I would have to submit that family's situation is rare. My dad did what he could to help me, bought me computers, subscriptions to Creative Computing magazine (I'm dating myself here, read early 80s) and letting me be me. My mother was not academic in any way. She was HS educated in the rural south and didn't contribute to my academics in any way. My father had a MSc in engineering and designed flight systems. He was always gone, sadly, so I had to sort out things myself.
With my own children, I read to them, have them read to me, and allow them to pursue their own interests, which as kids under 10, are admittedly not too many or technical, although they are wanting to learn Raspberry Pi stuff. I tend to walk them through their own questions, such as having them analyze potential outcomes. At the same time, I don't want to be a helicopter parent. They play outside, largely by themselves since we live in the county. I do keep on eye on them, but they tend to build things out of wood or look for frogs and lizards. We have agreed they want to build a small-scale replica of a fire lookout tower and they will help choose parts and assist in building. One of them already wants to be in Forestry and has for the last few years. I guess my answer is to allow myself to see our comings and goings as projects that we all enjoy and help them learn along the way.
Your parents' situation describes my marriage somewhat. I'm a software developer and (at least in my own evaluation) am an intellectually curious person. My wife is comparatively uneducated, not a good thinker and not very curious at all.
We had our first baby this year and I'm the one who does all the research and evaluation to ensure that we're taking care of our baby well and doing the things to help our child be setup for success later in life.
The problem is I work full time and she stays at home and is the primary caretaker. So I'm not there most of the time to give intellectual input.
As someone who seems to have grown up in similar circumstances, do you have any advice to make the best of this situation?
And just curious. Don't have to answer if this is too personal. How was the dynamic between your parents given the intellectual disparity? And what was your attitude and experience growing up with this disparity?
For myself, I love my wife dearly and she is a kind and loving person, but the intellectually disparity is a cause of disappointment at times. Of course, I don't express that directly. I just lower try to lower my expectations and find intellectual stimulation in other arenas.
Sounds like my situation. I cope in a similar way.
What i tell myself is that a happy mom is probably more significant than most scientific advice about average kids. I think twice or thrice if i really want to push for something. One example I would have pushed for is "no rewards for good grades but for effort" but she actually agreed immediately.
> (at least in my own evaluation) am an intellectually curious person. My wife is comparatively uneducated, not a good thinker and not very curious at all.
I get what you mean, but I’ll add the following: I’m sure she loves the child as much as you do, and wants it to turn out well and happy. Books and formal knowledge are only a small part of human understanding; if your wife is kind and loving, chances are she understands certain things (esp human aspects) better than any book can teach. I’m sure your child will find a lot to learn from her too (and so could you) :-)
I once read some advice that was something along the lines of "don't provide them with instruction, just provide them with the materials". I can remember being an extremely curious kid, but there were no materials in my house other than pencils and blank paper, and no books other than the dictionary. I'm still a curious adult, but I think the lack of access to any materials at home stunted my development.
Let your wife be your wife. You be you. Kids are naturally curious, especially boys. I have both. My daughter is bright and a straight A student, but she and her friends lack the adventuresome nature boys have. My boys are game for anything that involves spaceships, science, animals, fishing, etc. They wanted to know how fish worked, so I cut a catch open and showed them what a fish looked like inside: eyes, brain, intestines, etc. Kids need to see this stuff. They need to know where their food comes from. Trips to organic farms, fisheries, deer rendering if you hunt.
My wife has a doctorate. She's very intelligent, far more than I am, if I'm honest, but... she cares nothing for anything other than her field. Nothing. She won't entertain ideas other than her own. I love her to death, but she's very narrow minded.
My parents (deceased) were chalk and cheese. My mother was sweet and loving. Her skills ended there. My father was likely a genius on many levels. There was nothing he couldn't suss out. I was having issues compiling a program written in Basic one day in 1983. He was an Ada/C guy and in 10 seconds saw the issue and had me correct it. He was a math wizard--had to be--he designed flight systems that people's lives depended on. He was anal retentive to the nth degree and that rubbed off on me. He always said, "Son, if you're going to do anything, do it as if your life and others depend on it." He even had me PM my own bicycles and the lawn mower. My mother was distant in many respects and died an alcoholic. Maybe she felt like she never fit in. I don't know. Her parents, my grandparents, were very educated and well read. Odd.
Like you, I find it incredibly frustrating that I cannot get an Arduino or Raspberry Pi project launched and share it with my wife. Her eyes glaze over and she's actually said, "I'm not interested." My kids are too young to grok what I'm doing and don't have the patience yet to learn (yet). She likes those brain dead games and TV shows that offer zero in the way of intellectual worth. I love anything sci-fi, coding, fishing, woodworking, etc. Don't lower your expectations. I would try and find common ground with her in something you both enjoy and let that be your communal source of joy with your wife. You need you time and so does she. Parenting is no joke and she is performing an unpaid job that is high stress. Take the kid out, just you and the kid. Give her some downtime to recharge. Women love that stuff. Just what works for me.
