No phones or SM accounts for kids till they turn 18. Yes, there's a "fear" of being an outcast but they work their way around that quickly and if they have other things to spend time on, they'll be fine. The "need" for social media is mostly FOMO.
Our senior schools (from age 11, "6th grade" in US term) literally mandate a phone (not a computer, an actual phone) for school, both to use in class and to receive homework assignments.
Yes. I have kids. I'm not in the US. My kids school sends homework using an app. I get it on my phone, take printouts etc. and my kids get the work done.
We have a basic feature phone at home which they take if they're going out just to stay in touch/emergencies etc. They don't have phones unsupervised at all times.
I don't have any experience with D&D but wanted to learn it to play it with my kids. I used claude to learn the basic rules and then had it help me create the scenario. Then I played as the dm while it simulated being the players and then vice versa.
I think some way of batching information from the people/sources that you're interested in (and then perhaps running an LLM over it to surface the most important information) which is then emailed or texted to one might be a solution.
One of the "hard things" I've come across was turn of the century explorations. The stories of polar explorers like Ernest Shackleton (chronicled in Lansing's Endurance) or tropical ones like "River of Doubt" detailing Roosevelt's exploration of the Amazon tributary are fascinating stories of how people's grit accomplished hard things.
Shackleton and his crew became something of a hero of mine after I read South and Endurance. Less so frok.a masculine perspective, but more of a fortitude thing. There is a certain triumph felt when we persevere through impossible odds, and ever since I've been attracted to a genre of stories that I loosely label as "Frozen Thrillers," where humans just have to deal with bad things happening in cold unforgiving environments.
If you liked that, you should read "Empire of Ice and Stone" by Budy Levy which was about an Arctic expedition.
It's a good read from a leadership perspective. The "leader" of the expedition (Vilhjalmur Stefansson) abandoned his crew in the middle of the frozen arctic seas and went off the hunt caribou and meet his secret inuit wife. The book portrays him as being completely irresponsible and interested only his own glory and fame (and money)
Meanwhile, the captain of the ship (Robert Bartlett) walked for 700 miles from where they were stranded and then started a rescue mission from Alaska which saved some (though not all of the crew). He's portrayed as a real hero in harsh circumstances.
The whole expedition was named after the flagship. The Karluk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_voyage_of_the_Karluk). They had two inuit families with them during the trip including their kids. It was funny to see how the inuit kids would play in the snow and have fun while the "explorers" were all but dropping dead. The youngest child was aged 3 at the time. She passed away finally in 2008 at the age of 97.
I am reading a book about it right now and as I learn more it seems too crazy and unbelievable to sustain (and im quite gullible person), especially part about living on full ocean in small boats with no food, water and heat, in extreme cold, still travelling those 100s of kilometers.
There was a part that stuck with me, a journal entry that described the Endurance crew standing on a ice that had trapped their boat, and just watching in horror as the shifting ice flow crushed it. It powerfully conveyed raw despair and overwhelming hopelessness, which in an of itself is exceedingly difficult for anyone to overcome, let alone in extremely hostile conditions.
The "Rio da Dúvida" was a tributary which wasn't really mapped at the time. The Brazilian government was laying out Telegraph lines at the time to map the area.
There were tribals in the area but it wasn't mapped.
Covers Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon expedition. To the comment about "weren't people living in the Amazon" - read the book. The Brazilian government was scouting and mapping the terrain for the project of connecting the coasts with telegraph lines. This was uncharted territory and the chance of not returning was high.
The larger trend of "making things more user friendly and easy" is part of this problem.
I cut my teeth on early Linux with really poor driver support and had to figure out so many things just to get X to start or to get audio to play. This made me intimately familiar with the system and I had the confidence to explore things myself.If were to start off with a modern Ubuntu, I wouldn't be aware of any of this. Wouldn't know where the logs are, how to look at them, what a certain error meant etc. "A system error has occured. Click here to submit a bug report to Canonical" is just not quite the same as digging through some obscure log file and trying to create a mental model of how the distribution works before the next attempt at fixing the problem.
Things which require tinkering to get working are invaluable during the learning journey. Problems which require effort to solve are one example of this and a powerful solution that eliminates the effort and directly provides the reward is surely going to cripple learners.
In this specific case, I think the parents have "outsourced" education to the school/teachers/tools which is why this has happened.
I think much of the stuff that you need to do is common sense (put word out, write about it, encourage word of mouth). And it's usually obvious what will definitely kill your project (don't talk about it to anyone, don't listen to customer feedback etc.) so do the opposite of those.
My general experience has been that word of mouth is slow but very reliable and the customers you get from there are usually high value.
Fascinating. I was going to ask if there were similar projects. It seems like an obvious thing to do and I was mildly surprised that it never occurred to me and majorly surprised that this was the first time I'm hearing about the idea.
It was at my first job and first time away from home. I was single and so was a colleague from work.
There was no one in the office that night. So we installed unreal tournament, played "mistress of Christmas" out loud, ordered in some food from a nearby restaurant and played a lan game till past midnight. Then we went home.
I remember David Beazley of SWIG fame saying that he uses this as a metric. Include stuff in the course that makes people say... " I don't know how that's useful but damn that is cool".
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