I appreciate the observation, there's automated and manual curation that goes into this so there's definitely corpo stuff that shows up. We probably made things more difficult by wanting to include mainstream sources but heavily favor indie ones.
We have substantial lists of approved and denied domains so the authentic content is definitely there but it's not visible from a few clicks off of the categories page, we have more work to do.
I read somewhere that it is a consequence of the way these things work that they will naturally be more cooperative and helpful if you are nice to them, and if you order them around brusquely they will be less so. Maybe following the patterns of interaction in their training set (?)
Either it is a guilty pleasure and you are secretly relieved that the temptation is being removed.
Or prolonged use of the service has turned you into an apathetic apolitical blob of mindless jelly with no agency and no energy to effect change on your environment.
Apolitical is an interesting choice of description. My understanding is that the real motivation of banning TikTok is precisely the political influence it wields on the youth’s malleable minds.
This guy was not really trying to explain to hacker parents how they should teach their kids to ride a bike. As has has been adequately demonstrated in the comments they already know aaaaaaaall about that. His actual point, which seems to have whooshed past most people’s heads, is much more interesting: can you learn a thing more effectively by first simplifying that thing so radically that a seasoned user would find it useless? Also not exactly a totally new idea but, depending on context, just counterintuitive enough that you may miss it.
I would love to see this approach in language learning, which I am fairly bad at. I'm very much driven by results rather than accuracy, and so often a teacher will correct me on the finer points of the language I'm using and I'll either no idea what they are talking about, or know that I am certainly not going to remember that detail. In either case I find it very demoralising.
If there was a "Learn to speak German like a 5 year old" course then I would love that. Give me something usable to motivate me further, then I can come back for more complexity when I actually want and need it.
But isn't this the case for all language courses? They start you slow and build up? I feel like it isn't, although perhaps it is just the courses I have seen. It seems to me that the people who teach languages generally really like languages, so they understandably revel in the details. I, however, do not (although I wish I did).
I learned Spanish at a two year old level by focusing only on the top 24 verbs, in all (major) tenses first. So, ir, ser, estar, tener, haber, hacer, poner, poder, venir, ver, decir, dar, etc., in present, preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive, progressives, and perfects.
Then I learned about 2000 nouns from several lists. Then I learned some common "weird" constructions like darse cuenta, and hace falta.
Now I can read paperbacks on the plane without a dictionary, and follow the plot. I can communicate simply, and send pretty good texts. I have a lot of trouble with TV and radio, but it's progress. This took 2 years with mainly self study and Duolingo for accountability. I don't think an app alone would do the trick.
This is pretty much the methodology behind "comprehensible input", where you consume lots of content that you can just about understand and "let your brain figure it out".
There's quite a lot along these lines. LingQ helps you learn as you read books, and I built https://nuenki.app, which gives you constant comprehensible input as you browse the web.
I also really like Language Transfer, which isn't really a comprehensible input course, but tries to draw parallels to English and talks through the etymology a little. The approach appeals to me.
Along similar lines, I subscribed to r/nederlands, so that random reddit scrolling features intermittent Dutch practice. I figure that this sort of everyday exposure will help me build a subconscious, pattern-driven sense of grammar and word usage.
Yeah, it's been kinda interesting to see the effect of Nuenki actually.
I haven't been doing much proper German studying for a while - partially because I've been focused on Nuenki. However, I've been getting into it again recently, and I'm going to go to a language exchange.
There are a lot of sentences I can intuitively just sorta understand, even if I might not be able to tell you what a certain word or grammatical feature is. I think it's quite useful for getting you over the mental block of "ah I don't follow it" to getting the gist. I wanted to find something on the German Wikipedia a week ago, and I was able to navigate it as if it were all in English - even though, if you asked me what a specific word meant, I probably wouldn't know.
You definitely need to pair it with something with more active recall, though. My passive vocabulary is much larger than my active one after this break.
There are resources available for children, eg Muzzy is an animated immersion program for 5 year olds that (if you can bear the cheesy animation) might work. (In the US, available on Kanopy with a public library card.) And if you are good at searching you might also find resources that educators use for teaching recently immigrated children, although that implicitly requires a teacher/partner to be working with you.
