You’re right. A lot of parents leave it all up to the schools. Education can build the foundation, sure but the real work, the real conversations, should happen at home. Teaching kids how to think, not just filling their heads with facts.

The problem is, you’re lucky if there are even two parents around anymore. And if there are, most come home drained from work, staring down bills they still can’t pay. Conversations that matter just get lost in the exhaustion. Maybe I’m just grumpy in my older age, but it’s hard not to get cynical about it.

Especially smart TVs. They’re especially chatty, accounting for something like 85% of network calls (all blocked). Edit: I meant 85% of calls on my network. And they bypass upstream DNS trying to be sneaky. It’s insane.

I appreciate the effort behind your comment. Unfortunately, it will likely fall on deaf ears among those who most need to understand our government — no different from the MAGA crowd. I don’t mean this condescending. It’s just unfortunate how poorly our education system prepares Americans, across the political spectrum, for their civic responsibilities.

Agreed. There was a time when it worked impressively well, but it’s become increasingly lazy, forgetful, and confidently wrong, even missing obvious explicit prompts. If you’re using it thoughtfully as an augment, fine. But if you’re relying on it blindly, it’s risky.

That said, in my experience, Anthropic and OpenAI are still miles ahead. Perplexity had me hooked for a while, but its results have nosedived lately. I know they tune their own model while drawing from OpenAI and DeepSeek vs their own true model but still, whatever they’re doing could use some undoing.

Tired as Orwellian comparisons are, it’s hard to ignore how much this reeks of a Ministry of Truth.

With everything going on right now, the fact that I still feel physically sick reading things like this tells me I haven’t gone completely numb yet. Just absolutely repulsive.

We replaced about 60-70% of our backyard with native plants, trees, and shrubs. It was a shit ton of work but I saw a hummingbird for the first time in my life! And moths mimicking hummingbirds. And friendly bees. And weird beetles. And other birds galore. I rarely have to water.

Now our preschooler has room to roam and so so much to explore (and weird bugs to chase mom around with).

I’m discovering levels of brown nosing I’d never have thought to exist.