we didn't want a smart tv, but there's no more dumb ones

out of the box, it was so slow we joked it had north korean spyware

joke's on us, it did

a man in the middle attack compromised every device except, strangely, mine

all because i'd bullied google into deleting youtube the attack is not precluded by 2FA

2FA arguably makes you more vulnerable, not less

the attack does not require social engineering

it does not require phishing, or keylogging passwords

in fact it does not require passwords at all

that's why changing passwords doesn't kill it

i just got this odd little book, it's roughly the size of a passport

this photographer went around calling the biggest european companies, asking to show up at their office and shoot their boardroom

this is unilever in 1993 this is abb, an electrical engineering company

the cherrywood table was less than two weeks old at the time

they offered her coffee, and gifted her a swatch watch

math's the same in every language, it's lame but true

the singapore workbooks made me realize i do not have to be limited to worksheets in english

i surfaced >4,000 worksheets from japan and korea and china, cranking out a stack of homemade workbooks in a single bound the laser printer is monochrome with auto duplex

i printed double sided in toner save mode, enough pages to make a dozen workbooks to start

i already need a new cartridge

one time as a kid, my dad told me about some old research he'd read

he said, maybe asian kids are better at math because they just try 50% longer my dad's a mathematician, and this stuck with me

when i do hard things, i mostly try to just keep going, at least 50% longer

we bought all these singapore math books before our kid was born

for some reason we thought the series started at 6 years old, he's 4 and it's clear we should've started at 3

he blew through the first two workbooks in two days

and i've done a 180 on the power of worksheets first off, they're not ugly

this sounds trivial, i believe it's actually distinctly nontrivial

when things take him seriously, he takes them seriously too

the media mistakes montessori as a brand, or an expensive subset of oddly specific wooden playthings

the truth is that it's closer to an operating system than a school system

you don't need montessori school, but you do need montessori thinking: the tragedy of all the original montessori books is that the pedagogy is not the point — it's a mistake to only see it as some novel ways of getting read, write, math

montessori is heretical: it is not to reform education, it is to reject it

evidently @slatestarcodex does yearly book review contests, but this time he decided to do something different: "an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book"

someone entered a review of alpha school, and it went a little viral @mbateman @gtdad note that submissions to the everything-except-book review contest are anonymous, until winners are announced this week

all we know is that approximately a year ago, the writer moved his wife and family from some state to texas, in order for his three kids to attend alpha school

i've compiled more @yacineMTB, book II of his parenting posts

this one's called:

REGULAR PARENTS DON'T STAND A CHANCE CHAPTER I: ORDINARY PEOPLE ARE TARGETED *THROUGH* THEIR CHILDREN

–– Listen closely to the sounds
–– the people sharing these videos don't see what I see
–– i notice things that most people will agree is happening, but no one will understand the gravity of it
–– I see psychofauna devouring children
–– The nursery rhymes on YouTube are evil, horrible, extremely optimized to brain jack the attention of children
–– i saw a kid today that bumped into a door today because he was walking while scrolling youtube shorts
–– yesterday, a child was so entranced by youtube shorts that they were basically just reaching around for the bathroom door handle, trying to find it, while zombing out
–– ordinary parents are being targeted *through* their children
–– A gentle reminder that your family is an attack vector, and you need to spend the time to teach them how to protect themselves
–– I know it's difficult but you really need to network ban your kids from seeing short form videos
–– if you give your kid a phone or let them browse youtube you are destroying their minds
–– you are giving your children something worse than cigarettes
–– It's horrifying man
–– 70 billion parameters learning to stream pixel buffers straight to your screen
–– every parameter tuned on how to dopamine hack you
–– We should not be aiming algorithms at babies
–– people should be a lot more angry with google trying to push shorts down kids throats
–– these people are *literally* after your children and there is nothing you can do about it
–– there
–– are
–– babies
–– getting
–– fried

