mdip

This is all an interesting read from where I sit -- I worked for a global multi-national telecom that spun off from the 1996 deregulated local carrier, was bought up by a dot-com bust company, promptly went bankrupt and was sold off various times.

So ... I understand bad morale and 10% layoffs. We went from 25,000 employees (1998-1999) at peek to under 3,000 (2004ish?). I did 17 years of (at least) 10% cuts company-wide, often larger in IT, every 6-12 months.

They're going to have a problem hiring, that's certain. They seem very unconcerned with that both with the drumbeat of layoffs and the forced spyware nonsense.

I remember when things were at the worst at my company, HR did a company-wide "engagement" survey. Being in IT at the time, we worked closely with them to ensure as close to complete participation as possible. The theory behind it was that each employee (anonymous) would receive a ranking, bubbled up to segments within the company (less anonymous) and specific managers.

The reason for the rush to get this out was fraud fears. I guess that number goes low enough to represent something near "an employee who feels morally obligated to destroy the organization", but the number of employees who fit in the range of "so disengaged from the company that they are probably engaging in fraud/theft" in the trial phase was an order of magnitude higher than the team had estimated.

When things get that bad, it's tough to recover. In certain locations we had an impossible time hiring most positions -- we had a toxic reputation in a high-tech location with a lot of job openings; we were often the last choice of the worst candidates no matter what the position was.

You make a good point.

I'm "neurodivergent" but when it comes to empathy/sympathy, I tend toward the over-sensitive side rather than oblivious (as does my son, who is diagnosed with ASD Type 1).

I don't take any issue with that being used in this context, though. I mean, I wouldn't really in any context as long as the person writing it isn't intending malice -- they're just words, people can misuse/abuse them -- but specifically this context. "Neurodivergent" covers a lot of ground, but in reference to Mr. Zuckerberg, nearly all of us[0] pictured one of two things: Data (Star Trek) or Data with Borg accessories attached. Which you chose largely depended on your opinion of him, but both had an android character who has no ability to feel emotions or understand the emotions that others feel.

... and since good communication largely rests on people's understanding of your message, I think OP's word choice was largely sound. :)

[0] As in those of you who, like me, have never been in the same city at the same time as the guy so we know "him" based on what we read about him.

It's kind of always been a wild time to be alive in this industry.

You covered people washing out of CS degrees and people getting degrees and then not, ultimately, doing something in the CS field.

But what you see in our field that you don't see as often, elsewhere (or -- at all, depending on regulations) is people who ... (1) washed out of the degree because it was competing with their lucrative career as a software developer (or -- more rarely, successful entrepreneur), (2) got a degree in textual biblical studies and had a long career in software development[0] or, you know, other unrelated degree, (3) none of the above, even sometimes incomplete High School education (also[0]).

I've been hiring developers for almost 30 years, now, at a variety of employers -- one global multi-national telecom, one "we make a lot of the products other companies pass off as their own work" IoT/small shop, and a couple of video conference/remote-enabling service shops. There are far more degrees out there, today, than there were 30 years ago. My experience, however, is that the necessity of a degree at the companies I've been employed at has gone down. I suspect that's because I worked for "the giant multinational", first, and all of the rest have been startup or smaller/younger shops (typically 5-10 devs, but no more than ~20 at peek). The giant multi-national, though, during my 17 years, changed (early on) to "or equivalent experience" while rarely hiring someone without a degree for most IT positions to routinely interviewing and hiring people without regard for their degree (and focusing on "code you've written" over "whiteboard exercises", too) while still generally favoring candidates with them. At the best shop I've worked for, it was an even mix of "none", "some", "unrelated", "+bootcamp", "CS degrees" and filled with extremely competent, well-paid, developers.

It's a whole lot harder to get the experience required to have "equivalent experience" without university/internships/the like, but getting the degree without any relevant work experience along the way isn't a good way to go, either.

Around the late 90s (until the bust) and then again a few years later, everyone was pushing kids into CS degrees and the most "interesting" aspect to many of those kids was the starting/long-term earnings against the cost of the 4-year degree. And while, personally, I think "anyone can do it", not "everyone will find it enjoyable to do" like I do.

I'm starting to believe that last part is far more rare than I think it is with my 18-year-old son mostly disliking his introductory computer programming class in High School[1]. I don't push "what I do" on them, just like my Dad didn't, but I expose them to it whenever I can (like my Dad -- kind of -- didn't). And I'll never forget when their Mom looked over at my screen and said "So ... is that what you do all day?", and I beamed "Yes" because it really is the most interesting thing in the world to me, and she said "Wow ... I think I'd kill myself."

[0] Ok, so that's a specific example of someone I know.

[1] Ultimately coming around at the end when his assignment was "make something you want to make."

Wow, yeah, I picked up one of these a few months before the new generation came out for $350. Everything shot up after that.

My son is using that card, today, and I'm amazed at everything that card can still power. I had a 5080 and just comparing a few games, I found if he used the SuperResolution correctly, he can set the other game settings at the same as mine and his frame-rate isn't far off (things like Fortnite, not Cyberpunk 2077)

There are many caveats there, of course. AMD's biggest problem is in the drivers/implementation for that card. Unlike NVidia's similar technology, it requires setting the game at a lower resolution which it then "fixes" and it tends to produce artifacts depending on the game/how high those settings go. It's a lot harder to juggle the settings between the driver and the game than it should be.

I feel deep gratitude to you for this, and the timing of your post. Thank you!

Seriously. I also feel like you're owed an apology for having had to write this in the first place.

I'm coming at "figuring out the Kitchen" for what is almost the first time in my life in I-wish-I-were-in-my-mid-40s[0] and I'm thinking "The Internet in the Early 00s was pretty good for that." And then I fire up a browser on desktop while making a grocery list and once you filter for "things that are obviously AI Hallucinations representing partial recipes", I'm met with one or all of the following: (1) Pages and pages and pages of obviously made-up nonsense anecdotes about the discovery of this magical, uh, air fryer grilled chicken marinade, (2) a pretty haphazard set of instructions that don't bother to include ingredients separated with pleasant units and conversions, but hide them throughout with quantities like "a few tomatoes" here, "an onion" there, (3) which doesn't seem to impact the 4.8 stars after hundreds of "user ratings.". (4) And rather than help these miserable imprecise, ingredient-less recipes with pictures of what "until moist and brown" might appear, you're going to show me a bunch of chopped ingredients in separated bowls that I don't have and then a picture of it finished, delicately decorated in whatever-or-another sauce, and "HEY, here's some lady who's cooking something unrelated to the recipe in this neat little video window I popped up for you! Let's watch the top of her head and this bowl of something on mute for a little while!"

Good God, man, it's like they've optimized the design to break people with ADHD. Some sites were so bad, it felt like "the actual recipe I was looking for" was obfuscated on the page like sketchy sites will hide the "actual Download button" somewhere unexpected and give you a big green "Download" button that leads to revenue. And that's not even getting into the weird bad on some of these AI-churn sites. I end up opening a notepad on the side and refactoring the things that seem like they might work from time to time, but I popped a few recipes in there, including a Chili recipe that "barely had any problems other than layout and annoying cooking lady videos" and just turned it into the perfect representation of that recipe.