There are things we enjoy together like hiking and traveling. I just wouldn't be able to talk politics or philosophy on a deep level with her for example.
Amen that parenting is no joke. She's a trooper with our kid and is way more patient and persevering that I am. I'm very thankful for her.
Thank you for your sharing and advice. I have this whole subthread bookmarked.
Books about everything and instill a fierce love of them. Sci-fi, how-to, science, classic literature.. I grew up this way and my mum was proud of me even if she couldn't participate, it was enough.
Thank you for your comments. I'm not sure how to take the "lack imagination" bit, but I'll accept it.
I've automated what I'm allowed to automate, which is all user, group, file sharing, Exchange Online/O365 stuff, as well as backups, etc.
I don't like Google any more than MS, to be honest. Sadly, it seems that wherever I work, it's either O365 or Google Cloud offerings.
Why do you think moving away from MS at this time is bad? I'm curious.
Sadly, there are not a heap of good IT jobs where I live, so I'm limited in what I can do and where I can work, hence my desire to learn something like Python where I can branch out and maybe take on consulting jobs. I'm also hearing that things like Docker, Kubernetes, etc. are starting to wear thin with serverless objects being the new thing.
> I'm not sure how to take the "lack imagination" bit, but I'll accept it.
No pun intended. I automated stuff in PowerShell more then decade almost every day, and there is no calming down visible. You could:
- Automate your dev/main Windows machine - control panel, installed apps, etc.
- Automate web stuff (check here for awesome sample [1])
- Create reports of various kinds
- Automate databases on various aspects - backups, seeders, metrics
- Whatever really... every day something else
> Why do you think moving away from MS at this time is bad? I'm curious.
Because MS is the best company today since it opened - bunch of x-platform tools - .NET, PowerShell, Secret management, VSCode, Terminal, WSL ... clearly light years away from MS during 90's or first 2 decade of 20's.
BTW, forgot C#. With .NET 5 this is probably one of the best programming languages and ecosystems around.
> I'm also hearing that things like Docker, Kubernetes, etc. are starting to wear thin with serverless objects being the new thing.
Hype or overkill for 99.9% of companies. Literary almost 0 companies need k8s. The complexity involved is not worth it on premise. Docker is more useful, but also requires a lot of involvement. I had big gov projects in all, and didn't see any benefit compared to projects not using them, contrary, yet another realm you need to handle.
As for serverless, I don't know what to make of it ATM.
I'm going to come across here as an odd outlier, and that's OK. I accept it. Being in IT for 20 years has shown me that none of these companies can be trusted. Since I have to have a mobile phone, I chose Apple. I don't believe that there are
"lesser evils". You're evil or you're not. Full stop. I do my best to use open source tools (save iPhone) in my house. Granted, there are no open source TVs, Roku's, etc, but they are not tracking me. My TV is set to be dumb, I don't use "real" information when I sign up for transient things. I use email aliases for everything with Fastmail. I have no apps save the ones that ship with the phone and I don't use the health app. I use the phone, texting, and camera. That's it. I don't have an iCloud account.
The field of companies is narrowing with FAANG buying up everything of value or anything that may threaten them. I get it. It's all about money. While I don't agree with everything that Richard Stallman says, he's right more often than not. We are increasingly giving our lives to FAANG. The tracking is insidious. The sharing of information is insidious. We can fight back should we wish. But how many people are willing to give up their conveniences for their freedoms? I'd wager not too many. I'll admit I bought a flip phone for the purposes of avoiding any virus apps that may be required in future should that happen. I just want to stay off the radar and I have a right to do so.
> Granted, there are no open source TVs, Roku's, etc, but they are not tracking me.
Generally our views are broadly aligned, though the above sentence gave me pause. Are you suggesting specifically that Roku doesn't monitor ("track") what you watch? If so, you should really spend a little time with Roku's privacy policy[1] wherein they say quite explicitly that they do.
I chose Roku pretty early on for our household, and I have regrets about that choice, but I can't bring myself to replace our Roku hardware with Apple TV hardware given the latter is quite a bit more expensive, and then I'm left to decide whether to spend more money on a third-party remote or be stuck with the terrible one that comes in the box.
Just get pihole and put it on your network. Roku and Amazon Fire Stick are constantly calling home. Even every interaction with the remote is logged and sent back.
You can see it happening and block it. Roku also shuts down and stops you from using many apps if it can't call home for a long time.
