HN user
Not every parent has the time or energy to do so, but i certainly thought i was on the more relaxed end of parenting. I'm glad i appear to be different online! I will take the intensity of my parenting as a compliment.
PD - I never played D&D. If there were any non-RPG games that were extremely plot driven or written, i'd be all over them.
Action games turn out to be heavy on clicking, low on reading.
agreed. The sale of data is effective a run around existing law that forbids govt to collect it.
This is a huge issue. Privacy is dead as long as the government can buy its way around it.
Sheriffs depts and FLOCK, Ring Cameras, FBI , etc.
Do you let your kids eat candy for lunch? DO they eat pizza for breakfast ?
If not, why not ? Aren't you managing their food intake ?
So, what's so different from managing their information diet ?
I respect that. What would you do to teach your kids advanced math, electrical engineering ?
Does your recommendation hold with a full time job ?
My kids are rapidly approaching an age where they should be experimenting, and I can't offer any solutions short of involving AI in some way.
EDIT:
>> At some point around age 9,you will need to decide if violence and some adult themes, are tolerable (Dragon Wing series).
I am sorry. I mixed up series.
The series I was alluding to in my comment above, as the "grey" area for violence, death, and some adult themes is "WINGS OF FIRE " , not "DRAGON WINGS"
Dragon Wing series as top 5 as the most wholesome series for U8s , along with MAGIC TREEHOUSE etc.
Apologies for confusing dragons :)
Dragon Wing is great. It is a high recommend for early book readers.
I got my series mixed up . My intent , was to say WINGS of FIRE, is more adult themed and higher violence. APologies for the confusion
Earlier poster nailed it. LLMs are a godsend here.
There are tons of parents that have traveled this road before you and I. LLMs leverage this data. Its just a matter of writing a decent prompt, and recycling it.
Cynicism, Disrespect, Bullying, Violence, Sarcasm.
Wimpy Kid is a valid gateway drug if your kids refuse to pick up any books. But in my opinion, its a break-the-glass situation.
Its the book you buy only because nothing else will stick (options have been tried and failed).
>> Kids aren't LLMs, they know that what they're reading is fiction
My comment was not one-dimensional. Its not that they can't tell the difference between realitiy and fantasy.
Every kid is build differently. It sounds cliche, but it is not. Some are incredibly resilient, some are extremely sensitive. Think Briggs Myers = some extremely concrete-driven, others perceiving. My recommendation was built on experiences that worked for all kids, the concrete and teh perceiving, the sensitive and aloof, which means you must consider all dimensions of a kid when sharing books with them.
Reality matters little when mimicking behavior. Kids will learn to respond with "This is stupid!" when they are given specific books.
Can a resilient kid capture that this is unacceptable ? Some will. OK, but why risk it ? We are talking about your lifelong companions here. Potential best friends. Caretakers.
Parenting is hard. There will be a time for risks.
I'm torn about this.
I primarily think that a a kid who won't pick books is a failure of the family of not noticing their interests.
When i noticed my oldest 3 yr old was obsessed about cars, i bought him a car encyclopedia. He probably could not read most words or did not understand them. But pretty soon he was telling me about car models that i did not even recognize myself.
And as i saw interests, i kept feeding them.
My biggest struggle now is to actually keep books away from them at key times (morning routine, etc) , or keeping bad books (think cynical like My Weird School Daze, etc; or books that openly demean adults or parents) away from them
Start small. Graphical novels, mostly drawings, and continue to buil on that. It can be done. Rome wasn't built on a day.
At some point when they hit 5 yrs old, Grok / OpenAI are great tools to find good series appropriate to their reading level. Before that it can be vibed. Feed the addiction, buy whatever they like.
At some point, you need to watch out for cynical/nasty series. In fact, all of the books we purchase are ranked against peers they have read in the past, or those we know to actively avoid buying due to cynicism, sarcasm, or open disdain towards adults (Wimpy Kid).