Everyone learns languages in a different way. There are some people who like to be told what the basic rules of the language are and can use that to structure new sentences. Like giving someone K&R I suppose. Other people need to hear it. Personally, because I am only learning a language for practical purposes like travel, I'd love a course that dispensed with the grammar and taught contemporary phrases used in everyday life. For example, I am never going to ask and be told where the library is. But I'm very likely to hear, "cash or card?" or to ask "does this train go to Bologna?". So practicality for me wins early on, and then later I'd like to learn the top 500 words, and then the grammar structures.
I have a theory about language acquisition that I've never had the time to fully explore, that developing an ear for a language is the critical first step.
To that end, my theory would be that a program of imitation & mimicry would be the most effective way to learn. That you would hear a native speaker say a phrase and attempt to fluently imitate it. Specifically, record your voice as you speak and listen to what you say and try to as perfectly as possible imitate the prototype phrase.
Learn vocabulary and grammar later; focus, like children do, on hearing the language and imitating its use. Learn reading and writing last of all; formal grammar and especially spelling are the pedals on the bike.
That's the Pimsleur method. They have you listen and repeat sentences. You listen to a conversation between native speakers and repeat after them to practice the sounds and get a "feel" for it. Speaking is a physical thing with muscle memory.
Maybe this has evolved, but the version of this I was exposed to was in the context of French, where you would play these "ecoutez et repetez" things and the class would say things out loud. Pimsleur has a most likely well-deserved reputation for language fluency training, but I would go a step further.
For me the critical thing is hearing the playback of your own voice and being able to learn to hear the difference. I've encountered this with professional mimics / celebrity impersonators -- the most important thing to do is to hear what your voice sounds like.
I think there's something to the hearing. Some of my friends speak other languages and I'll try to repeat something but apparently I'm speaking gibberish because my pronunciation is so bad, but I simply cannot hear the difference. I've heard comedians make this joke about English speakers trying to speak Chinese too.
I think there's a similar thing with faces. I knew some identical twins in school and at first I couldn't tell them apart, but after seeing them a bunch it became instant. I think it's similar with facial recognition of races we don't see often.
So yeah, something about repetition until you can spot the difference seems to be beneficial.
Checkout Learncraft Spanish. The step they take to simplify that others do not is that they focus knly on grammer for a very lokg time, and just use english verbs and nouns.
For example, at a certain point the only words you will have learned are que and lo, so the quiz sentances will be like :
I want you to eat it -> I want que lo you eat
This prpgram has been extremely useful to me and helped me learn spanosh far quicker than other methods. They also use memory palace techniques and have an unusually effective way of organizing vocab learning
Author of the piece here, I speak three languages (Norwegian, English, and Spanish) and am currently working on a fourth (Japanese).
"Taking the pedals off the bike" advice for language learning:
- Learn pronunciation first
A lot of people never master a native (or semi-native) accent, but if you sit down and figure it out, it's easier than it seems at first. Getting the native pronunciation down matters because otherwise you literally can't distinguish between certain words, and it will be a habit you'll never unlearn. It makes everything else easier. It also gives you massive cred with native speakers who will overlook your atrocious grammar and paltry vocab because "wow, you sound good! I'm impressed." It's taken both as a sign of respect and that you're putting in the effort, and makes you punch above your actual weight. This does wonders for confidence and makes you less shy about trying to learn by speaking & listening, which is crucial.
Gabriel Wyner does a good job explaining it in his book "Fluent Forever" (his method is pretty cool too but I have some critiques of it overall, "learn pronunciation first" is the best single lesson to transfer to other language learning methodologies).
If you haven’t checked out the Pimsleur[0] app, you might find it useful for learning a language.
It’s the only language learning system that has ever worked for me. It focuses on speaking and every day language rather than reading, writing, and memorizing vocabulary, conjugations, etc.
It isn’t cheap, but it’s designed for you to learn enough to not need it anymore.
It probably doesn’t work for everyone, but it did feel like a different approach than many of the other language apps I tried in the past.
That sounds rather like the way the Pimsleur approach teaches. It drills fundamentals of grammar through fairly basic "travel vocabulary," but once you have that foundation you can go pretty far.
