When I think of the ideal place for sleeping it's something like, peaceful, dark, and quiet. The chaotic bright loud stage of a contra dance is pretty far from this, and yet generations of kids have curled up behind their parents and fallen asleep:

It's a good idea to make them a nest they can crawl into when they're feeling sleepy:

While this post touches on biosecurity it's a personal post and I'm not speaking for my employer

If you want to prevent airborne spread of diseases you have a few options:

• Filter breath (masks, PAPRs)
• Replace the air (ventilation)
• Clean the air (filters, UV light)

Masks, fans, and air filters are widely available, but what about UV? The CDC recommends upper-room UV, it has a long history of successful use in with TB, and in many cases it's great fit for the space. Look on Yelp, though, and no installers come up:

Maybe people are missing a good business opportunity, or maybe it's the kind of opportunity that's only ok but is worth it for the altruistic impacts of directly reducing spread and normalizing UV? Seems worth finding out!

In general, we don't want our kids (10y, 8y) to hit each other. Learning to control your impulses is an important skill, and resorting to violence is usually a substitute for other skills we're prefer them to practice (understanding what the other person wants, negotiating). Also they could hurt each other.

On the other hand, sometimes the kids enjoy hitting each other. This is very different from hitting out of anger: they're both having fun, they're not trying to injure each other, it's more about force than impact, etc. Even calling both of these activities "hitting" is a bit misleading: a hit intended to inflict pain looks very different than one intended to knock the other off balance or push them farther away on the couch to gain a strategic advantage.

Lily recently asked me to help them with a song they'd written. They'd written out the lyrics and had a melody, but they wanted me to play backup and help them make a music video. Here's what we ended up with:

Lily started with a hand-written lyrics sheet, but I wanted to follow along which meant getting it typed up:

I often talk to people who don't find LLMs useful. Paraphrasing:

Why would I want to ask questions to a thing that might give me the right answer but might also make something up that fools me into thinking it's right? I've played with them, but they don't seem like they'd save me any time.

My experience with has been that there are some things LLMs are much better at than others and you need to learn where they're suitable, but overall I get a lot out of working with them. I went back over my recent history in Claude, the one I use most, and here are cases where I found it helpful:

In general I'd like to see a lot more of people writing about their failures in addition to their successes. If a bunch of people all try a thing and have mixed results, and only the people with good results write about it, people who don't know about this selection bias or don't realize its extent are going to end up with overly positive views. I've written about some of my mistakes, and I think it would be good if this were a higher fraction of my posts.

On the other hand, once other people are involved this isn't entirely up to me. One place this comes up a lot is parenting: I don't want to write things about my kids that they don't (or won't) want public. This is especially tricky if I write a post about something we've tried which worked well in part because the kids did a good job with it, and then later they stop doing a good job.