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I tried to teach my children French. We had cartoons, and I even offered to pay them to listen to daily lessons. No dice.

To try to make a point about the ease of sitting inside listening to French versus manual labor to earn money, I offered them the same dollar amount to spend the same amount of time in the backyard breaking rocks with a hammer. Let me tell you how that backfired! Those two little boys were in hog heaven breaking rocks, and they asked me to do it again soon. I should have known better.

I love this! Sometimes I daydream about a device that works kind of like an old printing press. You can arrange letter tiles to create a message. Then, you power the thing by pumping a lever or something, and it constructs a digital signal from the letters and sends it over something like LoRaWAN.

This has been on my mind for years, though I hadn't been aware of a the formal definition of a third place. If you grew up religious and then found yourself secular as an adult, you may miss that gathering together that goes with a church service, if not the accompanying beliefs. It's really too bad there isn't something similar but without centering around a core spiritual belief.

How cool would it be to have a building with a kitchen and a sound system and huge screen and instruments and a gymnasium and occasional childcare? You could still have book clubs and speeches, but the book would not be a religious book, and the speeches could be about anything apolitical.

The way the problem makes sense to me is this.

Doors: Goat Goat Car

You pick a door. Monty shows you a Goat. You switch or stay.

Monty will never show you the Car before offering a switch. He always shows you a Goat. It doesn't matter which Goat he shows you - it's just "not the Car".

If your first choice is a Goat, switching will win you the Car. If your first choice is a Car, switching will win you a Goat. You have a 2/3 chance of picking a Goat, so, effectively, you want to pick a Goat so that you switch to the Car.

I watched a video from a woman talking about her aphantasia. I was struck by the fact that she is an avid reader and enjoys fiction. She said she processes descriptive text as facts. Like, if she read, "Raindrops glistened in the afternoon light as they rolled off the red maple leafs, falling peacefully to the lush green grass, below," she would just have a list of facts in her head and no visualization. It makes me wonder what such a person would write, themselves. How could they put together a scene?

I think I have the same kind of garden variety visualization experience that you have. There is bound to be a spectrum where some people's mental imagery is virtually non-existent on one end, and it's very lucid and persistent on the other. The people who come out of the woodworks online claiming they have a mental heads-up display, like AR superimposed on their vision, make me raise an eyebrow. I'd be more inclined to believe that a child had such an experience, but by the time we're adults, our brains have normally found it more advantageous to be squarely grounded in baseline reality.

Three years ago, my new home came with smart features such as a connected front door lock and thermostat and a wall panel with a sim connected to alarm.com. The intro period ran out, and I didn't want to pay anything ongoing, so I bought a z-wave usb controller and set up HomeAssistant on my old Pi2. With some effort to get everything working in docker with a cloudflare tunnel, I am back to being able to monitor and control my smart home from anywhere.

I'm not feeling compelled to get a more powerful pi. In fact, I'd be more inclined to buy the pi zero or several of them, but they were always impossible to find in stock when I was interested.

How nice would it be if AI chat replaced virtually all customer service agents, but those same people were employed to resolve escalations with the authority to do so?

Hmm, web presentation does not inspire confidence.

When my college roommate woke me up the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 and told me jets had hit the twin towers, it happened to be the first year of my life that I did not have a TV in the home. We had internet and a big 19" CRT monitor, but that was it. To see what was going on, I dragged myself to the McDonald's that was within walking distance, sat down with my breakfast and watched footage of mayhem on the mounted TV. That's an odd little nook in technological history - being beyond traditional television, but the internet was still 1.0 without streaming video (or maybe just our speed wasn't fast enough).

ahh, thanks. not to spoil anyone's fun, but i grabbed the word list from source if someone wants to cheat like me. https://pastebin.com/A4yTMvWE

What am I missing? I type "worm", and then that's it. There's nowhere to type, nothing to do with the mouse, etc.