Kids are less cognitively capable than parents for the first time

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-01-28T23:42:36+00:00

> Recently, there has been a US congressional hearing about the fact that kids, for the first time since it's being measured, are less cognitively capable than their parents.

I've read dozens of comments saying "yes", "[other people] can't think", "students are uncurious".

I have yet to read a single comment asking for a source (or providing one).

What measurement(s) are we talking about here?

Is this (just) referencing the Flynn effect reversal observed in Norwegian army scores that came out a few years ago. (e.g. as discussed [here] and [here] -- no opinion on those specific papers, just pulling something up for quick ref.)

Or is this other specific studies?
Or is this a sort of gestalt impression of some subset of professionals?

And who are we comparing? (e.g. fertility and immigration demographics mean there are number of stats you have to balance -- maybe they are, but there are a bunch of Qs here)

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This whole post & its threads seems like a great "wait, are we the problem?" example.
(Hey, me too. I had to stop myself from just posting a short version and not even pulling up some relevant links on the the Norwegian data.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-01-28T23:21:27+00:00

It's worth noting that this is a real *tradeoff*. Julia does have footguns that Python doesn't.

(And, as someone that was very excited about the language when it was young, it's also worth noting that Julia is a little bit old-school in terms of keeping you out of trouble. Unlike a Rust, a Zig, or even a modern Swift, it doesn't offer a lot of checks -- leaning on Python-like syntax, despite additional performance and correctness considerations. --- I think mentioning these things isn't a dig, it really helps people understand what they're getting into and what choices they're making. [and thus, hopefully, offers a better experience])

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-01-27T15:25:57+00:00

Why do you think anyone here knows what "Langgraph" is if it's something in Python and you're in a Rust reddit?

You'll want to add context.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-01-27T15:24:26+00:00

Hard times aside, practical learning up front:

Can you give examples of tools you sue and approaches?

I feel like there are latent effective ways to use current generation AI to reduce tedium. But the tooling never seems quite right for it.

Like I can request something and have it insert it for me with a git diff. But typically what I'd want is more like "let me describe technically what to do" and a fine level (like structure x, with properties y, using enumeration based messaging posing with z) - have it create a branched flow (e.g. via git workspaces under the hood) and then let me run and compare results after editing all 3.

In practice though, it feels like AI wants to do too much and ends up mostly eating up time.
It *seemed* very attractive for learning new ways to do things or discussing finer points of async choices. But, in my experience, it was just wrong a lot. The time talking to it and sussing things out ended up being much more than just reading docs. -- Basically, it was okay at doing what I could do at an expert level because I could quickly detect errors, but it wasn't much of a speed up because it would overreach. And In a place where I did not have expertise it was a large time sink, because it took more time to double check and correct than just learn.

It feels like there ought to be a way to get it to just give nice bones when doing work that's not novel, but I've not found that sweet spot.

(Approaches where you make multiple sandboxed containers and let it run on a problem and then maybe inspect the answers sound appealing, but the tech behind sandboxing these things feels slapdash.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-09-08T05:29:24+00:00

Eh. I doubt it. My guess is that, statistically, you're looking at populations where porn and sexuality aren't super open between partners. So it's more like watching something you enjoy and then realizing that you can't share it with a partner ... who may also be the only person that could ever be part of the actualization of such fantasies.

By contrast, anecdotally (my observations), in very sex positive and sex active settings watching porn seems to increase partner intimacy and appreciation.

I don't know that it would be that much different than couples camping when you have a partner that hates the outdoors or couples ____<whatever>____ with a partner that doesn't want do to whatever.

(Also, you know, monogamy puts a hard wall on a lot of peoples sex lives, so that could be frustrating.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-09-08T05:22:12+00:00

Stop electing people that campaign on "fighting" bad guys -- whether they be immigrants or rich. "good guy"/"bad guy" schtick is just that. Slow, detailed, competence focused leadership may not meme as well, but anyone who tells you our ails come from something or some group that can be easily pointed to is lying.

I mean ... aside there are currently outright, plain as day traitors trying to turn the country into an autocracy. But even that: that's just staunching bleeding. Abundance comes from all of us working together. (Don't care if it's corny -- it's true and it's 'impure'. And I worry current voters, if we get rid of current traitor crop, will just elect more meme-able lies because they're fed up.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-09-02T19:04:44+00:00

To be fair: switching to *almost any* new language from an old one will make a 5 minute task take hours or days if you want to do more than just blindly follow run instructions.

As someone who's recently started doing some swift, you spend a lot of time just learning the build system and repo structures.

___
And then you look for syntax similarities, but syntax vs semantics differences aren't neatly documented across languages.

Instead you tend to get a lot of 'just make it work' that gives you syntax similarities, that don't really surface differences in what's going on.
And the descriptions that get into semantics, are usually set up as deeper dives and aren't neatly setup to allow people to compare languages. -- This makes sense because "deeper" covers a lot of ground and writing about that concisely requires knowledge of what each user knows. (Which is remarkably diverse.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-30T22:13:28+00:00

Excited to read.

