I have a slightly ageing model (my co-developer is adamant there will be no upgrades, please do not suggest) and my problem is that it appears to have defaulted to ICT time (we are at GMT +11). I hear it performing operations well into the early morning, but booting from a cold start any earlier than 9am leads to all sorts of unexpected behaviour and system errors.
It sounds as though many of the commenters here are still trying to deal with the first-generation Small Child. My sympathies to all of you. A couple of years ago, I was fortunate to acquire a next-generation model, rebranded as Small Grandchild, and the UX is much superior. All of the troubleshooting and command-line interactions are handled by the Grown Child, who herself now has a reasonably good interface. For me, the UX of Small Grandchild is purely hug and play.
It’s probably running a process that’s connecting to internet services such as mine craft or league of legends out of working hours. I’ve found that disabling internet connectivity at the WiFi router from 12:00 midnight until the morning can be effective to prevent wasteful background processing over night.
Disconnecting Wi-Fi is not recommended, since it may prevent access to firmware updates that improve overall friendliness.
The real problem may be in your educational system, whose operating hours may be incompatible with the standard, pre-set clock phase that most models naturally acquire at that age.
I suggest contacting your local school board to continue troubleshooting.
Alternate take: some private third party school boards use a different scheduling algorithm and manage to bypass that issue. Plus you get an API key that gives you better support.
Turning off wi-fi isn't enough. Like many Samsung smart TVs, a Small Child will cycle through all access points in range if its configured network doesn't have internet connectivity.
Yeah the low battery warning is extremely obnoxious and not dismissable at all. I don't know who thought this was a good decision!
What's even more crazy is that often when I attempt to silence the low battery warning by placing the Small Child in the charger, it often refuses to begin charging until the battery has been entirely depleted, so along with not being dismissable, even attempting to charge the Small Child does not stop the low battery warning consistently! I believe this is likely a bug, but I haven't yet been able to consistently replicate it to file a bug report despite experimenting with various charging and usage schedules.
Mine evidently felt in need of a recharge last night and used its optional fuel intake valve to ingest some of my espresso, finding it not 100% compatible with its system it ejected the espresso and made an error sound, after which it walked around the room, came back and went for the espresso again. Prevented second time by manual intervention.
I've found that, while the smaller model's battery life seems boundless, what really drives the appearance is their remarkable ability to recharge quickly. I can wipe out the battery of both of of the smaller models I'm currently in charge of and within 2 hours they have resumed normal levels of activity.
You need to make a Use Case Diagram and further analyze the system. If you do this and properly understand the system, you will realize that you are the product and your UX is perfectly designed for the child who is the actual user in this system.
> Q: How do your parents know exactly how to push your buttons?
> A: They installed them.
But the truth is evolution installed the buttons in parents as well as installed instincts in the children enabling them to push those buttons whenever they need.
My parents tried that when I was the model in question. They discovered that at best, forcing a reboot triggers unpredictable output from the model's emotional processing unit. At worst, the sneak process starts running with full privileges over the system.
That particular model seems to be running with the be_fckin_rich cheat enabled, which allows for a team of clinician-type bots to treat her avatar. The rest of us don't quite* have that level of luxury.
How do I get new features added to the roadmap? I’ve been asking for an “eat vegetables” interface without the “offer dessert in exchange” workaround for over a year, no response, yet in the same time frame I’ve seen things like “climb top-heavy bookshelf” and “unfurl entire toilet paper roll” deployed… who is asking for these features??
The project managers have had a look at some of the competing products, and felt that matching features would be more competitive vs fixing existing bugs.
Yeah, but look at puppy for example - it just eats what you give it. (If anything, the makers of that product should introduce a bit of pickiness tbh). The small child makers should really take an example from puppy - AI is a nice way to get some behaviors trained up, but over-doing it (e.g. in the "what to eat" module) can be just as bad as not enough (compare brine shrimp for the problems of a no AI approach).
Sorry, you're blaming someone else for the decision on chosing Small Child vs Cute Loveable Puppy? Buyer's remorse is strong. You should have researched the return options before purchase. However, adding Cute Loveable Puppy can sometimes improve Small Child, or just add to headache.
Be careful. Testing has shown that if you run the Small Child and Cute Loveable Puppy containers on the same host, drink(alcohol) may start running at about 9:30 pm.
Oh sorry, I didn't mean to mislead! I don't own either model, I just am disucssing my experiences as a user. See my sister has both a puppy and a small child... Her and my brother-in-law have set up a combined SCaaS and PaaS called 'extended family'. As an early adopter (they call it "uncle" but whatever, silly naming has been a thing since "tweet"), I get more access than I can use to both small child and puppy. It's actually a great service if you're on the fence about getting your own, you can just send an SMS to 'extended family' and reserve some time. Most of the benefits of ownership, and when one of the defects littering this thread pops up, 'extended family' takes care of all the maintenance.
My best friend runs a similar service called "chosen family" and my early adopter title is "godfather" (i like that one, very mobster), but otherwise the service is basically the same.
If you're at all unsure about investing in small child or puppy, take a look around for a similar service to help with the decision!
You should have splurged for the Small Child Pro Max++. It comes with the extra neural engine cores. Sometimes buying the top of the line unit seems too expensive at time of purchase, but it's only after some usage does the decision to save money up front come to be regretted.
"Sass" seems to be a critical component of the operating system. That process runs unless my model is asleep or needs a doctor. Have you heard of the sass-back algorithm? Don't let it run constantly because it loses its impact, but you can always pull it out when you need the sassing to just stop....
function sass-back (sass):
return sass
I'm not sure why, but sass-back seems to put sass into a panic. It temporarily stops all system output while it tries to restart and initiates "stare".
At least that's usually the case! Our puppy is positively defective - she eats what she needs, and leaves the rest in the bowl. Unless there's chicken.
Such bug-features are always handy! I wonder if it's consistently reproducible in other dogs, maybe there's some source code behind it that may be useful in other species?
Talking by experience, my kids would just eat dessert and cry later that they want more dessert.
I went in the opposite direction. I put a small portion of meat on the dish. When it's over, I put some vegetables; rinse and repeat until the portion of food is assimilated.
It seems like giving small goals is helping with going through the entire dinner and not having a choice minimises building up dislike for a specific food.
I think the reasoning for the second phenomenon is something like:
1. I can eat potatoes or chicken.
2. I like potatoes.
3. I'll eat potatoes.
4. Remember that dislikeChicken++
4. Go back to 1 until I'm full
This is honestly the most original take I've ever seen on handling picky kids, and despite it being sort of in jest I can't help but think there's some potential validity. Kids tend to be pretty easy to manipulate when it comes to food (e.g. "broccoli is tiny trees!"), as long as you can find the fulcrum point from which to pivot the presentation. I hadn't considered the choice/reinforcement aspect of this before, and will keep it in mind as a harmless test concept!
Kids are very different. My first daughter had a healthy appetite while small, then after a cold she became a very picky eater; she remains somewhat picky today, as an adult. The second daughter, we "trained" to eat varied, healthy food. We were proud of ourselves and thought we know "how it's done". The third one broke us completely - at some point we were begging her "eat this cupcake, it has loads of chocolate!"