I don't know what the original feedback was, but beyond how clear and organized laid out the recipe, here's what I saw as really useful little touches (I'm half wondering if some were even intended): (1) Besides my affinity for circled numbers, I lose my spot when referring to recipes so I like to print out the ones I really like, laminate them, and mark 'em up with the whiteboard markers I have for fridge notes as I go, you gave me a wonderful spot for that -- I'm so prone to re-read/second-guess where I'm at when I need to "put a bunch of things together at the last moment", that was the first thing I noticed, (2) Your highlighting did the same thing for making my grocery list (I DoorDashed it, today) -- it's so much more readable and "easy to find my spot" the way it appears on my desktop compared to any other site, (3) Because of your choice positioning, I can scroll down slightly and see the ingredients and all of the instructions without having to touch this thing, again, while I'm cooking if I use the tablet in the kitchen.

Oh, and thank you for making it just work in the browser. I hate using my phone for this kind of thing and I'm not even crazy about using my tablet for it.

[0] The backstory being unexpected, but very much desired, custody change led to me cooking for my children all of the time, including one who struggles with weight. I was blessed without that struggle, I eat "whatever" atrociously (not picky), and about what I burn, I'm under-weight and my blood work is perfect. One of my kids is identical, just not the one that sounds exactly like me :).

   > As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated

Really, though, the biggest factor is just being their parent. When they're young, the vast majority of the time you can basically read their mind. When you're teaching your child, you almost instinctively know how well they're understanding things. I was never deliberate about it, I didn't look for things, I never had to. I was able to pace my delivery very tightly with their ability to consume and it was the most natural thing imaginable.

That, and having a class size of two, meant Home Schooling was "30-45 minutes Monday-Friday September to mid-April with generous vacations." And that's not "30-45 minutes but we also went to a museum, the library, co-ops (we did, briefly), and all kinds of other learning activities" (I'm sure I lied and said I did those things), that was 30-45 minutes, do some chores (we don't live on a farm, it's the same stuff most kids do), and play video games.

Parenting-wise, the only elements we were more strict with was we limited "watching a TV show or video content" to an hour (two, on occasion, for movies) a day ... and we were quite rigorous with that. But they could play pretty much any video game they wanted (within reason, but probably far less restrictive than most parents outside of Hacker News). And they didn't get mobile devices until 13 and 15. There was no reason. They had/have computers.

My goal was simply "to teach them at home better than they could get at school and to make them self-learners along the way." I wasn't looking for genius spelling bee winners.

They've been in Public School (since the start of HS for my son, 7th grade for my daughter) for four years. Those 30-45 minute sessions that -- not once -- involved taking a test resulted in them being straight-A students. The first test they took, a placement test, resulted in them landing in advanced classes.

They finish their home work at school (my son works way ahead because he's bored). They study for nothing outside of midterms and finals (and they only do that out of paranoia, it's not really needed).

The majority of the time they were Home Schooled, Mom and I were divorced (and it wasn't "amicable" for the majority of that, it was ... ugly). And while that was hard, actually home schooling the children was not. It was awesome. I'd have been a lot less stressed in the earlier years if I'd have known how easy it was.

It was "get good curriculum, follow it, don't move on until they understand it to what a teacher would grade an 'A'". You do the latter because you have to; anything else is debt and the only one who pays that debt is the you. Your kids will just sob through it. Outside of budgeting because you're likely down to one income, the rest was all upside.

   > It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children wen parents think they can do as well or better.

It took a lot of research on my end to get to that conclusion but I would have been just as good ignoring it and listening to the experience of a friend I made who home schooled all seven of her children, or talking to her kids. I did both; research led me to talk to her and her husband, talking to them confirmed I was making the right choice.

Though I am Christian, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (we taught the same science everyone else received; no "the Earth is 15,000 years old" or whatever nonsense). I even think there's reasonable evangelical arguments to be made that Christians should put their children in traditional schools, so this wasn't a faith choice for me. I loved High School and I went to a large High School. So "bullying" and the like had nothing to do with it.

Had I not attended Public School, I probably wouldn't be doing what I love for a living and it was a couple of amazing teachers that went to bat for me, creating classes that didn't exist and letting me take HS classes while I was in Middle School, so when I say "I know I can do better" that's doesn't come with "because the public school system and the teachers are garbage." There's problems, there, for sure -- but my kids live in the #4 district and attend the #1 public High School in that district. It's a pretty fantastic school, the kids are friendly and I'm fine with it all around. I didn't think they'd do poorly regardless of how they were schooled, I just knew I could do better.

That's not arrogance; I think the vast majority of parents could do better.

It's because, as a parent, when they're young you can basically read their mind. That's an advantage a teacher doesn't get. You don't even have to "notice" that they're struggling or that they "know it cold and are bored", you just pace things on instinct and you deliver knowledge very close to the actual rate they can easily ingest it.

The other advantage that would be hard to replicate is class size. I had a class of two. Two different grades, but all that meant was my daughter got a preview of (and often just ended up learning completely) whatever she had to do and whatever her brother was learning and her brother got a review every day.

You can pretty much take out every other advantage of Home Schooling. Just those two result in a 6-7 hour whiteboard directed lesson and busy work time down to 45 minutes/child (really ... 30 most of the time). That also gave us a September to mid-April school year with generous vacations (otherwise we'd finish in February).

It wasn't my goal to make genius, spelling-bee winners, or to put them years ahead of public school students. The latter absolutely happened, but we were only ever doing a single grade per year in every subject with pretty formal home school curriculum. There was just a lot of extra time to screw around exploring things beyond the books.

I wanted them to learn better than they would in school and I wanted them to be able to be self-directed in learning. They are successful beyond my expectations in both areas.

They've been in Public School, now, for four years. My son hasn't taken work home from school in ... really ... four years. Homework is assigned, he just finishes it. My daughter is the same way. Outside of midterms and finals (out of fear/paranoia, not necessity), they do not touch schoolwork at home.

Despite not having taken a "real test" in their lives until enrollment, they placed in advanced classes. Despite them never receiving an independently graded assignment (or even one that had a grade written on it[0]), they both have a 4.0 GPA. My daughter had perfect scores in half of her classes last year.

They are happy kids who aren't stressed out at school (because those 45 minute daily sessions, apparently, covered a lot of ground -- my son still talks about things "he did in, like, 7th Grade, Dad!"

Really, though, forget all of the other reasons. It's worth doing it just for the relationship you form with your kids and that they form with their siblings. My teenagers don't act like teenagers. They act like happy young adults (because they are).

It wasn't hard. I did the majority of it with my ex- wife (through a high-conflict divorce and high-conflict early years ... that was hard ... worth it, though).

[0] You don't let your kids rack up debt by learning something less than very proficiently because you're the one that has to pay that debt when the later lesson comes that builds on that part, so yeah, they "got all As" in Home School ... because I don't like misery.

