Same thing for stuff at work. Oh, the tables/schema changed and my queries broke? I could dork around with spark and cypher for an hour, or I can tell claude to update the queries for the new schema. At the rate I am paid, spending on Claude tokens is generally a better use of my resources.

Building a net new solution? Coding tools take a back seat until I get the core logic right, then I let automation handle web page and UI scaffolding.

The US likes to flex it's muscle by pushing other governments around on behalf of its commercial interests.

I think it's well past time for Canada to either formally pursue toes with the EU or pursue alignment with EU consumer protection legislation.

Middle powers unite!

I would be interested to see a formal study of this. I say this not out of anything other than a observation that I think the only real blockers are a) judgement, and b) physical reflexes/strength. As a kid I was certainly aware of ice,snow, and rain, because I road my bike year round and had low confidence in my own ability to control my bike on snowy or wet terrain, especially during season changes. That translated into learning to drive in northern Canada in the winter and applying those lessons to driving.

In an environment devoid of consequences, I have seen kids operate driving simulations (both real simulations, and video games) with a degree of precision that is shocking, including seeing several 9-11 year olds play the simulations and games with a much higher degree of confidence than adult drivers. Children have an awareness that the simulations are consequence free, unless given other motivation. Adults that are consistent drivers have muscle memory and preconceived expectations that govern the decisions they make when playing the game. I am curious about the level of training and exposure required for children to overcome their lack of awareness of the hard limits and consequences of driving and driver error, versus the amount of training and exposure required for expert drivers that are novice gamers to stop applying their learned experience to consequence free simulations.

I spend all day working on AI related stuff at my day job, but more recently I have been getting lots of questions about AI from friends and family and that ramped up when the Vancouver school board announced they were rolling out Copilot across high schools.

I put together the guide, made a few iterations and published it and now I am getting more questions than ever and it's turned into a blog too.

I'm having fun but it definitely feels like a topic that is underserved. A solid example, lots of resources for when your kid is the victim of a deepfake, but what if you as a parent know your kid is getting into trouble and escalating. Where do you go for help to make sure they don't escalate from unfriendly behavior to abusive or even criminal.

It's a big challenge!

In the meantime, I spend several hours a week talking to parents, teens, and educators who are looking for meaningful guidance on this topic that goes beyond "AI BAD!" and protest, which prompted me to create this resource. Not to mention the requests to help with cyber bullying, online safety and other parenting issues related to connected children over the last 20 years.

In much the same way that folks can push to ban social media, alcohol, sex, drugs, and other vices for children, abstinence and blocking is a path to failure if parents aren't educated.

Over the last couple of years I've found myself having more conversations with parents who know AI is going to affect their children's future, but aren't sure where to start learning about it. Most of the material I found was either highly technical, heavily promotional, or focused almost entirely on worst-case scenarios.

I started putting together a guide for friends and family, and it gradually evolved into a larger project.

The guide focuses on practical questions such as:

How AI is already affecting education What parents should understand about privacy and safety The difference between using AI to learn and using AI to avoid learning Skills that may become more important in an AI-enabled future Ways families can talk about AI together

The intended audience is parents who may not have a technical background but want to better understand the technology their children are encountering.

The guide is free to read and download. I'd be interested in feedback from HN readers, particularly parents, educators, and people working in AI.

I'd also be interested to hear whether others are seeing schools, districts, or governments developing guidance around AI literacy for parents.

A note about content: I am not a designer, so while I researched and wrote the content myself, and collected feedback from parents, educators, and students, I did use AI tools to assist with document and web layout, and to edit and review the document for elements like inclusive language.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487084

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

I am not going to do the work of gathering the evidence for you, and I don't think this is the right venue for a debate on the topic.

ZeroSSL from Austria also has a limited free tier. https://zerossl.com/pricing/

I mean really, if you use lets encrypt for anything that runs in a production environment, the responsible thing to do is build a fallback to switch to another provider in case LE has a bad day (or hits a brick wall and needs to say, enforce export restrictions).

As a consumer I can choose to buy subscriptions to a range of things, including $5 droplets or VMs on a broad range of cloud hosting providers. I can even buy cheap bare metal at a bunch of providers at an affordable retail rate.

I can also buy "unlimited" AI packages that will be optimized to fit the cost model from a variety of services, with different impacts, such as rolling outages when I consume a daily or hourly allotment.

