Author name: Paul Patrick

Gmail gains Gemini-powered “Add to calendar” button

Gmail, Google, Google Gemini, Tech / Paul Patrick / March 11, 2025

Google has a new mission in the AI era: to add Gemini to as many of the company’s products as possible. We’ve already seen Gemini appear in search results, text messages, and more. In Google’s latest update to Workspace, Gemini will be able to add calendar appointments from Gmail with a single click. Well, assuming Gemini gets it right the first time, which is far from certain.

The new calendar button will appear at the top of emails, right next to the summarize button that arrived last year. The calendar option will show up in Gmail threads with actionable meeting chit-chat, allowing you to mash that button to create an appointment in one step. The Gemini sidebar will open to confirm the appointment was made, which is a good opportunity to double-check the robot. There will be a handy edit button in the Gemini window in the event it makes a mistake. However, the robot can’t invite people to these events yet.

The effect of using the button is the same as opening the Gemini panel and asking it to create an appointment. The new functionality is simply detecting events and offering the button as a shortcut of sorts. You should not expect to see this button appear on messages that already have calendar integration, like dining reservations and flights. Those already pop up in Google Calendar without AI.

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Yes, you get used to the grille: The 2025 BMW 430i Gran Coupe review

BMW 430i Gran Coupe, car review, Cars / Paul Patrick / March 11, 2025

Back in 1995, a 430i badge would have meant that BMW had a 3.0 L engine. But this 430i makes do with just 2.0 L and four cylinders under the hood, albeit with a turbocharger. Output is 255 hp (190 kW) and 295 lb-ft (400 Nm), which in this case is sent to all the wheels—xDrive in BMW-speak—via an eight-speed transmission.

In the frosty and below-freezing winter temperatures, I averaged 28 mpg (8.4 L/100 km), one down on the car’s official EPA combined economy. Perhaps the engine’s 48 V mild hybrid system helped minimize the loss due to cold weather, which, yes, affects gasoline-powered cars, too.

Another downside to a diet that’s mostly electric cars is that you very quickly get used to that immediate throttle response. Even the best naturally aspirated engines can’t quite replicate that—not even the ones BMW has made in the past. Even though the turbocharger’s torque plateau arrives at just 1,600 rpm, it’s better to just be a bit relaxed about the whole thing. I found the automatic eight-speed a little too jerky in Sport mode, anyway.

A BMW 430i Gran Coupe seen from behind — Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

Among other minor grumbles, the brake pedal had too little bite for the first half-inch of travel and then too much bite for the next. And the steering wheel rim is too fat, a problem that has afflicted BMW for far too long. But they are minor complaints, and ones that hardly ruin the driving experience. While it’s more of a cruiser than a canyon carver, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. No one said that “ultimate driving machine” had to mean the fastest thing around a track, and for day-to-day driving, being in the 430i was a pleasant place to have to sit.

At $51,200, the 430i xDrive Gran Coupe looks relatively well-priced by the standards of 2025. But unlike the Korean or Japanese luxury brands, you will be expected to pay more if you want all the bells and whistles—our test car came in at $61,125 with options and delivery fee. Some might be superfluous—I’m not sure I’d spend $1,700 on the driving assists, or $2,500 on the M Sport package, but the top-down, 360-degree parking cameras are worth the $700 option, and the driver and infotainment display (part of the $1,650 premium package) lifts the in-car experience.

If all that sounds interesting but the internal combustion engine is a deal-breaker, check back tomorrow when we review the very closely related and even longer-named BMW i4 xDrive40 Gran Coupe (19-inch wheels).

Yes, you get used to the grille: The 2025 BMW 430i Gran Coupe review Read More »

Study: Megalodon’s body shape was closer to a lemon shark

aquatic animals, megalogon, paleontology, Science / Paul Patrick / March 10, 2025

the mighty, mighty megalodon

Also: Baby megalodons were likely the size of great white sharks and capable of hunting marine mammals

The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon’s size, body shape and swimming speed, among other characteristics.

While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark, others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon’s body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we’re not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.

Thanks to research published in 2023 on its fossilized teeth, we’re now fairly confident that megalodon shared something else with these relatives: it wasn’t entirely cold-blooded and kept its body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean. Most sharks, like most fish, are ectothermic, meaning that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group termed mackerel sharks, are endothermic: They have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps retain some of the heat their muscles produce. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their surroundings.

Of particular relevance to this latest paper is a 2022 study by Jack Cooper of Swansea University in the UK and his co-authors. In 2020, the team reconstructed a 2D model of the megalodon, basing the dimensions on similar existing shark species. The researchers followed up in 2022 with a reconstructed 3D model, extrapolating the dimensions from a megalodon specimen (a vertebral column) in Belgium. Cooper concluded that a megalodon would have been a stocky, powerful shark—measuring some 52 feet (16 meters) in length with a body mass of 67.86 tons—able to execute bursts of high speed to attack prey, much like the significantly smaller great white shark.

(H) One of the largest vertebrae of Otodus meg- alodon; (I and J) CT scans showing cross-sectional views. — (H) One of the largest vertebrae of *Otodus megalodon*; (I and J) CT scans showing cross-sectional views. Credit: Shimada et al., 2025

Not everyone agreed, however, Last year, a team of 26 shark experts led by Kesnshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University, further challenged the great white shark comparison, arguing that the super-sized creature’s body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought. The team concluded that based on the spinal column, the combination of a great white build with the megalodon’s much longer length would have simply proved too cumbersome.

A fresh approach

Now Shimada is back with a fresh analysis, employing a new method that he says provides independent lines of evidence for the megalodon’s slender build. “Our new study does not use the modern great white shark as a model, but rather simply asks, ‘How long were the head and tail based on the trunk [length] represented by the fossil vertebral column?’ using the general body plan seen collectively in living and fossil sharks,” Shimada told Ars.

Shimada and his co-authors measured the proportions of 145 modern and 20 extinct species of shark, particularly the head, trunk, and tail relative to total body length. Megalodon was represented by a Belgian vertebral specimen. The largest vertebra in that specimen measured 15.5 centimeters (6 inches) in diameter, although there are other megalodon vertebrae in Denmark, for example, with diameters as much as 23 centimeters (9 inches).

Based on their analysis, Shimada et al, concluded that, because the trunk section of the Belgian specimen measured 11 meters, the head and tail were probably about 1.8 meters (6 feet) and 3.6 meters (12 feet) long, respectively, with a total body length of 16.4 meters (54 feet) for this particularly specimen. That means the Danish megalodon specimens could have been as long as 24.3 meters (80 feet). As for body shape, taking the new length estimates into account, the lemon shark appears to be closest modern analogue. “However, the exact position and shape of practically all the fins remain uncertain,” Shimada cautioned. “We are only talking about the main part of the body.”

Revised tentative body outline of 24.3 meters (80 feet) extinct megatooth shark, Otodus megalodon. — Credit: DePaul University/Kenshu Shimada

The team also found that a 24.3-meter-long megalodon would have weighed a good 94 tons with an estimated swimming speed of 2.1-3.5 KPM (1.3-2.2 MPH). They also studied growth patterns evident in the Belgian vertebrae, concluding that the megalodon would give live birth and that the newborns would be between 3.6 to 3.9 meters (12-13 feet) long—i.e., roughly the size of a great white shark. The authors see this as a refutation of the hypothesis that megalodons relied on nursery areas to rear their young, since a baby megalodon would be quite capable of hunting and killing marine mammals based on size alone.

In addition, “We unexpectedly unlocked the mystery of why certain aquatic vertebrates can attain gigantic sizes while others cannot,” Shimada said. “Living gigantic sharks, such as the whale shark and basking shark, as well as many other gigantic aquatic vertebrates like whales have slender bodies because large stocky bodies are hydrodynamically inefficient for swimming.”

That’s in sharp contrast to the great white shark, whose stocky body becomes even stockier as it grows. “It can be ‘large’ but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be ‘gigantic’ because of hydrodynamic constraints,” said Shimada. “We also demonstrate that the modern great white shark with a stocky body hypothetically blown up to the size of megalodon would not allow it to be an efficient swimmer due to the hydrodynamic constraints, further supporting the idea that it is more likely than not that megalodon must have had a much slenderer body than the modern great white shark.”

Shimada emphasized that their interpretations remain tentative but they are based on hard data and make for useful reference points for future research.

An “exciting working hypothesis”

For his part, Cooper found a lot to like in Shimada et al.’s latest analysis. “I’d say everything presented here is interesting and presents an exciting working hypothesis but that these should also be taken with a grain of salt until they can either be empirically tested, or a complete skeleton of megalodon is found to confirm one way or the other,” Cooper told Ars. “Generally, I appreciate the paper’s approach to its body size calculation in that it uses a lot of different shark species and doesn’t make any assumptions as to which species are the best analogues to megalodon.”

Shark biologists now say a lemon shark, like this one, is a better model of the extinct megalodon's body than the great white shark. — Shark biologists now say a lemon shark, like this one, is a better model of the extinct megalodon’s body than the great white shark. Credit: Albert Kok

Cooper acknowledged that it makes sense that a megalodon would be slightly slower than a great white given its sheer size, “though it does indicate we’ve got a shark capable of surprisingly fast speeds for its size,” he said. As for Shimada’s new growth model, he pronounced it “really solid” and concurred with the findings on birthing with one caveat. “I think the refutation of nursery sites is a bit of a leap, though I understand the temptation given the remarkably large size of the baby sharks,” he said. “We have geological evidence of multiple nurseries—not just small teeth, but also geological evidence of the right environmental conditions.”

He particularly liked Shinada et al.’s final paragraph. “[They] call out ‘popular questions’ along the lines of, ‘Was megalodon stronger than Livyatan?'” said Cooper. “I agree with the authors that these sorts of questions—ones we all often get asked by ‘fans’ on social media—are really not productive, as these unscientific questions disregard the rather amazing biology we’ve learned about this iconic, real species that existed, and reduce it to what I can only describe as a video game character.”

Regardless of how this friendly ongoing debate plays out, our collective fascination with megalodon is likely to persist. “It’s the imagining of such a magnificently enormous shark swimming around our oceans munching on whales, and considering that geologically speaking this happened in the very recent past,” said Cooper of the creature’s appeal. “It really captures what evolution can achieve, and even the huge size of their teeth alone really put it into perspective.”

DOI: Palaeontologia Electronica, 2025. 10.26879/1502 (About DOIs).

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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Huh? The valuable role of interjections

history of language, language, Science, syndication / Paul Patrick / March 10, 2025

Utterances like um, wow, and mm-hmm aren’t garbage—they keep conversations flowing.

Interjections—one-word utterances that aren’t part of a larger sentence—used to be dismissed as irrelevant linguistic detritus. But some linguists now think they play an essential role in regulating conversations. Credit: Daniel Garcia/Knowable Magazine

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself—and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that’s what they had records of. But once recordings of conversation became available, they could begin to analyze spoken language the same way as writing.

When they did, they observed that interjections—that is, short utterances of just a word or two that are not part of a larger sentence—were ubiquitous in everyday speech. “One in every seven utterances are one of these things,” says Dingemanse, who explores the use of interjections in the 2024 Annual Review of Linguistics. “You’re going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently, we need them.”

Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. “Think of it as a tool kit for conducting interactions,” says Dingemanse. “If you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need.” An um or uh from the speaker, for example, signals that they’re about to pause, but aren’t finished speaking. A quick huh? or what? from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.

That need seems to be universal: In a survey of 31 languages around the world, Dingemanse and his colleagues found that all of them used a short, neutral syllable similar to huh? as a repair signal, probably because it’s quick to produce. “In that moment of difficulty, you’re going to need the simplest possible question word, and that’s what huh? is,” says Dingemanse. “We think all societies will stumble on this, for the same reason.”

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call “continuers,” such as mm-hmm — signals from the listener that they’re paying attention and the speaker should keep going. Once again, the form of the word is well suited to its function: Because mm-hmm is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.

Sign languages often handle continuers differently, but then again, two people signing at the same time can be less disruptive than two people speaking, says Carl Börstell, a linguist at the University of Bergen in Norway. In Swedish Sign Language, for example, listeners often sign yes as a continuer for long stretches, but to keep this continuer unobtrusive, the sender tends to hold their hands lower than usual.

Different interjections can send slightly different signals. Consider, for example, one person describing to another how to build a piece of Ikea furniture, says Allison Nguyen, a psycholinguist at Illinois State University. In such a conversation, mm-hmm might indicate that the speaker should continue explaining the current step, while yeah or OK would imply that the listener is done with that step and it’s time to move on to the next.

Wow! There’s more

Continuers aren’t merely for politeness—they really matter to a conversation, says Dingemanse. In one classic experiment from more than two decades ago, 34 undergraduate students listened as another volunteer told them a story. Some of the listeners gave the usual “I’m listening” signals, while others—who had been instructed to count the number of words beginning with the letter t—were too distracted to do so. The lack of normal signals from the listeners led to stories that were less well crafted, the researchers found. “That shows that these little words are quite consequential,” says Dingemanse.

Nguyen agrees that such words are far from meaningless. “They really do a lot for mutual understanding and mutual conversation,” she says. She’s now working to see if emojis serve similar functions in text conversations.

Storytellers depend on feedback such as mm-hmm and other interjections from their listeners. In this experiment, some listeners were told to count the number of times the storyteller used a word starting with t—a challenging task that prevented them from giving normal feedback. The quality of storytelling declined significantly, with problems like abrupt endings, rambling on, uneven or choppy pacing and overexplaining or justifying the point. Credit: Knowable Magazine

The role of interjections goes even deeper than regulating the flow of conversation. Interjections also help in negotiating the ground rules of a conversation. Every time two people converse, they need to establish an understanding of where each is coming from: what each participant knows to begin with, what they think the other person knows and how much detail they want to hear. Much of this work—what linguists call “grounding”—is carried out by interjections.

“If I’m telling you a story and you say something like ‘Wow!’ I might find that encouraging and add more detail,” says Nguyen. “But if you do something like, ‘Uh-huh,’ I’m going to assume you aren’t interested in more detail.”

A key part of grounding is working out what each participant thinks about the other’s knowledge, says Martina Wiltschko, a theoretical linguist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, Spain. Some languages, like Mandarin, explicitly differentiate between “I’m telling you something you didn’t know” and “I’m telling you something that I think you knew already.” In English, that task falls largely on interjections.

One of Wiltschko’s favorite examples is the Canadian eh? “If I tell you you have a new dog, I’m usually not telling you stuff you don’t know, so it’s weird for me to tell you,” she says. But ‘You have a new dog, eh?’ eliminates the weirdness by flagging the statement as news to the speaker, not the listener.

Other interjections can indicate that the speaker knows they’re not giving the other participant what they sought. “If you ask me what’s the weather like in Barcelona, I can say ‘Well, I haven’t been outside yet,’” says Wiltschko. The well is an acknowledgement that she’s not quite answering the question.

Wiltschko and her students have now examined more than 20 languages, and every one of them uses little words for negotiations like these. “I haven’t found a language that doesn’t do these three general things: what I know, what I think you know and turn-taking,” she says. They are key to regulating conversations, she adds: “We are building common ground, and we are taking turns.”

Details like these aren’t just arcana for linguists to obsess over. Using interjections properly is a key part of sounding fluent in speaking a second language, notes Wiltschko, but language teachers often ignore them. “When it comes to language teaching, you get points deducted for using ums and uhs, because you’re ‘not fluent,’” she says. “But native speakers use them, because it helps! They should be taught.” Artificial intelligence, too, can struggle to use interjections well, she notes, making them the best way to distinguish between a computer and a real human.

And interjections also provide a window into interpersonal relationships. “These little markers say so much about what you think,” she says—and they’re harder to control than the actual content. Maybe couples therapists, for example, would find that interjections afford useful insights into how their clients regard one another and how they negotiate power in a conversation. The interjection oh often signals confrontation, she says, as in the difference between “Do you want to go out for dinner?” and “Oh, so now you want to go out for dinner?”

Indeed, these little words go right to the heart of language and what it is for. “Language exists because we need to interact with one another,” says Börstell. “For me, that’s the main reason for language being so successful.”

Dingemanse goes one step further. Interjections, he says, don’t just facilitate our conversations. In negotiating points of view and grounding, they’re also how language talks about talking.

“With huh? you say not just ‘I didn’t understand,’” says Dingemanse. “It’s ‘I understand you’re trying to tell me something, but I didn’t get it.’” That reflexivity enables more sophisticated speech and thought. Indeed, he says, “I don’t think we would have complex language if it were not for these simple words.”

Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens.

Huh? The valuable role of interjections Read More »

After less than a day, the Athena lander is dead on the Moon

intuitive machines, Space / Paul Patrick / March 9, 2025

NASA expected Athena to have a reasonable chance of success. Although it landed on its side, Odysseus was generally counted as a win because it accomplished most of its tasks. Accordingly, NASA loaded a number of instruments onto the lander. Most notable among these was the PRIME-1 experiment, an ice drill to sample and analyze any ice that lies below the surface.

A dark day, but not the end

“After landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted,” the company’s statement said. However, this likely means that the company was able to contact the instrument but not perform any meaningful scientific activities.

NASA has accepted that these commercial lunar missions are high-risk, high-reward. (Firefly’s successful landing last weekend offers an example of high rewards). It is paying the companies, on average, $100 million or less per flight. This is a fraction of what NASA would pay through a traditional procurement program. The hope is that, after surviving initial failures, companies like Intuitive Machines will learn from their mistakes and open a low-cost, reliable pathway to the lunar surface.

Even so, this failure has to be painful for NASA and Intuitive Machines. The space agency lost out on some valuable science, and Intuitive Machines has taken a step backward with this mission rather than moving forward as it had hoped to do.

Fortunately, this is unlikely to be the end for the company. NASA has committed to a third and fourth mission on Intuitive Machines’ lander, the next of which could come during the first quarter of 2026. NASA has also contracted with the company to build a small network of satellites around the Moon for communications and positioning services. So although the company’s fortunes look dark today, they are not permanently shadowed like the craters on the Moon that NASA hopes to soon explore.

After less than a day, the Athena lander is dead on the Moon Read More »

iPhone 16e review: The most expensive cheap iPhone yet

Apple, Features, IPhone, iPhone 16e, Reviews, Tech / Paul Patrick / March 9, 2025

The iPhone 16e rethinks—and prices up—the basic iPhone.

The iPhone 16e, with a notch and an Action Button. Credit: Samuel Axon

For a long time, the cheapest iPhones were basically just iPhones that were older than the current flagship, but last week’s release of the $600 iPhone 16e marks a big change in how Apple is approaching its lineup.

Rather than a repackaging of an old iPhone, the 16e is the latest main iPhone—that is, the iPhone 16—with a bunch of stuff stripped away.

There are several potential advantages to this change. In theory, it allows Apple to support its lower-end offerings for longer with software updates, and it gives entry-level buyers access to more current technologies and features. It also simplifies the marketplace of accessories and the like.

There’s bad news, too, though: Since it replaces the much cheaper iPhone SE in Apple’s lineup, the iPhone 16e significantly raises the financial barrier to entry for iOS (the SE started at $430).

We spent a few days trying out the 16e and found that it’s a good phone—it’s just too bad it’s a little more expensive than the entry-level iPhone should ideally be. In many ways, this phone solves more problems for Apple than it does for consumers. Let’s explore why.

Table of Contents

A beastly processor for an entry-level phone

Like the 16, the 16e has Apple’s A18 chip, the most recent in the made-for-iPhone line of Apple-designed chips. There’s only one notable difference: This variation of the A18 has just four GPU cores instead of five. That will show up in benchmarks and in a handful of 3D games, but it shouldn’t make too much of a difference for most people.

It’s a significant step up over the A15 found in the final 2022 refresh of the iPhone SE, enabling a handful of new features like AAA games and Apple Intelligence.

The A18’s inclusion is good for both Apple and the consumer; Apple gets to establish a new, higher baseline of performance when developing new features for current and future handsets, and consumers likely get many more years of software updates than they’d get on the older chip.

The key example of a feature enabled by the A18 that Apple would probably like us all to talk about the most is Apple Intelligence, a suite of features utilizing generative AI to solve some user problems or enable new capabilities across iOS. By enabling these for the cheapest iPhone, Apple is making its messaging around Apple Intelligence a lot easier; it no longer needs to put effort into clarifying that you can use X feature with this new iPhone but not that one.

We’ve written a lot about Apple Intelligence already, but here’s the gist: There are some useful features here in theory, but Apple’s models are clearly a bit behind the cutting edge, and results for things like notifications summaries or writing tools are pretty mixed. It’s fun to generate original emojis, though!

The iPhone 16e can even use Visual Intelligence, which actually is handy sometimes. On my iPhone 16 Pro Max, I can point the rear camera at an object and press the camera button a certain way to get information about it.

I wouldn’t have expected the 16e to support this, but it does, via the Action Button (which was first introduced in the iPhone 15 Pro). This is a reprogrammable button that can perform a variety of functions, albeit just one at a time. Visual Intelligence is one of the options here, which is pretty cool, even though it’s not essential.

The screen is the biggest upgrade over the SE

Also like the 16, the 16e has a 6.1-inch display. The resolution’s a bit different, though; it’s 2,532 by 1,170 pixels instead of 2,556 by 1,179. It also has a notch instead of the Dynamic Island seen in the 16. All this makes the iPhone 16e’s display seem like a very close match to the one seen in 2022’s iPhone 14—in fact, it might literally be the same display.

I really missed the Dynamic Island while using the iPhone 16e—it’s one of my favorite new features added to the iPhone in recent years, as it consolidates what was previously a mess of notification schemes in iOS. Plus, it’s nice to see things like Uber and DoorDash ETAs and sports scores at a glance.

The main problem with losing the Dynamic Island is that we’re back to the old minor mess of notifications approaches, and I guess Apple has to keep supporting the old ways for a while yet. That genuinely surprises me; I would have thought Apple would want to unify notifications and activities with the Dynamic Island just like the A18 allows the standardization of other features.

This seems to indicate that the Dynamic Island is a fair bit more expensive to include than the good old camera notch flagship iPhones had been rocking since 2017’s iPhone X.