I appreciate you sharing -- specifically because my kids were Home Schooled until High School and attend Public High School, now.

I feel the same way about the value of early-years Home School and mainstream High School. Mom and I had agreed that we'd let them pick once they hit High School. That coincided with the end of the COVID lockdowns, so being lonely like everyone else, they picked Public School. Prior to COVID, I'd have put money on them remaining Home Schooled.

I did exactly the same things with my kids with regard to advanced math/science topics. Actual "sit down and learn time" was spent 80% on Math/Science and 20% on everything else. And I've found some things benefit being introduced way younger. Things like the theory of relativity are "accepted as fact" more easily when they don't stand in the face of 15-years of observation. It can be understood with cartoons and when the topic is studied -- in depth -- later, they're not having to start from "how, on Earth, does that make any sense?!"

I Homeschooled both of my children from birth to 7th and 9th grade, respectively. The state I live in had, at the time (might still), zero regulation around Home Schooling. I have met hundreds of home schooling families and children (as well as hired one), all wonderful people. A lot of them chose to do so for one or two common reasons (religion and learning disability seem, unscientifically, to be the most common).

I'm a bit of a unique case in that "it really should have been an unbelievable mess": this was done, almost entirely, while divorced from Mom. And we were not "amicable" through much of it. It was a decision we had both committed to before the kids were born and stuck with after the divorce. I have two children, not 4+ (maybe that's just my experience, but the first family I talked to about this had 7). I didn't do it for religious reasons, bullying reasons, "I hate teachers or public schools" reasons or because I wanted my children to win a bunch of spelling bees. I did it after researching options and concluding that I could educate my two children better than any other option available to them and I could do so without them spending all day in books. I believed I was taught arithmetic in a manner that made it harder for me to understand Algebra[0], and I didn't feel I was ever encouraged or otherwise directed "to learn skills and subjects on my own." The top two, though, were "I wanted self-learners" and I, my son and my daughter are diagnosed ASD (type 1); Mom probably is, too, but getting a diagnosis as an adult is combinations of difficult/pointless.

After the early years (probably 4th grade on, earlier for my youngest), the average Home School day became 45 minutes of book/traditional learning work (often less) from Home School curriculum, usually another 45 minutes of self-directed study and for the most part the rest of the day was for themselves to direct (with restrictions; video games were limited to creative and some other specific titles but our children had far more freedom than most). We did weekday only (with a lot of vacation) and September-April. There was simply no way to make the materials go any longer.

They did not take tests (at least, not in the way they're taken at school) until they took their first test in 7th and 9th grade. We, like most Home School parents, started off trying to "replicate school approaches" at home and discovered most of them exist because of schools. My favorite is "grades." If someone asked, "4.0". And they'd assume it's "because I'm Dad" and assume I'm grading lax. I'm not grading at all. We work on the material until it is learned above proficiently. And as a parent Home Schooling, that is the only path to success that doesn't involve misery because if you let them have a mulligan on something, it'll be built upon later and you and they will drown. You need grades in mainstream school, you need "pass/fail" with an "A" being the bar for passing in Home Schools.

I didn't admit most of this in the past, especially not the "45 minute" bit. I straight up lied about it to anyone who wasn't a Home School parent. I had family and friends actively discouraging me every single year that I did this. I admit it, now, because they're top students in their mainstream school and have been since day 1.

My children, like everyone else's, got lonely after the COVID lockdowns and we'd always told them they can decide what to do when my oldest reaches High School. It was sad, suddenly every kid is home but nobody's allowed to play together and even if they could, all of their peers were spending the whole day trying to replicate a classroom via video-calls. My kids were lonely, bored, and unhappy. The day-time Home School activities (that most people are completely unaware of) had been tried up for two years and didn't seem to be coming back. So we put them in Public Schools and lucked out that Mom was located the #4 district and the #1 High School in that district. It's been four years; my son is a Senior.

That first test taking experience landed them in accelerated courses. They started with and have continued to have a 4.0 GPA. They get the homework done at school. They might study for mid-terms and finals. My daughter, last year, I think had half of her classes with every single point earned. They've bested me in every imaginable way (I had a rocking 2.5 GPA in High School). They take school very seriously, but every year they've had a portion of the class that's been review from things we did in Home School.

If it seems unbelievable that I'd get these results on so little time, have a conversation with other Home School parents (assuming their children have some external validation to their education, otherwise we all lie). Consider that I have two children, not 20. You can basically read your own child's mind up until they reach their teens (much longer if they spend most of their time around you instead of peers at school). Being able to read your student's mind is an incredibly unfair advantage. It's not even that "you notice more quickly when you're going to slow or they're not understanding" it's that you anticipate it. I knew what parts of math I would have to slow down with for my son, they were different for my daughter (long division was daily fits with tears and all for a few weeks). Most of the time, with learning, there's a lot of burst/buffer/stall cycles and the sending and receiving end take a long time to figure out when one is in a sub-optimal state. We didn't do rigorous lesson plans (that's for keeping a class full of kids on the same page), we let them dictate how fast or slow we moved based on how much or little they struggle.

I hesitate to say "Just because we only spent 45 minutes in the books doesn't mean we didn't spend the rest of the day learning in other ways" but if you saw how a day was conducted, you'd conclude we didn't. My kids were enrolled in extra-curricular activities, but probably fewer than most mainstream school kids. They had weekly random activities that would be considered "field trips" in school. We were probably more strict than most parents with some things, because we could be: my kids received their first mobile phones at, I think, 13 and 15. We allowed no more than two hours per day of "watching a video, television show or movie." But (outside of inappropriate content) they were mostly unrestricted with which video games they could play and they played plenty (my daughter can slaughter me in just about everything, but I stopped playing for a decade while they were young). My daughter has taught herself to read music, guitar tabs and play Guitar, Bass, Piano and she sings. I played piano for 15 years and she's learned in a year what it took me five with formal lessons. She's taught herself to paint. My son is mini-me, computers, 3D printers, CNC, programming and any other electronic toy.

The reason I didn't do it for, though, turned out to be the reason I'm most thankful that I accepted the minor sacrifice: I wouldn't have had the arrogance to pray for the closeness and kind of relationship I have with my kids, today. I know my parents dreaded going to parent-teacher conferences. Those are my favorite!

[0] And, unintentionally favored an approach that ended up becoming Common Core math in my state, which is just loathed by parents ... which is too bad, because it worked very well for my own kids.

I believe this has a lot to do with the problem in my area. We have a bunch of disconnected sidewalks almost everywhere. They've started connecting them. There's more pedestrian traffic at some lights at some times of the day but it's nowhere near consistent.

Driving, especially during commute, becomes an exercise of muscle memory for most of us. We are used to what we see. All year long I might encounter a pedestrian at my most commonly encountered intersections once a year. Most drivers are on auto-pilot, they're used to looking for cars, if people aren't abundantly obvious, they're missed.

They've started connecting sidewalks around me. Foot traffic has tripled as a result. Still, that means I encounter a pedestrian three times a year? That's not going to improve exposure enough to make anyone specifically look any more frequently. It's going to just create more opportunities for people to get hit. And that's what's happened.