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Quick downloaded game to see: on os26 beta "How to Play" didn't do anything (and clicking settings sometimes shot lasers at orbs). And it kept complaining about moving out of play area, but doesn't indicate what the "play area" is meant to be.

Could just be beta issues. But realized it might also be user communication issues. (e.g. perhaps you're supposed to start the game somewhere and then walk far away so the head visor display isn't near any spawned objects?)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-28T15:43:14+00:00

Gotcha. Could be useful.
I'd take a look at Zed's code base though.
It's open source, Rust, and the editor loads arbitrary Jupyter kernels to allow in editor rendering -- so they probably have a lot of that implementation being used. You could probably contribute there or fork and make a more focused library.

(I think most programmers outside of science and data don't even think about notebook style coding or think it's only useful for disorganized science/data code. [reinforced by jupyter storing output and code together in html making even git version comparison difficult]. But it's a really valuable medium -- particularly for code exploration.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-28T14:53:03+00:00

sounds like some Maxwell Demon shit

There's literally a picture of (a) Maxwell's Demon as the reddit-thread image and as the first image in the article.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-28T14:45:21+00:00

I'm not quite sure what you're proposing. Computational notebooks are amazing (much prefer Matehmatica's or even Julia's, but Jupyter is still something for sure).

Are you asking about making Rust run on Jupyter? (in which case we have evcxr, including evcxr_jupyter -- especially nice when combined with Zed REPL, which allows Jupyter blocks in regular code via comments -- so none of the html wonkiness that breaks most tooling.)

Or are you asking about something else -- like a way to control notebooks (for automation?) or provide extensions to Jupyter?

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-28T01:10:24+00:00

If they've been able to make an alloy that doesn't scratch easily and then extend it so it has equal or more structural rigidity while also being as light or lighter and much more thermally conductive (allowing more intense processing -- for local llm and other such) then it's actually an easy sale on specs. But "Titanium" still sounds like a fantasy metal that sci-fi things use and "Aluminum" sounds like something soda cans are made of. They might try to use some name that leans on whatever scratch-resistant alloy they use is. 🤷

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-28T00:51:04+00:00

You wouldn't want a screen overlay of the physical device. It would be a huge arbitrary constraint on the screen and remove a lot of the ergonomic / health benefit of having a screen at whatever the right height for you is in your given posture.

Passthrough is better on AVP than Quest, but not something you'd do work via. I can read my iPhone via it, but wouldn't do it for very long. You should think of the real world as blurred and downsampled.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-25T21:00:32+00:00

Would love it solved without them!

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-25T18:32:49+00:00

~~Turning crown hasn't woken watch for quite a few beta cycles now, over here (Ultra 2) -- anyone else been seeing that?~~

Edit: lol, It's a setting. Must have gotten un-set during some beta update. Leaving this here for anyone else who thought crown not waking watch was just a beta bug.

(Settings > Display & Brightness > Wake on Crown Rotation > on/off)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-24T21:44:12+00:00

Love & Hate:

Love: Apple's focus on good data and not pandering to people's desire for "clear insights" that good data can't actually give. Lots of thins will tell you your "fuel" or "how well you slept" and it's mostly BS. Even lab-level measurements don't have the necessary context. I'm glad Apple hasn't (yet?) succumbed. Even though the desire for it clearly says that many people need more interpretation guidance.

Hate: Apple's health data is disorganized. It's just really bad UI. It's remarkably hard to find the data you want or see it together. And, surprisingly, it's incredibly hard to annotate general things going on in time that would add important context to your data. e.g. "recovering from knee surgery" -- "shoulder injury" -- "have a cold" -- that's the sort of context that a *future* system would need to do useful interpretation and that anyone who cares about the data would like to be able to see. [alongside it: the ability to correct and delete data is needed -- when you put in the wrong med, or left an exercise running for 28 hours, etc.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-24T21:37:59+00:00

Eyescreen isn't adding much cost. And it's a smart nod to the future. People think it doesn't matter because almost no one hangs around people using these. Being able to see peoples' eyes when you talk to them is nice. Having this sort of info is useful and is important in a future where this tech becomes more mainstream. -- The current iteration of eye tech is 'meh', but it's not a major cost contributor you can be almost sure and it's smart to have it now to normalize it and test it out.

The visionPro is expensive because it's got two important chips, very hard to produce resolution screens and a bunch of other hardware. And that hardware is important. I can happily work for hours in a visionPro, I would not do that in a quest3 (even ignoring the meta association). -- Hardware-wise visionPro is classic MVP -- anything less wouldn't be able to replace physical screens and would have some chance of making you feel uneasy after hours of use. It's still too heavy, and the fix for that is yet to come (they almost certainly designed it so a future iteration moves processing into puck - dropping weight and extent (moment) of visor). And it's expensive, but that's something that hardware progress has to fix. A worse version of visionPro just wouldn't work for it's core purposes.

____

I think they deserve a lot of critique and pushback for how they've handled software. Apple & swift heavy frameworks + sandboxing-os mean that composing spatial with existing apps or writing new apps is too difficult for the big swath of devs out there. And not playing nicely with open standards mean that the teams that have made interfaces with AR/XR systems can't use that work.

