I have a relative whose 8 year old has shown a keen interest in coding. He even takes books out of the library about coding even though he's never done it and I dont think he understands most of what he's reading. Seems like a little Bill Gates just dying to get started.

I used to teach LOGO to kids back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and I looked at some recent versions. Its good, and the logic is all there, but the end results are fairly mundane for a kid who's already experienced amazing video games. Then I stumbled across Scratch, a much more visual programming tool and it seems to fit what we need. Scratch allows kids to make animations, simple games, even do motion detection, music all with sprites that they can manipulate using drag and drop coding blocks. Lots of online video tutorials that he can follow himself too. https://scratch.mit.edu/

Before I dive headlong into Scratch, just wondering if there are other even better tools for teaching coding to kids? Or what your experience might be with them?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like boeing, urban planning and insurance.auto. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was mycket förvirrad.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Greetings Tildeans!

I am wrapping up my Ph.D. and am pursuing a teaching-focused career in higher education. I am currently in talks for a 4-year institution teaching faculty position that would revolve around teaching a subject I am passionate about and could provide a lot of intellectual stimulation. Unless something wild happens the offer is there and we are just negotiating the parameters. I also have a position that is in 2nd-phase interviews for a community college tenure track position that would be teaching general biology, anatomy, and physiology. I feel optimistic that they are going to offer me a position, but nothing is concrete yet.

I'm at this impasse because both have really good reasons for doing them and would provide experiences unique from the other. I am trying to balance the pros and cons between these two positions and consider what might be good for my career in the long run, and so I was hoping I could get some advice. Even if you're not in academia I think it would be helpful to get some outside prospective. I'm gonna list my thoughts on it below.

4-year University

Pros:

-Teach upper level and domain specific courses with opportunity to design courses I am passionate about.
-Integrated into scientific community if I want to to do more research/keep abreast of scientific advancements.
-Great community of teaching faculty with lots of support.
-Could be good curriculum vitae experience if I want to stay teaching at a 4-year institution, and could open up teaching psychology courses.
-Option to develop a community outreach project I am passionate about, not sure if there is support for me but there is infrastructure there.
-Partner's family is in the area, and it is a big metropolitan area with lots to do.
-Can get tuition at 25% cost for my partner and I incase we want to get some other degrees.

Cons:

-Pay is not great (does have option of picking up extra summer online classes to earn more).
-My partner and I don't want to live here long term, primarily because of climate, and cost of living is increasing. We are already ready to move, but this is a good opportunity.
-Is contract based, so not as much job security. Having said that, many of the teaching faculty have been there a long time and it seems like the student body for this department is generally growing.

Community College

Pros:

-Pay is pretty good, and there is a baked in growth of salary as long as you stay there long term. Pay could be as much as $15K more starting out than the 4-year institution.
-Small class sizes, so better teacher:student ratio means more involved education.
-Cost of living in the area is pretty cheap (so far).
-Beautiful area and would put us closer to a part of the country we would like to live in long term.
-I do like biology and physiology, just not as much as neuroscience.
-From my understanding there is lot of support and easy options to get into administration if so desired. All the faculty I briefly met had been there at least 7 years.

Cons:

-Only lower levels courses, with little room to develop new ones.
-Not sure how this would impact my ability to switch to a 4-year institution if I end up craving that intellectual stimulation.
-The area is in a part of California that does have issues with forest fires (not the town proper), and the county swings hard in the opposite direction of my politics.
-Small town so there isn't as much to do.

Overall, the community college looks best on paper. We're not planning on having kids so family support isn't as big of a deal. My main concern is if I could switch back to a 4-year institution if I feel like I'm missing something. So if anyone has any thoughts please let me know, in particular if there are other things I'm not considering that you think are worth examining.

Edit: Just to add some additional information. As part of making myself a good candidate for higher education, I have worked as a teaching assistant for several courses during grad school and I have taught online physiology as an adjunct professor at a community college, so I have some experience in both environments.

Thanks ahead of time!

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Im part of the EPMO of a healthcare system. We just got licenses and an intro to co-pilot for teams, word, excel , PowerPoint.

I swear this AI will tell you all the questions asked during a meeting. If you join a meeting late you can ask it to recap the meeting thus far. Did you get a sales presentation from a vendor you need to recap and present to stakeholders. Ask co pilot to create a pdf from the documentation the vendor provided.

AI is making my job so much easier but at the same time I kinda feel like I’m training my replacement.

Are you using AI at your job, how are you using it and how do you feel about it use in the workplace and if it will one day replace you?

It's nearly 6am here and I can't sleep because our sitter has decided last minute that she can only look after my pup from 9am - 7pm this coming weekend after confirming an overnight months ago, which has left us scrambling to find suitable care. I appreciate that because my dog has some stranger danger issues we're working through, his care isn't straightforward but apart from that he's young and healthy (no need for medications at specific times, etc.).

