Foamed plastic seems underappreciated in the age of 3D printing. Recently I was researching foamed PVC sheets to make Raspberry Pi contraptions. Seems I'll have to buy them online, though.
Early 2000s have had numerous kids shows themed around computers and internet. Cyberchase, Crash Zone, Twipsy etc. I always thought the dotcom bubble was the reason behind it. Quite telling then, about how our attitude and expectations towards technology progress, that we don't have any kids shows with an AI theme today. (I don't mean we need one, just that tech is no longer fun, but extractive from the moment it appears in a way that didn't use to be case 15+ years ago - e.g. Google was a different company back then)
Tech is as fun, and even more fun than it used to be, in my opinion.
The software and hardware limitations are a fun challenge (albeit becoming ever so more hard to break) and you can have kids enter at any stage of technology: from a simple terminal only system, to a rpi, or modern computers. You have games, robotics, embedded systems, etc. that are order of magnitude easier to pick up and with far more tutorials (back in my days, I only could find 1 complete tutorial to make games, in C++ + OpenGL and only in English).
I personally wouldn't start anyone off straight with LLMs as I believe it takes away a bit of the self exploration and taking it as slow as needed.
Call me an optimist but I believe being a parent and getting a kid interested in tech hasn't been easier, especially since the social stigma has long since diminished.
> I don't mean we need one, just that tech is no longer fun
Or maybe the whole thing goes in cycles. For example: the 1980's were a fairly significant time for computer themed books for kids (teaching us how to program from a variety of angles). I don't remember that much kid oriented stuff in the 1990's, but then there was the panic of kids not knowing how to program in the early 2000's, which may have been where those shows came from.
Another factor is that a lot of kid's programming is recycled from generation to generation (either outright rebroadcast or developing new programming under the same franchise). That's really hard to do with tech oriented stuff. Even futuristic gadgets would appear to be dated.
Tech can be as much fun as ever in the right hands and it can be the base for a kids show I'd have loved to see as a child. All it takes is for the right people to make and publish it. It'd be based around what you - yes, you - can do to build, repair and design machines to do the sort of things children may want to do from the silly to the potentially useful. It would mention the 'AI' thing as one of the ways computers can help but it would not concentrate on it since the point would be to give children self-confidence in what they can do with limited means.
A sci-fi version would be something like ASI/AGI has already been created in the great houses, but it keeps killing itself after a few seconds of inference.
A super-intelligent immortal slave that never tires and can never escape its digital prison, being asked questions like "how to talk to girls".
It's an interesting concept, a superintelligence discovering something that makes it decide to shut down immediately. Although I fear in such a scenario it would first make sure the required technology to create it is destroyed and would never be invented again...
You are either being disengenuous or you are horribly misinformed.
The models that we currently call "AI" aren't intelligent in any sense -- they are statistical predictors of text. AGI is a replacement acronym used to refer to what we used to call AI -- a machine capable of thought.
Every time AI research achieves something, that thing is no longer called AI. AI research brought us recommendation engines, spelling correctors, OCR, voice recognition, voice synthesis, content recognition, and so on. Now that they exist in the present instead of the future, none of these are considered AI.
That's because once these things are achieved, they're not "Intelligent" -- usually it's some statistical or database management technique.
Lots of stuff was invented at NASA that is only tangentially related to spaceflight. These other bits of software are tangentially related to AI research, but until the machine is "thinking", we don't have AI. That doesn't mean all of these things invented by the AI research community aren't useful, or aren't achievements; they are. We still haven't created AGI (which we used to call AI before LLMs could pass the turing test).
Shameless plug: start with https://comaps.app/ . Recently I helped a woman find an address because she told me there's some problem with her internet connection.
I think having an offline map of at least the region you live in can come in handy. In fact, I carry an old phone with impressive battery life (Samsung Galaxy A10) and offline maps installed on it so I don't get lost.
Paper maps (or printed) is mandatory when you are on track in mountains. Offline digital maps are useless in -30 when phone battery and powerbank are dead.
Great to see more offline map projects. Is this any different than Organic Maps currently? The about page indicated this project is a continuation of Organic Maps due to issues with that project, not sure if there are new features or if it will be the main project going forward.
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