All our three kids ate everything until they were about three, after that they were really picky but it seems to get slowly better once they reach 8-9 years old. That said, when they were in daycare/kindergarten they eat what they are served. Very strange. Our oldest attended an “alternative” kindergarten where everything they were served was full of spices and herbs. She ate it all, but at home she barely touched the most plain of plainest meals. Peculiar.
My brother-in-law's children are trilingual, and they react differently depending which language you talk to them in. Because they speak French at school, if you ask them to clean up or eat their vegetables in French they do it without complaining. But do it in Polish of English, nope, not having any of it. 4 and 7 years old.
- It's owned by Smucker's. I normally dislike anything from Smucker's, but Adams is a nice exception.
- If you get the giant jar from Costco, the oil separation is a significant issue. There's a simple solution: dump it all into a big mixing bowl (with the help of a silicone spatula), mix it, and pour it back into the jar. I did it last time I bought it and it was worth the 10 minutes I spent.
- Once it's mixed well, if you give it a quick stir every time you use it, the oil doesn't separate again.
The other hack for jars of any size is to store them upside down until you open them for the first time. Then when you open the jar, you get to stir the PB and the oil naturally comes up from the bottom instead of delicately trying to force the oil down without spilling it over the sides.
I've taken to using a using an electric hand mixer directly in the jar. It gets the peanut butter thoroughly mixed very quickly. As one might expect, it can go wrong spectacularly if you aren't careful.
It's owned by Smucker, but not developed by them. It originated early in the 20th century in Tacoma, WA and was purchased in the late 1990s by Smucker.
Why are all zero-sugar-added PBs not homogenized? It seems unlikely to me that sugar is the primary homogenizing agent in e.g. Skippy. I dread opening a new jar of peanut butter to the point where I will look for other things...
I think what keeps homogenized peanut butter homogenized is partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is apparently also not good for you. Adams Natural, for instance (they also make a homogenized version) contains peanuts and (optionally) salt.
Oh fun hack. Store the peanut butter container closed on its side in the fridge. More surface area seems to help the separation issue and the fridge solidifies it so it has less chance to drip or leak.
It's a combination of several factors: American kids foods tend to be heavily processed and run to sweet, which will set the baseline if you let it, and there's this widespread belief that children won't eat grownup food so you should offer something else.
We only offer what we're eating and, unsurprisingly, he has learned that as normal. That doesn't mean he eats everything — bitter flavors really are a learned taste — but he'll eat enough of it to get proper nutrition and understands that rejecting dinner means getting a second pass later rather than something else. We're also not monsters so there's always some high-probability staple in the meal so it might be that e.g. he eats the fish and sweet potatoes/kale chips but not the squash, which is acceptable. There are also some amusing outcomes: I haven't had asparagus tips in a year or two because he eats those happily but not the base.
> children won't eat grownup food so you should offer something else.
Having grown up in an immigrant household where the children’s plate is just a smaller version of the adult plate, is this a thing in American households? The kids eat an entirely separate meal-course from the adults?
I know baby food is processed but once a kid gets teeth, they’re just given what the adults eat.
My grandmother would have banish from the table if I had ever even dared to ask to eat something separate.
That's what kids' menus are at restaurants. Spaghetti & meatballs, chicken fingers, mac 'n cheese, pizza, sometimes fish & chips. The same staple foods that basically all kids will eat, as a separate meal course.
My wife grew up in an immigrant family, I grew up in a half-immigrant (but largely Americanized) family. This was an element of culture shock for her. In American culture the norm is that everybody eats whatever they want to eat, and it's considered rude (sometimes even abusive) to try and control someone's food. We have obesity & diabetes rates to match. In most immigrant cultures food is considered a communal experience, where set dishes are put out on the table and it's considered rude to decline or ask for something different. You see this in restaurant customs as well, where servers at American restaurants will come around and ask each person (even the kids) what they want and then bring out individual plates, while in say Chinese restaurants the servers will go to the oldest male at the table, ask for the order, and then bring dishes out family style for everyone to eat.
It's extremely difficult to raise kids against the culture they're immersed in. Our infant will eat anything - even broccoli, celery, carrots, etc. Our 3-year-old will only eat dino nuggets, or on rare occasions, noodles or rice. When our 3-year-old was an infant, he ate everything too. But he gets snacks, occasionally lunch, and occasionally parties outside the home, and in the course of that, discovers that he really likes spaghetti, dino nuggets, and PB&J sandwiches. Hence, that is now his meal, and he knows that it is possible to have them, and he won't eat anything else when placed in front of him, even things he previously enjoyed.
(I suppose we could just not buy dino nuggets and he'd be fine; he's been fine whenever we run out and I explain that we just don't have any. But it's just not that important to me. Like I said, in American culture, the norm is that if you have the means to make yourself or your family happy, you should do it, and it's not that hard to get a 5 lb bag of dino nuggets from Costco when we go.)
I spent about 4 months in total in the US as a child, visiting relatives and doing road trips.
I remember several restaurant visits. I was old enough (12-17) to order from the adult menu without comment in most cases, although in a fancy place I did have all the waitresses coming to look at me eat snails.
Elsewhere, waiters sometimes said "are you sure he/she will eat that?" when my younger siblings made their choices, or "I see you guys really are from Europe, American kids don't eat XYZ".
(I have eaten chicken/turkey nuggets perhaps 3 or 4 times in my life. From 2005, many schools in Britain were banned or limited from serving them [1]. Sodas are also banned.)
> Like I said, in American culture, the norm is that if you have the means to make yourself or your family happy, you should do it, and it's not that hard to get a 5 lb bag of dino nuggets from Costco when we go.
That is a perfect example explaining the huge problems with (child and adult) obesity and all the health-related problems originating from it, which are also very much "the norm" in American culture.
"Let's optimize for short-term happiness! The only reason why you maybe shouldn't do that in a particular occasion is because you lack the money!"
With the same reasoning you should also probably buy and take crystal meth if you can afford it. It's definitely a powerful boost for happiness, you can make the whole family happy as never before with just one small lump of the stuff!
> Like I said, in American culture, the norm is that if you have the means to make yourself or your family happy, you should do it.
That's kind of a bullshit cop-out. Way too vague and general to be a "norm". I make my family happy by helping lower their risk of diabetes and heart failure, so I guess I do subscribe to it. (I'm not directly knocking your choice to feed dino nuggets) but I think your general point is a bit shitty. I have many friends and close extended family that have successfully raised their children vegetarian or vegan - I don't care to do that but I am pretty strict about food choices in young children - it usually sets them up better even in the teen year as I have seen 1st and 2nd hand. It can be challenging - but extremely difficult is hyperbole. Young children get the vast vast majority of their food from home, one birthday party isn't going to force themselves to go on a hunger strike and starve to death. A daycare should be respecting dietary restrictions especially if you're providing the food.
I am genuinely confused by this phrasing. Are you saying that there are many situations where children and adults are receiving menus for food but are not “eating out”?
