Seems like a good one to quibble about! I’d like to think through it more myself. I’m going off personal anecdote, so if you have data sources to add I am extremely interested.

I think the strongest ‘yes, and’ is to point out that TV and toys competing with blocks were both very much present in the 90s and 00s. In the childcare settings I see, Bluey and paw patrol are world’s better than Clifford, teletubbies, or Barney. Hilde and SheRa are both excellent television. (I do not wish to disparage Mr Roger’s or Sesame Street; note they are still available!)

For toys, I note the spread of ‘Discovery Boxes’ that make those physics lessons you highlight substantially more accessible. You don’t need a mentor whose well educated to steer you towards the cool (and at least directionally correct) properties of nature. I saw only a handful of these before 2010, but they seem much more common now. Compare with the figurines, cheesy electronic noise makers, and furbies.

3D printers are also becoming more accessible (if you don’t know someone who has one, your local library might provide! They’re reaching that price-point), which has allowed kids (and me) to play with interesting mechanical devices, precise shapes, and have some say in the exact toy you enjoy. I know of one little girl who got special printed ‘poop’ emojis, which she helped customize and size for her intended play.

We also have much better board games starting to reach this cohort. Candyland, snakes-and-ladders, and sometimes uno are what I remember seeing 20 years ago. While they still make an appearance, I am also seeing Project L, Sushi Go, and unstable unicorns in playrooms. Classrooms now have Hex in addition to chess or checkers.

We can move the range we’re looking at to earlier, so that we aren’t comparing with the 90s low point (TV still present, mass produced toys still common). However I think as we slide back further, we find substantially more abusive parenting practices, and I think these wash out the benefits of more creative toys. I suspect this is partially causal; parents can manage their children without snapping psychologically partially because we do have quality entertainment for the kids. It’s hard work being entertainment all day. Someone could argue (but I am not confident) that entertainment time is replacing pointless labor/waiting/punishment time, and kids are still spending similar hours running around, playing in dirt, and stacking blocks.

My second argument would be to challenge the premise a bit. I know people who are living partially (or even mostly) for the next big cool movie/book/game/show/toy in their life. Silksong has a release date and I certainly feel better about this next week. I think it’s an objective improvement that the film nerds get to enjoy quality shows from age 3, and I don’t think it would be fair to begrudge them the opportunity (or that so many people take the opportunity). This is a reason to be happy for the kids.

No. Only joy for the new parents and child. (Though I do put in work to shore up their finances, try to get them my next bonus.)

Several reasons: being a kid today is better than being a kid 20-50 years ago. Toys are cooler, parenting competence and training has broadly improved, minecraft exists, and there is some really good childrens TV.

Health risks are largely down, especially compared to 35 years ago. (Anecdotally about 10% of families around my cohort lost kids. Far fewer in the younger cohorts.)

While economic mobility is down, more people means a stronger voting block. Boomers run the world because their protests changed policy. I see indications that kids are a more competent politic than earlier generations (eg, climate and LGBTQ rights), we just need them to matter sooner.

For what it’s worth, the economy is not just bad, it’s breaking. If workers remain this exploited, there will soon be nobody to sell to. We are seeing large (usually stupid) interventions to try and address it, I put nontrivial odds on something sane eventually being tried.

War deaths are low and really don’t seem likely to increase dramatically (see here).

Edit: I forgot to add LGBTQ rights/acceptance! While there are definitely still places that are not safe, many of them were not safe before (and that was just the status quo), I believe the risks have decreased and will continue to do so, while the medical access has improved (and that hopefully will continue, though I’m personally expecting that to get worse before it gets better. I think kids today probably get good care in 10 years, some kids 6-12 are in for a bad time.)

4. Don’t remember why.

Try installing mint! Make sure you’ve cleared everything you want from the hard-drive before you start (and decide now if you’re going to dual-boot. If so, clear up space so you can do the partitioning you want before you start the process.)

whoa that’s amazing. Jellyfin does everything.

I’m giving men who feel good about their lives an excuse to talk about how and what it looks like. The bit of their lives that they feel good about isn’t terribly important to me.

So: yes.

I’d spend much of it selling them on Linux (mint is really not bad to use/install these days), libreoffice, lemmy (for the upvotes), Signal, Matrix, Jellyfin, and some of the amazing free phone games.

Let people know there are alternatives. So they migrate comfortably the next time a garbage product comes out, and are willing to look+donate when a new thing comes out that could/should be free as in freedom.

Security is mostly theatre, and the average person probably isn’t under much threat even doing everything wrong. But slightly more informed as a consumer and user could really make a positive impact on their lives + those around them.

If you have a venmo or other money-transfer method, consider cash.

While a thoughtful gift is nice, cash is flexible. Enough small gifts, and one can flee home…

Housing and food for your communities.

Needing to go through and disable all the stuff sounds like managing bloat to me, no?

I’m personally angry that we have ads on the default minesweeper and solitaire. Gross

This sounds like something legitimately terrifying, but I’m struggling to make it concrete. Could you expand on the example a bit?