Oh man, you're bringing back memories.

I know I went with SCSI, originally, because I had actually purchased two drives -- the huge one, and another one that was a bit faster but smaller and something had led me to believe that SCSI lent itself better to that configuration. I can't remember, specifically, what though.

I recall with CD-ROM drives -- earlier ones -- it was similar. Actually, in a few ways it was worse because the earliest CD-ROM drives came as SCSI or "Parallel Port to SCSI" which I'm not sure anyone ever got to work completely right.

But ... and I could just Google it but I'm being lazy ... I recall it had something to do with Bus Disconnection and Native Command Queuing in SCSI that allowed the CD-ROM drive and the HDD to operate without waiting on one another (as much?).

I know SCSI drives basically disappeared once IDE drives became common. You didn't see SCSI controllers often outside of servers, ever, in the PC world except for a brief period when that was the most common CD-ROM drive.

I didn't make that point clearly enough in my comment ... my point, somewhat lost due to lack of brevity was "looks like some of the least reputable HDD salvage outfits discovered some a way to ditch the last problem of selling refurbished HDDs by making them look 'new'."

I assume that was the original business this outfit was involved in, anyway, since most of those companies are shady, already. :)

This is interesting, it really sounds like they were running a pretty normal salvage operation with the evil twist of "they were selling the salvaged drives as new" -- kinda feels like dialing back the odometer on a car.

Barring that "evil twist", they'd not be doing anything all that uncommon/illegal but refurbished hard drives and the companies that sell them have been a bit scammy/"buyer beware" hardware for as long as I can remember.

Back in the early 90s, I spent a year saving up for and building the best 486 PC I could buy. I went with a 330MB[0] SCSI drive that I picked up from a small magazine advertisement in Computer Shopper. They advertised it as refurbished, and there was no such thing as SMART parameters to reset (were there even counters of any kind back then, I can't remember?) so there was no way to tell how long it had been used except for the price. These were more than half off.

It seemed shady, the price was still several hundred dollars (though, I want to say something like $500 off of the cheapest new option) and being a dumb teenager, I called the number and placed the order.

My heart sunk a bit when it arrived. If memory serves, this was the one that came with all but one of the threaded screw slots completely stripped (of the four I needed to use given my case). Technically, they were all stripped, but one of them still had the screw -- left behind, evidently, because it became welded to the hole.

After some delicate work with a metal file, I got it all installed and nothing worked. So I called the manufacturer who took about ten seconds to find the problem: That's a Differential SCSI drive. It took another few minutes for him to explain what that meant. There was no mention of this in the advertisement (they didn't even include the model number, just "330GB SCSI DRIVES!" I think these were common in AS/400s or something along those lines.

fsck.

So ... I bought a differential SCSI controller, cable and terminator, which set me back more than half of the savings from the drive. Because, as a teenager, I hadn't learned about the sunk cost fallacy.

I hadn't appreciated, then, what a miracle it was that when everything was plugged in correctly, it all worked and continued to work until I upgraded the drive. The thing was extremely loud (occasionally making a unique sound similar to when wood hits a circular saw, like the magnetic head was grinding off some of the platter -- given its size, it had plenty of room to chisel the bits onto the surface ...). It was a massive heat source for not just the case, but the room. But it served my stupid BBS for several years, somehow.

[0] It's been so long, I may not have that capacity right. It was 3-4 times what was typical at that time (I ran a BBS with file"z"). It was a 5.25" drive that required a full height slot (it was about 3/4 full height) to give you an idea.

Right there with you. I just dropped an amount of money I'm unwilling to admit on replacement bulbs throughout -- only this time I was replacing WiFi RGBW LED bulbs in rooms that had lower-end bulbs (almost everything on the market).

Incidentally, I went with LIFX -- I had purchased their bulbs back when they were the only realistic option besides Philips Hue for smart RGBW bulbs[0]. Still seems those two brands produce the most flicker-free variety.

[0] LIFX was a handful of lumens brighter at the time and didn't have a hub requirement

They list the PWM frequency in the bulb specifications? That's news to me.

A few months ago I went through most of the bulbs in my house and replaced nearly all of them with LIFX bulbs. I had spent quite some time trying to figure out which bulbs would have the least flicker and knew from my more DIY setups[0] that PWM frequency is the cause.

I deal with Migraine somewhat regularly and PWM flicker/strobe lights amplify the pain when I'm dealing with one.

Nearly every smart bulb I've grabbed incorporates such a miserably slow PWM setting that dimming the bulb to 1% results in lighting that's reduced by only about 25%. It becomes clear when you set it to 1% that the manufacturer couldn't limit length of the "off" cycle further or the bulb would begin resembling a strobe light.

I haven't tested all of the more expensive variants, but I also had a really hard time finding any "from the manufacturer" information about the PWM frequencies. I've also never encountered an incandescent drop-in that uses anything other than PWM frequency (I wasn't even aware that there are fixtures that do that).

[0] Experiments? Magic-smoke generators? Sometimes-almost-house-fires? I'm no electrical engineer.

So ... like ... WOW.

I read your description and thought, "some toy 3D project; probably slow/lacking features." I mean, you did a fine job but perhaps reading it in such a simple view made it lose something? Not a critique on you, just an observation of myself.

I've looked at it all of a few minutes and this is pretty fantastic. Quite fast, the UI seems relatively understandable coming from other tools. Looks as clean as the rest, anyway.

And I've been annoyed that there's not Fusion 360 available (supported, anyway) for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed ... you may have saved me some grief with this, so thanks for that!

So these are popping up everywhere, then?

I have two within five miles of my house. They've both been there over a year, probably a bit longer. I'm in a mid-western US suburb, mostly blue-colllar/manufacturing employers around here. And there's a "Red Tag" store (similar) which is very obviously trying to pass off that they sell Target returns/over-stock. It's across the street from -- surprise -- a Target!

Of the two "bin" stores, nearby, one is much larger/newer. The bigger one starts off at $7 on Saturday at noon, dropping to a buck by the following Friday. There is a loooooong line. I think they started selling memberships or something along those lines to let you have the first spots in said line (or maybe get in a little early). They sell other, higher-dollar items, but I've walked out of there on a Saturday with a portable pump for $7 that was selling for $60 on Amazon (it was worth about $20 IMHO). There's a reason people line up.

They also sell $35 random (sealed) boxes (and I think you can buy 4 for $100 or some kind of arrangement like that). I've never seen the contents of these boxes. It looks like most of these businesses stock returns from, mostly, Amazon but also others which they buy in lots. I'm not sure the mechanics of it but I'm sure another comment has an explanation by now.

Searching "Surplus" on Google Maps surfaced the two I found (with identical models) as well as one an hour away that didn't do the "bin" arrangement, but dealt in larger items. I purchased an ultra-wide monitor for $400, there (about $350 off the best price when I bought it).

Personally, I love these spots. There is such a massive stock of returns that you can almost rely on showing up at one of these places and having a pretty good chance of finding what you need, it just takes a little more effort.

