as an addition or complement to it.

Our public school district offers a hybrid home school program for this. You can do core subjects at home, and then the kids attend a branch campus for classroom-based electives like music or robotics. It’s really sweet.

Our kids have done a mix of public, private, and home school depending on where we have lived and their individual needs. We are fortunate to have this level of flexibility.

Most challenging: It’s just a ton of work. Doing it well is a full-time job, which is of course why the world has professional teachers.

Most rewarding: Watching the kids really get into certain topics. There is a level of flexibility you can’t get in a large group, and your kid can move at their own speed. So if they decide they’re super into some topic they can quickly finish the other required work for the day and then have time to dive deeper into their topic of interest. I came home yesterday to find that my preteens spent the afternoon composing original music for percussion ensembles, and it’s actually good.

Middle picture brought back memories of Internet days of yore.

Fun fact: The disease is named for Lyme, Connecticut, USA. That’s where it was first identified as a unique condition.

It’s common enough in the northeast and north-central US that my public schools taught everyone basic prevention and symptoms as part of the regular curriculum.

And I say heeeyyy-yey-yey-yey-yey!

The bike lane:

US Constitution Article 1 Section 9 Clause 8, “Titles of Nobility and Foreign Emoluments”:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

It’s literally unconstitutional. In the past, foreign gifts to presidents were typically turned over to the National Archives to avoid breaking the law. If Congress was a functional governing body they would rake him over the coals for this, among the hundred other laws Trump has casually flaunted.

Product R&D engineer here. I have a product manager who only knows how to give one piece of feedback: make it smaller and slimmer. What requirement is driving this? Can’t say. What user need are we trying to address? No idea. But smaller=better for some reason.

Nothing ever just works. You must make it work, and keep it working. If you aren’t making it work yourself, then someone else is doing that for you.

I always assumed the translators were simply doing a heroic job. Getting puns and wordplay to work across languages is hard. I would not be surprised if some jokes had to be significantly changed for different languages or countries.

Thanks! This has become a January tradition with my kids. We are trying a different winter camp location in 2026, and I really hope there will be enough snow to do this again!

Pile the snow into a big mound, pack it down, then hollow out the middle. Camping overnight is optional.

1: @Skavau@piefed.social is right.

2, 7, 8: What’s the goal here? Is Reddit the gold standard we’re aiming for? I’m not convinced Lemmy needs millions of daily active users to keep a plethora of niche communities active, and to store a massive backlog for posterity. It’s fine if Lemmy is smaller and narrower in scope.

3: Reddit has duplicate/overlapping communities, too. I’m not sure how to avoid this without either (a) top-down control of community creation by admins, or (b) constant pruning of communities by admins. Neither are desirable, IMO.

4, 5, somewhat 7: Adjust expectations to reality, and appreciate what we have. Lemmy isn’t Reddit 2.0 and it never will be. There isn’t big venture capital money sloshing around. But Lemmy has come along way without it. Hundreds of instances hum along reliably, day-in and day-out. There are surprisingly good browser UI’s (look at Photon/Tesseract/Alexandrite) mobile apps. Not bad for an open-source project that runs on volunteer time and user donations!

6: The complaint about moderation tools is legit. I really want a better reports queue, among other things. But I don’t have the time and energy to contribute code, so I wait patiently.

Maybe related to the Sunshine Act? The intent of the law is to prevent companies from bribing doctors to use their products or drugs. I have seen companies extend it to other employees to be extra cautious.

They are all in medical or medical-adjacent careers: nursing, radiology, pharmaceutical R&D, medical device R&D, etc. These fields seem to attract empathetic people who want to do good.

I have many times, and I agree that travel is a good thing. But don’t be so quick to scoff at Americans who don’t travel overseas. Traveling is expensive. The flight alone from my house to Frankfurt or Tokyo (for example) is at least $1,500 per person, and a day of travel each way. That’s out of reach for a lot of people. Hell, it’s out of reach for me now that I have a family to bring with me. The most basic, banal holiday overseas would easily exceed $10,000. Nevermind the luxury of being able to spend enough time there to understand local takes on geopolitics.

Between the ticket prices and the, ah, challenging political climate in the US, I am really curious what game attendance will be.

Stats are valid when they are used in the proper context and are not being misrepresented. For example, Black and Native American people account for a disproportionate number of drowning deaths in the US. But it would be irresponsible to simply conclude that those groups are inherently bad swimmers. Just like the way the 13/50 trope is irresponsibly used to imply non-whites are inherently more prone to criminal behavior.

All that aside, this meme isn’t attacking men. It’s attacking sexist tropes used against women.

Quoting crime statistics based on race, like the old “13/50” trope, is often used to enforce racist notions that minority groups are inherently bad people. It’s punching down at marginalized people.

This meme, at least as I see it, is the opposite. It’s satirizing the usual crap from the anti-feminist crowd claiming that women are inherently inferior. It’s punching up at sexist men.

You might get some downvotes for mentioning that book. The author makes a few sloppy assumptions, and the anthropology/sociology/history communities love to hate him for it. His overall thesis is still generally good though, IIRC.

One thing I don’t think is in Diamond’s book: once Europe had realized they could sail far and wide to get things, the Dutch invented the idea of a stock market to fund voyages (the British took this idea and really ran with it). This system made long, risky trips easier to finance. Instead of a single monarch funding a single expedition, many people could pool their money to fund many expeditions.

I agree that none of this means Europeans have some special intelligence or attitude. Any other civilization that developed in similar conditions could have followed the same path.