instantly fascinated, and thought that trying to figure out the rules of each sequence was a wonderful game. Whenever I ran out of ideas, she pestered me for more sequences."
You replaced the rote recitation of faceless homework with engagement from an authority. She was not interested in the sequence of numbers, but interested in your interest. She loves you, and is reflecting your engagement back at you in hopes of getting more validation. Children do that a lot.
You describe the homework as
> basically lots or practice in basic arithmetic
Which is absolutely what you need for these sequences to have any meaning. There is no "pure math" to have a game about, without the "pathetic" examples of Lucy's 5 apples and Tom's 2. If somebody hadn't (brutally) drilled the concept of numbers into her skull, the sequences of random symbols would not mean anything to her.
Engaging with your child, who has already been partially socialized, is not proof that this socialization wasn't necessary. For that, you would have to have locked your daughter in the basement for those 7 years, and then find that she was spontaneously able to do multiplication. That is not going to happen.
> No, you really, really should not be brutal to little children.
I hope you understand that _brutality_ as spiritual. It's the brutality of going against nature, of putting a monkey in a suit and locking it in an office for 8 hours a day to feed itself. You don't beat math into your children, but they sure as hell don't learn it from eating candy and watching Minecraft let's plays.
> You replaced the rote recitation of faceless homework with engagement from an authority. She was not interested in the sequence of numbers, but interested in your interest. S
She was quite capable of expressing what she was not interested in. You are just refusing to take experiences that do not match your preconceptions.
There is a huge different between engagement and "being informed by an authority figure" which implies they have no choice.
> She loves you, and is reflecting your engagement back at you in hopes of getting more validation. Children do that a lot.
Read the blog post. She demanded more of things she enjoyed rather than what I wanted her to do (finishing her home work). That is not seeking validation.
> If somebody hadn't (brutally) drilled the concept of numbers into her skull, the sequences of random symbols would not mean anything to her.
No, nothing brutal needed to drill the concept. You can teach very gently and make it fun.
> Engaging with your child, who has already been partially socialized, is not proof that this socialization wasn't necessary. For that, you would have to have locked your daughter in the basement for those 7 years, and then find that she was spontaneously able to do multiplication
Strawman. I did not say socialisation was not necessary, I said it did not have to be brutal.
> I hope you understand that _brutality_ as spiritual. It's the brutality of going against nature, of putting a monkey in a suit and locking it in an office for 8 hours a day to feed itself.
Who gets locked in an office?
> but they sure as hell don't learn it from eating candy and watching Minecraft let's plays.
That would be neglect. no one things complete neglect is bad.
> I hope you understand that _brutality_ as spiritual. It's the brutality of going against nature
> they sure as hell don't learn it from eating candy and watching Minecraft let's plays.
I learned math from flash cards my mother was using for my brother. He got M&Ms for getting them right, so of course I wanted to learn and join in. Many years later, I graduated with a degree in math.
So you absolutely can learn math from eating candy. I did.
By the time the bankruptcies come, they'll all be owned by index funds and main street. The price will crash at the break of the bankruptcy, and wall street will swoop in to buy up the "distressed assets" at bargain bin prices.
> We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.
That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing. The prevailing wisdom was that this "internet" thing was going to fundamentally change the structure of human society, and nothing would ever be the same again. We ignored the laws, and society broadly accepted that those laws weren't fit for this new world of abundance and information freedom anyway. Big tech was offered broad protection from any responsibility through laws such as Section 230, which basically says they can't be blamed for anything, as long as they structure their services as a "market".
After 20 years, I think we've found that actually the structure of human society has remained largely the same. The things we all need are still the same. The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.
>The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.
Except for something like housing, the supply of which has been artificially constrained by policy since before the internet arrived on the scene, I can’t think of anything which is harder to produce or distribute since the advent of the internet. Particularly on distribution, I have far more access to goods and services than my parents did.
Agreed that this hasn’t changed the structure of society in any meaningful way. We’re still social animals with all the same strengths and weaknesses as before.
>That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing.
By the people not involved in the things breaking maybe. If you didn't drive a taxi or run a hotel the tech companies "disrupting" things by breaking laws didn't affect you directly. Now with LLMs, they do.
I think this is a severely outdated take that was true a few years ago, but has not been true for at least 1-2 years. Especially from the top models at the top labs.
Qualitative measurement is always hard, but plenty of studies have come out in the past year that generally find many models' code to be roughly equal to human code in terms of maintainability, complexity, readability, etc.
> Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be?
He's been spinning his wheels for a while. Carmack is a great example of how important working on the right stuff is. He's undoubtedly a brilliant programmer. Through him we get to see that a brilliant programmer working on non-programming tasks, can produce nothing.
We are witnessing a generational lack of accountability and concern for the commons. We are being spied on everywhere we go, we are exposed to coercive advertisements at every waking moment. All of this at the hands of private actors. And your worry is the government?
I'm assuming you're a US citizen. There is no separation between your government and Sam or Dario. Neither of these guys have to be "gagged" by the government, they are the government. The call is coming from inside the house.
A retraction from the gaming market wouldn't necessarily mean they'd still even produce the current crop of products. I could (and I would argue would) involve a complete shuttering of the GeForce brand, halting current production. On the assumption that Intel and AMD would follow, that wouldn't be an end of upgrades, but an end to the market.
Gaming is a larger market than Hollywood. Maybe it becomes a distraction for Nvidia, but someone will step in. That might actually be a good thing and why Nvidia wont do that: it creates an under served market in which newcomers can cut their teeth.
This probably includes little silly games like Candy Crush, and (maybe) others that seem more like "paper" games like Sudoku, Wordle, Connections, etc. Many play those, especially the second bucket.
> Electrek has a bias against Tesla/Musk, IMHO and so tend to paint everything in a negative way.
I would say Tesla and Musk are a little bit worse here than Siemens or Honda or whatever. Usually the manufacturers don't lie quite as loudly about the future of the product.
I'm sure Tesla has been more opaque then other manufacturers, but I agree that the consequence here is just normal course of business stuff.
I'm not convinced children need "hands-on, engaged" education at the age of 10. At some point there's no shortcut to being socialized that patterns in numbers are interesting (which is one of the national goals of maths for 3rd graders in my country). 10 year olds won't find that stuff "engaging" on their own, they must be informed by authority figures that it's a thing worth paying attention to.
Too much of this "fuck the schools" mentality treats children as perfect little beings that must only be supported to grow into wonderful adults, when the reality is that socializing children is a brutal exercise in fitting them into norms.
reply