Beat me to it -- completely relate, man. I wrote an entire Visual Studio extension just to let me set my monitor to extremely low brightness/contrast and still be able to read the text.

I've since discovered medication that has eliminated the brunt of Migraine, for me, but this would have been an easy purchase to make, for me.

He did it more out of necessity, originally, but when I met him, yeah, it was "for fun". Among the other stories I found to be true was "I worked at KFC for $8/hr and owned a home[0]"

[0] In a lower-middle-class neighborhood.

Interesting ... it's presented in the context of drugs for curing infections.

I wonder if this is being used for other drugs. My curiosity stems from personal experience: I had Migraine headaches from age 17 to about 35. I was put on ancient seizure medication that's common prescribed for Bipolar[0] because this doctor had three other patients that it nearly eliminated Migraine from. It was fall, a time when I'd get about one a week. After five days of taking it, I had my first Migraine ... if you could call it that -- I could only identify that it was a Migraine by the aura; the pain was about 10% what I'm used to).

Searching through the web, I found a forum that was filled with Migraine sufferers. Sure enough, there were a handful of people who swore by it. There were also a handful of people who it didn't work for. Looking at the more official sources, there was no indication that this drug could have any effect on Migraine; they listed all of the other off-label uses[1], but Migraine was not among them.

This medication had been in the news several times (and on the front page, here[2]) over the last few years and a year ago (or so), I looked it up on the "official sources", again. It now indicated that it was prescribed for Migraine.

It made me wonder ... how are things like that figured out/communicated down-stream? Is it entirely informally amongst doctors? I went to four different specialists before I found one who suggested this drug -- and he did so in a "half-hearted manner" not truly expecting it would work. It'd be nice if this was centrally tracked/managed as it might surface both "new uses for old drugs" and "new problems with old drugs."

[0] Which I do not have.

[1] It's rarely, if ever, prescribed for what it was originally approved for.

[2] It's Depakote, I'm not being cagey for nefarious purposes, I just didn't want this to be a drug advertisement.

Getting laid off is a unique experience -- I can't find a better word than that. I mean, on one hand we always knew this was a business transaction: I'm providing a service, you're paying me to provide a service. But work, on some level, is a social activity. You often make lasting friendships at jobs, especially a job you enjoy. If you share an office with your team[0], it isn't unusual for that to become your closest "group of friends." And you're friends mostly because you spend 8+ hours a day together five days a week. When the job ends, that daily refueling that your friendships received also ends. It's not unusual for the last day of that job to be one of the last times you communicate with those people and the last time you end up in the same place, together.

It's why a job starts to feel like "a family."

Just for the sake of context: some of the "unique" aspects are unique to the field of Software Development; some may be unique to my particular skill-set/location/circumstances. It's "unique" in that right when it happens, it ... sucks. But the two times it's happened to me -- both cases of "economic realities" or "radical business restructuring" -- it ended up being a few weeks off and into a better job -- in both cases, forms of "dream jobs." I've never gone more than 4 weeks without a paycheck since I was 16. I live near the car capital of the world and don't like cars/have no interest in working for any car/car-related company. I've worked for a global multi-national telecom, a conferencing provider, a maker of IoT devices for huge third-party companies, machine learning for a fraud company and remote medical software with a hint of robotics. The IoT job and the last job happened after being laid off. After about 2-3 weeks of back-and-forth, I had at least two offers in play both times I lost my job. In both cases, the economy and hiring trends were negative. In one case it was so close to Christmas that many people were difficult to reach.

I received a piece of advice way too late in my career from a 50-year-old man who was working for a startup that -- literally anyone who had any familiarity with the space would have given about a 99.99995% chance of cratering in bankruptcy. I was brought in on contract to help them get through some code written off-shore, he was my "project manager." Over lunch he'd offered me a job directly with the company[1]. I mentioned "benefits, salary and job security" and he said: "You won't beat the pay, the benefits are fine, and you're a software developer -- even 2008, unemployment in our sector was low enough to be considered 'full employment'. And if they get bought or succeed, the stock could make you a lot of money." Random advice, even from graybeards, is not often the kind that I take blindly, but having just gone through being unemployed during a -- not terrible, but not great -- economic time and finding more than one offer on the table in about three weeks, I couldn't argue with him. Thinking back to the scores of employees who were laid off when I worked at the telecom, I could name only one (non-manager) guy in IT who didn't end up some place much better a month after they started looking for work, again[2].

While there's never any guarantees and I don't want this to be a "buck up, camper" kind of dismissal of the misery of losing a job, I suspect the ex-Googler will land on their feet and maybe they'll look back on this and say "Yeah, but if I'd stayed there, I'd have missed out on all of the stuff I'm working on, now."

[0] Even if not, though physical proximity encourages it.

[1] This was not only allowed at the company I worked, it often came with an e-mail announcing when it happened in "celebration"-style. We rarely directly contracted to a third-party, so it wasn't a sort of "temporary placement agency" or anything like that. In fact, the reason I was contracted directly was because the owners of the company went to school with the owners of the startup and the 50-year-old guy was a former employee of my employers. They'd worked out an arrangement during a time when business was slow.

[2] Depending on how long that person worked there, they may have received over a year of severance paid at 100% of the employee's salary -- in one case, paid in a single lump sum cheque (due to the company going bankrupt and the court preventing them from paying the outstanding severance checks of employees who were laid off a week prior to the bankruptcy). One guy took a year off and still landed a job in a month.

A buddy of mine started me on a similar habit that I find obnoxious but impossible to kick.

It started when we were in a meeting with an executive (who was a wonderful man) who -- due to nerves -- used the filler phrase "ya know" about twice a sentence -- like someone who's nervous might use the filler word "um" or "uh."

When the meeting was over, I'd joked that he'd said "ya know" three times in the same sentence and without missing a beat he said "541, I counted"[0]. He went on to explain that when someone repeats a word/phrase, especially if it's a word that's used "to sound intelligent", he can't help but count.

Incidentally, despite having no reason to be suspicious[1], I didn't believe him and being in an IT department with its share of folks with social anxiety and various forms of autism[2], it took all of a day before we were in another meeting with someone who, I think, pronounced "infeasible" as "in-THESE-able." A minor mistake, but he repeated it a solid thirty times and liked to really push that emphasis on the second syllable. We got out of the meeting and I asked for his number. "37"[0] he said. I was one off. It ended up becoming a weird sort of corporate meeting game that we did a few times a month over 17 years. It's a ridiculously easy habit to pick up, it turns out. I've been out of that job for years and I still do it. No real reason, any longer. I don't think less of people who don't have a solid command of public speaking -- as in, I'm not doing it for the purpose of feeling superior or being a d!ck and pointing it out to them. The only people that know I do this (other than readers of my comments on HN) are my kids and the guy who got me hooked.

[0] The exact number escapes me but it was a suspiciously random sounding number

[1] This guy marched to the beat of a different drummer. I have so many stories of outlandish claims he made that turned out to be absolutely true by this point that I should have taken him at his word. By this point he'd shown me a receipt indicating his bill was less than a dime for what must have been two carts worth of groceries (early 2000s), and it was only a dime because he bought something from the register to avoid a negative balance (a problem he's navigated in the past).

