One of the highest-value streaming subscriptions you can get is PBS Passport. You get it with a $60 donation to either a PBS TV or NPR radio station. The donation is tax-deductible and the PBS subscription is rich with high-quality content for both adults and children.
I've gotten it many years, but rarely watched it, because my login keeps "expiring" on Roku. If I don't watch it for, say, a month, I'll need to log in again. It's terribly inconvenient.
The last PBS produced video I watched (it was on yt) was on the current super El Nino, totally cool. But somehow they managed to segue into more than a few minutes of "Remind white people of what happened 300 years ago" right in the middle of it.
No thanks. I'm here for science, and if your writers are mostly people primarily concerned with making sure they bow at the alter in every single video, I'm 100% out. It's like watching a cooking video produced by a Christian group that works Jesus into chopping carrots.
The "Remind white people of what happened 300 years ago" in question is an explainer on how a 19th century Super El Nino wiped out over 3% of the world's population, mostly in Asia, despite the fact that these regions had experienced famines and droughts at numerous points in their prior history. The video then asks the question, "Why was this so much more deadly?"
The explanation posits that this was only possible due to the multiplier of the rapidly expanding British empire. It is not posited as British/white people are bad, it is posited as society, politics and trade creating a multiplier effect. The whole point of this section in the video is to setup the final chapter of the video, asking the question, "Could this happen again?", which feels like a valid question given that society, politics, and trade have exponentially evolved since the 19th century.
This section of the video is portrayed so agnostically that I felt compelled to reply to your vague criticism.
Here is the video linked to the timestamp of the aforementioned section, which is only around 2 minutes long, so others can pass their own judgement: https://youtu.be/69o-8Mtd3Kc&t=330
Not sure how you can be here for the science if you're not willing to be here for the history.
I think you're talking about "Weathered." About 150 years ago about 8m people died in India, because during an El Nino drought and famine British companies continued exporting food from India.
I guess you could call that "white people guilt" but you could also say that it's valuable context that the impacts of climate change can be exasperated by economic and national policies.
Its the exact same with NPR as well. There's actually a nice podcast that breaks down their ideological capture and downfall over the years. Its called All Things Reconsidered.
It's funny because I had the exact experience with NPR/member station. I listened to it daily every morning about 15 years ago because my job at the time was perfect for it. Then I changed careers and couldn't listen for a long time.
Five or so years ago I was excited to have a new job that would allow me to listen again and I didn't last a week...
That sounds like the alcohol permit loophole. Instead of getting a permit to sell alcohol, just buy this $10 pack of peanuts and it comes with a free beer. This is known to come with hefty fines btw.
That said, If the gift is insubstantial in value it’s allowable. Or they’re supposed to give you a statement of the value and you have to deduct the donation less value amount. My thought is maybe the content is or will be free and the app is just a convenient portal to consume it. So one would claim it’s rather insubstantial. But to be honest, no auditor would really dig too deep into a donation to PBS.
I felt successful before I had kids. Satisfying, upward-moving career; happy marriage; lots of travel; volunteering in multiple organizations. I liked all these things, succeeded in them, people liked me, etc.
As a dad, I feel like a total loser. All of the aforementioned are diminished or put entirely on hold (travel, most volunteering). I'm medicore at everything, except parenting, in which I am successful at keeping my kids alive and safe and healthy, but not in satisfying their desires. In that I am totally inadequate.
I expected that I would have to put "my" life largely on hold when we had kids and instead of the satisfaction I got from the pre-kid things, would enjoy the satisfaction of raising happy children. To have neither is demoralizing and I'm constantly looking for the critical thing that will improve the child-raising experience. And no, waiting it out for the kids to grow up is not the answer!
I fully empathise. It feels like my career went from upwards to a horizontal line. I have far less energy for work, for learning, and for the things I'm interested in. It's incredibly demoralising. I dread weekends and look forward to school drop-offs - what kind of life is that?
I don't care about my career so much, but the weekend and school dropoff thing resonates hard.
Work is the only part of my life where I feel any sort of competency. Anything else I'm just a ship on a stormy sea being battered around. I can change the sails and move the rudder, but the sea takes me where it wants me to go anyway.
The joke was "welcome to your vacation" when people got back from paternity leave for their new kid. I don't think I ever left that vacation.
It's also normal, and okay, to feel down about being tired and feeling like you can't do everything at once. Because that's how it is — you can't do everything at once. You have to choose, and a lot of the time the depression comes from the conflict of having to give up things you want to do.
And what can also help is talking to your partner or to a friend who's also a parent. And realizing it's normal to look forward to the weekend being over so you can sit down and work on the thing you're good at and know how to do... unlike dealing with our kids, who are always creating problems we don't know how to solve.
Luckily I have an amazing wife. We don't hide anything from each other, and she's always been there for me (just as I have for her). I have good support.