Right now VC and the investor class are subsidizing the rapid evolution of the services and availability, but that VC is running out. In more traditional economies, AI would have developed and rolled out more slowly, and through metered subscriptions, with the eventual rolling out of "unlimited" packages like telephone, internet, or cell services once the market became commoditized.

We have seen a big inversion of that with the race to "win" AI marketshare. Now the true cost is being exposed, and the most competitive and capable models are hideously expensive to operate, so it makes sense that we are moving to metered billing for a utility service. If you want gas, you can buy regular or premium. If you have a premium car you definitely want the premium, but for most people regular is good.

Give it a couple of years, and the survivors will settle around fairly industry standard models of consumer grade services, pro-sumer accounts, and business/enterprise models.

Things are still shaking out, but I get the sadness. Luckily I work at a big tech company who is banging the drum on doing experimentation so I use my prosumer claude pro and other accounts at home for hobby stuff, and save my heavy lifting and potentially experimentation for work :P

The fact that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism is not material to whether or not ethical existence is possible under communism or socialism. In order to survive in a capitalist society, one inherently has to make choices that require trade-offs, and those trade-offs are burdened by a history of decisions made not just by the people alive today, but our ancestors as well. Does that mean I walk around chanting "Reparations", "Land-back", or other calls to action? No, but I do acknowledge that there are unresolved issues and as a Canadian, I know we need to do more to resolve treaty issues, and environmental issues, and system discrimination. I also know that Americans need to do better to address systemic discrimination and many, many other issues. It also doesn't mean I want to give back my house, or give away all of my possessions. It just means I try to make good choices and support businesses and people that are open about the trade-offs they make and try to engage as ethically as possible.

Acknowledging those facts doesn't absolve us of responsibility, it's a framework that allows folks concerned about whether or not they are doing the right thing to accept the trade-offs that they choose to make and be responsible and accountable for those choices to themselves or their communities.

We live in a world with scarce resources. It's possible that with a foundational redesign of the global economy, and the requisite authoritarian government that would be required to force such a redesign, we could eliminate food scarcity, solve energy scarcity, and make sure that everyone has a place to live. Those trade-offs are probably not worth the ethical cost in political and physical violence required to accomplish it. We have seen the trade-offs that happen when the powerful are able to exploit communist or socialist governments. We are seeing the "late stage capitalism" impacts of allowing the powerful to exploit capitalism in democratic societies. Acknowledging that the current capitalist system has lead to the greatest prosperity for the upper echelon (financially) of humanity, and a dramatic reduction in global poverty shouldn't obscure the reality that much of that wealth comes from exploitation of people and the environment.

It's a huge problem to unwind, and we can't let the burden of every choice that we make stop us from trying to do better, but we (as in society in general) can't do better if we don't at least acknowledge the compromises we are making along the way, and try to plan to fix it in the future.

Probably a topic better suited to beer and a pub setting than HN though :P

The AI landscape is changing rapidly, and with Apple announcing the option to change the AI backend, and potential requirements enable AI choices as well, similar to EU browser choice requirements (this is more reading tea leaves than any actual requirements I am aware of). The new OS changes coming to support Googlebook, and deep Copilot/AI integration into Windows will make maintaining user facing subscriptions essential for independent model developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistal to remain relevant longer term.

If the don't maintain that relevance there is increasing likelihood that they will get consumed by other companies whether it's Apple, Microsoft or Google to form a foundation for their OS, or other cloud providers.

Anthropic needs to be at least somewhat in the good graces of a capricious administration that is already under pressure from businesses and citizens to regulate AI companies across multiple different domains, whether it's energy consumption, job displacement, military and defense applications, surveillance, etc.

If Anthropic wants to survive, they need to acquire influence with the government that most impacts them as an American company, and a massive exporter of services in the AI space to other countries, otherwise they could get locked down and locked out of the market for national security reasons.

It sucks, but sometimes the survival choice is to make an ethical compromise in hopes that you can still be around to make better decisions later.

I learned to debug and built comprehension by typing it in, and built it as a practice. Later in life and career I learned the value of transcription rather than copying and pasting because it at the very least forced me to read and write what I was copying, and built the base and familiarity I needed to learn from what I was copying.

That extends to how I use AI today. I use AI tooling to explore the concept of what I am building, use spec based designs to build solid outlines, and scope individual coding sessions, so that even when I use AI to build it, I have read, edited, and managed the design, and when I run into parts that I don't consider boilerplate I treat it the same way, transcribe what was attempted to understand why it was failing, and make sure I understand what the AI is doing that I haven't done before.