[2] Myself and (I suspect) my friend are diagnosed ASD as well.

The only issue I've ever had with archive.* links had to do with compatibility with Cloudflare's DNS but those just fail to resolve. I'm not sure what three lines that fade out is all about -- extensions, maybe?

I mostly agree with what the author is saying with regard to "the current state of things." I do not feel, however, that it is a particularly large concern, especially long-term, given the second step (summarizing) is probably already integrated into everyone's e-mail client, and if not -- it will be at some point. The "smoothing out of difficult communications", however, may end up being worth the whole "having to read a summarized response."

The reason it won't matter "long term" is that e-mail clients are solving/will solve[0] the "give me 'the point' of this e-mail." If my couple of decades of experience across multiple employers is any indication[1], the vast majority of people in software development fall into one of two camps: (a) They don't have the basics of written communication down. It's not a matter of misspellings or improper semi-colon, or emdash. It's all lower case[2] with no punctuation, or with "..." (no spaces between, either) in place of every other form of punctuation. Or (b) they are generally grumpy people who write in a manner that fits their personality.

Conveying tone, correctly, via written text is hard unless the tone you're trying to convey is "frustration/anger/impatience". And, of course, the same folks who can't figure out punctuation tend to respond tersely. Between co-workers who work closely together, that's preferred. When my boss has to tell me something minor about my performance and sends it in a five-word e-mail, it comes off like I need to start looking for new work. Prior to AI, "good managers who were writing-challenged" would find templates online and replace words. It never sounded genuine. AI brings us a lot closer to that, while not requiring an enormous amount of effort on the part of the writer. It'll be a matter of time before a lot of that process happens within the client (if it doesn't, already). I know tone detection is a common feature on communications tools I use[3].

[0] Not entirely sure; I use e-mail so infrequently, but thinking about the chat app we use at work, it provides AI summaries of the day's chats in each channel.

[1] Anecdata, I know, but it's all I've got

[2] Including the first letter of every meeting invite and subject; if I have OCD, that triggers it.

[3] Divorce communications ...

The company my employer uses, as far as I can tell, handles all of HR functions -- compliance, training, tax/payroll, benefits and the like.

Thank you for the explanation. It's been something I've been meaning to research because I'd never encountered this before my current employer and it's become something I will actually ask about in the future.

I prefer smaller employers (500 or less) but this is pretty fantastic. I've worked for a Fortune 500 employer with a solid, expensive-but-generously-subsidized healthcare plan, a tiny employer with expensive coverage that wasn't all that great but I've never been able to select from three different providers with a few options a piece.

It was a "killer feature" for me. My family has low-to-moderate medical needs, I like HSA eligible PPOs if the deductible/cost is right. I was able to find three plans that were taken by my family's specific specialists where I could max out the HSA deduction and pay less than half what I had at the last "typical employer plan" company.

This came too late for the Dental side of things -- I would have saved a couple grand per child on braces by purchasing the "Cadillac Plan" even with the two-year lock-in. The last three employers all had plans that seemingly no dentist on Earth is "in network" for and from insurance brands I've never heard of.

There's other upsides -- working at BigCo, we received various discounts at specific car rental companies/hotel chains that the company negotiated discounted rates in exchange for preference for business travel.

I haven't looked into what my company is doing, fully, yet, but it sounds like we have a subset of some of those features, too. We're around 150-200 people (I think) but this is the most comprehensive and reasonably priced benefits offering I've ever seen.

There were a handful lesser known brands at that size, as well. I remember we went 16" when 'it was incredibly rare to see anything other than 14" screen sizes.'

Honestly, I can't remember what the brand was, but I don't think it was the NEC. I remember I had sold a few 16" displays and had liked a cheaper model well enough to save the money. We tended to value larger monitors with higher resolutions at home (Dad had spreadsheets and AutoCAD), so we went through a few -- plus, at one point, "I worked at CompUSA" and it was hard to get them as cheap as "employee discount"[0] as a small-time re-seller.

But the huge deals, IIRC, were with the "strange vendor" -- the Nokia Display -- that was a huge solid Trinitron tube, the largest sporting a slightly higher refresh rate than ... anything else.

But they have a hard time selling because "Who's Nokia Display?" As this was pre-"digital mobile phone service" -- the "pagers are cool" days -- it was often "Nokia Who?". If you could catch the vendor when they swung by and grabbed the right form, they'd let you buy the top-of-the-line for like 75% off[1] which was substantially less than "employee discount." I know I picked up a monitor, a scanner and a US-Robotics modem, cheap, that way. :)

[0] We were told this was "cost" -- and that wasn't completely out of left field. I had a re-seller agreement with some of the same distributors and got worse pricing, pretty consistently, than I could get as an employee.

[1] Either in the form of "do this and ..." ("spiffs") or just "we'll give you a discount on exactly one" and depending on the vendor, this was "mail us a bunch of sh!t" and "we'll ship you one" or "we'll mail you a rebate check equivalent to the difference from what you paid" (assuming you paid MSRP or less). And make sure you make copies of everything :).

Lovely read -- the 80s early 90s were such an interesting time in computing. That was a nice walk down memory lane for me and instantly brought back memories of dialing into (and eventually running) a Bulletin Board System.

Few families had computers and -- as a kid -- the luckiest kids had Commodore 64s. I was the only kid -- out of 8 of my friends -- who's Dad insisted on having the same hardware at home that he had at work and he, like so many of that era, fell in love with Lotus 1-2-3[0]. I found it incredible that a nearly $4,000 (1985ish dollars) 8088 "generic clone" computer with ten times the RAM of a C64, 2 floppies and an RLL (?) HDD and "a real computer monitor" had a pretty abysmal collection of often terrible looking games available (it was the early days).

The most obnoxious part of this machine was, upon powering it on, it would count all of the memory, climbing in 64k steps, for a solid minute[1] while the jet engine that was a full-height RLL 10MB HDD[2]. Because this obnoxious boot time and the small shop's recommendation (likely because "this happened before") after the rapid demise of our HDD[2], my father elected to just leave the computer running 24x7, turning only the monitor off when not in use.

That machine (that I hated), though, became a pretty substantial part of (if not all of -- at times) my life from age 11 on. The 386 really was a revolution. With a VGA adapter and Sound Blaster (Compatible) you could spend an hour making a boot disk and eventually get a game with excellent graphics (for the era) to start without running out of memory below the 640k barrier.

We couldn't afford one so my Dad took the unconventional approach of starting a company and having me build PCs for neighbors, friends and eventually businesses to afford a top-of-the-line one. I had a 486DX/33 (top sku when I purchased it) PC with ... everything (even SCSI drives), a 16" SVGA monitor and laser printer a year later.

