It's like telling people pre-built furniture sucks because you can build anything with your hands. With a cherry on top explaining their decisions have robbed themselves of the experience of sanding down a piece of pine all because they'd rather sit on a couch. As if they couldn't at literally any time do both. Like grind away on a piece of wood right in your living room. Or open a terminal app to a virtual machine and go wild.

IDK, maybe it can be your hobby and not everyone's? Since you're being that melodramatic about it, do you even enjoy it or are you punishing yourself.

Easy to say, like the solution to crime is being nice to each other. Here's a story about equality for you.

The US military could meet its recruiting goals by focusing on the most populated areas, say California, Texas, New York, Florida. That would still fly under equality of opportunity, all are welcome, and it would make sense for efficiency. Higher population density, more kids, bigger schools, less spread out recruiting offices, etc.

The very predictable result of that would be states further out like Montana, Minnesota, Maine, Nebraska, a whole bunch of "minority" states would be very underrepresented. The act of identifying that fact and measuring it would offend a lot of fragile snowflakes, as if I just insulted what it means to be Texan by saying what about Kansas, because thinking about it might make them feel guilty and nobody should force you to think about anything, not ever. They'd spread lies about how kids up north or out west or over there just aren't motivated, there's a problem with their culture, it's their parents fault, it's the school's fault, etc. You would falsely frame it as picking states, forcing equal adoption, and project "everyone will think diversity Nebraskans are unqualified" and I'd tell you like I'm telling you now, that's thinly veiled bigotry and you know it.

That is not our system thankfully. The US military operates recruiting stations in every back woods state and travels to every podunk high school in every sparsely populated county. Marine recruiters will anyway, I can't speak for the others, they're probably too busy dealing with walk-ins to call you back. THAT's what equal opportunity looks like. They didn't just decide gee we should open and staff a whole recruiting station in bumfuck Montana for efficiency. They did it to make sure we have Montanans in our military. You might not see it as the four letter words diversity, inclusion, or equity but it is literally the most perfect example of it working successfully on a large scale. If you really think about the history of our country and its military, how it means something that every state participates, you'd see how important it is. That takes effort and even quotas to make it happen, and we're all better for it. Do you NEED quotas, IDK, not in all cases no, but it fucking works and it's not a bad word. Do you NEED to measure force composition by different demographics, uh.. probably, not always, again, why is that a bad thing. I'm not convinced if we cover our eyes shit will just work out, the Michiganders will just fucking show up, like you shouldn't even be checking.. and driving out to talk to them. You KNOW you would!

So when you tell me "all we need is equal opportunity"... please fucking explain how that actually works because I have the solution to crime that takes no effort too, let's all just get along mkay.

One on one tutoring works so everything else doesn't? Well you're highly regarded aren't you.

The rest of your rant is just ignorance of dialects and regional differences. English speakers in California, Texas, and Maine for example pronounce words quite differently. I bet you don't know what a tank means in Texas.

Look gav, I'm glad you found a boyfriend that speaks Spanish and you've had this great epiphany with what kind of learning works for you. You won't learn regional differences from a tutor. If your boyfriend is from Mexico City you're going to get a different experience than someone from YucatÃn probably. Like New York and Montana, you have to go there.

Enjoy your new friend and all, learn everything you can from him but learning lots of vocabulary is still a huge part of learning a language no matter how you slice it. You don't use a lot of the English you've learned over your life, it's how it works. Duolingo is great for that, it's gets people on the right track. You still always have to go places and talk to people, and nobody ever finishes learning.

This might come as a shock but there are regional differences INSIDE Mexico too. Just like there is all over the US.

You learn those by experiencing it, visiting different regions and talking to people, not from an app or a tutor. Nobody is suggesting otherwise either, just a bunch of bizarre strawman arguments.

Nintendo has excellent parental controls and that feature specifically can be disabled with a checkbox in the app. That's the first layer of defense. The next layer is being able to report abuse after it has happened.

Going to level with you dude, I have standards for putting someone on my red dot list here. There's some 45 to 47 items on this checklist I use, and all it means is I should read into what they have to say very closely and take my time responding. That's my personal way of supporting a diversity of viewpoints. When the red dots show up making bad faith arguments for "children's privacy", it's hard not to make connections, know what I mean?