That compromise aside, the display on the iPhone 16e is ridiculously good for a phone at this price point, and it makes the old iPhone SE’s small LCD display look like it’s from another eon entirely by comparison. It gets brighter for both HDR content and sunny-day operation; the blacks are inky and deep, and the contrast and colors are outstanding.

It’s the best thing about the iPhone 16e, even if it isn’t quite as refined as the screens in Apple’s current flagships. Most people would never notice the difference between the screens in the 16e and the iPhone 16 Pro, though.

There is one other screen feature I miss from the higher-end iPhones you can buy in 2025: Those phones can drop the display all the way down to 1 nit, which is awesome for using the phone late at night in bed without disturbing a sleeping partner. Like earlier iPhones, the 16e can only get so dark.

It gets quite bright, though; Apple claims it typically reaches 800 nits in peak brightness but that it can stretch to 1200 when viewing certain HDR photos and videos. That means it gets about twice as bright as the SE did.

Connectivity is key

The iPhone 16e supports the core suite of connectivity options found in modern phones. There’s Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and Apple’s usual limited implementation of NFC.

There are three new things of note here, though, and they’re good, neutral, and bad, respectively.

USB-C

Let’s start with the good. We’ve moved from Apple’s proprietary Lightning port found in older iPhones (including the final iPhone SE) toward USB-C, now a near-universal standard on mobile devices. It allows faster charging and more standardized charging cable support.

Sure, it’s a bummer to start over if you’ve spent years buying Lightning accessories, but it’s absolutely worth it in the long run. This change means that the entire iPhone line has now abandoned Lightning, so all iPhones and Android phones will have the same main port for years to come. Finally!

The finality of this shift solves a few problems for Apple: It greatly simplifies the accessory landscape and allows the company to move toward producing a smaller range of cables.

Satellite connectivity

Recent flagship iPhones have gradually added a small suite of features that utilize satellite connectivity to make life a little easier and safer.

Among those is crash detection and roadside assistance. The former will use the sensors in the phone to detect if you’ve been in a car crash and contact help, and roadside assistance allows you to text for help when you’re outside of cellular reception in the US and UK.

There are also Emergency SOS and Find My via satellite, which let you communicate with emergency responders from remote places and allow you to be found.

Along with a more general feature that allows Messages via satellite, these features can greatly expand your options if you’re somewhere remote, though they’re not as easy to use and responsive as using the regular cellular network.

Where’s MagSafe?

I don’t expect the 16e to have all the same features as the 16, which is $200 more expensive. In fact, it has more modern features than I think most of its target audience needs (more on that later). That said, there’s one notable omission that makes no sense to me at all.

The 16e does not support MagSafe, a standard for connecting accessories to the back of the device magnetically, often while allowing wireless charging via the Qi standard.

Qi wireless charging is still supported, albeit at a slow 7.5 W, but there are no magnets, meaning a lot of existing MagSafe accessories are a lot less useful with this phone, if they’re usable at all. To be fair, the SE didn’t support MagSafe either, but every new iPhone design since the iPhone 12 way back in 2020 has—and not just the premium flagships.

It’s not like the MagSafe accessory ecosystem was some bottomless well of innovation, but that magnetic alignment is handier than you might think, whether we’re talking about making sure the phone locks into place for the fastest wireless charging speeds or hanging the phone on a car dashboard to use GPS on the go.

It’s one of those things where folks coming from much older iPhones may not care because they don’t know what they’re missing, but it could be annoying in households with multiple generations of iPhones, and it just doesn’t make any sense.

Most of Apple’s choices in the 16e seem to serve the goal of unifying the whole iPhone lineup to simplify the message for consumers and make things easier for Apple to manage efficiently, but the dropping of MagSafe is bizarre.

It almost makes me think that Apple might plan to drop MagSafe from future flagship iPhones, too, and go toward something new, just because that’s the only explanation I can think of. That otherwise seems unlikely to me right now, but I guess we’ll see.

The first Apple-designed cellular modem

We’ve been seeing rumors that Apple planned to drop third-party modems from companies like Qualcomm for years. As far back as 2018, Apple was poaching Qualcomm employees in an adjacent office in San Diego. In 2020, Apple SVP Johny Srouji announced to employees that work had begun.

It sounds like development has been challenging, but the first Apple-designed modem has arrived here in the 16e of all places. Dubbed the C1, it’s… perfectly adequate. It’s about as fast or maybe just a smidge slower than what you get in the flagship phones, but almost no user would notice any difference at all.

That’s really a win for Apple, which has struggled with a tumultuous relationship with its partners here for years and which has long run into space problems in its phones in part because the third-party modems weren’t compact enough.

This change may not matter much for the consumer beyond freeing up just a tiny bit of space for a slightly larger battery, but it’s another step in Apple’s long journey to ultimately and fully control every component in the iPhone that it possibly can.

Bigger is better for batteries

There is one area where the 16e is actually superior to the 16, much less the SE: battery life. The 16e reportedly has a 3,961 mAh battery, the largest in any of the many iPhones with roughly this size screen. Apple says it offers up to 26 hours of video playback, which is the kind of number you expect to see in a much larger flagship phone.

I charged this phone three times in just under a week with it, though I wasn’t heavily hitting 5G networks, playing many 3D games, or cranking the brightness way up all the time while using it.

That’s a bit of a bump over the 16, but it’s a massive leap over the SE, which promised a measly 15 hours of video playback. Every single phone in Apple’s lineup now has excellent battery life by any standard.

Quality over quantity in the camera system

The 16E’s camera system leaves the SE in the dust, but it’s no match for the robust system found in the iPhone 16. Regardless, it’s way better than you’d typically expect from a phone at this price.

Like the 16, the 16e has a 48 MP “Fusion” wide-angle rear camera. It typically doesn’t take photos at 48 MP (though you can do that while compromising color detail). Rather, 24 MP is the target. The 48 MP camera enables 2x zoom that is nearly visually indistinguishable from optical zoom.

Based on both the specs and photo comparisons, the main camera sensor in the 16e appears to me to be exactly the same as that one found in the 16. We’re just missing the ultra-wide lens (which allows more zoomed-out photos, ideal for groups of people in small spaces, for example) and several extra features like advanced image stabilization, the newest Photographic Styles, and macro photography.

The iPhone 16e takes excellent photos in bright conditions. Samuel Axon

That’s a lot of missing features, sure, but it’s wild how good this camera is for this price point. Even something like the Pixel 8a can’t touch it (though to be fair, the Pixel 8a is $100 cheaper).

Video capture is a similar situation: The 16e shoots at the same resolutions and framerates as the 16, but it lacks a few specialized features like Cinematic and Action modes. There’s also a front-facing camera with the TrueDepth sensor for Face ID in that notch, and it has comparable specs to the front-facing cameras we’ve seen in a couple of years of iPhones at this point.

If you were buying a phone for the cameras, this wouldn’t be the one for you. It’s absolutely worth paying another $200 for the iPhone 16 (or even just $100 for the iPhone 15 for the ultra-wide lens for 0.5x zoom; the 15 is still available in the Apple Store) if that’s your priority.

The iPhone 16’s macro mode isn’t available here, so ultra-close-ups look fuzzy. Samuel Axon

But for the 16e’s target consumer (mostly folks with the iPhone 11 or older or an iPhone SE, who just want the cheapest functional iPhone they can get) it’s almost overkill. I’m not complaining, though it’s a contributing factor to the phone’s cost compared to entry-level Android phones and Apple’s old iPhone SE.

RIP small phones, once and for all

In one fell swoop, the iPhone 16e’s replacement of the iPhone SE eliminates a whole range of legacy technologies that have held on at the lower end of the iPhone lineup for years. Gone are Touch ID, the home button, LCD displays, and Lightning ports—they’re replaced by Face ID, swipe gestures, OLED, and USB-C.

Newer iPhones have had most of those things for quite some time. The latest feature was USB-C, which came in 2023’s iPhone 15. The removal of the SE from the lineup catches the bottom end of the iPhone up with the top in these respects.

That said, the SE had maintained one positive differentiator, too: It was small enough to be used one-handed by almost anyone. With the end of the SE and the release of the 16e, the one-handed iPhone is well and truly dead. Of course, most people have been clear they want big screens and batteries above almost all else, so the writing had been on the wall for a while for smaller phones.

The death of the iPhone SE ushers in a new era for the iPhone with bigger and better features—but also bigger price tags.

A more expensive cheap phone

Assessing the iPhone 16e is a challenge. It’s objectively a good phone—good enough for the vast majority of people. It has a nearly top-tier screen (though it clocks in at 60Hz, while some Android phones close to this price point manage 120Hz), a camera system that delivers on quality even if it lacks special features seen in flagships, strong connectivity, and performance far above what you’d expect at this price.

If you don’t care about extra camera features or nice-to-haves like MagSafe or the Dynamic Island, it’s easy to recommend saving a couple hundred bucks compared to the iPhone 16.

The chief criticism I have that relates to the 16e has less to do with the phone itself than Apple’s overall lineup. The iPhone SE retailed for $430, nearly half the price of the 16. By making the 16e the new bottom of the lineup, Apple has significantly raised the financial barrier to entry for iOS.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that a pretty big swath of the target market for the 16e will buy it subsidized through a carrier, so they might not pay that much up front. I always recommend buying a phone directly if you can, though, as carrier subsidization deals are usually worse for the consumer.

The 16e’s price might push more people to go for the subsidy. Plus, it’s just more phone than some people need. For example, I love a high-quality OLED display for watching movies, but I don’t think the typical iPhone SE customer was ever going to care about that.

That’s why I believe the iPhone 16e solves more problems for Apple than it does for the consumer. In multiple ways, it allows Apple to streamline production, software support, and marketing messaging. It also drives up the average price per unit across the whole iPhone line and will probably encourage some people who would have spent $430 to spend $600 instead, possibly improving revenue. All told, it’s a no-brainer for Apple.

It’s just a mixed bag for the sort of no-frills consumer who wants a minimum viable phone and who for one reason or another didn’t want to go the Android route. The iPhone 16e is definitely a good phone—I just wish there were more options for that consumer.

The good

Dramatically improved display than the iPhone SE
Likely stronger long-term software support than most previous entry-level iPhones
Good battery life and incredibly good performance for this price point
A high-quality camera, especially for the price

The bad

No ultra-wide camera
No MagSafe
No Dynamic Island

The ugly

Significantly raises the entry price point for buying an iPhone

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

iPhone 16e review: The most expensive cheap iPhone yet Read More »

What does “PhD-level” AI mean? OpenAI’s rumored $20,000 agent plan explained.

AI, AI assistants, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, Deep Research, Google, large language models, machine learning, openai, PhD, Tech / Paul Patrick / March 8, 2025

On the Frontier Math benchmark by EpochAI, o3 solved 25.2 percent of problems, while no other model has exceeded 2 percent—suggesting a leap in mathematical reasoning capabilities over the previous model.

Benchmarks vs. real-world value

Ideally, potential applications for a true PhD-level AI model would include analyzing medical research data, supporting climate modeling, and handling routine aspects of research work.

The high price points reported by The Information, if accurate, suggest that OpenAI believes these systems could provide substantial value to businesses. The publication notes that SoftBank, an OpenAI investor, has committed to spending $3 billion on OpenAI’s agent products this year alone—indicating significant business interest despite the costs.