I felt this way until recently, when I’m becoming much more aware of how limited our collective attention is. Every honest belief probably deserves to have one (maybe 3) reasonable people listen to it. But they definitely aren’t all worth national/state/city/expert attention.

As I understand it, there are many many such models. Especially those made for academic use. Some common training corpus’s are listed here: https://www.tensorflow.org/datasets

Examples include wikipedia edits and discussions, and open source scientific articles.

Almost all research models are going to be trained on stuff like this. Many of them have demos, open code, and local installation instructions. They generally don’t have a marketing budget. Some of the models listed here certainly qualify: https://github.com/eugeneyan/open-llms?tab=readme-ov-file

Both of these are lists that are not so difficult to get on; so I imagine some of these have trouble with falsification or mislabeling, as you point out. But there’s little reason for people to do so (beyond improving a papers results I guess?).

Art generation seems to have had a harder time, but there are stable diffusion equivalents that used only CC work. A few minutes of search found: Common Canvas, claims to have been competitive.

Not a number theorist, but the wikipedia reads ok for me, so I’ll give an attempt. Answer based on the AMS’s Translated Math Monographs 240, by Kazuya Kato et. al…

A sample of the questions class field theory wants to address: a) Which primes p are the sum of 2 squares, p=a^{2} + b^{2}?

b) What about other formulae, say eg p=a^{2} +2b^{2}?

c) Consider a Galois extension. Take a prime ideal P in the smaller ring. For which primes does this ideal factor when we look at the larger ring?

d) When is the factorization square free (unramified)?

e) What’s the smallest cyclotomic extension that contains sqrt(M) for a given M?

If we look at the integers, you may already know the answers to several of these! And they all have something kinda magic in common. For (a), for example, the primes that are the sum of 2 squares are exactly those with p = 1 mod 4. For example, 5=2^2 + 1^2, yet 7 cannot be written as a sum of two squares. The answer to question (b) is similar! We can do it exactly when p=1,3 mod 8.

For ( c ), for concreteness let’s take the extension of the rationals Q to the rationals with a square root of -3, Q(sqrt(-3)). The prime ideal (7) factors as (7, 1-sqrt(-3)) (7, 1+sqrt(-3)) (a product of two distinct prime ideals; unramified), as do the ideals (13), (19), (31), and (37). But (5), (11), (17), (23) and (29) all don’t. Perhaps you notice a pattern: p=1 mod 3 ? factors. p=2 mod 3? doesn’t. There’s also a unique ramified prime, (3) = (sqrt(-3))^2. There will generally only be a finite number of ramified primes. Do a dozen more examples and you’ll notice a spooky pattern: the ramified primes seem to show up in the modulus (in this example, 3 was ramified and the factorization pattern works mod 3. If 7 and 23 are ramified, the factorization cases will work modulo 7*23=161). [Quadratic extensions are not special btw; the factorization of (p) in Q(zeta_5) (Q with a 5th root of 1) depends on p mod 5.]

On the face of it, why would modular arithmetic be the relevant condition? And why does the modulus seem to care about ramification?

A major result of Galois theory is that there’s a correspondence between subgroups of (Z/NZ)^* (integers modulo N under multiplication) and intermediate field extensions between Q and a cyclotomic extension Q(zeta_N). Prime ideal ramification and factoring can be stated in terms of this correspondence. Further, they show that every finite abelian extension of Q lives inside some Q(zeta_N). This result lets us explain all of (a)-(e). Generalizing it is one of the big motivations of class field theory. If we start not with Q, but with say Q(sqrt(-3)), what still holds? What is the right generalization of cyclotomic extensions and (Z/NZ)^*?

My understanding is that this program is quite successful. There’s a replacement for both that’s only somewhat more technical/tedious, and that gives similar results. One of the bigger successes is generalizing ‘reciprocity’ laws (the quadratic case is often taught in undergrad number theory; it’s about the surprising fact that p is a square mod q depends on if q is a square mod p).

As one of the few folks who have asked such questions, I obviously am against. I don’t think the dedicated pol communities are particularly good for honest questions about platforms/political figures; everything in those spaces feels like it’s being intentionally spun (even in discussions) in a way that this community does not. (Also, several of the communities you suggest as pol discussion places are… just not? Extremely few questions, most the posts are headlines, discussions don’t seem to happen much. Some feel closer to a curated feed of cringe.)

I do agree it could become an issue, and that would justify some division, perhaps tags? But I don’t think it is currently very unpleasant, and it will almost certainly get better in 2 months (at least short term).

Agreed, that would be.

But the most they could have done is 308% instead of that 300%, and I think they managed to get lots and lots of small stores to do it at the same time.

What do the laws on the book look like?

I’ll note that grocers record profits are orders of magnitude less than the price increases. Maybe somebody is getting rich off of the price increases, but I’m pretty sure Walmart is not.

I’ll note that grocers seem to have made very little profit per American in the last few years; Walmart made ~$70 off each of us last year, which seems incompatible with the price increases I’ve been seeing…

It’s likely in some cultural groups - and has been true for a friend or two of mine. A particular example was someone going to a Psych ward, where their phone was kept in a vault. Obviously you know more context than me. But the probability is nonzero.