I definitely agree. Back then, the bad stuff was often more… innocent, grassroots-ish? (With exceptions.) Like, if you stumbled on a cartel beheading then no one was trying to sell anything to you.

Nowadays it’s markedly more corporate – there is ad revenue in constructing an extremist pipeline, and anyone can see how content has sprung up to assume that vacuum. (Try opening a private browser tab and watching only Ben Shapiro videos. The algorithm will eventually point you to Trump conspiracy videos with AI voiceovers. Last time I did this was before Cambridge Analytica changed their name to Emerdata though so I’m not sure if it’s the same.)

One thing: you mentioned that there was a pipeline in “‘fun’ kids content”. I’ve only seen stuff like that directed at early, questioning teens (the Discord offensive-jokester type) – does this “‘fun’ kids content” thing target even younger ages now? Because I’ve yet to hear of that.

You prevent them from waking up earlier, huh? Youngsters definitely have infinite energy at the odder times. I sure did my fair share of waking up early to increase the fraction of the day I gamed for.

This is a pretty convincing stance in favor of timers, actually. The idea of transferring video-watching from the iPad to the television is a friendly way to prevent an unchecked iPad-kid situation. My opinion shifted a little. :P

Do you have timers on the iPad for any mobile games, or just YouTube?

Your stance on the age-inappropriate reminds me of what @southsamurai commented! I’ve definitely seen a lot of “Don’t protect your child too hard by concealing the inappropriate from them” lately. I wonder how many modern parents are shifting to that ideal.

“Kids respond well to being treated seriously.” (from Vox, “Why safe playgrounds aren’t great for kids”, 3:17)

You mention that there are some cases where parental controls would help, but you also mentioned that, (1) regarding inapproriacy, you shouldn’t baby children and (2) regarding screen time, BananaKing’s take is the best route. Doesn’t that cover both aspects of where parental controls would be used? What cases would you say parental controls would help with?

Someone downvoted but I want to hear your differing stance so I upvoted. (Come on fellow lemmings ` . ` let’s melting-pot a little!)

Anyway – your belief is interesting, though I feel like I might disagree! Seems similar to @Contramuffin’s upbringing, but more extreme.

How would you train them beforehand? Or would you just drop them into the archetypal sink-or-swim? Don’t you think the kid would feel lonely, say, if they stumbled on a jumpscare video and got the heebie-jeebies but you didn’t help? Everyone makes mistakes. And outside of scarring – what if your kid turns into one of those YouTube Kids jockeys?

Is your hypothetical “Tough shit, deal with it and get stronger” approach similar to how you were raised?

That makes a lot of sense! Definitely much less friction in that approach – clearly delineated boundaries, decently low pressure, and secure trust without the ethical quandary.

…don’t attempt technical solutions to administrative problems.

Good advice.

Thanks for the in-depth response!

My parents “let health class do the job” and kept their eyes closed – regarding porn – so your punishmentless one-on-ones are new and interesting to me. Trust is definitely the most vital here.

Someone downvoted you but I’d like to hear differing opinions, so I upvoted.

By teaching the child how to circumvent these measures, what do you mean by that? Do you teach them to break your router rules? And when would you do that – when they appear mature enough to you? Of course, there’s the chance that they don’t like tech.

Imaginarily, my kid and I could have some arms-race fun, but I don’t know how realistic that is.

Hah! Faraday Cage, nice. Location spoofs too!

Interestingly, the route my mother took was, when I went off to college, she asked me if she could track me. We discussed privacy (who has my location?) and security (Is the protection endeavor proportionate to the threat chance?), and I demonstrated a basic location spoof (I am in control of my data).

In the end, we agreed to allow some monitoring.

That’s different of course – it’s a rare (I think) circumstance and consent, and isn’t quite parental control, as both parties had equal grounds to form said consent.

I wonder if such a conversation could happen among younger children. 12 to 13 y/os maybe? Depends of course.

That’s fair. Subscribing to a singular doctrine doesn’t make sense, and there are lots of culture gaps to acknowledge.

What about for you specifically? To what extent would you/do you digitally monitor your kids (if you have any or not)?

Oh I love the “walk me through what I’m about to do” concept. Dry runs should be more common – especially in shell scripts…

The world would be a better place if every install.sh had a --help, some nice printf’s saying “Moving this here” / “Overwrite? [Y/N]”, and perhaps even a shoehorned-in set -x.

Hope your r/w wasn’t eaten up by the subfolder incident (that I presume happened) :P

I think I disagree with a lot of the comments here. The “trying to sound smart” feeling only really occurs when there’s a mismatch in decorum – someone is trying to appear Higher and More Logical – but that can happen with any word, especially adverbs.

Technically, your argument is fallacious.