At the individual level I agree that people are not 100% good or 100% evil. Corporations may have good people that work there and help with tasks that are mostly evil. But companies that are truly evil and offer no product, no benefit, no public good, no service, do not exist. A truly evil company offers nothing and expects everything in return. So from my perspective it's impossible for a company to be 100% evil. But some larger companies will get as close as they can.
Any for profit company that is sufficiently large enough will eventually behave in ways that are evil.
The problem here is corporate bylaws and shareholders. Many Corporate bylaws state the only purpose of the company is to pursue profits, everything else is secondary.
These things create a perverse incentive to continuously show growth.
It's not enough to be profitable as a company. The company is expected to continuously expand their market share.
If they own a relatively small market share they can innovate, improve their product, get better at marketing or sales and expand their share that way.
But eventually if they are already the dominant player in a market, to continue to grow they must snuff out competition with anti-competitive behavior and expand into to new markets often by buying companies already in those markets. And If a C level executive or board member refuses to put profits over people, they can be ousted by shareholders or sued for securities fraud.
This behavior pattern of infinite expansion of market share is the symptom created by the perverse incentives of shareholders and will eventually drive any for profit company that is large enough and has shareholders to behave in ways that we consider evil.
And while I am sure the solution is likely reclassification into B Corporations or non-profits, getting companies to reclassify is not going to be easy.
I appreciate your comment, but let's be honest, good and evil are binary like night and day. I don't cotton to the idea that one's morals can be suspended in "twilight". There are ways to make tons of money and be completely moral.
> let's be honest, good and evil are binary like night and day.
Now why would you think that?
In fact I'm pretty sure you're wrong: good and evil are various shades of gray, never white nor black. In real life, there aren't entities (corporations or humans or whatever) that are "pure good", nor are there entities that are "pure evil".
Furthermore by not differentiating between shades of gray there's no way to encourage good behavior from companies/people because they're all equally bad so you treat them the same even if one is making more efforts to do the right thing.
In a philosophical sense yes, but there’s degrees to both of them, and once you consider practical issues your options will often be a mix of good and evil.
Thank you for your comment, but please clarify how a moral person can see "degrees" of evil and allow themselves to make money with a conscience, knowing full well they are not being lawful good (Sorry, my D&D youth)?
As for myself, I work for non-profits largely because I want to do good for others. I cannot see taking advantage of another's data, for instance, without their consent (real or imagined) to make a profit and then share it with them. Perhaps I'm a goody-two-shoes, but I'll accept it. I cannot fathom working a job where my existence is to bleed out as much profit from others without them knowing, or if they do know, them not having a voice or a way out short of not using the devices of modernity.
Do you work for a non-profit in the United States, Canada, the UK, France, or another western country and pay taxes?
Do your taxes contribute to murdering foreigners in a desert far away?
Are you evil?
This isn't a personal attack, I just really struggle when I see moral absolutism and binary thinking. The world isn't binary even though our work with computers and human systems often lead us to pretend that it is.
Do you eat meat? I don't, for moral reasons. If you do does that make you evil in my eyes? Are you in fact evil?
I could do this all day. A clear and unambigious view of what's wrong and right is a risky thing - you will be compelled to fix it, without limits to your interference.
That was provocative and I think you're a good person but I don't think it's so easy, or safe, to draw a dividing line. But that risks not drawing a dividing line, so more dangers lurk.
Thank you for your comments. I agree with you that this can be taken to the nth degree and it benefits no one. I guess I could say that I do my best to avoid "grey" areas if at all possible. If I don't stand for something, I fall for anything.
As far as meat goes, I don't eat red meat. Fish, yes. Chicken, don't really care for it. I could easily get by on fish, rice, beans, salads, etc. I see your point. My eating fish would be evil to someone else since a life is lost in doing so. Beef is nasty to me because I hate even seeing fat on food. As an aside, to me, nothing is better than fried fish or a salad made from chilled chickpeas, lime juice, cilantro, diced Roma tomatoes, and red onion. Add Serrano or Jalapeno peppers if you like spicy.
I think the idea of morality being a spectrum is pretty self evident. There's good, great, bad, worse, and neutral (like the action of me sitting in a chair right now). The reason it's important is in avoiding "'perfect' is the enemy of 'better'" issues.
> I'll admit I bought a flip phone for the purposes of avoiding any virus apps that may be required in future should that happen. I just want to stay off the radar and I have a right to do so.
iOS 13.7+ can track your location for Covid contact tracing, even if there is no "virus app" installed. There should be an opt-out setting.
Yes, mine is turned off. Look at some European countries now. England has QR codes at the entrances to all public spaces. Download and install the app or provide your details that they hold for 21 days. No, thank you. Will. Not. Comply.
Germany is introducing a fine for providing incorrect contact details to restaurants. Former East Germans have living experience with "papers please".