Meanwhile, OpenAI faces financial pressures that may influence its premium pricing strategy. The company reportedly lost approximately $5 billion last year covering operational costs and other expenses related to running its services.

News of OpenAI’s stratospheric pricing plans come after years of relatively affordable AI services that have conditioned users to expect powerful capabilities at relatively low costs. ChatGPT Plus remains $20 per month and Claude Pro costs $30 monthly—both tiny fractions of these proposed enterprise tiers. Even ChatGPT Pro’s $200/month subscription is relatively small compared to the new proposed fees. Whether the performance difference between these tiers will match their thousandfold price difference is an open question.

Despite their benchmark performances, these simulated reasoning models still struggle with confabulations—instances where they generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information. This remains a critical concern for research applications where accuracy and reliability are paramount. A $20,000 monthly investment raises questions about whether organizations can trust these systems not to introduce subtle errors into high-stakes research.

In response to the news, several people quipped on social media that companies could hire an actual PhD student for much cheaper. “In case you have forgotten,” wrote xAI developer Hieu Pham in a viral tweet, “most PhD students, including the brightest stars who can do way better work than any current LLMs—are not paid $20K / month.”

While these systems show strong capabilities on specific benchmarks, the “PhD-level” label remains largely a marketing term. These models can process and synthesize information at impressive speeds, but questions remain about how effectively they can handle the creative thinking, intellectual skepticism, and original research that define actual doctoral-level work. On the other hand, they will never get tired or need health insurance, and they will likely continue to improve in capability and drop in cost over time.

What does “PhD-level” AI mean? OpenAI’s rumored $20,000 agent plan explained. Read More »

Feds arrest man for sharing DVD rip of Spider-Man movie with millions online

Blu-ray, copyright infringement, copyright law, dvd, Marvel, marvel movies, online piracy, Policy, Spider-Man: no way home / Paul Patrick / March 8, 2025

A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies’ scheduled release dates.

According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole “numerous ‘pre-release’ DVDs and Blu-rays” between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly “ripped” the movies, “bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying” and shared copies widely online. He also supposedly sold the actual stolen discs on e-commerce sites, the DOJ alleged.

Hale has been charged with “two counts of criminal copyright infringement and one count of interstate transportation of stolen goods,” the DOJ said. He faces a maximum sentence of five years for the former, and 10 years for the latter.

Among blockbuster movies that Hale is accused of stealing are Dune, F9: The Fast Saga, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Godzilla v. Kong, and, perhaps most notably, Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The DOJ claimed that “copies of Spider-Man: No Way Home were downloaded tens of millions of times, with an estimated loss to the copyright owner of tens of millions of dollars.”

In 2021, when the Spider-Man movie was released in theaters only, it became the first movie during the COVID-19 pandemic to gross more than $1 billion at the box office, Forbes noted. But for those unwilling to venture out to see the movie, Forbes reported, the temptation to find leaks and torrents apparently became hard to resist. It was in this climate that Hale is accused of widely sharing copies of the movie before it was released online.

Feds arrest man for sharing DVD rip of Spider-Man movie with millions online Read More »

Review: Mickey 17’s dark comedic antics make for a wild cinematic ride

bong joon-ho, culture, film reviews, Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson / Paul Patrick / March 8, 2025

Mickey settles into his expendable role on the four-year journey, dying and being reprinted several times, and even finds love with security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie). The mission finally reaches Niflheim, and he’s soon on Version 17—thanks to being used to detect a deadly airborne virus, with multiple versions dying in the quest to develop a vaccine. As the colonists explore this cold new world, Mickey 17 falls into a deep fissure inhabited by native life forms that resemble macroscale tardigrades, dubbed “creepers.” Timo leaves Mickey for dead, assuming they’ll just eat him, but the creepers (who seem to share a hive mind) instead save Mickey’s life, returning him to the surface.

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) failed to read the fine print when he signed up as an “expendable.” Warner Bros.

When Mickey gets back to his quarters, he finds his replacement, Mickey 18, is already there. The problem goes beyond Nasha’s opportunistic desire for an awkward threesome with the two Mickeys. Multiples are simply not allowed. The controversial reprinting technology isn’t even legal on Earth and was only allowed on the colonization mission with the understanding that any multiples would be killed immediately and their consciousness backup wiped—i.e., a permanent death.

A tale of two Mickeys

It’s Pattinson’s impressive dual performance as Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 that anchors the film. They might be clones with identical physical traits and memories, but we learn there are subtle differences in all the printings. Mickey 17 is more laid-back, meekly suffering abuse in the name of progress, while Mickey 18 is more rebellious and frankly has some anger issues. Pattinson adopted two different accents to differentiate between the two. Mickey and Nasha’s love story is the movie’s heart; she loves him in all his incarnations, through death after death. The scene where she dons a hazmat suit to hold Mickey 14—or is it 15?—in his isolation chamber as he dies (yet again) from the airborne virus is among the film’s most touching.

Review: Mickey 17’s dark comedic antics make for a wild cinematic ride Read More »

“They curdle like milk”: WB DVDs from 2006–2008 are rotting away in their cases

dvd, Tech, warner bros. discovery / Paul Patrick / March 8, 2025

Although digital media has surpassed physical media in popularity, there are still plenty of reasons for movie buffs and TV fans to hold onto, and even continue buying, DVDs. With physical media, owners are assured that they’ll always be able to play their favorite titles, so long as they take care of their discs. While digital copies are sometimes abruptly ripped away from viewers, physical media owners don’t have to worry about a corporation ruining their Friday night movie plans. At least, that’s what we thought.

It turns out that if your DVD collection includes titles distributed by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, the home movie distribution arm of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), you may one day open up the box to find a case of DVD rot.

Recently, Chris Bumbray, editor-in-chief of movie news and reviews site JoBlo, detailed what would be a harrowing experience for any film collector. He said he recently tried to play his Passage to Marseille DVD, but “after about an hour, the disc simply stopped working.” He said “the same thing happened” with Across the Pacific. Bumbray bought a new DVD player but still wasn’t able to play his Desperate Journey disc. The latter case was especially alarming because, like a lot of classic films and shows, the title isn’t available as a digital copy.

DVDs, if taken care of properly, should last for 30 to up to 100 years. It turned out that the problems that Bumbray had weren’t due to a DVD player or poor DVD maintenance. In a statement to JoBlo shared on Tuesday, WBD confirmed widespread complaints about DVDs manufactured between 2006 and 2008. The statement said:

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is aware of potential issues affecting select DVD titles manufactured between 2006 – 2008, and the company has been actively working with consumers to replace defective discs.

Where possible, the defective discs have been replaced with the same title. However, as some of the affected titles are no longer in print or the rights have expired, consumers have been offered an exchange for a title of like-value.

Consumers with affected product can contact the customer support team at whv@wbd.com.

Collectors have known about this problem for years

It’s helpful that WBD recently provided some clarity about this situation, but its statement to JoBlo appears to be the first time the company has publicly acknowledged the disc problems. This is despite DVD collectors lamenting early onset disc rot for years, including via YouTube and online forums.

“They curdle like milk”: WB DVDs from 2006–2008 are rotting away in their cases Read More »

Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell

Childhood / Paul Patrick / March 7, 2025

This complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it.

School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave.

Also, there is a deliberate ongoing effort to destroy many of the best remaining schools and programs that we have, in the name of ‘equality’ and related concerns. Schools often outright refuse to allow their best and most eager students to learn. If your school is not hell for the brightest students, they want to change that.

Welcome to the stories of primary through high school these days.

Peter Gray reports on the Tennessee Pre-K experiment, where they subjected four year olds to 5.5 hours a day of academics five times a week. Not only did the control group (kids whose parents applied and got randomly rejected, so this was effectively an unblinded RCT) catch up on academics by third grade, the control group was well ahead by sixth grade, and the treatment group had a lot more rule violations and diagnosed learning disabilities. I think Peter’s conclusion that drill in Pre-K and kindergarten is actively bad is overreach, since the dose often makes the poison, but yeah focusing on drill that early seems terrible.

NYC officials consider virtual learning to reduce class size. It seems the law requires there be no more than 20 to 25 kids in a classroom depending on grade level. So the proposed solution is to get rid of some of classrooms entirely. Transparent villains happy to inflict torture upon children.

How to organize a protest against your teacher, recommended, made me smile.

Scott Alexander asks, given Americans clearly do not know basic facts that were supposedly taught in school, but do remember things through cultural osmosis, what is even the point of school? If you learn via spaced repetition, isn’t school failing rather miserably at that? The unstated question there is if you actually wanted to teach things, wouldn’t you used spaced repetition, which schools don’t use in any systematic way. The answer to the puzzle, of course, is that school is not about learning.

Your periodic reminder: Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture according to the San Francisco Unified School District. Features of ‘white supremacy culture’ include Perfectionism, Individualism, Sense of Urgency and Objectivity. They end by saying we can do better.

A theory, from a longer thread.

David Bessis: The #1 reason why we fail to teach math: we present it as knowledge without telling kids it’s a motor skill developed by practicing unseen actions in your head. Passive listening is useless, yet we never say it. We’re basically asking kids to take notes during yoga lessons.

Math is about reconfiguring our brains and reprogramming our intuitions. By ignoring this, we effectively refuse to teach math. We teach the cryptic symbols and convoluted formulas, but we never teach the secret art of making intuitive sense of them.

I think he severely oversells it in the longer thread, but he has a good point. You learn math by doing, by messing around, by experimenting and playing. Math lectures are relatively a waste of time.

Even getting math thought at all is increasingly hard. Here’s governor Newsom, signing a law, SB 1410, explicitly to force Algebra I to be taught to eighth graders, and all he can do is require the Instructional Quality Commission to ‘consider including’ that it be offered. What happens when they consider it, and simply say no?

Florida 9th graders rebel against their Algebra 1 state exam, refuse to take it despite it being a graduation requirement, in sufficient quantities to invalidate the test.

I do not see why any test would have an attendance requirement to count? Let the half that want to take it take it now, the other half can change their minds and study for a refresher when they realize they won’t graduate without it. At least if we don’t cave.

Alternatively, if the students can simply form a union and make the school cave, let’s see what else they want to do with that power, shall we?

Even if you end up at a ‘good’ school, a 10/10 rated school, what do you get? Mostly you get a lot of wasted time.

Tracing Woodgrains: This thread is absolutely correct. Sometimes people treat “good schools” as black boxes where you put kids in and education pops out, with everything working well

But for many kids, their core memory of even “good schools” will simply be waiting idly. So much more is possible.

Simon Sarris: The schools in my town are fine. The high school has 10/10 score on GreatSchools and the others have high scores for academics

But the best public (and many private!) schools still do very little in terms of education and take up too much time. Most engaged parents could not only do more with less time, but do more interesting things, and have more help around the house as the kids grow, since they’re around much more of each day.

The curriculum at so many schools just has terribly low expectations of what a child should be learning. Looking at the english/lit curriculum here was glum. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was disappointing at “elite” colleges now, too.

I have higher expectations than that.

I went to excellent catholic schools for 12 years. I had a fine time. I liked all my teachers.

Still, my biggest childhood memory of school was just waiting. Waiting for everyone else to be done, waiting for the day to be over, waiting to be picked up. I think we can do better.