There are alot of people who basically eat out every meal. That's why every time there is a snowstorm, the bread is always gone. Those people only know how to make sandwiches.
As a first generation immigrant to the US, this is something which bemused me. When I was a kid if I refused to eat veggies, I know my Mom would kick me off the dining table.
In my home, we are trying to instill a little bit of that. Veggies, meat and carbs first. Then fruits and on occasion dessert. My kid knows if he wants fruits (he loves fruit) / dessert, he needs to finish his veggies. Meat and carbs we don't insist too much. My kid eats a no-spice version of what the adults eat. This is mostly cause his day care provides bland food and his taste buds are too sensitive.
Very much yes: like you'll have a meal with normal food and someone will make a batch of Kraft mac-and-cheese without even offering them what everyone else is eating. I can understand the appeal of not fighting about it but that problem only gets worse the longer it runs.
My observation of my friends (mostly SF bay area) is it's about 50/50. I'd like to think that it's my brilliant parenting that we have a one-meal family, but our 4yo has always been very food-motivated. Without getting too much into the nature/nurture debate, I'm willing to accept there's plenty of both, and I try not to judge my friends who make separate meals for their kids.
That said, kiddo doesn't like shrimp (yet!), and I love shrimp, so on shrimp nights he gets something else.
Ours also doesn’t like shrimp. We always put one on the plate for him to look at, inspect, discard. As a shrimp loving dad all I can think of is: more for me!
I have an American gf and can confirm she does this. Sometimes three separate meals, one for adults and one for each kid. Apparently this is the norm in households around here.
My ex and I did not even think of doing this with our kid.
My kid (~2 years) prefers to eat food they like the taste of most.
Turns out that they prefer the sweet tastes of biscuits and even bananas etc to broccoli and carrots.
They'll whinge and whine about being hungry, so you offer them some peas or avocado or something and they will literally push it out of the way, look you straight in the eye, and tell you about how hungry they are (...but not hungry enough to eat the veggies in front of them!). Offer them crisps or biscuits or even just fruity-yoghurt and they'll scoff it down super-fast because presumably it tastes nicer.
I can understand peas, but avocado is fatty indulgent wonderful food. Not liking avocado is absurd. It's like not liking peanut-butter.
Side-note: I learned the most grotesque aberration that shows how the U.S. is orders of magnitude into complete dysfunction: there's something called "diet peanut butter" (learned about this because of a warning I saw online not to give it to dogs). WTF is "diet peanut butter"???? Peanut butter is this rich, delicious oily food. It doesn't need a damn thing to be a great treat. But in the U.S., it's not only typically salted, they add a large amount of sugar. That's already insanely stupid. You want to cut out the sugar? Just enjoy the plain amazing peanut butter on its own!! Nope, they made "diet" by swapping the sugar for xylitol or something. INSANE.
P.S. I live in and grew up in the U.S., I'm judging my own country.
Widely eaten in the Netherlands (though not on its own - usually on bread, and never with jelly). Many people swear by the main brand Calvé, although peanut-only single-ingredient peanut butter has gained serious traction in the past few years.
I don't think ive ever eaten it by itself, but I can confirm that I've had it on sandwiches in Australia, in Satay, (Golden tofu/chicken) and a peanut stew (African iirc).
My parents avoided this issue by just not offering me crisps biscuits etc almost ever (perhaps one on the weekend if I were lucky - certainly not every day). Within healthy food groups they would make an effort to provide foods I liked though.
Classic symptoms of sugar addiction. I've found it takes around three weeks without sugar to reset this, then the sugar cravings hacking the system disappear.
I hated carrots growing up. I definitely would not describe them as "sweet": they taste dry and sour, take a long time to chew, and the juice makes my throat hurt.
Maybe my family just bought bad carrots, but they all seemed to like them. I don't know.
We solve this by having a tiered eating system that starts with some salad or veggies, if they don’t eat, they clearly aren’t deathly hungry; dessert is available at the end of the meal if they finish.
Note this may require a family eating culture that includes salad et al. With every dinner, which is not the norm in America.
My experience with little kids is that steamed vegetables are the most appealing, they just need to be offered before sweets. Things fried in grease or with salt added seem to be something that becomes much more appealing later.
I was well into my 40s before I learned that cauliflower actually tastes amazing when roasted. My mom always boiled it and I swear it always smells like something died in the kitchen when she did that.
Regarding salt, From the link, “babies” is different than kids. I doubt salt is going to hurt anyone older except in specific cases like heart disease or something.
I don’t buy the saturated fats thing either, except to the extent that they are a source of calories. If you have links to some studies that indicate negative outcomes vs the same caloric intake from other sources I am willing to read them.
I figured out the flash fry thing just last year. Game changer, for me as well as the kids. So yummy. Be careful with that hot oil though! The most dangerous thing in the kitchen afaikt.
The danger with this pattern is that it encourages overeating - stuff in the vegies so you get dessert as well, and wind up eating way more food than you need.
If everything is saturated with salt/sugar/artificial ehnahced flavors/refined everything/fried/etc with "instant hook"-overcranked-at-11 taste, and it's all targeting the lowest common denominator palette, good luck then trying to teach a person to appreciate tomoatoes, brocolli, asparagus, mushrooms, cheeses, and so on...
This is a very good summary of my culinary experience visiting the US. This is not to say that good restaurants don't exist, it's just that cheap/everyday restaurants had everything cranked up to 11. The Cheesecake Factory menu was basically butter and sugar in different ratios.
Edge's translation of the Arnisia ameletita page is hilarious. I don't know Greek, so I have no idea how much of this is in the original—
"The composition of the recipe for negligentness is the product of deep study by the entire staff of pandespani, which dedicated its energy both to the symbolic significance of the proposal and to the gastronomic one.
In order to enrich our indignant recipe with meanings and symbolism, members of our team, due to three days, rigged to Mani in order to find the most angry instruments from the well-known butcher shop of the Kourakos Brothers in Areopolis, but also to the popular one in Argos for potatoes, because of the slow salaries that the "castrated" taxpayers cover.
With these and with them, yesterday we found all the pantespanic contributors and we pinched our neatness in two different ways"...
>Edge's translation of the Arnisia ameletita page is hilarious. I don't know Greek, so I have no idea how much of this is in the original—
It is. It's a recipe site, but this particular article was written during the period of austerity measures and protests, and has some humoristic references to the era.
Note that amelitita means "unmentionables", and those are basically the testicles of the animal.
This recipe however is for bovine "unmentionables", not arnisia (lamb) ones.
>Splinantero so rare Google didn't even guess it from how you spelled it.
I has a typo in my spelling. Spinantero is basically a composite word for "splina" kai "entero", the Greek words that are the ancient etymology of english "spleen" and "enteric". And the recipe is exactly that, speen and other meet wrapped in intestines, and grilled with spices etc.
>Arnisia ameletita doesn't even have any non-Greek results at all.
Ameletita is literarlly unmentionables (basically "testicles"), and arnisia is means "from lamb". So this recipe is easy too (though the recipe site gives one for bull ameletita).
