Note that those are deepseek, not chatgpt. I’ve largely given up on chatgpt a long time ago as it has severe limitations on what you can ask it without fighting its filters. You can make it go on hallucinated rants just as easily - I just nowadays do that on locally hostable models.

I’ve massively reduced my time spent with youtube over the last year or so when I noticed that the overall experience was just getting worse and worse.

Previously I’d watch a video, and from there jump to another interesting video, and so on - now pretty much all the top level suggestions are useless already, and it’s rare that after watching a video you get something worth watching recommended.

I assume it’s not just youtubes fault - while I do think youtube is pushing those videos even from people I used to like I now see more videos where they go on for 20 minutes about something that should’ve been said in 3 minutes max.

I now almost exclusively use youtube to watch videos from people I’ve subscribed years ago, and as they either become annoying to go with youtubes algorithm, or eventually stop/slow uploading my usage goes down. Nowadays I often enough don’t open youtube for two weeks, while previously there rarely was a day without checking at least a few videos.

A week ago, my mom figured out how to get through my bedroom door lock: using a screwdriver.

That doesn’t help you, but: My kids were 4 when they figured that out - by themselves.

Assuming you’re old enough that your mom doesn’t have to worry about you cutting your hair with the paper scissors or something like that this behaviour doesn’t sound normal - and while it might be useful in the short term to be able to properly close your door it’ll most likely just shift conflict in the longer term, and you’ll have to look into actually resolving that. We have a saying in IT - ‘you can’t solve social problems with technical solutions’. This might apply here.

I’m currently bringing her to that specific hobby as it’s a bit further away than the area she’s usually roaming around in, and she needs to cross one major road (connection to the highway) to get there - but I guess in a year or two she’ll be able to do that by herself.

She sometimes gets brought to school in the morning as it’s the same building her brother is in for daycare - but if she starts at a different time than him she can get there by herself, and of course she comes back by herself when it finishes. She’s also not required to take the direct way home - or could even decide to go home with friends, as long as she calls us if she’s coming unexpectedly late.

I assume that was meant as comment reply? :)

I think in many European countries bicycling is at least a common way for the kids to get around - at least it was like that in Germany, where I’m originally from. There are huge differences in the available infrastructure (which also impacts how many adults stick to cycling) - but also was fine in Germany just by bike.

Infrastructure in Finland is a lot better, though, and cycling in winter also not a problem.

No, living in Finland.

and could barely speak a few basic sentences after 5 years of schooling

Thanks to events earlier last century pretty much everybody at least in Europe/Russia can speak a few basic sentences, and is often more than willing to demonstrate: “Haende hoch!” (hands up), “Nicht schiessen!” (don’t shoot) and a few others.

Are you in one of those north American developments with long straight multiline roads without proper sidewalks?

If so, something like this doesn’t exist here at all. The smaller roads are not really suitable for high speed driving, and there’s not much traffic. The main roads all have wide foot and bike paths on both sides next to them - so only thing you need to know is how to safely cross a road.

In addition to that there are lot of small pedestrian/cycle only paths as shortcuts between parts of the city.

Currently in Finland - single family home in a town with 46k people. Originally from a 2k village in Germany.

We have two daycares, a school and a grocery store 1km from home - here that kind of stuff is integrated in the neighbourhoods where people live. Many elementary schools, some just grades 1 and 2 - by grade 3 they can already easily travel the longer distance to another school by themselves.

In Germany it’s also mandatory - but learning the language at school unfortunately doesn’t necessarily mean you can speak it. LucasArts adventures contributed more to my language skills than my first English teacher. I’m always shocked about the lack of English skills in a lot of Germans when I’m back visiting. Rather surprisingly one of my uncles born in the 30s spoke pretty good English, though.

We’re now living in Finland - me German, wife Russian, we each speak to the kids in our native language, between each other English. So they’re growing up with 4 languages.

It’s quite interesting to watch them grow up in that situation. When learning about a new historical figure my daughter always asks which languages they spoke - and few weeks ago she was surprised someone only spoke two languages. So I explained that some people only speak one language - she gave me a very weird look, and it took a while to convince her that I’m not just making a bad joke.

As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old)

I’m now 41, never made a license - there wasn’t really much of a need until now. I can get anywhere I want with a combination of bicycle and public transport.

Physical education is usually a mandatory part of US schools through high school

In Germany the same - but swimming classes are mandated by law from grade 3 onwards, though we started going from grade 1 back then.

How big distances / population are we talking here?

I was growing up in a small village, so in elementary school we went by bus to a nearby village with 7000 inhabitants and a swimming pool.

Now we’re living in a town with a population of 46000 with its own swimming pool.

In Germany a lot of people reduced the amount of cycling they did once they had a driving license - now here in Finland a lot more adults keep using bikes, and also use it in Winter. Back in Germany I always was the odd one for cycling in the snow.

Starting a camp fire is something I’m teaching my kids just because I don’t want them to burn my house down - being allowed to play with fire outside along with an explanation of which are the dangerous bits took the fascination out of all the fire starting equipment in the house.

That leads to a follow up question to people from different areas: Is swimming a regular part of school sports?

I grew up in Germany with pretty much no lakes, and we had blocks of sports classes in the swimming pool from first grade - didn’t make me a great swimmer, but I can go swim a bit in a lake without having to worry.

Now we’re in Finland (lots of lakes here), and also swimming classes take place from first grade.

Not really much. Now if my wife would get the dump the story might be a bit different.

Github is pretty annoying nowadays - and pretty much the only reason I haven’t left for my own stuff is because going to a different platform will probably see me in the same situation in a few years again.

I still have my self hosted git instances around, and everything is pushed to there plus github - but github is where issues get created and pull requests come in as obviously nobody wants to make yet another account. That might be able to solve just that.

Mine are handling oit perfectly fine - and we have the added difficulty of having German as mother tongue, and wanting to keep the English language content in the kids library low. Finding german language torrents is rather tricky.

Both. Some work chats also are still IRC, but unfortunately less than they used to.

I also bridge whatever is possible into IRC via bitlbee. Unfortunately not that useful anymore, but looks like there’s now an active project to bridge matrix again, which probably can take over.

My irssi configuration is exactly how I want it for about two decades now. Why change something good?