You’re right. A lot of parents leave it all up to the schools. Education can build the foundation, sure but the real work, the real conversations, should happen at home. Teaching kids how to think, not just filling their heads with facts.

The problem is, you’re lucky if there are even two parents around anymore. And if there are, most come home drained from work, staring down bills they still can’t pay. Conversations that matter just get lost in the exhaustion. Maybe I’m just grumpy in my older age, but it’s hard not to get cynical about it.

Especially smart TVs. They’re especially chatty, accounting for something like 85% of network calls (all blocked). Edit: I meant 85% of calls on my network. And they bypass upstream DNS trying to be sneaky. It’s insane.

I appreciate the effort behind your comment. Unfortunately, it will likely fall on deaf ears among those who most need to understand our government — no different from the MAGA crowd. I don’t mean this condescending. It’s just unfortunate how poorly our education system prepares Americans, across the political spectrum, for their civic responsibilities.

Agreed. There was a time when it worked impressively well, but it’s become increasingly lazy, forgetful, and confidently wrong, even missing obvious explicit prompts. If you’re using it thoughtfully as an augment, fine. But if you’re relying on it blindly, it’s risky.

That said, in my experience, Anthropic and OpenAI are still miles ahead. Perplexity had me hooked for a while, but its results have nosedived lately. I know they tune their own model while drawing from OpenAI and DeepSeek vs their own true model but still, whatever they’re doing could use some undoing.

Without delving deeper into these numbers, the politics, mechanics, or absurd cost of education in the US - $2.2B is an absolutely staggering amount of funding for a single institution. To say that it is privileged is an understatement.

Tired as Orwellian comparisons are, it’s hard to ignore how much this reeks of a Ministry of Truth.

How about if he threw in the Tesla’s with poor quality and no craftsmanship? Y’know to boost all those American manufacturing jobs, and the mechanics, and Elon’s tax subsidized billions.

One could even say that’s an art of a deal, ay?

Here I am, snorting my wife awake at 2 am because of an unexpectedly hilarious cock joke

With everything going on right now, the fact that I still feel physically sick reading things like this tells me I haven’t gone completely numb yet. Just absolutely repulsive.

I’ve seen this come up a couple different ways and it’s almost always a scam. Social engineering to get victims buy-in with plausible tech buzzwords and investing their time as a hook.

But then again, maybe they really are soulless pricks.

Am I late or oblivious? Is grte the bot? I couldn’t tell from the post history. Or is this way, way over my old-aged head?

I don’t even want to imagine the environmental studies and hurdles they’ll have to jump through to artificially alter an areas day/night cycle. There’s a laundry list of environmental concerns that I’m sure any homeowner or eco-activist worth their salt would jump on. Not to mention glare and impacts to air traffic, on and on.

Would make my solar panels pretty darn effective though. Would probably be great for SAD in winter too. Clever idea. Not sure I can get behind it though.

as a pre-schooler non-social media parent, this is fucking hilarious.

Whenever I have to brave the Google abyss, I usually use Startpage. Obviously uBlock Origin but if I can avoid being bombarded by devious and distracting ads altogether, I’d rather that.

True but I see this more as a critical thinking problem - which is pervasive in our society and worsened by the tech bubbles. People should want to seek out information that both argues for and against a topic.

The way our education systems work now, at least in the US, that method of thinking only begins around college and varies widely by academic pedigree.

I was going to say “you mean, eastern hemisphere times? I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you.”

I don’t run VPNs at the router level. The speed and latency hit, plus the spambot triggers aren’t worth it for me. This is purely a non-privacy minded preference, mind you, and I’m totally not an expert.

You bring up a good point though. Regardless of what’s running upstream, if my device is running private relay, it all gets bypassed. So I have to disable private relay.

My preference is to run nextdns over DoH, AdGuard locally on iOS + Stop the Madness, and a VPN when I’m feeling sheepish.

On iOS, I’ve tried quite a few combinations and I’ve gotten feedback from users with others.

When I ran pi-hole or AdGuard home, I also used AdGuard on all my iOS devices - both the DNS pseudo-VPN and safari extensions cause otherwise ads would sneak in. The Adguard app removes the annoying ads from Apple News and NYT apps.

Now I just use NextDNS and the same AdGuard iOS app setup.

8??? For banking? I haven’t used less than like 16 in at least 5, maybe 10 years. Jeez.