We need all test statistics to be normalized, e.g. with transparency on PCR cycle threshold used by the test vendor and laboratory.
Given Bluetooth security weaknesses, it's only a matter of time before a legal challenge occurs against an iOS proximity assertion which has a large economic consequence, e.g. person returns to country B with PCR CT30 after being near a person in country A with PCR CT40 "positive" test result.
Should Person B be quarantined (e.g. they are expected to perform in a high-value sporting event) if they have no symptoms and there's a broad discrepancy in PCR cycle thresholds? Lawyers will sort this out after enough money is at stake to justify thorough collection of scientific evidence to challenge local policy assumptions syndicated by global iOS.
> Germany is introducing a fine for providing incorrect contact details to restaurants
The older I get, the more true the adage "those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them" becomes to me.
Why is it that every few generations we have to repeat the mistakes of the past, in versions ever more vicious and horrific, in order to learn (for a couple of generations maybe) that it was a bad idea?
But it leaves me wanting more. I mean -- we know, to be blunt, we know that the vast, vast majority of people will never stand up and agree with you, even if some unidentified part of them wants to. The world is marching in lockstep toward authoritarianism again, and cheering it along the whole way.
Where does all this go? What can we do? Disappear into a countryside somewhere and live off the land? What's the endgame for those of us who don't want to play anymore?
I don't have an answer to this. And without an answer, symbolic acts of rebellion become meaningless to me and I suspect, is 99% of the reason nobody else stands up either. Without an alternative - there's no point in fighting back.
So how do we create an alternative? Not just advocate for one... create it. So that people flock to it.
I think one of the best voices in this regard is a man named Dave Cullen out of Ireland. His YouTube channel, Computing Forever, has always been spot on in regard to the plandemic and other authoritarian happenings. He has some fascinating guests as well. I've yet to find him wrong.
I don't know what the answer is as far as getting people to wake up. Most people are utter sheeple when it comes to adhering to the diktats of government. They implicitly trust government and they shouldn't. Very few governments are really in lockstep with their people. Iceland is one, the Swiss do fairly well in this regard, as does Finland and Denmark. Again, very few.
Would you consider something like the Shield TV open source? There are some proprietary drivers, for things like Dolby Vision I think, but probably as open as you can get. [1] Or you could certainly set up a Pi / NUC to run Linux and Plex to have more control.
As an anecdote, I previously tried to run Plex without any connections back to the mothership, and they were doing some super crazy stuff (server _and_ client side) to ensure that it wouldn't work if those servers/IPs were blocked.
If you really want to avoid external parties, you should probably be running Kodi, compiled yourself, and firewalled off from internet access for good measure.
(This assumes you _are_ worried about tracking, and so only use offline media, and not Netflix etc)
1. If they're worried about gaseous emissions from cattle, isn't this worse?
2. What will authorities do to keep their numbers in check? Hunting? State-sponsored culling? Will they be suggesting people eat them?
3. Who will control their ranges? If so, how? What happens should you wake in the night to find your garden being decimated by mammoths? Or they trample your car? People do live in the areas they are suggesting inserting these creatures.
4. Will they occasionally have to shoot them with tranquilizer darts to check up on their DNA progression from generation to generation? In other words, track them like they do other species like wolves or polar bears?
5. What happens if they migrate from one sovereign nation to another? Will that nation be welcoming to creatures that I'm sure eat massive amounts of flora.
For the moment, running a Pi-hole in the cloud and pointing your mobile devices to it works. As you say, how long? When the adholes start doing ads as part of the content, this may break, but I'm sure the Cold War between the adholes and the blockers will heat up. There is always a way. God bless all the creative programmers who help to keep this crap at bay.
Pi-hole. Works like a charm. Also does the same for every device in your house. Moreover, if you don't mind spending an additional $5 a month, set up your Pi-hole in a Digital Ocean droplet and you can blocks ads everywhere YOU happen to be, even on your mobile device.
I run one and it works very well, but I fear the rise of DoH and devices just bypassing your network's DNS settings to query the manufacturer's DNS servers. I think Google devices do this.
A sad world we live in when you have to fight the devices you paid for.
I do digital signage as part of my job. We use Samsung TVs. They do work better, but they do run hotter. Much hotter. We use Yodeck Raspberry Pi players (4K) using HDMI, Ethernet. ADA now says TVs in public places have to be very close to the wall. This means that the players have to sit atop the TV, either in the small gap between the TV and wall or hook & loop to the TV. The older TVs (we replaced them this year) were OK. The new ones, because they run hotter, melted the glue off the back of the hook & loop and let the player slide down.
The link has a section named Audit Process, which is interesting.
https://www.openbsd.org/security.html