I've heard some speculation that this can be related to breast vs. formula feeding. If the mom eats a lot of vegetables, some of the tastes will come out in the milk and get the baby accustomed to those tastes.
This is highly unlikely, similarly to claims that eating cruciferous vegetables will lead to gassy breast-fed babies. Breast milk isn't the distilled contents of the parent's stomach. In contrast, alcohol (for example) is a problem because it affects the parent's bloodstream, not because it fills their stomach.
The percentage of alcohol that makes it into breast milk, which is the mother’s blood alcohol content, is less than the percentage in a typical slice of yeast leavened bread[1]. Coma level alcohol abuse is a BAC of 0.4%, which is the around the minimum found in bread. It’s very important to remember that this intake is going through baby’s gut and liver. On the other hand drinking while pregnant is essentially putting baby on an alcohol IV and is extremely harmful.
The real danger of alcohol for breastfeeding is that it can impair the mother’s ability to properly hold the child, among other things.
Obviously I don’t advocate drinking and nursing, but if mom does have a couple glasses of wine with dinner she shouldn’t be wracked with guilt if she has to nurse.
On the alcohol thing, I'm inclined to agree. Even if you drink enough to be legally drunk, the milk should only be 0.08% alcohol, which is considerably less than say, orange juice. This of course does not at all apply to a pregnant woman.
On the cruciferous vegetable thing, I can say that it is a real phenomenon at least for some babies in certain circumstances. One of our babies was particularly prone to gas, and we had a few horrible nights. Finally, after the worst night of crying we'd ever had, it dawned on us that my wife had eaten a salad with raw brussels sprouts and also eaten cooked brussels sprouts that night. Once she cut out the brussels sprouts and went easy on the broccoli, the problem mostly went away.
Whatever the chemical in brussels sprouts that causes gas is, evidently it is active at pretty low concentrations at least for certain babies.
I live on a dairy. Yes, when our cows grazed on our cover crop which included radishes, it affected the flavor of the milk. And the color, too.
We actually had some customers tell us later that they wouldn't have kept buying our milk due to the unpleasant flavor, except that they knew it was temporary.
I'll second this; my parents had milk goats while I was young, and their diet definitely affected the milk flavor. Garlic, onions, even some weeds would do it.
I think if Korean kids can love kimchi, Italian kids can love eggplant, and Mexican kids can love nopales you must be able to condition kids to like anything.
Historically, there was a big food safety / “scientific nutrition” movement which was heavily influenced by the various food-safety issues around the turn of the previous century and also things like Great Depression / WWII-era concerns about malnourishment (my grandfather remembered all of the concerns that American teenagers hadn't been fed enough to be able to go toe to toe with the Germans).
This lead to a lot of truly regrettable food — when my grandmother did home economics classes the focus was always on things like having enough calories for manual laborers on a budget, cooking thoroughly to avoid the chance of disease, etc. which really emphasized meat and carbs, and techniques like pressure cooking (which allowed you to eat cheaper cuts of meat). Enjoying your food was not a priority. Her children were quite happy when she got into California cuisine back when that was new.
Yes, pickiness is definitely passed on. The only children I know who insist on ridiculous "meals" of mac-n-cheese and chicken nuggets have at least one parent who also has no taste.
This is also known as the "Salad Dodger" bug. Many users in Scotland have been less than successful at getting a patch for this issue. Something to do with territorial licensing and the Pies and Bridies patent.
>I’ve been asking for an “eat vegetables” interface without the “offer dessert in exchange” workaround
Perhaps "not eating vegetables" shouldn't have been presented as an option, but instead "we eat what is on offer today, there is no special menu".
More often than not, it's spoiling the kid with sweets, pizza, or perhaps just cooking their favorite dishes on demand every time (as opposed to as a love gesture once in a while), that prevents them from enjoying and appreciating a wider range of food.
Once somebody has been hooked on the quick-fix of a burger, for example, it's difficult to learn to appreciate the deeper textures, tastes, etc. of vegetables and other more refined recipes.
Genuinely curious as a vegetarian: aren't vegetables considered a part of daily meals in your household? I've been asked this question by a couple of friends and in my experience, it depends on how the veggies are cooked (there are a million ways to make them tasty), and if the kids actually see adults eat veggies regularly.
I'm almost entirely plant based and despite this, my child will not go near a vegetable. It's reached a point where I use extra vegetables when I make stocks because she will eat soup, but only if it has meat and no visible vegetables. Putting extra vegetables in the stock likely accomplishes nothing but it makes me feel a little bit better.
I've gone so far as to watch exotic cooking shows on YouTube with her to see if any vegetable dishes or different ways to prepare them are interesting. I deserve a fucking Michelin star with all I've learned about cooking vegetables for her. Despite this, vegetables are bad and "Mmmm actually, kids don't have to eat vegetables."
You know, you'd think so. Unfortunately, she embodies everything I love(d) about hacker culture in her pursuit of a vegetable free existence. It would be admirable if I didn't really want to feed her a damned vegetable. :)
If it makes you feel better, I knew two people who were both committed foodies (an Italian and the guy who risked a $25k fine smuggling a leg of jamón ibérico through customs before there was a licensed importer), and then their son went through (IIRC) a 5 year stretch where he would not eat almost anything other than Wonderbread and Jif peanut butter. I am not exaggerating: their doctor actually pushed on vitamin supplements to avoid scurvy.
I have a 9mo and we don’t cook usually so we’re feeding him industrialized baby foods (slowly introducing eggs, alphabet noodles, etc. His appetite is growing crazy fast and baby food isn’t cheap…)
Typically "vegetables" are synonymous with "the boring vegetables" when it comes to convincing kids to eat them. They'll jam in the mash potato like it's going out of fashion, but the kale/cabbage gets funny looks and derision.
I try to get creative with my vegetables so that not only my kids eat them more, but so do I.
and by creative I mean "add lots of different flavours, herbs, and spices to mask their otherwise dullness to make them exciting"
Using the adjective "dullness" is unimaginable to me. All the vegs I've ever fried were delicious. No spices, all I need is butter and salt. How are you folks preparing those vegs?
I have a vegetarian adult friend who doesn't like to eat vegetables. They eat things that contain vegetables, such as grilled/baked veggie burgers, but dislike things which are obvious vegetables.
Personally I love them and will happily eat a meal consisting of nothing else, but as I eat a lot of takeout food due to my work setup, it's surprisingly difficult to get a dish full of good vegetables that way.
The refusal to eat vegetables is, in fact, a known regression introduced during a recent bugfix intended to prevent the intake of toxic plant matter. Not all models received the bugfix that causes this problem; unfortunately, for those affected, workarounds will continue to be necessary for the foreseeable future.
I realize the satire, but honestly the best thing we ever did was have a vegetable garden. She started eating random vegetables from the garden when she went outside to play and it's been a breeze to get her to love vegetables in meals since. Really feel lucky about that one!