Matthew Yglesias: It’s mostly child care (for young kids) or prison (for teens) where the hope is that some learning takes place. You could teach much more efficiently but then the kids would have to go somewhere else.

Freia (QTing Lehman below): Public school isn’t just tailored to the average student, it’s designed to oppress and humiliate smarter kids with genuine curiosity and enthusiasm for learning.

Every smart kid has stories of trying to read under the desk to escape the monotony and having their book taken.

These kinds of kids are acing the exams, and unlike e.g. talking, reading under the desk bothers no one. confiscation is just punitive.

It’s hilarious that their justification is always “respect”, as if it’s not disrespectful to waste hours of kids’ lives w/ useless “teaching.”

In HS i skipped a year of math by reading a textbook & taking a placement exam. it took me ~40 hours over 10 days to teach myself the material—taking the class would have been >200 hrs. the amount of kids’ time we’re wasting is totally unconscionable.

Why does this continue to be true? One reason: A lot of people do not care about smart kids. Or they actively want them to suffer.

Charles Fain Lehman (1m views): I think we underrate how hard it is to provide education to a range of abilities at scale. If the smart kids are bored, that’s an okay outcome.

Most interventions don’t work at scale! School kind of does some stuff! That’s pretty good!

I also spent a lot of time waiting as a kid. That was good! I’m glad that I was forced to wait. It was an important lesson in how my edification is not the most important thing.

But ofc, this is exactly the fallacy. “Everyone should have their ideal outcome.” But they can’t under given constraints! The question is always how to optimize.

In other words, you.

Seriously, what the actual ?

Here’s a general response: if you think (as the qt does) that “so much more is possible,” provide me with an evidence-based intervention that a) reduces smart kids’ boredom and b) yields large increases in attainment. I’m happy to hear about them!

Okay, at least that is a form of the right question. I don’t know why it has to be ‘and’ here. If the smart kids are not bored, or it increases attainment, either one of those is super awesome on its own. So can we do either or both of these things, at scale, without actively damaging the other?

Yes. Obviously. ‘Evidence based’ requires someone collecting whatever you consider admissible evidence for your particular court, but here are some interventions that seem very very obviously like they do these things.

Magnet schools or tracking. Give them their own classroom with more advanced topics. Why do I even have to say this.
Allow grade skipping, both in individual subjects and overall. If you can pass the tests, you can move up. Obviously this will help with both issues. If you say ‘what about socialization if you aren’t stuck in classrooms with kids exactly your own age’ short of kids trying to skip 4+ years prior to high school then I will flat out piledriver you.
Let kids acing a class do other things when bored, and ideally skip the busywork too. This could not be simpler. If you are getting an A, and you want to read a book about something else, or do homework for another class, go ahead. If you want to be a jerk limit it to ‘educational’ things, sure, fine.
Let the kid stay home and learn from LLMs and textbooks, provided they keep passing your periodic tests. Seriously.
Let the kid take online college classes. Arizona State University’s are $25 each and some are done by children as young as 8. Others are often outright free.

There is mostly universal agreement that great teachers are much better than good teachers, who are much better than bad teachers. There is not agreement about how to find, create or enable the good and great teachers, or how to fire and avoid the bad ones.

Strangest of all, there is no agreement that we even should in theory be firing the bad teachers and hiring good ones. It’s easier said than done, but you have to say it first. There are even those who say ‘it is wrong to attempt to get your child in front of better teachers, that’s not fair,’ which is somehow not a strawman.

Noah Smith: Progressives claim test scores are about family wealth. Conservatives claim test scores are about IQ. But a lot of test scores are about the government’s ability to FIRE BAD TEACHERS AND HIRE GOOD TEACHERS.

Alz: Here’s a fun paper by a Stanford econ JMC on grade school math teachers. Looking at AMC data matched to Linkedin, paper finds that even just decent, above-average middle/high school math teachers dramatically increase students’ AMC scores: top AMC scorers increase by 165%!

The paper in question is ‘Early Mentors for Exceptional Students,’ which is a different topic than finding good teachers in general, but finds that exceptional teachers going the extra mile can massively increase the chances talented students will win honors, attend selective universities, and have the most valuable career paths. There are obvious concerns about selection effects, they did some work to minimize that but I’d still be wary.

Alex Tabarrok emphasizes that the highest marginal educational value is in mentoring the smartest and most talented kids to be all they can be. Having access to a mentor greatly increases the chance that our best talent truly excels. Roughly half of the potential top math students in the country stay unidentified. Alas, so many in education think that when exceptional students get a chance to excel further, this is at best a nice to have, and perhaps even bad because it ‘increases inequality.’

The broader point from Noah Smith is also important. If we believe teacher quality is valuable, why are we in so many ways not acting like that?

Which leads to the question, what factors predict teacher quality?

Journal of Public Economics: Just published in @JPubEcon”The unintended consequences of merit-based teacher selection: Evidence from a large-scale reform in Colombia.“

The paper examines a nationwide merit-based teacher-hiring system in Colombia that replaced experienced contract teachers with higher test-performing new teachers. The reform decreased students’ test scores and reduced college enrollment and graduation by more than 10 percent.

The paper examines the effect of a nationwide merit-based teacher-hiring system, which replaced experienced teachers with high-performing new teachers. The new teachers could choose where they would go, replacing old teachers.

From what I (read: me asking Claude questions) could tell, the policy did not in any way evaluate the teachers being replaced, or attempt to replace bad teachers rather than good teachers. The new teachers decided where to go based on what they wanted. So effectively, they were replacing either random teachers, or the teachers with more desirable assignments.

Thus, what we find here is that when we replace random existing teachers en masse with new teachers, and do so without using local knowledge and relying mostly on test scores (see Seeing Like a State) the reduction in experience and non-measured qualities overwhelmed the new teachers scoring higher on the tests.

The study goes too far when it suggests that test scores are uncorrelated with teacher quality. I don’t care what studies show here, that doesn’t make sense. But it can be one factor of many, and relying on it too much can still be actively worse than the previously used methods, as can sticking teachers into new locations they’re not familiar with, as can lack of overall experience, all at once.

If you want to do a reform like this, it has to go hand in hand with firing the bad teachers rather than random teachers, or you’re going to at least be in for a very tough transition.

It is important to realize that teachers are sometimes very wrong about basic things, and sometimes when you point this out they dig in. It is remarkable the extent to which some people refuse to believe this, and tell people that they are lying or remembering wrong.

from r/NoStupidQuestions: My son’s third grade teacher taught my son that 1 divided by O is 0. I wrote her an email to tell her that it is not 0. She then doubled down and cc’ed the principal. The principal responded saying the teacher is correct… What do I do now?

Tbh, I’m mildly infuriated but I’m wondering if I’m just overreacting? Should I just stop fighting this battle?

Andrew Hoyer: Ask them to enter 1 / 0 into a calculator and report back.

Andrew Rettek: People say this is fake, but as a high school senior I had two teachers and my principal tell me that 22/7 was irrational.

Magor: Well, pi is irrational. So every fraction with numerators and denominators that are integers is rational except for the one that’s pi.

Andrew Rettek: This was their reasoning, yes. My principal literally told me that he thought that 22/7 was the only non repeating fraction.

Elizabeth van Nostrand: One year I worked as assistant at summer school for 3rd graders. The teacher said echolocation worked because water was made of electricity, and columbus was financed by the wife of King James of Spain.

Is this a case for or against formal education? Either way, it is wise.

At any given level of education, literacy rates have fallen dramatically, despite overall literacy rates remaining unchanged. Simpson’s Paradox! But as Alex Tabarrok points out, also a scathing indictment of the educational system, pointing to both the signaling model of education and also highly expensive inflation in that signal.

Schools in many places, including Palo Alto and Alameda, increasingly refuse to allow math acceleration. They flat out don’t let kids learn math at any reasonable pace, and this is allowed to continue in areas with some of the brightest student pools around. I wouldn’t mind too much if schools simply taught other subjects to the kids instead, it’s not like being way ahead in math is ultimately all that valuable and you can learn pretty easily on the computer anyway, but they’re flat out wasting hours a week of the kid’s time.

Andrew Bunner: Our district is as Niels describes. Our daughter got in trouble for working on her outside-school advanced math during class even though she finished the worksheet they were assigned.

Neils Hoven: The audacity of a student! To try to learn something while in school.

Benjamin Riley (Former deputy attorney general of California, founder of ‘Deans for Impact,’ self-described ‘influential voice in education’): It’s so weird this keeps happening to the children of the Tech Bro community. Will no one speak for them?

Niels Hoven: This is the former deputy attorney general of California and an influential voice in education, saying that if your child is stuck doing work below their ability, then you must be a Tech Bro and your child’s learning needs don’t matter.

Gallabytes: this happened *to me*. my parents are not remotely tech bros. they tried their best, put me in schools they felt were good, and those schools thought that the best way to enrich my math education was to make me teach the other kids. this WILL NOT HAPPEN to my children.

There are very few issues I’d emigrate over. mandatory public schooling is one of them, and things like this are why.

Mason: To understand tall poppy syndrome you have to fully accept that yes, they want your children cut down to size as well.

They do not feel that they have to hide this because they do not think it’s a bad thing. They think this is prosocial.

I suppose we now know what impact those deans want to have. Their issue is education. They are against it.

Niels Hoven has other examples as well, such as this one from Justin Baeder, a former principal now training other principals. Or this from his own experience, in response to Baeder asking “what would be the point?”

Niels Hoven: It’s fascinating to see “education thoughtleaders” who are not only unable to imagine the benefits of supporting high-achieving kids, they’re unable to imagine a world where it’s even possible!

I went to public school and took AP Calculus in 8th grade. For my entire school career, I was in group classes with kids no more than 2 years older than me, with the exception of 3rd-6th grade when I would do an hour of independent study during math class.

Every day when my 4th grader comes home, he asks how my conversations with his school are going because he’s tired of being taught material he already knows.

Don’t tell me that kids don’t want to be challenged, and don’t tell me that it’s impossible for us to do so.

But yeah, Justin Baeder can do so much better.

Justin Baeder: The academic acceleration maximalists are honestly worse than the sports dads living vicariously through their kids and making them hate the sport.

Yes, you probably CAN push your kid to do 10th grade math in upper elementary school. But…why?

Of course, if you have a true prodigy and they want to go all in on something, go for it. Just recognize that you are choosing a very difficult path for your child and yourself. This is not normal or healthy parenting, and doesn’t lead anywhere your kid will want to go.

How dare you actually attempt to have your kid actually learn things? Just flat out.

But it gets even better than that, wait for it…

Justin Baeder: Let’s say your kid reads many years above grade level, as mine do and always have.

Guess what—that just means they run out of books to read faster than everyone else!

What’s the goal here? How does it benefit the child to pay $$$ to push them even farther out?

That’s right. You need to be careful. They’ll run out of books!

That’s why you need to smuggle them in.

Pamela Hobart: just another underappreciated yet tremendously brave teacher protecting an uppity 5yo from running out of books here in South Austin, what a relief.

Quoted Post: Kindergarten parents: If your child could read entering Kindergarten, are they reading in class yet?

We’ve been pretty disappointed and are curious if it is the teacher or public school.