If you read reviews for kids foreign-language language books on Amazon, you'll see a fair amount of adults reading it for themselves mixed in. That's a little more self-directed but the vocab and sentence structure is organically restrained and the books are fun!
caveat: I've only read two books in this manner incidentally, but I knew some people who did this kind of thing on the side during our college language classes.
I would think such a course might ingrain bad habits. The case system sounds strange when used incorrectly, and it'd be much harder to re-learn it if the wrong version started to become familiar to you.
I think this is exactly what the article is getting at. Maybe you’re right but maybe it’s at least a step in the right direction just like learning to ride without pedals didn’t ingrain bad habits.
It's funny really. I assumed by the context of being posted here on HN that this wasn't literally about teaching children to ride a bike.
I'm reminded of the approach taken by the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP): start with this magical thing called Scheme and learn simple programming techniques and general principles like abstraction, then gradually add the "pedals" back until you've basically learnt to program in assembly and write a compiler for your high-level language.
I agree, but to be fair I think that point could have been made clearer in the post.
A similar but related lesson: the best way to teach something is to design a task that is just difficult enough that the learner can figure it out on their own.
When I was reading parenting books in preparation for my own kids, this is one consistent theme that kept coming up, sometimes called "scaffolding." The idea is that you provide a safe environment, design a task that is just the right level of difficulty, then let the child figure it out themselves. (For example, rather than directly holding a kid climbing up a ladder, let them climb it by themselves while you stand by to catch them just in case.) As a result, they develop more independence, self-confidence, and the lessons stick.
"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life." -- Jean Piaget
Piaget is well known in teaching circles as a philosophical father of pedagogy. A (slightly) less know pedagogist is Vygotsky, who invented the term “Zone of Proximal Development”. The idea is that kids can learn from others and from experimentation if you can design activities where you take the skills they currently have, consider the skill you want them to acquire, and build steps between them that a child can succeed in. To develop this example: once a child can walk, they can learn to balance by being given a task which allows them to safely experiment with falling over and staying upright. Once they can balance, you can experiment with moving while balancing. Once they can move forward with balancing, they can learn stopping safely. Finally, they should be ready to learn how to pedal.
If you don’t allow them to complete all the previous steps, they may just keep failing at the next task, because they’re not yet in the “zone” to be able to acquire the next skill.
If a child can’t balance annd move forwards unaided, they won’t be able do the next thing (pedalling) even with help.
Children have different skills and capabilities and Vygotsky is not prescriptive about who needs to help, and the ZPD theory often encourages learning from peers rather than adults (parents/teachers).
Don’t Miss the Post for the Trees – Here’s Why Most People Do
You see it all the time. A post comes through your feed. It's insightful. It’s bold. It’s… mostly ignored.
Why?
Because people don’t actually engage with the core idea — they react to what they think it says.
The same thing happens in business:
- Founders get stuck in the weeds of their product without seeing the bigger market opportunity.
- Teams hyper-focus on the tech, missing the customer pain point.
- Investors hear the pitch, but miss the deeper vision driving it.
People miss the post for the trees.
Here’s the thing: breakthroughs happen when you push past surface-level reactions.
The best founders? They’re not just building products — they’re connecting dots others miss.
The best marketers? They’re not just optimizing campaigns — they’re shifting narratives.
The best investors? They’re not chasing trends — they’re seeing past the noise.
If you want to stand out in a noisy world, here’s the question to ask yourself:
Am I reacting to the surface? Or am I leaning in to understand what’s really being said?
The magic is always in the nuance. The signal is often buried in the noise. The big ideas?
They’re the ones that most people scroll past.
>Teachers, you may want to be sitting down for this one.
>The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform, adopted June 9 at the state convention in Forth Worth, seems to take a stand against, well, the teaching of critical thinking skills. Read it for yourself:
>"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
I've been told that it's easier to learn to ski without poles by an experienced instructor. Apparently his pupils would all spend their time trying to figure out these new "pole" things and very little time actually learning how to balance if he started there. I also think it's probably better to hike without trekking poles even on difficult terrain until you master balance. They're more for supporting your upper body if you have a 75+ liter pack full of gear than for keeping you from eating shit if you step on an unsupported rock.
I've taught several snowboarders how to ride and the teaching process is about putting them in a position where they forget about the distracting things.