“Technically” is a useless crutch word (techy!), and “fallacious” is hella overused outside of formal logic stuff, so here it’s a mismatch in decorum. (What’s the fallacy? Does the other just… disagree with you, or are you using a converse error like A implies B, therefore B implies A?)

Well, you don’t always have to do that, per se, but you can irregardless.

A lot of crutch words are just innocent habits, too. [email protected] mentioned something like that… though there are always people who up their jargon levels for no reason other than To Be More L33t. _{and_screw_irregardless}

On the other hand, some words commented here are needed. For example, if a reviewer calls Grossman’s The Magicians “erudite”, it fits perfectly – the book

Continuing on that feeling of summed-up-in-one-word-ness – what alternatives do we really have for “whataboutism” or the “algorithm” or “milquetoast”? Those words hit hard, they sum things up.

The algorithm is an alt-right pipeline, of course he’ll have that phase.

Great, another video on the most milquetoast youtuber drama I’ve ever heard.

Those words are concise, they roll off the tongue and evoke feeling! Don’t shorten words just to sound more colloquial when you have a choice that really fits! And likewise, equally – don’t be grandiloquent just for the sake of it.

Or else you’ll face floccinaucinihilipilification :3

The depth of a dive is always delightful! Does K8s have a solid use-case for the project or did you just sK8 for fun?

Round two, hell yeah.

The aesthetica of a stack of notes, born from a “dead end”, is secretly an odd motivator. You look back and see

Here is the breadth of what we did wrong.

and then beyond you, the effort lays itself out in a pretty trusswork.

__{or_maybe_i_just_think_well-used_notebooks_are_pretty}

Hah, stochastic parrots.

Makes me wonder. Every laziness I’ve had with the vector guessers, I’ve seen an exact counterweight.

One, you can invoke more often (throw ChatGPT configs against the wall until it doesn’t error); the other you can invoke more deeply. So I can’t help but wonder – when we cancel out all the terms – if the timesaving sum is positive or negative. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, it’s pretty funny how distros just passed each other by like that. Back then it was Debian that was regarded as the hyper-poweruser distro:

The reason I havn’t used Debian is because I can’t install it. “This guy is totally clueless” you might think. My only response is that I’m writing this on a Gentoo box that I have installed myself.

And then now there are plenty of people reading this thread who liked Windows 7. As time passed, their grade on the ease-of-use of A passed the don’t-get-in-my-way of B, and a load of Windows 10ers jumped ship to Linus & Friends, the last place their Windows 7 selves would have expected to go. Always a reminder that the end of history isn’t now.

Bending the question a little but my second “first impression” of Arch’s “simplicity” surprised me the most.

I was running Gentoo for a while before deciding to move back, and I was surprised that somehow I had

• saved space
• gotten faster at doing new things (…)
• didn’t lose any boot speed or anything like that

Granted, I had jumped on Gentoo because of misconceptions (speed, ricing, the idea that I needed USE flags), but going back, I saw things more clearly:

• the AUR being basically a shell script download + 300 MB of base-devel was simpler and more space-efficient than /var/db/repos (IIRC – since the portage and guru ebuilds were all held locally anyway after syncing, an on-demand AUR saved space).
  • the simple automatic build file audits on Arch felt more clean to me. I like checking my build files; had to make a script for the guru ebuild equivalent (but maybe there’s a portage arg i missed somewhere – wouldn’t be the first time)
• Arch repos separating parts of packages in case you don’t need some part (like splitting some font into its languages, or splitting a package into x and x-doc and x-perl) was almost a simple USE flag-ish thing already
• /etc/makepkg.conf was Gentoo’s make.conf. And its build flags looked similar to the CFLAGS I manually set up anyway.
• My boot time (btrfs inside LUKS with encrypted /boot) was the same with systemd vs. openrc
• I realized I liked systemd (because of the completeness of my systemctl muscle memory, like with systemctl status and journalctl, or managing systemd-logind instead of using seatd and friends).

Not bashing on Gentoo or anything, but it’s when I realized why Arch was “simple.” Even me sorely missing /etc/portage/patches was quelled by paru -S <pkg> --fm vim --savechanges.

And Arch traveling at the speed of simplicity even quantifiably helped: Had to download aur/teams the other day with nine-minute warning.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Successful GitHub pulls are rare; more often, patches live like this. You’re better off contacting the maintainer of the subsystem you’re editing. See the official submission guide.

Not to be dejecting!

Fun investigations (tac and factor), things I never bothered to check the existence of until now (install -s), and fundamentals I glossed over ([). Pretty fun read.

And of course,

And that’s why the ‘$cmd’ command is my favourite Linux command.

Stunningly simple, solely a shift. I love MVPs… we can possibly even remove the -P completion func switch :P