At the beginning of the year our daughter was excited to learn but now she says she hates to read and do math. She asked the teacher to read harder books and was told “no” – this was from her teacher and her teacher justified it by saying she doesn’t know if she has comprehension yet (she does).

My daughter confirmed she read a lot in preschool and has only read once in Kindergarten (when she brought her own books from home) in school. My daughter says she doesn’t want to bring books from home anymore or read at home because her teacher hates reading. We are worried to make a big fuss because the teacher told us our daughter should be in GT and we don’t want to jeopardize that if we just have a bad teacher this year but we can’t see our daughter continue to hate learning, when she used to enjoy it.

She also just got settled with friends. And if it matters we are seeing problems in math too where the teacher is working on counting to 10 still but my daughter can add/subtract 100+ and knows some multiplication tables.

Foxyavelli: It’s somehow rare kids are being held back from learning but literally everyone who knows a smart kid in school or was that kid has an anecdote.

Faded Magnet: This happens a lot, and it’s not new. Similar happened to me as a kid, because I arrived at school already reading. I just read what I wanted at home and played along at school.

David Hines: “why are you homeschooling, David?” WELL —

Ian Miller: I tell my sister we need bad teachers because there aren’t enough good ones to meet the necessary demand. But the current crop of bad ones seem determined to prove me wrong.

How should we think about solutions that only help high achievers?

We should think of them as highly valuable. Instead, we see the opposite.

Niels Hoven: This article is typical of the toxic attitudes toward high achieving kids.

High achieving students are seen as “the kids who need it the least” as though they’re some kind of second-class citizen. If they learn quickly, it isn’t a success, it’s a problem to be solved.

So yes: A huge portion of those tasked with educating students is working to actively sabotage our best and brightest, and often the other kids too, thinking this is good and also gaslighting everyone involved about the whole process.

Kelsey Piper: Our schools are failing children. Some parents, mostly the rich ones, have the time and confidence to speak out about it. Then people go “oh it’s a whiny privileged people problem”. No. Your schools are also failing the children whose parents don’t know how to speak out.

Not that it’d be acceptable to deny kids a good education because their parents are whiny privileged people! That’d be a cruel and evil thing to do! But in fact what we’re doing is denying all kids a good education and then looking who objects.

And then going “oh it’s only the rich people who object so it’s only their kids who are being harmed so it’s fine”, which is just evil on so many different levels I can’t quite fathom it.

Entertainingly many of these same people hate private schools on the grounds that it’s bad when privileged parents opt out instead of advocating to make the schools better. damned if you do, damned if you don’t.ta

Some places used to have standards, including standards for admission, like Thomas Jefferson High School. Then they killed many such places, so RIP, with national merit semifinalists down 50% in a year despite increased class sizes. And the entire county went from 264 semifinal candidates to 191, showing that this is a real loss.

A lawsuit was allowed to go forward challenging NYC’s gifted programs as ‘segregation,’ including targeting Stuyvesant High School and Bronx Science. It asserts that testing for academic ability is ‘racial’ and discriminatory. The admission tests in question are very similar to the SAT. The whole thing is madness and an attempt at civilizational suicide. If there is a law that makes that kind of admissions test illegal, it is incompatible with civilization, and the law must be repealed.

The latest formerly exceptional school we have learned was intentionally destroyed in the name of ‘equity’ comes from Philadelphia. You see, it’s important not to ‘disadvantage’ some students, so we have to ensure we don’t accidentally give others an education, or admit more talented students over less talented ones. Same old story. Out with the old motto, ‘dare to be excellent.’ And that was for all practical purposes the end of Masterman.

The obvious answer is, then only give such programs to the high achievers. Having looked at the details here, it’s actually a relatively non-toxic version of the concern, noting that if 95% of students fail to benefit from or use such programs, then they’re not a solution for that 95%. Which would for now make them not a general solution.

And yes, that’s disappointing, although I expect rapid improvements over time. Also disappointing is to call such kids ‘those who need it the least’ as if the goal of mathematics education was to hit some minimum bar and then stop. But this article seems to stop short of making the case many ‘equity’ advocates actually make and even put into practice, that Niels is warning about here, which is to claim that the success of the best students is actively a problem to be fixed.

Ozy Brennan: a question for people concerned with educational equity: if schools aren’t flexible enough to serve children who are multiple grade levels ahead, how well do they serve children who are multiple grade levels behind? (badly. it’s badly)

I also agree, for these reasons and also for others including cultural ones, that parents should have a right to see the curricula that is being imposed by force upon their children in a public school, so they know what and how their children are learning. And that a school or teacher refusing to share this information, or the state supreme court saying you don’t get to see it is a five alarm fire. I don’t see how someone can say ‘no this is a secret, you have no right to that, and send your kids to school or we’re calling the cops’ and not notice the skulls on their uniforms.

The ultimate proof that school is not about learning is that we know school starts too early for teenagers to properly sleep and thus be ready to learn, we’ve known forever, and it is impossible to fix this.

Lomez: The dread of school could be mitigated by 75 percent by simply letting children sleep in. Teenagers need significantly more sleep; without adequate amounts, they can become depressed and irritable. When I am education czar, the children will get their sleep.

Danielle Fong: My co-founder presented a study showing that teenagers learn better if they can sleep in a little more. The school responded with, “Well, we can’t adjust it now; we have a contract with the bus drivers.”

Oh, so the school is for the benefit of the bus drivers?

Much like the port is for the benefit of the longshoremen and the polity is for the benefit of politicians, eh?

Abstract: Using a natural experiment which randomized class times to students, this study reveals that enrolling in early morning classes lowers students’ course grades and the likelihood of future STEM course enrollment. There is a 79% reduction in pursuing the corresponding major and a 26% rise in choosing a lower-earning major, predominantly influenced by early morning STEM classes. To understand the mechanism, I conducted a survey of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory course, some of whom were assigned to a 7: 30 AM section. I find evidence of a decrease in human capital accumulation and learning quality for early morning sections.

Wait, a 7: 30 AM section? What fresh hell is that? When I was in college I did sign up intentionally for 9: 00 AM classes and given my sleep schedule that turned out fine, but the other kids clearly didn’t love it. A 7: 30 AM start time is nuts, such a thing should not exist, we need to amend the Geneva Conventions.

Still, the reduction seems extreme. 79% reduction in further classes is quite a lot if this was indeed a randomized trial. I presume some of it was the cultivation of hatred and aversion rather than pure lack of human capital. At this level, the classes at that hour are effectively non-functional. How can those involved not notice this? Why would anyone ever need (or want) to schedule a class that early? How many points are these kids attempting to take?

Legal battles continue (WSJ) over whether, if you decide to have charter schools at all, also allowing religious charter schools is then mandatory or forbidden. There does not appear to be middle ground. One of these violates the first amendment, the other does not, but it is not clear which is which. If it was mandatory, in some places charter schools would get a lot more support, and in other places they would get a lot less.

I do not think the government should be discriminating here, and imposing an effectively very large tax on those who want their children to go to religious schools, or any other kind of school, provided everyone has a local non-religious public school available. And frankly, a lot of the ‘non-religious’ public schools are effectively rather (non-traditionally, de facto) religious and have no intention of knocking it off, giving me even less sympathy.

Then there’s the step beyond that, those who appose privately funded private schools. People being mad that some pay for private school while also paying for everyone’s public school will never actually stop being weird to me, as will people who think this is super commonly done by people in the upper middle class purely for quality reasons.

Quinn: there’s this class of upper-middle/upper class urban yuppie that makes a big stink out of sending their kids to “public school” and man… I hate them. Yeah, your kid will go to your decent local K-5 and bolt when shit gets real, just like every aspirational underserved family.

Matt Bruenig: Reminder when approaching this discourse that 90% of children attend public schools, most of the rest attend so-so religious schools.

If ‘shit gets real’ in my local school, and I am being underserved, I do not know what that means, but it does not sound like a time to not be bolting? Yet most people do not have that option. Also, yes, it is very strange that the same person also thinks this:

Quinn: I want to see the urban public education system completely broken down and rebuilt from the bottom up. I do not hate that it exists; I hate how it is.

Again, seems like bolting conditions to me. If you are expecting parents to sacrifice their children on the alter of public pressure to improve failing schools, please speak directly into this microphone.

Tough but fair.

Politico: School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close.

Chris Freiman: Netflix has been wildly successful. Now Blockbuster locations might close.

Politico does point to some concerns. If standard schools are losing interest, why then destroy the schools that are exceptional, as many places are somehow doing? That seems rather perverse.

Hopefully the Montessori school could reconstitute itself, but the ‘vote with your feet’ plan only works if you close the schools that lose feet, not the ones that keep them.

Andrew Atterbury: One proposal aiming to turn a popular Fort Lauderdale magnet school that focuses on the Montessori teaching method into a neighborhood school brought a crowd nearing 200 people in opposition at a recent town hall. There, dozens of audience members, a sea of blue “VSY’’ shirts representing Virginia Shuman Young elementary, contended the plan would cause an unnecessary “disruption” for a top-rated school.

…

“If your product is better, you’ll be fine. The problem is, they are a relic of the past — a monopolized system where you have one option,” Chris Moya, a Florida lobbyist representing charter schools and the state’s top voucher administering organization, said of traditional public schools. “And when parents have options, they vote with their feet.”

The data cited in Politico says that the decline in enrollment due to increased homeschooling is modestly bigger than the increase in private school attendance, some of whom are getting scholarships to do it. Home school as always has principle-agent issues where you worry if the education is happening, if you do not trust parents to want to educate their children.

But yes, if you do not zero out the very high social cost of regular schooling, home schools start to look a lot better. If the city gave us a budget equal to what it costs them to have our kids in schools, I would 100% be putting together a vastly better homeschooling program with that money.

Always remember it could be so much worse.

Bryne Hobart: Discussions about school vouchers, homeschooling, etc. make me feel grateful that it’s legal for us to cook for our kids, even though neither my wife nor I went to culinary school. Things could be very different.

Microschools are an obviously great idea. The cost of private school is far in excess of the costs of hiring a teacher, renting a space and paying for plausible supply and other costs. You get the socialization benefits of school, and the flexibility and customization to not do the awful parts, and as a society we get to try different stuff.

Also, home schooling and stay-at-home parent are expensive, and now you can spread that cost around along with its benefits.

Getting rid of trivial inconveniences can help quite a lot in such cases. Instead of having to go through rezoning, the school will often find space it can use for free.

Matt Bateman: Microschools are an extremely good and natural format for schooling and the only reason they aren’t much more common is because of unnatural blockers.

“Hey maybe we should pool our children and resources around the best and most willing educator in our community” is an obvious and ancient approach to organizing schooling and it’s quite strange that we today have managed to greatly disincentivize it

Politico: Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, want to let tiny private schools open in libraries, movie theaters, churches and other spaces where they can fit makeshift classrooms.

…

Florida’s policy change appears small; it allows private schools to use existing space at places like movie theaters and churches without having to go through local governments for approval.

But it could have a dramatic impact. This shift gives these private schools access to thousands of buildings, opening the door for new education options to emerge without them having to endure potentially heavy rezoning costs.