Ah, the main "eat vegetables" interface is actually emergent behavior driven by three different interfaces: the "parental mimicry" interface, the "repeated exposure" interface, and the fuel sampling system's feedback to the main processor. If the first two systems are repeatedly engaged with one particular desired food item, the third system will eventually acclimate to the new fuel source and learn to accept it. A word of caution, though - not all fuel samplers are the same, and some models will always reject particular inputs.
This is about customer obsession, relentlessly following the needs of our audience. I know the engineers are always complaining that without vegetables we'll create significant tech debt but there's no time for that right now. Maybe next quarter. The customer wants desert and the customer should get it.
While I admit this current strategy does not directly lead to a health business, we're aiming for scale right now and scale up is what we're gonna do. Did I mention that "stick things in the outlets" is coming next quarter?
Someone deployed the "public punch in the balls and run off laughing" feature on mine. I can even get rid of it, I was told I needed to keep it longer than 4 years. The "throw trantum when not allowed to eat broken glass" feature is really annoying.
I can't remember the last time I needed a postage stamp, but I have a strong memory of my then 3 year-old proudly showing the book he had decorated with the roll of "stickers" he found!
A lot of times if your unit won't accept vegetables, there may be less space in it than you think. Data moves into the trash slowly, and if there isn't enough storage, it will reject the veggies. Give it an hour and try again.
There is a good workaround for the "eat vegetables" feature that so many desire. Introduce the french style "3 course meals".
Always start with the vegetable course, if the child is hungry, they will eat the vegetibles. Keep other courses out of sight, otherwise it leads to distraction. Then the next course is something filling. This tends to improve performance metrics and overall ability to function. Finally the third course is something they really enjoy eating(desert)
Classic Innovator's Dilemma. The existing older model has mastery of several different features but adding unrelated features to the model is time consuming and expensive. Adding these features to the newer smaller models is much easier. Often times the older units are completely unaware of the capabilities of the newer ones.
Along the same lines, pushing kids to eat everything on their plate can result in serious food/eating disorders, training them to ignore their 'full' feeling.
Wow. I am now confident that SMART TV manufacturers simply want to make our TVs as easy to use as our children. Who can blame them for that? It preps potential future end-user/parents like myself for the advanced UI that is a small child.
Our models have OTA Updates included since delivery. The updates are slow and take 10-12h each day. We processes them during the night so that we can use our models during the day.
Although the updates take very long and happen every night, the improvements are really minor, but at least they’re there. So we’re hoping to have fully functional and independent models after maybe 16 years or so.
The antivirus isn't great, either. This is a critical issue, because the networking process inevitably results in numerous breaches which frequently affect other stakeholder systems. Those networking operations critical to a successful eventual deployment of the small child, but the number of bugs experienced is simply inconceivable to users accustomed to good security hygiene.
The trouble we find is our v2 model, which we had hoped could have made improvements over v1, frequents the same unsavoury places that v1 did initially and continues to be compromised by the same vulnerabilities. It seems later versions are destined to make the same mistakes again. The only comfort though is that you have become accustomed to how to address the bug reports when they are filed.
Fortunately our V2 has also reached the point where we have been able to retire our bug reporting and pager setup as it now has its own implementation of this functionality. Although sometimes the reports are less than ideal, such as this evening what it filed a bug report, very loudly, 30
Min after going to bed that it was wearing the wrong pyjamas and the correct ones being it’s Toy Story pyjamas, which were in the wash…
The maintenance of several products in different lifecycle phases is a huge issue for us. Different failure modes, different protocols for providing feedback, and different basic maintenance needs. For example, v1 requires the users to manage reading homework, the v2 requires bedtime stories, v3 requires diaper changes and milk, all simultaneously. This adds a lot of operational complexity for our already overwhelmed team, since they have to triage several different issue streams and context switch between them.
At least you’re working with versioned releases. I’ve recently acquired a new model and it’s definitely still in beta. There’s no documentation, conflicting user training and undefined behaviours everywhere. As soon as you discover workflows that meet your needs there appears to be a background update that while introducing new features, completely changes the behaviour of previous ones.
Oh and don’t get me started on the sleep mode, it’s more unreliable that a Linux laptop and plays this horrible wake sound with no clear way to disable it. From what I’ve read on support forums this is happening to other users too.
They're really different product lines because each one is a complete rewrite; each has its own patch stream, which, like yours, change wildly without warning, as if the developers are just trying random stuff out. And nothing is ever backported between the products. While our different products have wildly different operational characteristics (and even move into different lifecycle phases at different times), the good news is that our team has gotten better at managing the constant flow of UX inconsistencies and changes.
For example, my advice on sleep mode failures is to use the Erlang method: let it crash. We don't even look at the monitoring dashboards for our newest product anymore.
We were concerned about trying to manage more than two of these products at once and so, as the Assistant to the VP of Reproduction, have made certain permanent operational changes to the equipment to ensure no further acquisitions are possible.
My cofounder and I were doing a recent retrospective on our most recent acquisition, and while we're very proud of the product, we considered that your approach may have been more sound.
Well, if anyone is considering making similar changes to the equipment, in our experience it was very quick to implement with no side effects after about two days.
As someone who's gone through this five times (ok, going through it for the fifth):
My experience has been that once I understood it it became very simple, but learning it was hard since none of the documentation is complete and it often only covers the small child that the author of said document had.
One piece of very practical advice that I picked up from some docs somewhere though:
For some reason adults easily understand that kids needs to learn to eat, learn to walk and learn to speak and later write.
For some reason however many of us think that kids just should know how to sleep.
Most kids however doesn't know how to get a good nights sleep however.
Some general advice in that regard:
- Don't let kids over a year fall asleep with anything they cannot keep during the night (food, parents by their side, music, film etc.) We all wake up about once an hour to see that things are still OK. This is good thing. For small kids this check seems to be mostly that things are exactly as they were when they fell asleep. Not knowing about this mechanism can drive a good hearted parent mad since they'll go to extreme lengths to make sure their kids are happy - including waking up once an hour to help the kid fall asleep again. (Case in point: I did this for months until I realized my kid woke up once an hour because she always fell asleep with a bottle of milk and consequently woke up once an hour the rest of the night to tell us things weren't right until she could have some more milk in her bottle.)
- Some people recommend letting one year olds crying themselves to sleep until they "learn to sleep". I recommend against it. What small kids seems to be afraid of is that parents disappear. Training the kid to realize that parents are there and will check back even if they don't cry seems to help a lot. In other words: if kid cries, pop your head in and say the some very few carefully selected nice words, but more importantly and somewhat counterintuitively if the kid does not cry, have a timer on short intervals and make it boringly predictable to the kid that you will show up even if they don't cry. What I found out was that as soon as my kids realized I would come back with boring precision even if they just played with their toys they stopped shouting or crying: I cannot know what they think but I guess somewhere along the lines of "no need to bother crying if dad shows up in exacly 2 minutes 40 seconds since he was here 20 seconds ago"
Yeah sleep is something that you quickly learn as a parent doesn't come all that naturally. Training my daughter to sleep properly is one of the most valuable things I did. I used the Ferber method which is similar to the method you mentioned. Where you visit them in intervals but the time between intervals increases over time. It took about 3 days but since then she sleeps 10-12 hours every night.