That said, you say "it's normal to look forward to the weekend being over so you can sit down and work on the thing you're good at and know how to do" - this isn't what I'm getting at. I look forward to the weekend being over so that I can spend time away from my kids. I trudge through work for the week while trying to regain mental energy to tackle the after-school pickups and the next weekend. I'm just always running at a mental energy deficit. I enjoy my work, but I just have no energy to apply myself - the kids suck it out of me.
> It feels like my career went from upwards to a horizontal line. I have far less energy for work, for learning, and for the things I'm interested in. It's incredibly demoralising
How do you separate how much having kids affects this, and how much of it is just being 30+ and not taking care of own health?
I have a few childless friends who say the same thing word for word.
I had a week where the kids were with Grandma and Grandpa. I got more done on a Wednesday after work than I did in the previous few weeks including weekends.
I don't think everyone needs kids and I don't subscribe to the 'moral high ground' of having kids, BUT I have zero sympathy for childless peers that think their life is too busy.
Maybe the problem is trying to satisfy the wishes of someone who doesn't know what they want, because they're under 6 years old!
What worked for me to make the experience of raising kids better is paying attention to the small things they notice. For them the world is a completely new place, and if you can get in tune with that, you can rediscover the world all over again from another angle. Talking with my son makes me see everything differently — they're great triggers for creativity.
Mine is 6 now.....and man it is by far the most difficult stage for me.
Begging and thinking of ideas to get him to brush his TEETH DAILY. Meltdowns, even in public places. Conflicts which need resolutions. Dealing with teachers, who sometimes I agree but other times disagree with. Working with them on homework. Constant need to watch them not to get hurt.
I've saved 2 children from drowning, and one of them was my child, who randomly thought it would be a great idea to jump into a deep pool without a life vest.
I would have a child again as I do finding rewarding but my career has taken a back seat and my energy levels are always on low. I dread mornings.
Yeah... I'm in the 3-year-old stage and oh boy... it can be really tough. But lately I bought some kids' board games (HABA) and we can enjoy them together — not always, and it's not the same as playing with peers, but I can see it being like that in the future. And the experience of teaching, for me, not being a teacher, is really educational and transformative.
I like the ideas of this article but would not use SPARC as a main badguy in my examples. A naive and probably popular takeaway would be, "Thank goodness I am not writing for SPARC and don't need to worry about these SPARC architectural concerns!"
I went through elementary and middle school using MECC software on Apple II, and of course had no idea at the time what a treasure it was. My generation was at the beginning of the computer-education revolution; we had "gamified" learning before that was ever a thing.
An Apple II on a wheeled desk-cart was always popular in elementary school.
I don't know your definition of "rolled in", but the actual successor to the SE is the e line (iPhone 16e, 17e, etc).
I agree that the SE was a great iPhone and a great form factor. I didn't have one, but my kid did. Whenever I had to do something on their SE, I found it so much more usable than my own whatever Pro phone of that time. It wasn't enough to get me to go to an SE, however.
Tangentially related, if anyone has Sun nostalgia but only a bit, find a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard on eBay and plug it in. Great keyboard for a Mac. Unfortunately, the left-hand function keys (Stop, Again, Props, etc.) do not emit any usable keycodes. But everything else works.
There is a difference between Chinese model and Chinese service.
Your company most likely is banning the use of foreign services, but it wouldn't make sense to ban the model, since the model would be ran locally.
I wouldn't allow my employees to use a foreign service either if my company had specific geographic laws it had to follow (ie, fin or med or privacy laws, such as the ones in the EU).
That said, I'm not sure I'd allow them to use any AI product either, locally inferred on-prem or not: I need my employees to _not_ make mistakes, not automate mistake making.
In private sector yes. Anything that touches public sector (government) and it starts to be supply chain concerns and they want all american made models
The only problem is that the American models are super fracking dumb. Arcee Thinking Large (398B) is orders of magnitude worse than even Qwen 3.5 35B, getting stuck in thinking loops with incredibly basic questions that Google could answer in 500ms.
LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft.
It's still the only free as in freedom office suite option I'm aware of. I do try my best to avoid needing such software at all (I prefer to stay inside vim), but it has its uses when dealing with files from other people, or niche stuff like importing XML and saving as a CSV.
Gnumeric is great. It's the only one that holds up with massive CSV files and remains snappy. So I tend to prefer it. Functions are more limited than Calc though.
About 10 years ago the Ubuntu package manager borked my installation of LibreOffice (or maybe it was OpenOffice then). I only used it for spreadsheets and Gnumeric was able to open the ODS files just fine. There was only one function that I need to change (DaysInYear for handling leap years).
If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.
None of the tools that you mentioned except for LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free-as-in-freedom, and if you’re using Linux on the desktop, then Microsoft Office and the Apple iWork suite are unavailable as desktop applications.
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