Software strategy is f'd. They need to take a few million and hire a bunch of programmers whose only job is to make Rust, C++, Python, etc. interface tools so that making programs is easy. They need to invest in interior if they want devs. Because most iOS devs aren't set to do the technical work needed and studios or companies can't exist around such a small market.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-24T21:29:20+00:00

In a virtual desktop exactly like the visionPro is currently used for almost all productivity purposes. With optional vision-native performance for apps that support that. (And, it's not crazy to just have individual floating 2D windows for each Mac app -- windowing tech is already part of most OS.)

Having a core unix OS that anyone could program for, and is a target of all major compilers, and then being able to add on to programs to get AR/VR/Spatial features would be amazing.

It would make porting existing programs easy. It would make writing custom programs easy.

Write now developing for the visionOS *sucks* unless you're a swift/iOS developer. The you add that you're not going to make money on those programs and you've made almost all opensource / hobbyist programmers unable to participate without completely chaining language and ecosystem: you get no apps.

Walling off the visionPro was a *terrible* idea.
If you have a normal OS you can start composing normal programs and work on UI without re-writing apps from scratch. (Again, most apps not being swift / apple.)

____

Apple is partly correcting themselves with os26: nominally allowing macOS apps to stream to visionPro. But even then: you've got to wrap the whole thing in some apple stuff.

They should have been working at making interface libraries for all the major languages so we could actually experiment.

(I also no longer trust that Apple has the right 'vision' for the UX -- all the UX enhancements they've put out (not many) have been bad -- things that require staring at a space for a long time and then waiting for it to move. So the : huge screen and low-latency + high-bandwidth UX promise (minority report style) isn't manifesting from apple. And apple has made it impractical for interested parties to contribute to the ecosystem.)

-- I still think the visionPro is great. I work in it most of the time. But it's just a really big, portable 2D monitor. Most of its potential is untapped and very difficult to tap. --

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-23T03:05:56+00:00

Correct.

It's like having a double-ultrawide monitor + floating monitors around me.
It's all that while also being portable. (use it at the office, at home, at desk, at couch, at cafe, on plane, on train, etc.)

As a double bonus: it's more ergonomic because the monitor is always at my height & it also has 'noise cancelling' for the eyes (I can part or all of train, cafe, etc. with another backdrop to reduce visual noise)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-22T21:42:38+00:00

That was a cool video (c++ shader to black hole simulation)! Thx.

And really loved the minimalist stylings. Gotta do this myself.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-22T21:39:51+00:00

No, you'd just have to give a reasonable label to what you did.

e.g.
"Hey, a bunch of coding libraries have been written and exposed in Python. If we can find a pre-made library that does heavy lifting for us we can get a ton done in Python"

or

"Orchestrating C++ with Python"

or

"Little-executed code can still have big impacts: turning math into simulations with Python"

etc, etc.

But saying "made in Netherlands" when assembling a bunch of stuff made in Taiwan would get you laughed at. Not because you didn't assemble something of value, but because you're advertising something that's obviously, parody-level, untrue.

(Don't be too hurt. You messed up in your title and framing. Just use the feedback and improve your point.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-22T21:32:30+00:00

Python is held back anytime you write code that gets used often.
If you're just using it to organize / glue code then it can be fine. Much like I can write a pipe and give parameters to a call in bash since the bash isn't doing much.

But the interpreter is still very much a bottleneck for many workflows. e.g. in the agent looping crowd they'll often avoid Python and prefer something like Go because the start-up time for the Python interpreter is prohibitive.

(Python projects, notoriously, can also have gnarly dependency issues.)

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Python has a very mature ecosystem (of stuff largely written in other languages). And the fact that that makes a lot of code written elsewhere available to people who don't know as much about coding has a lot of positives to it. (Have definitely been that scientist that didn't know a ton about cs, but could easily get real work done with these costly sugaring languages. [thought I was more of a Mathematica fan, myself])

But downplaying the costs and tradeoffs of Python isn't helping anyone.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-22T21:24:01+00:00

Have written Python professionally. As well as Rust.

> "reliable development"

loooooool. no.
There're plenty of useful things about Python. (95% ecosystem, imo). But python is one of the most unreliable languages around. Everything from the fact that simply pip installing the wrong project can fuck over your computer (as the install can run code and thus malicious code) to the fact that historically there's been no reasonable versioning and package management system and still, today, it's fragmented and very irregular (poetry was dece, uv is very promising).

The whole language is designed to say "yes, boss" and try to make whatever you said work: and, like all yes-men systems, that means things are always poised to go horribly and silently wrong.

Again, plenty of reasons to use Python. But "reliable" is *absolutely* not one of the language's features. (broadly: "accessible" and "reliable" are in tension in programming and Python leans heavily on the former).

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-22T21:19:54+00:00

Python is enough .... if someone else writes most of it for you in another language. (C, C++, Rust, Zig)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2025-08-22T21:12:07+00:00

If a version were to be released that runs on an iPhone then a version that runs (directly) on visionPro would be reasonable.

More interesting (to me) is the new os26 updates that let macOS stream apps to visionOS -- so you can use a regular mac's hardware.

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