PebblesRox

I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.

If I were trying to do something like this I would sketch it out first with imperfect curves and then worry about making it perfect once I was at the computer. It would look slightly different but I don’t think it would make that much of an impact in the initial design process.

Ah, the SR-71 was new to me, thank you!

https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

I felt shortchanged my senior year at my fairly well-regarded university when I was dealing with depression and doing what I saw as the bare minimum academically. I still got straight A’s despite putting in minimal effort.

Desmos also produces curriculum for K-12 (Desmos Classroom) that takes advantage of the computer’s ability to give real-time feedback for student answers beyond just giving them a binary correct/incorrect. It shows them what their wrong answers really would mean in the little animated scenario. Good stuff!

https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/the-only-question-you-need-t...

Every so often I will have a dream with a joke or pun that surprises me. And they even make sense after I wake up! I always wonder how my brain manages to do that.

A similar time was when I dreamed I was reading a blog post about a game that was abbreviated WoH. I was trying to figure out what the name of the game could be, so I looked it up (still in the dream) and it was “Whore of Honor.”

After waking up, I pondered the fact that both of those words start with a silent letter - so I never would have consciously guessed them from the abbreviation, but somehow that’s what my subconscious brain came up with.

I had to look it up in real life to make sure it wasn’t a real game that I was just remembering - nope, not the case as far as I can tell!

I would be up for signing up for email notifications for events in my area.

I had a friend who used Excel to render blueprints for the dream house she was designing. As an architecture student, I was both impressed and horrified!

Your cube board is beautiful.

Yes, the studies tend to exclude the kids who aren't using the tools "enough," which can end up being 95% of the students! [0]

On the other hand, I know there are people who enjoy math but struggle to pay attention and learn from a "sit quietly and listen" lecture-based model. (My husband is in this camp.) I can see how the back-and-forth conversational approach of these AI tutors could be really helpful for students like this.

They're still a small minority of the student population, but maybe a different minority from the students who are already excelling academically. If Khanmigo helps only 5% but it's a slightly different 5% from the students who are best served by the current system, I see that as a win, even if it's not the educational revolution that is being hyped.

[0] https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/the-kids-that-edtech-writes-...

This video has some good examples of the nuances of door design:

Why video game doors are so hard to get right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEWsLdLmcc

I discovered that it's much easier to dip apples slices in peanut butter if I nuke the peanut butter for 30 seconds. Now I don't get frustrated by my apples breaking off in my peanut butter.

You could say the same for plastic surgery in general. Techniques developed to restore injured faces (e.g. of soldiers) are now used for cosmetic purposes.

This blog post [0] has a few more examples, and I like how the author's alligator calculator [1] translates from traditional notation into alligators.

[0]https://propella.blogspot.com/2011/09/yet-another-alligator-...

[1]https://metatoys.org/alligator/#!/(%CE%BBx.x)%20y

Thank you for sharing! I tried it out with my 7yo, who was interested. Unfortunately we had some issues with the toddler interfering so our session got interrupted.

I did find an online version here, for anyone who wants to try it without cutting out a bunch of alligators: https://tibordp.github.io/gator-calculus/

I am also on the search for more puzzles/challenges to do with it.

I have a short collection of ideas here.[0] The biggest thing I've done is tell bedtime stories (often collaboratively) that incorporate topics like functions, negative numbers, and debugging. Here's one where we did FizzBuzz together. [1]

[0]https://twitter.com/CBancos/status/1581662053189574656

[1]https://bancosparenting.wordpress.com/2023/02/04/pickle-and-...

This is a great new addition to my collection of low-budget screen-free ways to teach programming concepts to little kids.[0]

We don't have a xylophone but I might just have to get one so we can try out this game - I love it!

[0]https://twitter.com/CBancos/status/1581662053189574656

My kids are having a blast with these. Although my ear drums are feeling thankful that so far they haven't discovered the spectrogram one that makes a picture of whatever you sing/shout.

What's the technical distinction between "not guilty" and "innocent?"

A Facebook friend was talking about how overwhelming and chaotic her life has been feeling lately and people were chiming in to say they were in the same boat and attributing it to the Mercury retro-whatever.

Must just be a coincidence that it's back-to-school season and everyone is transitioning out of their summer routines into school-mode.

I got the FirstEnergy settlement email this morning and was very suspicious, but I'm finding multiple sources online claiming it's legitimate.

Is this an intentional design to make it so that people don't claim the money? It has to be this bad on purpose, right?

https://www.cleveland19.com/2023/08/10/yes-its-free-money-su...

I’m familiar with this principle as “Alternate your mistakes.”

I call it "seeding." When a mess is bothering me but there's a barrier (internal or external) to dealing with it completely in the moment, I "seed" the cleaning process by doing just a little bit.

A few rounds of seeding can have a surprisingly big impact and every round is an opportunity for the momentum to kick in it that leads to the whole job getting done.

We definitely relaxed our standards for kid #2 compared with kid #1 in terms of phone time.

Mainly he would watch photos and videos of himself and his big brother. We did not install any kid-specific apps and did not allow YouTube at that age.

He did enjoy Wordle - at his peak he knew how to type in around 8 different valid five letter words, which I thought was pretty impressive at age 2! His favorite was TRAIN.

Unfortunately it was too late to change the address by the time I discovered it, but we, uh, actually did order our own copy (from a much cheaper photo place) and it's currently hanging on the wall in our kitchen.

Sorry for the confusion, the fridge was just part of the photo he was looking at. We gave him the phone to look at photos, thinking he couldn’t make too much trouble with that app. But while looking at a photo of himself with ketchup, he managed to complete the ordering process for ordering a photo canvas - a feature of the photos app I had always ignored until I saw the email that the order had shipped.

Dr. Doofenshmirtz would definitely do this.

It's already bad enough that my toddler can order photo canvases of a picture of himself getting ketchup out of the fridge via the Google Photos app. (He even chose expedited shipping . . . to our old address!)

Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone, which was the only way I could see to enforce that he couldn't do it again, but then someone made a payment and ended up saving the payment method again.)

I feel like it's only a matter of time before it happens again; at least the address is correct now so we'd actually receive the item if we were unable to cancel/refund.

Yes, our happy medium is a black-and-white laser printer that we use a few times a week. For color printing we go to the store a few times a year.

I’d be curious to know if someone could get a more “valiant effort” version of those first two questions with some prompt engineering. E.g. if it was asked to roleplay a conversation with the proper disclaimers to override its objection to not knowing what they actually think.