At some point around age 9,you will need to decide if violence and some adult themes, are tolerable (Dragon Wing series).
This iterative rocess also works really well for foreign language learning (reinforcing via reading mostly), by leveraging localized RPG video games.
With all that said, notice that I've focused on reading skills.
I don't know how i'd go about replicating this iterative path on other skills like math, mechanical, or electrical engineering learning. That's where I think a busy parent will need to find AI as the solution.
Great article. One item that it avoids touching even though it clearly insinuates it - the solutions.
And among the solutions, there's one that is briefly alluded to, but skipped around like a hot potato.
What if EMS were to refuse services for those who don't pay for the option on a monthly basis? And for the rest, if they choose to pay "on the spot" they can be OON like everyone is now? Why give out a free (or subsidized) option out, at all ? After all, I dont think it is illegal to turn away Medicare & Medicaid patients if you are not in-network with them.
We pay for other types of insurance. EMS insurance seems like a natural fit for a family.
That number looks low.
we have multifelons (+10 arrests) running around and committing new crimes -often killing- in nearly all major urban centers.
What makes you think police are going to pay heed to teens with heavy pyrotecnic ordinance ?
And even if they did, would the DA prosecute ?
>> Property taxes are not calculated that way. The property tax rate for a given year is backed into (a "mill rate") based on approved dollars of spending divided by total property value. If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the property tax rate doubles that year.
When the LLCs that own the commercial buildings declare themselves bankrupt, and walk away from the asset and throw the keys on the table, who pays the 50% increase ? The banks?
Will banks own a 50% increase in property taxes ?
What about residents ? Renters ?
What are the financial "instruments" ?
The main claims from the article seem worrysome, IN particular, the 37% vacancy rate, as well as multiple buildings underwater[3], etc.
Now, lets dissect the claims that this is part of some cycle, and not the result of new city hall management. The reality is that with Jumpstart, and with the vacancy rate, enterprises are not renting. But, the owner is stuck with the asset in what is now a hostile jurisdiction. So, even if owner may not be able to change terms on their mortgage, they certainly can charge less for rent. Empty units do not contribute to cash flows to pay the building mortage. I understand there may be consequences to lowering rents, but those consequences are coming home anyway: The building will need to be sold, at a loss, by the bank to a new owner. And as you said, that process takes time. And the jurisdiction seems hellbent to make it harder.
Now, as buildings sell, this in turn lowers the appraised value, which is key to the Seattle tax base.
So, the downtown core is going to produce far less in property taxes in the foreseeable future, with fewer tenants paying (at least in short term) occupancy taxes, etc. This is going to play out in a decade.
According to this, commercial property taxes are about 26 %[1] of the Seattle budget
Let's assume appraisals go down 50% for those impaired offices. This is not crazy, there's precendent for it[2]. That means the Seattle budget must be cut by 13%. This is not even factoring other losses from job loss, sales tax lost, etc. Maybe that's not "Seattle is dying" , but sound pretty bad ?
[1] https://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/financedepartm...
[2] Seattle/downtown office properties lost ~$10–15+ billion in assessed value since 2020 (46–48% drop) . https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/app/uploads/2026/06/New-Repo...
[3] https://www.king5.com/article/money/business/downtown-seattl...
(a) has to sue and they will prevail.
(b) does not have standing.
The theme of this article is seen directly as a major plot point in the series Shogun.
Its quite a good show!
this article feels 10 years late. Toys R us marked the end of the toy store.
Its just a matter of time before other stores follow, except for the Lego flagship stores , or the ocassional anime store in a bigger city.
Its sad.
>> by just having a copy of the encrypted data sent to some cloud service, e.g. iCloud/OneDrive/Google Drive, but decided you couldn't trust any?
False sense of security. As proven countless times in these forums, a ban on 1 product or 1 account on Google, is a ban on all of Google for that device and linked devices. I dont think you have factored in this risk. Or that commercial products get discontinued all the time. Open source (syncthing) doesn't have that issue. And we haven' touched billing yet.
