Show HN: Semantic Calculator (king-man+woman=?) (calc.datova.ai)
56 points by nxa 2h ago 60 comments
Launch HN: Jazzberry (YC X25) – AI agent for finding bugs
26 points by MarcoDewey 6h ago 17 comments
Perverse incentives of vibe coding (fredbenenson.medium.com)
104 points by laurex 3h ago 99 comments
Students Are Short-Circuiting Their Chromebooks for a Social Media Challenge
9 ChrisArchitect 13 5/14/2025, 5:59:19 PM nytimes.com ↗
Now because there is no physical retailer of some of these garbage goods to demand third party certification. They just ship garbage directly.
> damage school property
Look, we're mostly talking about elementary/middle school students here, right? So they're age 7-12 or so. Mostly boys, I would imagine.
So perhaps we've got an unjust proposition these days. Students often mark up their textbooks and their backpacks and vandalize their lockers to some degree. That's always going to happen -- it's a given for any school and any group of students.
Now we're routinely saddling each student with an advanced computing device. It may cost $300-500 to replace this thing. It is very high-tech and very delicate, and very resource-intensive, being a netbook type thing. And we say it's "school property" but the students themselves are responsible for lugging it around to every class, every day, doing homework on it, studying and taking notes on it, day in, day out.
I say that's nearly ridiculous. I say that in the United States, we shouldn't be uniformly training children from 7 years of age to be docile worker bees in the white-collar office. I say that a $500 high-tech device is an enormous responsibility for any child.
Now I had a similar experience in high school. The band director lent me a series of saxophones so that I could participate without my family purchasing one on our own. It was very kind of the school to lend out such equipment. A baritone sax could've cost five digits to replace, plus all the accessories. It was huge and unwieldy. I treated that thing gingerly, as if it were my own. I cleaned and maintained it in working condition. I returned it with regrets when I finished, having earned an academic letter for my service to the band.
But my cousin is a Kindergarten teacher. During the lockdowns, they put her kids on Zoom. They told her "now teach 'em". That's just beyond the pale. These are young children, and cannot just be babysat by someone on a screen. Now TikTok is their babysitter, and they're obeying TikTok more than their parents or their teachers. Perhaps that is a symptom of worse things going on.
This is no different than a kid throwing a cherry bomb in a toilet at school or tipping over gravestones in a cemetery. Things stop being silly innocent pranks when they become destructive.
Also, there's a lot of real potential for harm here. It's only a matter of time before "it's just a prank bro" turns into a house fire or worse someone dies.
Also, you have to love the reflexive draconian reaction of charging minors with felonies. When all you have is an overgrown police department hammer, you might as well ruin kids' lives before they've even begun. It seems like if this behavior is really as serious of a problem as to warrant that kind of legal response, then the adults creating the situation (ie school administration) need to be getting charged with criminal child endangerment as well.
I'm a parent, a tax payer, and just a member of a society that I would like to remain civilized and ordered.
Kids that think it is okay to damage public property for something as silly as a social media challenge have the serious potential to become adults that think it's okay to damage other people's property if they don't face consequences for their actions. Also, children that see other children doing things like this without consequences become emboldened to mimic this behavior.
I'm far more worried about kids thinking it's ok to use the jackboot to solve petty problems that arise out of dumb trends or thinking that it's ok for government institutions to threaten people with unreasonable consequences for things.
No comments yet
Digital devices have no rightful place in the classroom. They cost a fortune, erode attention, and now literally catch fire. If the cure for social media-driven stunts is a smoking Chromebook, maybe it's time to rip the plug for good.