You getting recorded picking your nose behind the Wendy's cash register must be embarrassing but that's not "1984 shit". If you can read, try the book sometime.

I have a problem with children broadcasting anything precisely because you can't control what anyone does at the other end. Your argument is like saying Twitch shouldn't record streams because there might be children in them. As if the problematic people watching children are dependent on the integrated reporting functionality... they are, on it being disabled! Or as if they're incapable of recording anything broadcast to them, they aren't. Which is why children shouldn't broadcast anything about themselves in the first place. Removing auditing or reporting functions isn't protecting children, it's protecting creeps. Fuck off.

Nintendo has excellent parental controls, there's an app that controls how long a switch can be used on what days, you can restrict specific features, grant exceptions or time limit increases, reports on usage by game/day/month etc.

There are specific settings for "communicating with others" and "posting screenshots/videos to social media". I'm sorry but creeps are going to record or save whatever they receive anyway, that is really a stupid argument to disable the ability for people to report abuse, as if pedos don't know how to record on their own. Nintendo is really really good at what they do.

There's absolutely no reason for you to have complete privacy with some random kid on the internet, and they have every right to relay what you say to them to responsible adults. It's no different than you emailing someone and them forwarding it to authorities.

Frankly, the weird internet libertarian flavor of privacy when it protects you at the expense of someone else that always overlaps with the weird flavor of free speech that protects you at the expense of someone else "if you didn't want it to be made public you shouldn't have shared it with anyone" can eat rotted dick.

If you're the asshole and you don't want it to be made public then don't share it, and if someone shares intimate information with you in confidence, don't be the asshole and share it. Privacy and speech have reasonable limits. It's not rocket surgery.

Crony capitalism is in this season. That's about the whole of it.

Wacom Tablets replaced people if you want to look at it that way, but why ...

You bought a Nissan Versa ... for FUN? It has the same power as an older Prius, but without even the little bit of electric torque that has in the low end.
Literally any old hybrid has better throttle response than that little manual because of the electric motor and CVT.

Nobody took your manual away to keep you from having fun, they're gone because despite the lower price almost nobody wants them. Stick shift is not fun with any amount of traffic. If you want to have fun you can get a great used dirt bike for cheap and ten minutes going through the gears will leave you shaking. Or get a road bike ... and be responsible. FFS there are so many ways to have a lot more fun for a lot less money on the road.

What bond yields 100% annually?

It is exactly that. You could call me an AI/LLM coding proponent I guess, I use it daily but that vibe coding shit is no different than the Ruby on Rails hype train for example. I doubt it will have much impact outside hipster webdev "I made a twitter clone" trash.

An LLM is actually great at tearing through stuff like that, and translating existing patterns and idioms into new languages, new settings, etc. Waaaaay faster than you would, and they're a great learning aide.

Creating new idioms, new design patterns, no, LLM probably won't do that, but if a new language, OS, or API was intended to be used in some novel way, there would be examples of it.

I'm tempted to say new idioms don't come from a vacuum.. but they do, when a clever monkey invents one. At the same time, nobody else knows what it means without examples. An LLM would learn new design patterns of a new language the same way you would, from the same sources.

A new undocumented API without any examples, yah an LLM isn't going to be much use, it's like using a camera in the dark. There only so much it or you can do with little information.

I don't think that's fair. Local journalism is basically dead in the US now, and I'd rank that higher than some online magazine. I'd take a local paper with fewer jobs over none at all, but it's too late. The lost jobs suck... but it's dead.

Take the Gardening part out of this and replace with Popular Mechanics, something a lot of nerds grew up reading. It's turned into clickbait slop to keep up with the times. I don't think I'd feel any different about a lost job there. AI isn't the reason they lost a job. They lost a job for the same reason it turned to slop in the first place, and for the same reason local journalism already died before it even had the chance at being strung along with AI. There's a fucking article about Bigfoot in the current issue. I'm sure they employ people that still really care about what the magazine used to be prior to keeping up with the internet. If I knew they lost their job specifically I'd shed a tear. Or maybe they're the one that wrote "Is Bigfoot Hiding in Florida's Jungles" fuck if I know. Sorry about your job... but

The internet is a terrible place to sell quality content, and it's impossible to compete with. The downward spiral from everyone expecting instant results for free started long before AI. AI is not the reason there isn't a paying job for producing good gardening content, and so much more is already lost.