One thing we did early is train our first child that she should not expect us to be in the room when she sleeps. It took a few iterations of (put baby to sleep, leave room, give baby a chance to self-soothe, pop back in for a bit to let her know we're still here) until she no longer cried when we left the room.
We didn't set a timer, but we usually gave her 5-10 minutes to calm down before popping back in.
If there's one thing I've learned though is that every baby is actually different (and it's not just a saying). For example, we've been bottle-feeding the baby right before sleep (nap and evening) every day for two years now, which I understand is against the usual advice of not feeding the baby immediately before putting her to sleep, but we found that she sleeps much better throughout the night and it didn't seem to cause any issues as long as we burped her properly before laying her down in the crib. YMMV though.
Oh wow, this is the first internet baby tip that has actually worked. Our two year old would take 30 minutes of settling every night, with one of us in the room sitting in a chair. Tried this checking in every couple of minutes idea, and within a few days he only took 6 minutes and was relaxed the whole time. Thanks a bunch! Got any tips for when they wake up freaking out in the night?
Maybe even add a bookmark for it, filed under a new tag: bragging_rights ;-)
But please remember I did not come up with this, see sibling comment (pjgalbraith). It seems the method is called the Ferber method although I learned a modified version from what I found when I looked it up[1]: the way I learned it was to increase by two minutes each day, not more, ie first day 1 and then 3 minutes, second day 3 and then 5 minutes etc. I believe this will be even gentler and it has worked wonderfully for both children and adults.
Now to your question:
> Got any tips for when they wake up freaking out in the night?
Two things:
Once kids learn to associate bed with relaxing on their own they can often find their way back to sleep easily but not always.
My rule of thumb has been that if they have been asleep and wake up I walk in immediately as soon as I can so to make sure they aren't worried about being alone. Then it is up to ones judgment as a parent: if it is just old habits, start the countdown timer. If however they are scared (nightmares etc) stay a bit longer or if necessary take the child out of bed and hold them.
This is easier to judge if one arrive quickly because otherwise it is hard to know if they were scared when they woke up or if they became scared after thinking they were alone.
I think this speaks to how when learning a concept, just having it framed in the right way can really help.
I’d heard of the Ferber method before and we tried it a bit to no success. But just hearing the same idea framed as “the parent checking back in regular like a metronome”, rather than “the baby needs to learn to self settle” just clicked in my head.
Thanks for the tips, will keep trying this and see if it sorts out the late night wakes too.
Seems like you already have the most important part settled from the start: you care about the child :-)
And, since you mention it: like a metronome is a good way to think about it. I used to use a digital timer or a phone but anything with fine grained resolution is fine I think, the point seems to be to be predictable.
Also I try to remember to point out that I go back also if the kid doesn't cry.
Some people think if the kid is silent then they are about to fall asleep and we should not wake them.
In my experience if the child feels safe they fall asleep with no problems even if I walk in and out.
On the other hand, if they haven't fallen asleep that will teach them that if they don't cry I won't look after them, at least that is what I think.
As an owner of a fairly new one of these, I sometimes dream of someone coming up with an accessory that converts the audio notifications into light notifications. A small LED would do. I realize different colors for different desires are too much to ask (unless the colors would be picked at random I guess), but I would be more than happy if it just showed intensity of desire via intensity of light.
The Cetacean Translation Initiative is doing a similar thing with whales. That one is scary to me.
I remember hearing that one researcher joked that the worst case scenario is that whales end up being really boring. That's not true. The worst case scenario is that we decode their language and realize that they're all constantly screaming in pain and terror.
Of course, for the Star Trek nerds, the real worst case scenario is that we discover that they have a complex language, they use it to speak to aliens, they have no chance of surviving rising ocean temps, and the aliens are coming back soon!
The NLP in mine seems to be totally broken. It thinks “Stop throwing your food on the floor!” Means “Please, do that on loop.” Also, it supposedly has the advanced AI capabilities, but its driving is way worse than Tesla Autopilot.
“Don’t do X” for young versions have to process the “X” part before the “don’t”, and processing includes going thru that motion - then getting to “don’t”, realizing the mistake, laughing about it, and then attempting to process the phrase again with the same result.
We think that many users of Small Child should actually read the user manual before complaining. You see, Small Child has a very simple logic: it makes tons of mistakes to learn. The new users shouldn't be put off and learn the most important skill needed to use Small Child : patience. Please don't compare Small Child to other devices which usually are tailored for efficiency, return on investment, getting answers, etc. Small Child just require you to spend a lot of time and energy into it (we mean a lot). If you don't think you can commit a huge amount of time and energy into it, please don't choose Small Child; keep buying distracting toys instead. However, if you use Small Child and follow its upgrade plan for at least 12 years, we can guarantee you a level of pride and happiness you will never find in other systems, ever.
You told the developers they had to deliver on time and they did - maybe even earlier than the original estimate. This is what you get with death march product development.
And then you have the nerve to complain when the developers try to unionize? You should be lucky that they tolerate your crap - you need them more than they need you.
This small child has a better UX than many things I have been forced to implement. At least as it iterates, improvements occur that make the UX better and provide a more pleasant experience.
Humans get upgrades for free. With Dogs, you apply the patches yourself.*
Cats? Fuck that, those assholes want or don't need you.
* Results not guaranteed, past performance is no indication of future results. Please read the instruction manual for all possible upgrade scenarios.**
** You believed that shit? Actually, we lied, there are no instructions and everyone is just improvising all the time!
(Evil laughter)
I'll just be over here in a corner trying not to cry...
"At least as it iterates, improvements occur that make the UX better and provide a more pleasant experience."
Certainly more interesting features get activated. But at least with my model, the error reporting got a lot more complicated and the input acceptance rate dropped considerably around the time the product turned 15 years old.
I believe this technique is called fuzzing - Adversarial QA testing to make sure the prior sysadmins weren't total morons and left the system in an unusable state before deploying it to production.
As you say, the reporting is inscrutable, so I'd guess there are still a few bugs to be worked out.
These units ship with nothing but a BIOS, and that's basically the only programming on-board for the first few months. No functionality except boot, sleep (no scheduler included), system bell (massively over-used), charge power, and flush buffer (far too frequently). You have to wait over a year just to get basic resource management and decent device drivers. I don't know how you can even call it UX before around the two-year mark, as there's no meaningful I/O, and no functionality that delivers any real value, until then.
The whole "child" thing is great for DIY enthusiasts, but totally impractical for the rest of us.
Honestly, I'm loving this process because you discover so many situations where the answer is "Why not? Uhhh shit, I don't know, actually. You're right, this is stupid. Why does everyone do it this way?"
Mine is 2, so most of the situations so far are just about English rules. (Though every language has stupid inconsistencies)
But there are many things like this in the world. I'm looking forward/dreading trying to balance "OK, from first principles, you're right. But in order to exist in society, you need to do something differently. It's important to recognize when you need to try to fit in. And also important to recognize when it's worth breaking those rules. And even if you choose not to break them, you should be aware of the underlying purpose or lack thereof"
I think it's an impossible task. My kid is going to hate it. I'll do my best.