>> There's no one you would trust with an encrypted copy?
Doing password backups is particularly tricky. Commercial vendors are robust and depend on local circunstances. They do have changes in ownership which do change security priorities. Its a bit of a moving target whether they can be trusted or not. For non password needs, the answer is much simpler:No. They will sell data, at a minimum.
>> o you have any automated backup of your phone to a cloud service, or only local?
Only local. I have 1 device parked in a relative's house that gets updated everytime i am there. That's my remote backup. But its not a daily backup, but i can live with that.
>> I am overseas holding a new replacement for a lost phone, looking at the text "Enter the 6‑digit verification code", I will wish I'd thought about more carefully.
This is, indeed, the most important thing you must resolve. How urgent you need access to X ? Maybe you should solve for that separately. Everything else is much simpler and done.
same. Recommend
as long as the house doesn't catch fire, or as long i run outside with 1 of my syncthing devices (have several), local cloud is the best.
in my humble opinion, Dominos ?
I wish articles/domains like this one, which are accessible, playful, informative, short, and with images would be easy to identify in HN.
That would be something worthwhile to share with children aged 8-12 who love learning new things.
A few thoughts on the layoffs:
1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.
2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.
3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.
4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make
This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?
5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.
None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"
open source server code if you are going to cease support
Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used and that we had clear, valid copyright to everything there.
I can tell you the other side of that equation. There's no poison pill -short of outright fraud- that will kill an acquisition of a software company, than open source code embedded deep in the product.
I've been in both sides of the table of M&A activity, and in the due dilligence, smart acquirers will always look at the code and libraries in use. If there's anything that even has the hint of open source, that is heavily scrutinized: what is open source by default can't be owned by anyone and if it cannot be owned, it doesn't have IP value.
Most deals that ran into this issue would stop dead in their tracks, and it would take a while to spin back up, that is if the deal went thru at all
The thesis is as follows:
OpenAI receives funds as a non-profit.
Some of those funds are redirected to for profit ventures.
Critically, the GM (Altman) of the nonprofit owns shares of the for-profit ventures, that OpenAI funds were redirected into.
A regular company could and does invest in any company even when there's a conflict, as long as the conflict is disclosed and the Board votes in favor of it. There's no criminal element there.
The problem is introduced in Altman's case if
(a) there was no disclosure (red flag) and/or
(b) nonprofit that received the funds, is putting money into things not aligned with the 501(c)(3) mission.
I'm not sure if either (a) or (b) are criminal, but they don't pass the smell test, which is why Altman is being sued in civil court, unrelated to the congressional investigation talked about in the article
what a well written article. Very human. Refreshing to read in the era of AI. Witty without trying too hard, genuinely funny, yet informative, and succinct.
I'm going to have to read more from Steven Morea!
50yr old tech (mouse) still hangs around because it is effective. Whatever this Google slop is, will likely not replace mice. The mouse has been successful at passing the test of time. Most of Google's own hardware products don't last 1/20th of that time.
There's a reason chairs are still around. They are +2000 years old. Its still waiting to be replaced.
One should be extremely skeptical of claims of replacing tech that has been around for a very long time.
I actually see it as quite worrysome. This would crowd out competition, but then gives full monopoly of payments to the local government.
If you are say a political outcast, there's a single point of failure in getting debanked. Not good.
I do like processing fees down, but definitely not at the cost of creating a single point of failure with power over the entire population.
Yet people risk their lives to go in illegally. Something doesn't track.
Its because, inequality is not the problem.
The problem is the ability to move between income levels. That coefficient used to the highest in the US. Rich people could and did go poor. Poor people could be rich.
That index was always the highest by far in the US, but now its decreasing. That's the real issue.
Here you go:
The WARN Act is triggered if there is a mass layoff of at least 50 employees (excluding PT) and that number represents at least 33% of the active employees at a single employment site
OR, if RIFF means closes location (with 50+ employees affected).
META is doing* it . The main RIFF has yet to happen.