Always start them on a blue (or blue-black) slope, because it forces them to learn to use the edge of the board. Lot of easy drills like side slipping and simply turning your head to control direction.
If you start a snow boarder on a green run, it always results in them catching an edge and eventually face planting. Not a fun experience.
that might be a good analogy because, generally speaking, skiing is much, much harder without poles (hence an expert would never do it (unless they are hitting an olympic vert ramp or something)), but it is exactly for this reason that the poles distract you from learning the "right" lesson-- people use their poles pretty much randomly at the start, and the poles help them... to do the wrong thing. but once you have the real crux of skiing down-- body position and balance + using your edges and weight shifts to turn-- poles are completely trivial to add.
Another take I've had is that we were wrong in the past. Pedaling isn't the tricky part of riding a bike. Balancing is. Training wheels let you learn to pedal.
Maybe that's part of the reason why "strider" bikes are becoming a lot more common for toddlers to learn how to ride a bike. They're effectively what the OP describes, a bike with no pedals that you run and then balance on.
Those were already somewhat common around here, back when I taught my kid to ride some... 17-18-19 years ago. But it felt rather superfluous to buy a separate gadget that he'd use for at most a few months, when the same effect could be achieved by just taking the pedals off a "real" bike.
(Unfortunately, we'd already started him on the old-fashioned route with pedals and training wheels. Fortunately, he wasn't all that heartbroken when we "discovered that a thief must have stolen" the pedals and training wheels. And he was quite ecstatic when later "the thief must have returned the pedals".)
So I really recommend the ordinary-bike-with-removed-pedals method to start with. The trick is just to get the saddle low enough. Old-fashioned[1] saddle mounts with a multi-piece clamp on the saddle post usually have that below the longitudinal rails on the saddle. You can flip the bits around so the rails go below the bolt of the clamp, and thereby lower the saddle by a couple centimeters / about an inch. This is a rather fiddly job within the narrow confines under the saddle / above the rails / inside the side flaps of the saddle, but it's possible. Three guesses as to how I know this.
___
[1]: And most stuff on not-exorbitantly-expensive kids' bikes is quite old-fashioned; kids' bikes are much cheaper than "serious" adult ones, so manufacturers have to scrimp wherever they can.
That is an interesting video! Your writing made me expect the neural network had changed gravity as hacky part of its solution, but it's the creator trying to train a neural network to balance a simulated double pendulum and failed, and then wondered if he could train a simpler version in a simulation with no gravity and high friction to make it easy, then see if the solution can gradually be retrained to cope as he adjusts those to full gravity and normal friction. The visualisations in it are very good.
Yes yes, I was trying to show "here's a simplification one made to train a simple network how to do a hard thing" and much like removing pedals, I think it's effective
Unrelated, in dog agility they sometimes train weave poles using the channel method. So they set the weave poles to form a channel that the dog runs through. And then they gradually narrow the channel. Finally they have narrowed the channel until the poles are in a straight line
Made perfect sense when I read it, because this is also how to teach snowboarding. A reasonably proficient snowboarder will think 'it all about going back and forth from the front edge to the back edge smoothly' but a beginner needs to learn how to first stand in balance over the board without falling on the face or their back.
I’d like to say, “Is this not obvious?” but I’m not sure I fully appreciated what follows until I had a sufficient level of exposure to abstract mathematics. A core element of problem solving is reduction, be it to logically equivalent formulations or to more atomic components that can be reasoned about together.
If we could talk to animals, then, on the positive side we could explain things to them like “watch for traffic when you cross this road” but we could also deceive them. A lot of what hunters and farmers have done since time immemorial has used our superior - or maybe just different - intelligence to exploit or trap animals, but imagine the chaos we could wreak if we could literally argue them into behaving against their best interests. Not everyone would use this ability responsibly, especially if there was money to be made.
If you are going to collect books as physical objects, rather than their much more convenient digital versions, then it strikes me you should actually find the signs of previous interactions with that object (library stamps, marks from other readers etc) make them more interesting than pristine copies that no one has read.
Personally I do like these marks. But I buy books to read, not as an investment. I recently bought a book on "How to survive being gassed" published in 1934. It had a typed A4 sheet of paper in it with a poem about how to identify the different types of gas. Humourous and probably useless but real and very alive.
