The first public use of the word internet wasn’t for the internet. (h/t TF)
I’m not sure I agree with it all the way down, but Ken White wrote one of the best things I read today.
Prince warned us about the Internet.
If you need a feel-good story, I suggest this one.
I just finished recording myself reading Bill Watteson’s commencement speech to the 1990 graduating class of Kenyan College for my kids. I just did it in Voice Memos on my computer. I then put it into a collection of stuff for my kids. There are quotes, advice, links to things, lists and other stuff that I’m collecting for my kids as a reflection of me and my values. More parents should do this kind of thing.
Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn’t have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that “10 minute full body” workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It’s not that the quickie doesn’t do anything, it’s just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
I was on a jury for four weeks in Jan/Feb 2020. One of my fellow jurors worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and extended an open invitation to bring the kids for a special tour, not just the regular one that anyone can do. On June 15, 2023 I could finally take him up on the invitation. While we were there, we got to see the Europa Clipper spacecraft being built. I remember getting chills and even getting a little choked up. Today the spacecraft is being launched on a Space X mission to begin its 1.8 billion-mile (2.9 billion-km) journey to reach Jupiter sometime in April 2030. It will orbit Jupiter, and conduct 49 close flybys of Europa.
It is officially pomegranate season here in California. I just picked the most perfect and delicious pomegranate I’ve ever had. From our neighbor’s tree that had some branches hanging in our backyard.
Speaking of AI, we had a school coffee meeting with middle schoolers’ parents (my daughter just started 6th grade), and the topic was AI. I was pretty impressed with how open they were about its usage. They’re taking a conservative approach, see it as a potential tool and will be helping kids explore it for things like structuring their writing, not writing for them and using its inevitable hallucinations to help teach media literacy and critical thinking, which I think is pretty cool. But man, a lot of parents are freaked out.
Also, I sat with my daughter and ChatGPT’s voice interface last week. I prompted it to help her study for a vocabulary test, on which she proceeded to get 100%, which is encouraging. I especially like that it removes some of the inevitable friction with parents helping kids with homework, which the school discourages anyway.
Easily the best thing I saw – or rather heard on the Internet today. Your weekly reminder that this is the “worst” it will ever be.