We've had multiple paid meetups with her since December last year to make sure he's comfortable around her. We've been explicit from the beginning that we will be back from this event late at night therefore we would be happy to pay an overnight fee and there is the option of staying in the guest bedroom if she's not comfortable travelling home that late at night. I said this multiple times. I understand that part of it is because she's been unwell for a while and another part is needing to get back to her own dogs but this is an absolute nightmare. We've been planning this for months. She's suggested getting someone else to cover the bit from 7pm onwards but because of his fearfulness of strangers I'm terrified of this happening without our supervision.

We have a backup sitter but she's recently gotten a puppy of her own so I have no idea if she'll be able to pitch in and help at such short notice. We need to be at the venue at 9am so my pup will need to be crated until the main sitter arrives - we already can't be there for one handover, the thought of another one having to happen is just more co-ordination to go wrong and more stress and worry for me. The easiest thing to do at this point would be to cancel the whole sit and miss my friend's wedding (at the very least my partner can still attend). There's just no good outcomes anymore: it's either cancel and stay home or we get sitter cover, we both go to the wedding, I'm miserable and worried the entire time.

It's not just this one off thing though. Actually finding a suitable sitter in the first place was a complete headache and it's been a constant uphill battle with trainers too. We had a trainer who was fantastic for several months but then got sick with covid before Christmas and since then contact with her has just completely petered out. Another trainer offered a six week package so I paid for the initial £115 assessment only to be told that she suddenly had to move to Manchester and couldn't commit to six weeks anymore, but she could offer two sessions in the fortnight that she had to get ready to leave (spoilers: she couldn't, turns out moving cities is a lot). A third trainer talked a big game over messages but it was utterly impossible to organise a session with him at all. As soon as I suggested an actual, tangible date instead of asking for his availability for a third time it was radio silence. Our weekly puppy classes are the only reliable constant in our lives.

It's genuinely put me in a bit of a crisis. Am I the problem? Have we just had fantastically shitty luck? Is this just the industry standard? Like, is this normal and does it just suck for everyone? My mood's absolutely spiralled from reflecting on all this, I love my boy to pieces but if this is the typical experience I just don't think I have it in me to own another dog after this. I want to believe that I'm just tired and cranky and it'll get easier once he's 2 or 3 years old, but right now everything around dog ownership is a miserable, miserable slog.

Other dog owners: please, please share your experiences.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

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To start: I was taught in the 90s when I first entered the "internet" that "everything online is public. The End."
I still adhere to that. I am perhaps a bit overly cautious and whatnot, as I will forego convenience to have the feeling of privacy (though in some cases I believe it's just a smokescreen).

That being said, the main premise to my question is this: I have three cards with which I pay for things. I have a debit card which I use for most purchases, a credit card I use for large purchases I can't immediately cover with my bank account, and a credit card for two specific payments. Every December my company gifts all employees a $100 Visa gift card. I tend to splurge on things I'd rather not have show up in my bank account or credit card, because I feel my purchase habits are tracked (similar as to when I put in a local brewery into Waze... and yeah, I use Waze.)

And now to my actual question: is there a credit company, or a method of credit/debit card I can utilize that will not track/share/etc my personal or purchase info? I had never thought of this idea, aside from the gift cards which usually come with some form of caveat (you lose money on fees for a prepaid card, or you can lose your balance if not spent in a certain time frame, etc) until just now I guess. I found privacy.com which looks kind of legit, but ... I'm always skeptical to start.

All that being said, if you could offer any advice or thoughts on the matter, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

(Edit: the original reason I ask this is because I was thinking that I use Discord a lot and would like to throw a few bucks their way and customize my profile or something "fun" like that, but I do not want them to have my info.)

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

I finally swapped my pre-historic phone for something a little more current and would like to play some games on it. I'm not a big fan of touch controls for games, so I got one of those adapters that allows me to play games with my Xbox controller while the phone is attached to it. Right now I would be interested in MMORPGs as well as things that resemble MMORPGs. Other than that, I appreciate pixel art in general. I am well aware of emulators and will be looking into those, but I have played emulated games for years so it might be interesting to try something else for now. The phone can probably handle most games unless we're talking about something very intensive.

Preferably games that were either made for mobile or adapted well. I don't care for tiny text or tiny UIs.

Zaniness, wackiness, and fast pace are appreciated.

Thanks!

I started listening to podcasts in June of 2017 after having heard about them being great for years but never getting around to listening to them. I preferred music at the time and would put on a playlist or an album if I had a long drive, walk, etc. Once I started listening to podcasts I was hooked. The amount of time I spent listening to music plummetted and since I started I've spent 4% of my time listening to podcasts, I've used the same app since I started which makes keeping track of that easy.

I mainly listen to mine whenever I have some tedious or when I don't need too hard about what I'm doing. Walking the dog, driving, all of the housework, and some video games when I have time to play one and just want to zone out a bit and do something. Its made me enjoy cleaning more which my wife has appreciated a lot.

I was curious when other people listen to podcasts, how you fit them into your schedule, and if you're keen on sharing what your favorites are. I have way too many podcasts bookmarked in my app to listen to but its fun to add more to the ever growing list.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.