As a teenager I took a job at CompUSA[3] in hardware sales -- from about 1993-1997ish -- what an awesome time to work at a computer chain. I'll never forget the Windows 95 launch (after years of being promised a successor to WFW 3.11; even long enough for IBM to have a reasonable contender in OS/2). We had been receiving boxed (3.5" floppy and CD-ROM versions) of the software for weeks with an embargo[3]. We'd run promotions for the release day that involved staying open over-night. Somehow many members of the public were under an odd impression that "there might not be enough copies for everyone" and people actually started lining up around 10:30 at night. By midnight the line went all the way around the entire strip-mall (which could fit three CompUSA's worth) ... twice. The warehouse walls were floor-to-ceiling Windows 95 boxes, as were the tops of all of the aisle, the entire wall behind Customer Service, along with several large 5 foot tall 4-pallet wide stacks, several end caps and a few floor-to-ceiling shelves-worth, along with their "Power Pack". The store was surrounded in "blue." We had more RAM, Hard Drive and CD-ROM drive upgrades in the store than we'd ever had at one point in time at discounts that meant nearly everyone bought one of the three, many bought all of them. We played rock music on the speakers and watched Bill Gates with the cast of Friends from a CD-ROM displayed on the monitor wall.

That release at that time felt like a very large tipping point. Not just "there's something better than DOS that's mainstream" but with the local news regularly bringing up "The Information Super-Highway" and careers were increasingly requiring computer skills, by then the 8ish people I knew who owned computers became "half of my friends" (all from suburban middle-class families) owned recently purchased PCs. It was a unique thing to see. There were hundreds of people waiting in line. Unlike other situations where people "wait in line to buy something", this wasn't a Cabbage Patch Kid, concert tickets to a huge musical act's tour, or various Super Mario/Link cartridge games ... this was a boring operating system. One that I'd been running betas smuggled through "Elite" BBSes for probably a couple of years by then[4]. It was also well known by then that there was no shortage of the OS or the promos (we did run a few door-buster "first X people get Y for free" deals) but we'd never had more than maybe 25-30 people "waiting for the doors to open" during even the biggest promos outside of this. The composition of people, as well, was unique. Yeah, all but maybe four were guys. But it wasn't hundreds of "computer nerds" -- it was a pretty huge number of normal, average, middle-aged men of various ethnicities (we had an unusually high number of Korean individuals due to the location's racial make-up).

Summers were notoriously slow and usually saw a few bumps toward the end of August with "laptops becoming a school supply for college students" but that year, every weekend from the release of Windows 95 until the following summer seemed as busy as early-Christmas and this was in a location that was a half-mile from Computer City, Best Buy and Circuit City. Things started taking off like crazy owing mostly to "The Information Super-Highway" everyone kept reading about (and a half-decade later it was basically "over", with all computer-centered brick-and-mortar shops but Microcenter failing).

Intel, having gotten into a legal fight with AMD, went with Pentium branding and brought some of the best swag. I've got varieties of stuffed Intel "hazmat suit" toys and still have two Pentium key chains with the processor embedded in (apparently) Lucite. Their competitors vendor reps brought T-Shirts (and I still wear my Athlon64 "Power me Up" T-Shirt).

Crazy stuff ... fascinating how rapidly things apex, collapse and then just become part of every-day-life and the cycles get shorter and shorter. Intel had a few mis-steps here and there during that time (Pentium FDIV), but they were the king through most of my childhood. I now sit in a room with three high-end workstations. All are recent AMD processors.

[0] The company he owned also designed parts and was an early user of AutoCAD, so there was a profanity-infused evening involving my Dad installing an 8087 in that iron lung of a case.

[1] After about age 8, I could recite every number it displayed for a few seconds ... 64k, 128k, 192k, 256k, 320k, 384k, ... 576k, 640k

[2] One that I destroyed a few months after its purchase because I wanted to see what kinds of sounds it made if I turned it on, then off as it was spinning up, then immediately back on. It turns out that given a sufficient number of cycles, the kinds of sounds it makes is "none at all". It also turns out the number of cycles impressively low, like, maybe, five? Luckily, it was new enough for warranty replacement since nobody discovered my devious act.

[3] Including rewards if we caught a competitor selling a copy before the release date.

[4] I continued to run the final beta version I had downloaded because it was more stable than the GOLD version on my hardware ... I finally relented after the first service pack, I think.

I've been a user of openSUSE since "openSUSE", nearly. It's my daily driver, today.

I want to say I was playing with Mandrake, Red Hat and a little Gentoo at the time. I started using it regularly around 2010ish - I was working at a Windows shop and had a pretty elaborate home lab with Windows servers and domain controllers so I could do things at home "before trying that on corporate." I remember the deciding factor became "I can use YaST to add this device to my domain controller and login with domain credentials easier than I can add a Windows box to the domain." And I found that was often the theme with many tasks, whether they're unusual like "logging into a Windows host" or mundane. Over the years, the software options available have been pretty incredible. I run Tumbleweed in most places and it's, by far, the smoothest "bleeding edge rolling update" distribution I've worked with. `Snapper` was my first experience with "working rollback."

Because of the fine folks at openSUSE, I went from "knowing nothing about Linux" to "using it as my primary desktop" and I'm mostly a .NET developer. So many development tasks are just easier to do under Linux, whether it's the pesky node or python module that needs gcc/LLVM to compile some dependency and the expansive set of software repositories and available `.rpm`s make it all very straight-forward.

I recently picked up a higher-end AMD GPU and was dismayed to find that ROCm support was limited, mostly, to Ubuntu[0]. I got everything mostly working in Tumbleweed -- interestingly, most of the AI workloads I put it through worked as well in Tumbleweed as they did in Ubuntu following the official documentation but a few of the ROCm utilities didn't run. I ended up reloading with Ubuntu and quickly regretted the situation. Stupidly, I assumed doing a distribution update would be flawless like it typically is with Tumbleweed. After all, the only way to actually update Tumbleweed is via a distribution update, and 2K packages later it very rarely fails to boot. I knew right away that I wouldn't have the safety of being able to pick the previous snapshot but I was surprised that when it failed half-way through it didn't bother to roll anything back; it simply left my machine in a broken state that booted directly to a text console. Having re-loaded this box four times in the prior few days, I decided to go back to what I knew.

About the only complaint I have centers around their default choice of `btrfs` for the filesystem. While I like the CoW functionality (the only particular "advanced" feature that I utilize with `btrfs`), it seems to excel -- mostly -- at teaching me about filesystem recovery. My home lab isn't anywhere near as elaborate as it had been in the past. It seems even on a UPS with proper shutdowns it's ridiculously prone to getting itself into a state where a `btrfs restore` is the only way to recover from a filesystem problem. Every single time I get everything back except for some random cache/tmp/log file but I need to dig up or purchase a volume of equal size to restore it to, meaning I have to keep around an empty drive at least as large as my largest volume. It seems to me "if the filesystem can literally restore everything except for a file or two that has become corrupted" it should offer a "dangerous" option to do so online. To this day I have never had to restore everything from an actual backup, it's always gotten back everything important simply restoring the broken filesystem to a new volume and the filesystem becomes corrupted without explanation -- power didn't fail, the system had a clean shutdown, it just randomly goes "read-only" with a guarantee that the next boot will drop to an emergency console. Unfortunately, CoW helps a lot with the work I do and ends up being worth the grief involved. While I've had fewer failures in the last couple of years and an easier time recovering from those failures, it's often a full day's work to get everything right, again.