there's a maternal dissonance in college-educated women narrative debt accumulates when upwardly mobile girls get a degree or three –– they invest time and money, they invest social capital and moral position too

these girls then get jobs that are light on impact and heavy on soft skills: signaling is the primary return on investment

whenever lofi girl protocol goes viral, people assume i'm anti screens –– it's really quite the opposite

i decided to run a new experiment: i gave the now 4 year old an ipad, exclusively for texting

a bold move, given one notable constraint

he can't read @tzhongg over his winter break, it took me less than a week to teach him the alphabet, and since then he likes to text his favorite people, tapping out very short words on my phone

that said, it's clear he still loves voice messages more, and thus the use case i was testing against

i'm slogging through all the original montessori books again so that you don't have to

this one's about agency

and how parents lose the plot by doing too much: as parents we delude ourselves that we are giving *everything* to our children

so @karpathy posted grok's take on agency

> exert control over their actions *and environment*

your agency demands the capacity to make others act

do things, and get others to do things too: danny meyer is famous for hospitality as a competitive edge

this is a book about how to get people on your side

schools meme girls into believing 'life is fair'

men have it beaten into them that it's not

notes: ostensibly the book is for those who worry too much, that said, men are not as lured by worry — i see it as written for husbands who have wives, specifically wives who worry

as i read it, i picture every scenario a marriage, and every character a wife

this book is not satire

reality is absurd, deal with it

notes: i should be daunted to do these notes, that said, douglas adams treated hitchhiker's guide as a moving target, very much the opposite of a fixed narrative

maybe i will too

this book is not about running

it’s about deciding today is no different from yesterday

notes: there’s a saying that goes, everyone's the star of their own story

the risk in making yourself a protagonist is that it can lock you into a frame where your suffering is the story

murakami tells us: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional

every company is in two businesses: the one they’re actually in, and talent

the worse founders are at talent, the more risk they have to underwrite

notes: the writers do not pretend this is only a feel-good book, and i can relate — to be interested in human talent, you may have to be equally interested in human failure

the media sold you the lie of fairness in marriage, but what you actually need is agency

marriage is not 50/50, it’s 100/100, that's the game

why argue about fairness when you can just do things: you may assume this is about *messy houses,* but it's actually about *messy minds* –– and learning how to put order to intentions *before* putting order to things

long before spawning a netflix show, the book sold >9M copies, which is on the scale of a malcolm gladwell book

i agree with @yacineMTB: "fairness does not exist in marriage"

the media ruined marriages by programming women to think they should be ‘fair’

tldr it's bad code: i can muster that the book is brave –– no face is saved in making the message pretty loud and clear for the wives who need to hear it: fairness is a meme

this is inadvertently the story of her falling prey to the meme, martyring herself, in turn crucifying herself

marriage is all about husband and wife together against the world — and the big problem with the fair play book is that it pits wife against husband

this book does not do that

notes: if fair play is ‘winning against each other’ — this book is ‘winning together’

overall, on reread, this book is a bit too feelery for me –– that said, because it’s so much more balanced, more people need to know it exists

if the book escapes containment (read: outside of x), it’ll be crucified for its anecdotes, perhaps justifiably

that said, it’s more or less exactly the way i was parented — no limits on screens, on school, on sleep, not even on sugar (unlimited ice cream)

full agency

notes: first, i’m not exactly the target audience, in the sense that i don’t find the ideas that groundbreaking — maybe also because i lived it

some of the core arguments don’t align for me — but as always, i take what works and leave what doesn’t

ferris bueller says it better than me

there’s a dearth of fathers writing on parenting — i read them whenever i find them, particularly when on bilingualism

> born in moscow, as a small child he immigrates from soviet russia to boston, grows up to attend harvard, later raises his own children in brooklyn

notes: it would be difficult to have ideological views further from the writer and his wife — but i’m often able to enjoy memoir even when it’s very far from the way i see things

this is a compilation of short essays, i’m mostly doing the parts that touch on parenting in two languages