> The things children are born not knowing is crazy. The pre-programming is limited!
The one that blew my mind was, when you're out in the yard, playing with the running hose, and you decide to come inside for something, don't bring the running hose with you! Turns out kids don't automatically know that.
>The things children are born not knowing is crazy. The pre-programming is limited!
You purchased the DIY version. With this version, you are expected to continuously update the programming. Most people seem to focus on higher level programming using a language of "ivy league".
Right, people may focus on "ivy league" as it is the "it" option, but most people have to settle for "state college" which is much more widely available. however, subscription fees for this option have steadily been increasing as well.
Either way, you are expected to keep the programming updated at your expense. Without it, your Small Child unit might fall behind other versions and become a negative influence on other Small Child units.
> Either way, you are expected to keep the programming updated at your expense. Without it, your Small Child unit might fall behind other versions and become a negative influence on other Small Child units.
This is blatant Programming as a Service propaganda. Keeping your Small Child unit updated is possible using the GNU/Homeschooling suite, even if self-hosted operation does take more effort compared to managed offerings.
Is there any reason beyond social standards that you shouldn't you eat your boogers, or pick your nose? And of course children wouldn't be pre-programmed for social standards, because you don't know what region they are going to be provisioned in.
Rhinotillexis and mucophagy may help expose the immune system to weakened versions of pathogens. Depending on how well you clean your hands before and after, however, it may introduce new things into the nose, or introduce things in your nose to the people you shake hands with. There is also a minor risk of injury, mostly nosebleed.
Just wanted to say that this sort of interaction is important. I'm glad people question what they're taught and I'm glad that you have responded with a reasonable answer that explains the why behind this social norm. I think the reasoning behind social norms are really important to understand. Not only because they might help reinforce a positive behavior, but we might also come up with a better solution when we discuss it.
Its possible that nose picking and similar behaviors by kids are important for helping build the immune system.
Picking your nose is introducing pathogens from the part of your body that encounters the most germs, straight into the part of your body that has no barriers or stomach acid to repel them. I think if early humans had lived in large enough societies to have a lot of transmissible disease, we would have evolved an instinct against touching your eyes or nose by now.
I guess the main reason is that picking nose leaves the finger covered with mucus, and the risk is that the mucus could be spread around - potentially passing on germs.
I suppose if people used hand sanitizer after every nose picking, then maybe it be less of a problem?
If (say) you're starving to death in Donner Pass, then go ahead. Similar for drinking your urine - if at sea in lifeboat and dying for lack of non-salty water. Otherwise, violations of "eww, ick" social standards tend to be punished harshly.
It seemed really weird for a few years, when conspicuously talking to yourself went from being a "this person has a serious mental illness" indicator, to being a "this person has a cell phone" indicator.
Every time we try and call the function, it either throws an ERR::ScreamingFit or just flat out crashes. Something about "illogical fear has occurred" and then you have to wait 30 minutes to tray again
I've had some kind of undefined issue for about 5 years now (long before covid) where I will go to sleep breathing fine through both nose and mouth as appropriate, sleep with zero problems and no snoring recorded by noise monitors, then wake up with a sudden onslaught of mucus which seems to generate itself (upon consciousness) throughout the upper respiratory tract and rapidly. Various sleeping positions seem irrelevant to results.
I wake up breathing freely, regardless of position. If I stay still, I can get about an hour max of no concern breathing/existence. After that time, or if I sit up, I have between 3 and 15 minutes before mucus seems to accumulate in my nose, lungs, and throat simultaneously. It starts as a mild cough to clear the airway, which I always think will be the end of it because it's a "clearing" or "productive" cough with a little spittle and/or grating feeling. Then, about 3 seconds later, some kind of loop triggers, and I cough dryly and unproductively until it's time to inhale. This repeats sort of randomly for several rounds, never really obstructing breathing and producing no obvious mucus; after a cough, I can inhale and exhale freely through my nose and mouth both, and nothing stops a full inhale/exhale cycle.
After 3-6 of those cycles, mucus magically appears everywhere; the mouth I hale and exhale becomes ragged and wheezing, the nose inhale becomes nearly impossible, and the coughs produce globs of white mucus that must be spit out or swallowed.
Sometimes it all disappears after a few rounds of this, but that's maybe 1/50 chance. If this cycle goes on for more than 5 rounds, the esophagus starts chiming in saying hey maybe I can help, and the rest of it jumps in too. Now every cough becomes a prelude to a gag, which may or may not become more. If the gag causes any output in the form of vomit, it (the vomit) is strangely not acidic like bile, nor does it contain any fragments or traces of recently consumed food/liquid. The vomit is purely aerated mucus, and causes zero pain while going the wrong way through my system. This goes on until the mucus is all gone and I breathe fine in all ways for the rest of the day, with maybe a brief encore 12 hours or so later, but inconsistently. I have no idea what this is and neither do doctors I've seen.
I am 100% sure this is the wrong place to document this and irrelevant to the rest, but it struck my mind while reading this comment as a thing to write down fully for the first time, and I trust instinct in this regard. Maybe someone needed to hear/read it, or maybe I just needed to get it out properly, who knows!
Purely anecdotal obviously, but I've had somewhat similar issues in the past and ended up figuring out that they were related to reflux/LPR. If you haven't already looked into that possibility it might be worth reading up on it.
My issues have been resolved by controlling reflux and they rear their heads again when I allow the reflux to return for more than a very brief amount of time (ie. I stop paying attention to the food and drink I consume and my intake of <things that trigger my reflux> becomes too high for a sustained amount of time)
No one expects getting old how you can just wake up to a new, weird, worse life on any given day, and not switch back.
I have nothing like that, but for me personally all mucus-related stuff (sneezing, gummy eyes, frog in throat) is are controlled by drinking water. Can serve both as preventative and cure, but it gets the mucus membranes working normally again.
I remember being a parent helper at a school trip. Now at my paid employment, 99% successful completion rate would be bonus time, but coming back with only 99% of the children who started the trip was considered a failure - clearly the education system has something to learn from modern management practise !
My 2018 model won't enter sleep mode, even after pairing for hours. On the other hand, my 2009 model isn't able to exit sleep mode without manual override.
Makes me glad I decided never to install this system in my life and continuing to execute in single user mode. I sometimes init to multi-user mode providing the occasional access for mature, if idiosyncratic, friendly processes that are no longer maintained well but properly reviewed for defects. That said I did allow these wee furry apps to side load that apparently have something called "murder mode". But as long as keep them well fed they seem to sleep quite a lot.
We got this book from my colleagues for the birth of our first child. Surprisingly it's quite good. I expected it to be a cringeworthy collection of nerd jokes but it's full of reasonable advice.
People on HN like to complain about it becoming impossible to replace even the simplest parts on Apple products yourself. Try replacing pretty much any part on the Small Child units! It's a total nightmare! It can drive you into bankruptcy and still the Small Child might take weeks or even months to regain full functionality!
