blindsight @ blindsight @beehaw.org

Posts

6

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755

Joined

2 yr. ago

As an educator and parent, I couldn't disagree more strongly. Smart phones are addiction machines and childhood experience blockers. Children should not have smart phones at all until age 16. Age 16 would be a very appropriate time to introduce smart phones after their harms have been explained in detail at ages 12 through 15.

Banning cell phones during instructional time doesn't go far enough. Students having a smart phone in their pocket is damaging. (Dumb phones are fine—SMS texting and phone calls are great.)

There has been a precipitous decline in youth mental health globally in nations where cell phones were affordable starting in 2010. The evidence is clear. Smart phones (and, more broadly, addictive dark patterns in all apps/games) are a big problem.

If you want to learn more, read the first chapter of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. (I'd recommend the full book if you want details, but chapter 1 is enough to give you a grounding in the data and the broad strokes of the argument.)

It's such a shame nuclear power is such a non-starter politically. If we could go back in time, switching from coal to nuclear earlier would have been a massive change for climate change.

I'm still an optimist about this; at some point, if we keep pushing, we'll reach a political will inflection point and actually start taking serious action on climate change. With serious financial backing, we will be able to scale up technological solutions to anthropogenic climate change.

Exactly this.

I'll never vote Green (as a Canadian) since it's strategically equivalent to not voting at all.

I played Superhot first on the Deck. Since time only moves (much) when you're moving, you have lots of time to practice aiming and getting used to track pads/stick + gyro controls. It requires precise aiming, and there are occasional times where speed helps, so it was a good "training" game for me.

It's still not as natural as KB+mouse, but I've been enjoying Ziggurat 2 a lot (on normal difficulty). I won't push into hard modes, like I would on PC, but it's working well for me.

I feel for the teacher if they don't have a continuing contract, yet. You're completely dependent on staying in the good graces of your principal to have a job for the next year, and you will only be recommended for a continuing contract with the support of a principal.

But if the teacher had a continuing contract, then they probably should have told the principal to censor the student's work themselves if they wanted it done. Or that you want the instructions to do so in writing.

This image shows it well, including where other primates fit in

Downloading content is almost definitely legal in Canada, and non-commercial digital distribution has never gone to court, so its legality hasn't been established.

I can't find the source, but I recall reading speculation that sharing backup copies between owners of the media is likely legal in Canada but, again, it hasn't been tried by courts, so its legality hasn't been firmly established.

Anyway, with non-commercial digital distribution not having any legal teeth in Canada, it's effectively legal and its literal legality is unknown.

Depends on your jurisdiction.

As far as I know, that's never been tried in court in Canada, and there's reason to suspect that may not be the case here. (Although I'm not a lawyer, so I may be mistaken.)

You can if you own the Mario game...

... but I just downloaded a 1TB Batocera Switch image to run from MicroSD.

Indeed. As a silly example, I had a Pacman clone game that ran based on CPU cycle speed. I needed to turn the in-game speed setting way down and toggle turbo off to make it slow enough to be playable.

Sad but not surprising that governments failing to fund maintenance costs are leading to service failures. Even less surprising that a conservative government is using the problem they created to privatise profits.

I'm having a hard time having sympathy for someone who was supporting anti-trans bigots, who were accusing teachers of being pedophiles, and (I suppose) attempting a coup. (Hard to take the last one seriously.)

Like... Of course this ended poorly. I'm surprised they paid any of the hydro bill from their camp, tbh.

Sentencing hasn't happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.

Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it's just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.

I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.

Maybe a nice neutral woman's name... Like, Anna?

And it's more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.

Yeah, Anna's Archive. Great name. Let's go with that one.

I don't follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It's not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.

And publishers' profits are rising and don't seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.

What am I not understanding?

That's... Hilariously bad. Canned meats vs. fresh. Fancy ice cream vs. cheap ice cream. Everywhere you look things are shittier for the Aboriginal People's food guide. What the fuck were they thinking? Why did they even put out a different version?

Vitamin D supplementation is recommended for all Canadians, not just vegans. And Omega 3, D, and B12 are common supplement recommendations (actually backed by strong evidence) for the general population. (Although the benefits of Omega 3 supplementation for heart health has come under scrutiny, I think its anti-inflammatory effects are still pretty widely supported.)

Anyway, no need for the vitriol. Nobody is forcing you to go vegan. If it works for them, then great! It's definitely better for the planet to eat less meat, so power to them. (I eat way too many eggs to ever consider going vegan, personally.)

Yeah, the new Canada's Food Guide is actually really good. (The one below is modeled after it, but changed to vegan foods).

Like, it seems like a reasonable, evidence-based, practical guide to healthy eating habits. (Unlike every single previous version going back to the 50s that might as well have been propaganda from the Canadian Wheat Board.) The latest revision is from 2019, iirc, and it's the first time I've felt comfortable using it as the basis of classroom instruction.

Thoroughly explained and well supported. I want to save this in case this topic ever comes up again so I can copy-pasta this.

It would be pretty trivial for a script to automatically detect and delete tags like this, I would think. Diff two versions of the file and swap all diff characters to any non-display character.