I also take umberidge with the idea that digital books are more convenient. A physical book is more engaging, more beautiful, more real and more present than a digital book. All things that I find convenient when I want to interact with knowledge and art. Horses for courses I assume.
The UI of paper books is better in most ways. Ebooks don’t need separate large print editions, and have full text search. Basically every other point goes to paper books. I don’t bother to defend the aesthetics of books, because their actual utility is high, too.
They’re damn bulky, though, especially when there’s an alternative that weighs nothing. Damn bulky.
I tend to disagree, or at least argue that UI/UX is strongly subjective. I have sought out digital copies of books that I have in paper form just because I strongly prefer reading on an ereader for text. Obviously, something with graphics is likely to be better in paper.
You can't lose your place easily. Lighting isn't an issue if you buy a backlit model. Reading lying on your back or side is much easier. Traveling is easier with an e-reader. Access to wikipedia and the dictionary on the same device.
There are emotional reasons that I like paper books, but if I'm just trying to read, give me an ebook.
Ebooks will be on their way to being a match when readers come with facing-page screens, spine and cover screens (I've forgotten the authors of ebooks I'm actively reading because I don't get reminded of the title & author passively by just having the book around me) and some kind of much better interface for locating and bouncing between bookmarks, which interface will probably need to not reside entirely on the main screen(s) in order to make a real difference. Still missing a lot, but that'll close maybe half the gap.
To add to your comments on travel, reading position, lighting, some books are just too large or heavy to lug around or even hold for long periods. There are a number of door-stopper books that I otherwise just wouldn't have read because of this.
If the medium makes the difference between me reading a text rather than not reading that text, I tend to think that makes it functionally "better".
The thing is, I've had a number of instances where the paper copy of a book was so poorly typeset (usually overly long lines on too-wide pages, e.g., _The Inklings and King Arthur: J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield on the Matter of Britain_ edited by Sørina Higgins) that I actually purchased the e-book version so as to be able to read it comfortably.
I'm guessing you don't (yet) need large type to read comfortably. When that time comes, you may gain an appreciation for the accessibility features of a good ereader.
Do you use a handheld glass, or do you wear magnifying reading glasses? I've thought about trying glasses and probably should - they aren't expensive. I'm assuming though that I'll end up feeling sick from them because of the distortion around the center.
I have a large rectangular handheld magnifying glass. I 'think' it was designed for map reading. I only really use it for inspecting electronics though. I can get by with reading glasses when reading a book as long as the light conditions are good. A good reading lamp really helps and I didn't think it would make such a difference.
It took me a long time to get used to reading glasses though. Eventually age just forced the issue though.
You bring up a good point about physical vs digital.
I'm still not sure if my children for example, understands that when I'm staring at an iPad I'm almost always reading a book. Does a vast library in iBooks translate to them as well as the same library on physical books in a bookshelf in the house? My sense is it does not.
And when I'm gone, will anyone find any interest in my iBook library? In its highlights and notes? In the books I've read and re-read dozens of times?
Some of my fondest memories are going over my older or deceased family members' book shelves. I have never, however, gone over anyone's tablet. Part of that is because it's newer, but something about the browse-ability of an e-book misses the mark. I can't see which book is worn from being read and re-read, or brimming with notes and scribbles. In digital, it's hard to tell which books that person found significant, but in physical it's obvious by the condition (or even number of copies) of the book.
> I can't see which book is worn from being read and re-read, or brimming with notes and scribbles.
It's amusing to read that, for on one side of my family, scribbling in a book would be considered a most heinous crime! I keep any writing to the flyleaf if the book is a gift, but don't otherwise write in them. Another thing that complicates the matter in my family is that we have always been serial second-hand book buyers, and in such a case a book's physical condition is not necessarily an indication of how much it was loved by its immediate previous owner. On the other hand, my grandmother tended to insert relevant newspaper cuttings into the book for the benefit of future readers!
I'm from a books-are-sacred family, though I don't particularly subscribe to that myself. But I've never understood the idea of annotating books in the margins; I don't reread them that often, nor was I a literature student.
> And when I'm gone, will anyone find any interest in my iBook library?