It’s worse when you discover someone who sincerely behaves this way. I once spent two horrifying hours learning about the emotional journey of cat food from a young Purina brand manager.
This piece is funny but points to something important. Being human and caring for other humans is not intuitive. When we demand and receive products that are intuitive and comforting, we may, unbeknownst to ourselves, begin to assume that caring for ourselves and others should be intuitive too, creating painful demands on others and ourselves. We must develop something else — a reminder that life is complicated and confusing, but that we have the strength, and more importantly, the compassion to meet it and listen to it, we’ll probably be alright. It’s when we don’t want to listen and be compassionate and strong because we feel we shouldn’t have to be is when all seems to go wrong.
Containerization is actually a valid strategy to help induce the sleep states necessary for both parent and child process functionality, especially since prolonged operations outside the containerized environment may result in the parent process(es) not passing even the simplest sanity testing.
It’s not just UX. The engineering architecture is terrible too. No separation of concerns, no built-in logging, no test environment before running in production, and no access to the source code either. It’s the worst you can imagine of a legacy system and to top it all off I’m pretty sure the original developers threw in random number generators into the logic just for kicks.
My primary complaint is that the machine learning model not only took forever to train, has too many hyperparameters, but also has too many fail cases.
It also comes with almost no defaults. Self preservation algo is non existent from the beginning.
That said, OTA upgrade is the best I have ever seen in any systems. From speak nothing to tornado of words in just 1-2 nights.
I have two fairly recent models (2016 & 2019) and while I'm generally very satisfied I can't escape the feeling that new models are less of an upgrade and more a random combination of features (and bugs!) from the last gen models already in our household.
McSweeney’s is one of those rare gems that's been going forever and is still great. I started my first site in 99 and still remember taking some inspiration from McSweeney’s. Though I wanted to be Slashdot mostly.
It sounds like these problems would be easier to address if the project maintainer adopted a CI/CD workflow. Just make sure that if it’s a public repo to setup proper access control.
The CI/CD workflow exists. It just takes hundred of thousands of years to build and be released into production. And every once in a while, the whole system is given a factory reset.
Very nice description of the v1, which is obviously flawed. We are in a similar position where the v2 is currently entering in the final stage of assembly (hopefully this one will arrive at the ETA and not before), and my partner and I are trying hard to put together the last specs in place so there won't be much friction during v2 production integration.
Will assess a first post-launch retrospective meeting 30 days after the release, with the hope the patch list length will remain short.
This makes me wonder about the opposite--taking cues from humans' instinctual child-rearing behavior in product design. Not being a parent though that thought started and ended with using infant crying sounds for emergency notifications, which would probably just disturb most people. Does anyone with experience have ideas?
Crying infant has a quite specific frequency range that makes my wife jump immediately. Our cat has figured out that meowing at that frequency is very effective.
So you may be on to something for high priority / safety alerts...
The teachers would speak mostly in Mandarin. My son came out of Spanish immersion preschool speaking pretty close to native level Spanish (despite neither my wife nor I speaking it).
Congrats! I tried to teach my kids Russian (my wife doesn't speak the language). My big daughter used to understand Russian, but didn't speak it; Later, our second daughter did have some slight delay with language acquisition, so that I stopped trying.
I am not sure that your son will keep the language, once he is out of the preschool. A second language is a very fragile posession, as far as i know...
Keeping a second language is certainly hard; I lost my parents' native language when I was a kid and still regret it.
Since my son left the preschool, he's been doing online virtual lessons with a lovely woman we found in Guatemala to keep it up, and fortunately his new school has a heavy emphasis on foreign languages. They have different Spanish classes depending on the child's ability, and they put my my son in with the kids who are native speakers at home. Our only problem is that the teacher sends communications to (presumed Spanish speaking) parents in Spanish, which my wife and I have to Google Translate!
Perhaps a riff on French immersion schools like we have in British Columbia which are supposed to impart a higher level of education due to their much-vaunted academic standards.
Try working on interview prep/Leetcode bullshit problems, reading through dense textbooks on subjects you know nothing about, and doing side projects with a child or a puppy. Your ability to focus on things deeply for extended periods of time disappears almost entirely.
Are you speaking from experience? If so, do you feel on balance that having a child was positive in your life despite the inability to focus on deep tasks? Does this get better with age?
Has anyone else had the problem where the first generation Small Child seems to be able to break out of its container and access root privileges directly?
My cofounder and I tried to implement some firewall rules, but our Small Child seems to bypass them with little effort.
Maybe McSweeneys should do a series of these, next up: who was the idiot on the engineering team who decided to put a recreational center and sewage treatment plant right next door to each other?!?
Just wait till you get service pack "Teenager" installed - all references and knowledge that you have painstakingly accumulated over the years are now null and void.
Thank you for your thoughtful feedback. We understand you're experiencing some growing pains on-boarding the product, but are confident you will soon come to love and appreciate the unique quirks your Small Child.
I've shared your concerns with our engineers and they've made a few suggestions I'd like to pass along:
1) Have you read the documentation? It sounds like you've reversed the direction of the Storytelling port.
2) High-pitched scream notifications are locked in the stock ROM. They prevent you and your Small Child from remaining in Sleep Mode beyond the rated limits. Per your request I've submitted a priority ticket to adjust those limits, and we expect to push an update in roughly 13 years time to default your Small Child to Silent Mode and implement extended Sleep capabilities.
3) Your Small Child's visual design was inherited from the fusion of two disparate legacy platforms, both with outdated graphics. Although the resultant "look and feel" is a bit clunky, perhaps even unseemly in places, rest assured our highly acclaimed design team is hard at work on a complete UI overhaul. Our roadmap follows the industry-leading Tik-Tok model, and just like your favorite OS, periodic cosmetic refreshes will decorate the canvas with more diverse visual elements including tailored themes, customized styles and individualized artwork rendered in perpetuity on ink-enabled skins.
You mentioned "less is more". You might consider the Young Adult upgrade pack which includes a more minimalistic, uncluttered theme. It's still in beta, however, and some users have reported unwanted activation and missing overlays when their unit is left in proximity with other similarly upgraded models.
4) The UI-string translation mistakes you encountered are a result of outsourcing to a third party. We cannot warranty development that did not take place in-house.
4) To meet your aggressive delivery deadlines we shipped a Minimal Viable Product. We appreciate you relaying the roadbumps you encountered during your user journey. You can expect improvements over time as we tweak the internal systems and fill in missing features. In particular, we're investigating the inconsistent poop latency you reported and believe it's the result of a race condition. An interim patch comprising a disposable posterior accessory is available in the meantime to users on a subscription plan.
5) Some of the bug reports you've filed have been closed and marked as "Could not reproduce", in spite of repeated efforts by our overworked and exhausted QA team. But don't fret - our latest platform collects enhanced user telemetry and will automatically broadcast it to servers hosted by a third-party when you and your other stakeholder commence the v2.0 initiative later this year.