Primer, a company poised to act as a support system for such schools, is backed by Sam Altman. The man’s past investments often have excellent taste and speak well of his values. I’d be curious what he has invested in this year, after the events of November.

Scientific American used to be a magazine my family subscribed to that contained cool articles about science. Now it is… something else.

The latest example of this is Scientific American’s hit piece on home schooling. Eric Hoel has a thread and a post detailing the situation. The part about educational results is misleading but reasonable. Then they start in on accusations of ‘abuse.’

That is the part where, after using a child that was not home schooled as justification for a moral panic, they cite a 36% rate of homeschooled children being reported for alleged abuse to show how horrible it is.

Except…

Well, it turns out researchers have an answer to that question. Here’s from a 2017 paper, “Lifetime Prevalence of Investigating Child Maltreatment Among US Children:”

We estimate that 37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years.

As Hoel notes, focusing on withdraws from school only, and other details, suggest that the base rate of abuse for home school is potentially substantially below normal. At worst, it is normal.

The good argument against home school is it requires a large investment of time and resources by the parents, so most families cannot afford to do it. Obviously, if you can get your child consistent 1-on-1 (or e.g. 4-on-1) attention and a customized path of study then that’s great, and will only get better now that AI tools are available.

Instead, the actual thesis of many against homeschooling, when they’re not making up things like the claims earlier in this section, is flat out that parents are not qualified to teach their children. And that those who claim that they could teach their own children things like how to read or write or do arithmetic are therefore ‘big mad’ and also presumably flying in the face of education and The Science.

Waitman Beorn: The Home Schooling Crowd is big mad. lol But also, how insulting is it to teachers who literally train specifically to teach kids of a certain age a specific subject that Ashton and his trad wife think they can do it just as well in the playroom of their log cabin mansion?

Charles Rense: I read the replies, and they were for the most part polite and reasonable in their disagreement. The only one who’s “big mad” is you.

Polimath: How insulting to the academic institutions is it that parents with little or no training end up educating their kids better than the teachers who literally train specifically to teach kids?

Austin Allred: Anti-homeschooling folks often have expectations of school teacher qualifications that are just wildly out of touch with reality.

Jake McCoy: Dr. Waitman admitting he couldn’t teach 2nd grade math is not a great look for him.

Prince Vogelfrei: People say smug shit like this while not doing the tiniest bit of research on homeschooling outcomes which beat public schooling in every standardized test category. California makes everyone do tests, we have the data. But what does the truth matter when superiority is to be had.

Most people do not care about results, they care about process – particularly a process which ensures no one can really be blamed and avoid the messiness that ensues

It is beyond absurd to think that an average teacher, with a class of 24 kids, couldn’t be outperformed by a competent parent focusing purely on their own child. The idea that if you don’t specifically have an ‘education degree’ that you can’t teach things is to defy all of human experience and existence. Completely crazy. And yet.

Austen Allred: The conventional view any time you dare to suggest there might be a more optimal way to learn than the existing school system.

I love that it’s a he that ends up on this hypothetical stripper pole at 16.

Kelsey Piper answers questions about her private tiny home school. Parents typically teach a weekly class, student/teacher ratio is 4:1 to 6:1, full price is $1200/month/child. All reports I’ve heard are quite good, but of course talent involved is off the charts.

Comparing the Bryan Caplan home school method to Robinson’s similar one, with critique of the general framework and focus. Both focus on not helping the student, letting them work things out, with Robinson being full on ‘the student must never be helped with any problem.’

They assigned kids two hours of math a day. I am confused why that is needed, if you train in math reasonably less than half of that should be plenty. I get that history and music are secondary priorities, but cutting them out entirely seems like a mistake, although honestly art can go. I also don’t see how most children could focus like that. I know mine would have no hope no matter how hard I tried. In general, why so much time in a chair doing school-style work? I don’t understand how that helps.

Of course all of it is obsolete now. If you have access to Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude Opus, all previous learning techniques are going to look dumb.

The constant refrain I hear is ‘but what about socialization?’ Which seems crazy to me, and I love this way of putting it.

Violeta: Re: the socialization issue with homeschooling

I asked my 16yo daughter who went back to high-school this year “do you wanna continue next year?”

“I don’t think I’m ready for the isolation of sitting 6h with people only of my exact age and an adult speaking at us for 90% of the time, I need to socialize more.”

There are far better ways to get socialization. What socialization you do get in school, from what I can tell, is by default horribly warped in deeply unhealthy ways. Most of the value is essentially ‘you might make a friend at all, and then interact with them outside of school in your few hours of freedom.’ There are better ways to find friends.

Aella summarizes her home school experience, listing pros and cons of the type she experienced. The cons are that parents control what you learn and who you see, and your social skills and knowledge base are different from other kids. The pros are you don’t waste massive amounts of time instead learning at your own pace, you don’t get stratified by age and you dodge a lot of toxic dynamics in normal schools.

Her description of her three months in normal high school instruction, where everything is checking off a box and no one actually cares, tells you that yes it can be otherwise, we should be horrified by our defaults. If your soul has not yet been crushed and you show up most of the way through the process, the soul crushing engine becomes impossible to miss.

If you are a parent, presumably ‘choose what to teach’ is pro rather than a con, and you will choose something reasonable. So the only cons are having quirky socialization touchstones rather than the insane ones we get in primary and high school, which all mostly gets overridden anyway? Yeah, choice seems very clear if everyone involved can handle and invest in the process.

The exact opposite method is illustrated in this video, the concept of never making a child do anything they do not choose to do on their own. As several people here note, this is the ‘homeschool with no effort by doing actual nothing’ method, and by default it is absolutely be an excuse for negligence. It can also be done right, via noticing what children actually want and ensuring they find it and helping steer them, which requires work as active as other methods.

When can you teach children about law and procedure and proof? Tracing Woodgrains suggests about 8, Kelsey Piper thinks similarly.

Michael Gibson asks a good question, but the opposite might be even better?

Michael Gibson: Why do kids hate school? If you don’t have an answer to that question then you’re not even in the conversation, let alone the debate.

Rebel Educator: The tragedy inside America’s K-12 schools.

Here’s another question. Why do kids love school?

Notice that teachers are saying that 95% (!) of their kids love Kindergarten (I can’t imagine they’re paying close attention, given my anecdata and this very different poll even if its sample is biased, but perhaps normies be norming), they still believe 74% love fourth grade, and even at the trough 37% are supposedly loving Grade 9.

If you force kids into a fixed location and subject them to strict control and force them to work at arbitrary stuff for roughly half of waking hours, these would be very good rates of loving the results, if the teachers are describing the kids remotely accurately. Consider that if you ask people if they ‘love’ their job, that’s going to score rather lower. We’re doing some things very wrong, but we must also be doing some things very right.

In relative terms this reaction seems roughly right? You start out with ‘hang out with other kids and mostly do fun things,’ which plausibly kids do mostly enjoy, then they turn it into progressively more sitting still for lectures and progressively more homework and busywork and wear you down for years. Then as high school progresses you start to get a bit of flexibility back and the world lets you do things like walk on your own or select classes or do actual work, so things improve a bit.

Remember, it could be so, so much worse.

Richard Hanania: In South Korea, 84% of five year-olds and 36% of *two year-oldsattend private tutoring schools. What causes a culture to go this far off the rails? This is genuinely horrifying.

Again, not for every child all the time, even in a ‘normal’ school.

But for many children, it mostly makes them miserable while wasting their time.

And I’d boldly claim that this is not good.

And I disagree with Tracing Woods in that actually they can articulate this pretty damn well most of the time.

Tracing Woods: I hated school starting in first grade. I wanted to go faster, wanted more interesting work, wanted something better. I kept wanting this and kept leaping at any available alternative through twelfth grade. Kids can’t fully articulate their desires. But they know.

Kelsey Piper: I’m not going to say “kids are 100% accurate at identifying the best learning environment for them”. But they will absolutely tell you “I hate school” if they hate school. They will tell you by begging you to quit your job and homeschool them, by telling you it’s okay if that means the family ends up homeless, we can set up a tent in the lot on the corner. They will tell you by pretending to be sick, and by really being sick.

If they love their school, they tell you that too. They will tell you by begging you to take them in to their school on weekends. They’ll spend Christmas break complaining that school isn’t in session. They’ll say to you thoughtfully ‘I do really love my summer camp, but it makes me sad to be missing out on school’.

If you’ve decided your five or six year old is too stupid to be worth listening to, you may miss the signs they’re in a really bad situation that is harming them a lot – and you’ll definitely be teaching them that their education is not something in which they are active participants, not something where their perspective is valued, not something where their experiences even matter.

I also hear a lot of people say ‘if you let them choose, won’t they just choose whatever school is easiest and has the most toys?”. No. They won’t. One family at our microschool literally had their child do a side by side comparison by attending public school and the microschool for a period of time and then choosing where they wanted to go. The child loved the amenities that the public school offered – it had way more funding! It was big enough to have a soccer team!

But they were desperately bored. They said that everything the teacher said, they already knew. They spent all day being told to be quiet while the teacher said boring things. And they didn’t want that.

Almost everyone was supportive, with many similar stories. Then there was one person who spoke up to say that kids saying they are miserable is fine, actually.

Ed Real (Teacher): Vomitous drama queen tripe. In Kelsey’s fantasy world, people are secretly wondering “why isn’t my kid begging for me to homeschool them? What’s wrong with me?”

Kelsey Piper: I think you may have misread. I was saying that children do beg their parents to homeschool them sometimes. If your children aren’t, that’s a good thing!

Ed Real: Oh, no, I understand what you’re saying and it’s designed to get parents to worry if their kids aren’t soooooooooo engaged with their school life that they’re DEMANDING more! In fact, a kid begging for homeschool or private school or whatever needs to be squelched routinely.

Kelsey Piper: Do you think that kids are never miserable in their school environment and are only pretending to desperately seek alternatives, or do you think that they are miserable but that the correct way for parents to respond when their children are miserable is ‘squelching routinely’?

EdReal: I think your inability to distinguish between misery and a kid whining that he’s miserable is a very big part of your delusion. Absent criminal neglect or abuse, “miserable” is not the word to use about a child’s state of mind. Not seriously, anyway.

Especially since you’re claiming these kids are “miserable” for academic reasons. I mean, social reasons, bullying, sure. But academic? Please.

And yes, I’m saying you are positing such children to make other parents envious.

Scott Alexander: I was miserable at school and begged my parents to home school me. I still endorse this 30 years later, and my parents (who refused at the time) in retrospect agree. I can’t figure out if you’re denying my existence or saying that because I was a child my feelings didn’t matter.

Ed Real: Neither. I am saying that “miserable” is not an accurate description of your state of mind. You were a bright kid who felt you could do better. Oh, well. Pretty obvious you didn’t suffer career-wise.

Keller Scholl: It is always striking to me that one of the most common nightmares is being back in school, under the control of people like this poster, and this is not seen as a failure of schools.

Mike Blume: Teachers on [Twitter] doing a fucking fantastic job of making me want to entrust my children to their institutions.

Rohit: People forget their own schooling, I think. Things I did to show school was boring:

Repeatedly said school was boring.

Skipped all classes.

Created a pro and con list on why I should spend all my time in the library.

Read advanced textbooks for fun.

Not taking children seriously is wrong.