Probably not, but nor will anyone else find interest in your physical library. One's collections are invaluable to oneself, but usually uninteresting to anyone else.
I donated hundreds of books when I cleaned out my parents' house. Most probably ended up in a dump or recycled.
That runs very much counter to how collectors actually collect books currently. The more pristine the book, the better, aside from particularly rare or valuable inscriptions.
While that's true, and I do prefer books that actually have interesting histories, rather than being purely pristine and box-ticking, I have to admit that many collectors seem not to be, and are purely interested in box-ticking first edition first printing, pristine copies of books, with no marks, or just an author signature. Outside of the most exceptional and well-known of cases, this seems to extend to cases where other editions seem more interesting, rarer, or more notable.
Of course, this has the advantage of keeping prices down for those of us looking for those other editions and conditions, but it can at times be rather perplexing. I was once in an auction where it was evident that the auctioneer was also surprised by a case of this: in an auction with a first edition by an American trade press, and a first UK edition from a year later by a particularly notable private press, with a smaller print run, typeset and printed by hand by notable historical figures and friends of the author, and an estimate of around four times the first trade edition... the UK edition sold within estimate, and while the first edition sold for significantly more than the UK edition, vastly over its estimate.
In another case, I had a bit of trouble finding sellers online who even noted the edition of a particular 19th century book in its description if it was not a first edition, despite the second edition being at the center of a significant historical legal drama, being nominally banned and ordered destroyed, and making a mess of British blasphemy law in a case where no one, including both the government and the prosecution, wanted the publisher to be found guilty.
My guess is that many book collectors will set a particular goal, for example, collecting first editions or author-signed copies of a particular genre, set of authors, etc, and will follow that goal, rather than acquiring individual books for individual reasons.
More generally, collecting communities often seem to fall into purely seeking rarity, placing the highest demand on the items with the least supply regardless of why the supply is small. Thus at an extreme in book collecting, for example, you have collectors who see entirely uncut pages as being preferable, despite it making the book unreadable. I have a friend who is fond of antique pens who expressed disappointment that in seeking the rarest pens, the community often ended up placing the highest value on the worst: the pens with bad designs that didn't work well, the variants and colors that were particularly ugly, all the models that sold very poorly and were quickly discontinued, and are thus rarer.
Arguably the “lived in” copies are only notable if they’ve been owned and scribbled in by someone who is themselves notable. There’s no serious demand for books that have been scribbled in by nobodies like myself.
True, but collecting is generally a terrible investment from a pecuniary perspective, unless you’re the mercenary type of collector who sells to people making terrible investments.
Yeah, speaking as someone who inherited a stamp collection, the one thing to avoid is thinking you’re in it for the resale value when you really just want an excuse to buy the object of your desire.
Sure. But while I can understand this approach for rare objects which are the result of great craftsmanship (I would rather not have a crack in my faberge egg) a book is generally a mass produced article with little individual character until someone has left their mark on it.
I know a suprising number of people 10-20 years older than me who regularly use desktop computers but do not understand what a window is e.g.: that windows can cover each other up, and that there are special places you must grab or click them to either resize or move them, that you can shrink them into a dock without closing the application etc.
Rather ironic considering that the operating system they all use is actually named after this, for them, inscrutable abstraction.
Those guys at Apple knew what they were on to when they created iOS with its one app at a time paradigm, even if it is slowly adding all that complexity back in to the more recent versions.
Fits nicely with the Southpark creators views on Pot: it makes you feel fine with being bored and it's when you're bored that you should be learning a new skill or some new science or being creative.
Smartphones and everything that comes with it are more dangerous in that regard, in that a lot of activities on there are designed to give you a sense of accomplishment - finishing a level, getting an award, getting upvotes on the internets, winning at something, being moderately entertained by an endless stream of memes, dog / cat videos, etcetera. It's a continuous stream of short lived distractions.
Disclaimer: I use the phone all the time, Reddit takes up a lot of my attention. That said, I managed to sit down and read a book for a bit yesterday.
Good feature but the three month window they grant is way too short. Winding up someone’s affairs after they have died often takes longer. A year would make more sense.
Technically you have 3 months to click the 'download all account data' button and it is from the moment of the inactivity trigger, which would reasonably be many months itself.
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