[0] Support exists for Leap but the repositories were broken for a solid month while I was setting things up.

Both of my children were Home Schooled until High School (technically 7th and 9th grade). They've been students at a private school and now one attends an excellent private High School and one attends the 4th best High School in my state.

They are straight-A students (lowest grade: 94%; History -- my Daughter). They are shocked that they attend school for 7 hours a day and there are kids who "struggle" while they finish their homework on the ride home, don't study, and get the grades they get. They are in advanced classes and both have had a perfect score in Math all three years. Mom and I are also divorced and have been since they were 2 and 4. They make friends easily but struggled when they were Home Schooled because they have less exposure to kids their age. They were given the choice when my son hit 9th grade "continue or attend Public School or a school we can afford). They didn't want to miss out on "The High School Experience" but both, enthusiastically, want to Home School their own kids one day.

They aren't unique/gifted. There are plenty of students at their schools who do as well as they do and were not Home Schooled. The difference, though, is they "did school" in a given weekday for never longer than 1.5 hours. Most days were 30 minutes. September-April with summers off and that was it.

Religion was not a factor in our choice. My son's ASD Type 1 diagnosis played a role, the way Math was taught to me played a role, the arrogant belief that I could do better and the fact that my ex-wife didn't work played a role. Mostly, talking to other Home Schooling parents and their children and "wanting my kids to be like that" was the primary factor. Watching a 13-year-old speak intelligently and with confidence about a subject they understand and actually expect an adult to listen to them is kind of crazy, especially when they really are intelligent and should be listened to.

In a decade of Home Schooling, I have talked at length with hundreds of families and their children who took that path (various conferences, Home School events at local businesses, and extra-curricular activities done "during the school day" for Home School kids). I've observed a few things: All of them teach as much as we did. None of them will admit to it until their kids are in college or they decide to send them to traditional schools and "their child's education is validated by someone else." Nobody who is actively Home Schooling will admit to an outsider that their children get 1-1.5 hours of education a week day because you'll call CPS on us. All of their children are about a year or two ahead of children "their grade" despite this minimal amount of lesson time.

I read over and over and over again about how Home Schooled children are ignorant, don't believe in evolution, believe the world is flat, their parents don't actually "teach them" -- I have no doubt those children exist and I haven't seen them because the Home Schooled families I encounter attend conferences, belong to groups (we didn't), and care about their child's education. I live in a state that, at one point, had the largest number of practicing Home School families (not sure where it is, today) and the most liberal rules around it -- literally "take them out of school"; that's it.

Everybody seems "to know some invented Home Schooled child" who had some kind of major life problem. I usually challenge for specifics and it's always turned out the kid doesn't exist. Knowing any child who is Home Schooled is unusual. But knowing the one child validates your choice to NOT Home School, the statistics of which make them extremely rare, and you find they're parroting some anecdote they heard. My daughter's school[0] has about 1,700 students in it. Her last had about 500. I have asked every single one of her teachers, her counselors and several teachers they don't have "have you ever had a Home Schooled kid in your class, before?" I'd guess 40 educators and some staff/administrators. There's exactly one who had exactly one child in her class at her last job who was Home Schooled. He was an excellent student. And this in a state that has a lot of Home Schooled students. Judging by Facebook, you'd think there's one hiding around every corner peeing in people's Cheerios.

I suspect it's people feeling (needlessly) insecure about the choices they made for their own child and feeling threatened by the fact that I chose differently. I don't encourage people to choose to Home School. It's not for everyone -- for starters, you can't do it with two full-time working parents and that means it's simply not an option for most people. However, this topic very rarely came up without judgement from everyone who didn't Home School about what a dangerous choice I made when I was still Home Schooling. It's a lot more fun, now, since I can point to their success.

Yes, some Home Schooled kids struggle/drop out of college or can't hold down a job. Certainly none of us have met a kid who drank his way through Freshman year of College, or was ill-prepared by their public school and failed out. And we came from High Schools where everyone received a degree, too. Studies continually affirm the success of Home Schooled students, yet "everyone knows some Flat Earther child from Home Schooled parents." Children fail in every type of education. They fail less in Private schools and Home Schools. They fail more in Public school (largely because of "everyone goes there, including children in extremely difficult life circumstances"). The problem is that these wrong impressions of Home Schooled kids turn into laws that ban or curtail the freedom to have the choice of Home Education.

I know if I had chosen a more traditional route, my kids would have had the same probability of success. I would have been deeply involved in their education whether or not I was the one teaching them and that's how you get successful students in traditional education, too. While it might be nice to stand on some high horse, claim that "I just love my children more than you did", pretend that all of this was some massive sacrifice and I'm some super-parent by comparison to all of you who went the traditional route, that would be a self-aggrandizing lie. I paid for and followed curriculum. It was easy. The only challenging part of it is that "your kids will argue, yell and cry at you when they struggle"; they won't do that with a stranger.

With all of the extra non-lesson time they had, it was probably easier for them to excel. But I don't look down on people for not making that choice. Quite the opposite, everyone looked down on me for the entire duration that I was a Home Schooling Dad. It's silly.

And I'd do it all over again if given the choice for one reason alone: My kids are incredible self-learners and that was the one thing that I was very intentional about. Both of them have the confidence that "nothing is beyond their ability to learn" and that it's a simple matter of finding the right information, studying and practicing. My daughter is a shining example of this: She has learned to plays Guitar, Drums, Bass, and Piano (some proficiently, some she's well on her way). She has never had a lesson. She can read music and tabs and she can sit down and compose as well as learn to play anything she wants to learn to play on Guitar, Bass and Drums. She's getting there with Piano, but it's a much more difficult instrument and she just started last Summer with that one; she's got a few years behind her on the others. But I bought her a full sized weighted-key MIDI piano last summer and I had 15 years of lessons, competitions and study in that instrument as a child/teenager, so I have a good understanding of typical progress in learning it. She took it to Mom's and decided she didn't want to take it back and forth but brought it back here over Christmas break. I listened to her practicing and had to walk into her room to make sure it was actually her playing rather than the computer playing back some MIDI file. In three months she's as far along as I was after 5-6 years of lessons. She doesn't even realize how well she's playing; nobody told her it was unusual for her to be able to play some of the things she's playing at her skill level. A teacher would have never had her playing those things. She just went ahead blissfully unaware of the fact that it's extremely hard to play some of the things she's learned to play and that probably made the biggest difference of all. She wanted to play it, so she sat down and learned how to play it, never getting discouraged over the fact that "you don't learn something like that until year 5." Her technique (fingering ... stop snickering) is even correct.

Both of my children love to learn new things, just like me. Except, I didn't learn that about myself until formal education was over. They have always known that about themselves.

[0] My son attends a private school that is very small and the results were the same but less surprising to me.