I think that if a child tells you they are miserable at school, chances are they are miserable at school. And yes, of course I speak from experience. Do people doubt that being constantly bored, for hours every day, is insufficient?

As in:

In class I’d pass the time

Drawing a slash for every time the second hand went by

A group of five

Done twelve times was a minute

But

Shameika said I had potential

– Fiona Apple, Shameika

I mean, yes, that is pretty miserable. Stop pretending it isn’t. Or that it doesn’t matter when a particular teacher is very much not Shameika, so long as you ‘turn out okay.’

There are plenty of other reasons that school can become a five alarm fire you need to get away from (e.g. Fiona Apple also notes ‘I wasn’t afraid of the bullies and that just made the bullies worse.’) But boredom and wasted time is enough.

You can do so much more, and we should treat failure to excel where it was possible similarly to how we (should and used to but increasingly also don’t) treat failure to stay at grade level for average students.

Daniel Buck: We need to quit wasting the time of gifted students and make it easier for them skip grades.

How many spend their days twiddling their thumbs after finishing the days work in minutes, waiting for their classmates? Or worse, getting conscripted to be the teacher’s errand runner?

I actually think being the teacher’s assistant is far better than thumb twirling, especially if the thing you assist with is the actual teaching. Still not ideal.

Matt Bateman: People are so used to talking about minimum acceptable outcomes in education that they truly have no idea how high-variance educational outcomes can and should be.

The top quartile of students can skip grades. The top 2 percent of students can do an entire multiyear curriculum in *weeks*.

As Nuno Sempere says, there are obvious problems with ‘kids decide when they get to drop out of regular school.’ At minimum, there need to be highly credible costly signals sent, rather than simply expressing a preference. Kids often have to be told to do things they don’t want to do. And you want a credible signal of how much they don’t want to be there, not one designed to get them what they want.

I have a very strong commitment, that if this kind of misery around school appears and is sustained, then that is that. Especially if they successfully locate and point out this statement.

Democracy mostly works, to the extent it works, because when things are truly terrible, people get mad and then they Throw the Bums Out. Like the children miserable at school, we do not know what we need, but we know when conditions are miserable and it is time for a change.

Also it is insane how many people use the argument Kelsey Piper talks about below, and do so with a straight face. Indeed the comments contain many people condemning Kelsey Piper as bad for not sacrificing her children on some symbolic alter.

Kelsey Piper: I also get really irritated by “you should send your kids to bad public schools because people like you doing that is what makes them into good public schools”. I’m willing to make a lot of sacrifices for my community. Wronging my kids isn’t one of them.

I am happy to donate to local classrooms in need of supplies (I do make those donations). I am happy to volunteer in local classrooms if they need me. I am not happy to condemn my kids to unhappiness, and I frankly don’t think I have the right to do so.

They deserve some input into where they spend 40 hours a week and they want it to be in a safe environment with challenging academic work and individualized curriculum and support in pursuing their ambitions.

And again.

Kelsey Piper: The weirdest and most horrifying thing about the school choice discourse was the apparently universal assumption, on left and right, that the only thing that matters about schools is student population. On the left the takeaway was that by removing a child from a school you wronged the school; on the right the takeaway was that there is no hope for general improvements in education, just the hope that you can be better than other people at securing a place for your children in the schools with “high quality” children.

A lot of the families I know of that took their kids out of a local public school did so because their child wasn’t learning to read. Their child wasn’t learning to read because they needed phonics-based reading education and the school did not offer it. Now it was third grade and the child was badly behind, fed up with the whole concept of reading, had lots of bad habits around bluffing and faking it, and felt deeply ashamed of themselves. That family would have been much much better served by a school with the identical student body, but a better reading instruction program.

I talked recently to another parent whose school had a problem with parents fleeing for private schools. The principal of the school forbade students from doing ahead-of-grade-level work, including checking out ahead-of-grade-level books from the library. The problem wasn’t the student body. The problem was this rule.

Interruption to highlight that yes this is a thing. There are schools where they are very strict about not allowing students to get more of an education than they are supposed to get. No books that are too advanced. It is a crime against humanity, and I mean that.

Kelsey Piper: When I was in third grade at a public school, the teacher called up my mom to try to tell her that I would not be allowed to take advanced math, because the teacher thought it wasn’t healthy for girls to take advanced math. My mom objected and I got into advanced math, but I had a miserable year under that teacher, who kept me inside on detention every day on various pretexts (I’d never gotten in trouble before or since). The classmates were not the problem. The problem was the teacher.

When I was in tenth grade, the school inexplicably assigned a person who didn’t know Calculus to teach the Calculus class. He identified the smartest boy in the class on the first day and told that boy to teach us all. He did his best.

Another reason kids frequently struggle at school is because the school starts at 8am. Those kids would thrive at a school that started at 10am. Their parents often wish they had that option, but they don’t.

Interruption number two: Oh my yes, and this effect can be rather large.

Kelsey Piper: I understand that there’s a lot of research to the effect that peer effects on education are much more reproducible than teacher effects on education. And certainly ‘who attends the school’ predicts test scores more strongly than ‘are the teachers any good’. But I think somehow we have jumped from that to a deranged insistence that the only thing that can be good or bad about a school is the student body, which carries implicitly an insistence that schooling is fundamentally zero-sum, that there are no wins that do not come at someone else’s expense, that to desire your child be happy is to desire someone else’s child suffer.

When I say a school is bad, I mean ‘it does not teach reading’. I mean ‘it does not allow students to work ahead at their own pace’. I mean ‘the teacher was hostile to my child’. I mean ‘the teacher was sexist’ or ‘the teacher was incompetent’ or ‘the teacher was not sober’ or ‘the teacher was not familiar with the material’. Bullying and unsafety are ways a school can be bad for kids, but not only is it not the only way, in the cases I’ve run into it’s usually not even in the top three reasons why a child is miserable at school.

When I say a school is good, I mean that kids spend their time doing work that they’re bought in on, work that matters to them, work they care about, work that’s challenging and interesting. I mean that they want to be there. I mean that the adults who teach and mentor and support them are trustworthy and trusted.

Under the worldview where all we can do is shuffle student bodies, school choice is suspect, probably just another way for some people to profit at the expense of others. But under the worldview where schools vary in quality and in which traits they possess, school choice (if implemented justly) is obviously a good idea. It’s a good idea in two ways. The first is a form of accountability which isn’t about test scores. Schools where the teachers are miserable bullies will lose students to other schools that do better at hiring. Schools that don’t serve their students will lose out to ones that do.

The second advantage is that children are different from each other! Some want to start at 8am because they drive their parents nuts by being up since 5 anyway. Some need to start at 8am for their job. But some work night shifts or have late risers and job flexibility and benefit from a late start. Some kids do well in orderly quiet classrooms; some do well with hubbub and flexibility. Some kids care a lot if the school allows them to work ahead, and some don’t. School choice allows people to self-sort around what works for their child.

It’s obviously not a panacea. We know that because we’ve had school choice in various forms for a while now and I observe a distinct lack of panacea around here. Incentives to solve education only get you so far if no one knows how to solve education. The well-intentioned focus on testing introduced the most painful costly clear-cut Goodharting I’ve seen in any industry. And any system that involves parents taking action will benefit the kids with active and involved parents, and practically all processes benefit the wealthy because that’s in a very fundamental sense what wealth means.

But once you acknowledge that schools can be good or bad because of policies and teachers and curriculums, and that schools can be different in ways that make them a better or worse fit for a child, and that we’re not playing some relentlessly depressing zero-sum game where every benefit for any child is extracted from some other child, I think the question becomes “what would a good policy regime here look like?”.

One thing that I am very grateful about California is that you can just start your own school, pretty straightforwardly. There are no state fees; the legal requirements aren’t even that onerous. You and a few of your friends can get together and see if you can build something that’s good for your kids, and if it is, you can open it up to more kids. This does not just reshuffle the kids. It makes it possible to do better. And when you have an unsolved problem, like how to provide just, high quality education to every child everywhere, it’s really valuable to open up the possibility of inventing and iterating and finding something better.

And – if a child is miserable, their misery matters. If your child is miserable, you need to help them. Even if the studies show they’ll be fine as an adult, this is a human being, over whom you have power, to whom you have duties, and they do not only matter for their future trajectory. http://GreatSchools.com will not tell you whether your child’s school is good or bad for them, but your child will. Please listen.

Sarah Constantin: “surely nobody would criticize Kelsey for putting a ton of work into founding a goddamn school to make sure her kids got a good education, that’s like motherhood and apple pie”

oh no.

It is indeed literally motherhood, and a central part of it. And yet.

Many times, in many ways, they make it hell. On purpose.

Then they justify that because you need to be ready for more hell, and say that overrides everything else in life.

Wes: Exhibit A in why I hate school. This is from Roxie’s preschool. They don’t let the kids inside until 9am, so if they show up early, kids will often play on the playground right next to the entrance. This is now banned. The reason is “the morning transition time is very important in order for the students to begin their day ready to learn.”

This is the petty tyranny of school administrators. They have the authority to make rules, so they do whatever is most convenient for them, and always default to “don’t let the kids have any fun.” Kids enjoying themselves is seen as a threat to the educational environment. IN PRE SCHOOL. It just gets worse as the kids get older. It’s not just the kids who associating learning with being bored and uninterested – it’s the adult too. So apparently they need a ten minute “transition time” to stop having fun and get ready to go be bored in class.

Outdoor playtime is now referred to as “gross motor time” because kids can’t just play. It has to have some pedagogical purpose.

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“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft

gaming / Paul Patrick / March 7, 2025

Viral success (for someone else)

VoltekPlay writes on Reddit that it was only alerted to the existence of My Baby or Not! on iOS by “a suspicious burst of traffic on our itch.io page—all coming from Google organic search.” Only after adding a “where did you find our game?” player poll to the page were the developers made aware of some popular TikTok videos featuring the iOS version.

“Luckily, some people in the [Tiktok] comments mentioned the real game name—Diapers, Please!—so a few thousand players were able to google their way to our page,” VoltekPlay writes. “I can only imagine how many more ended up on the thief’s App Store page instead.”

Earlier this week, the $2.99 iOS release of My Baby or Not! was quickly climbing iOS’s paid games charts, attracting an estimated 20,000 downloads overall, according to Sensor Tower.

Marwane Benyssef’s only previous iOS release, *Kiosk Food Night Shift*, also appears to be a direct copy of an itch.io release.

The App Store listing credited My Baby or Not! to “Marwane Benyssef,” a new iOS developer with no apparent history in the game development community. Benyssef’s only other iOS game, Kiosk Food Night Shift, was released last August and appears to be a direct copy of Kiosk, a pay-what-you-want title that was posted to itch.io last year (with a subsequent “full” release on Steam this year)

In a Reddit post, the team at VoltekPlay said that they had filed a DMCA copyright claim against My Baby or Not! Apple subsequently shared that claim with Bennysof, VoltekPlay writes, along with a message that “Apple encourages the parties to a dispute to work directly with one another to resolve the claim.”

This morning, Ars reached out to Apple to request a comment on the situation. While awaiting a response (which Apple has yet to provide), Apple appears to have removed Benyssef’s developer page and all traces of their games from the iOS App Store.

“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft Read More »