It's practically fucking impossible to have a normal amount of tech in the house and keep it under control, while also keeping things not-annoying for the adults. It's so much work, all because the tech is bad at providing simple and powerful solutions.

Everything lacks the basics, and nothing reads system-level e.g. content rating restrictions, it's all per-service and per-device and it's maddening.

Worse, the single most-useful parental control possible, an allow-list, is often absent from TV interfaces and steaming services. Allow-list just the PBS app on AppleTV? Impossible, there is no way to do a case-by-case allow list. Allow-list only the handful of non-brain-rot children's shows on Netflix? Nah, it's just by age rating. Et c.

[EDIT] Our solution, after years and years of banging our heads against this? App-installation blocked everywhere, no YouTube on anything, all streaming services cancelled because they're such a pain in the ass, and the kids have a large curated set of pirated content served by Jellyfin that they can watch when they get TV time, including some things pulled from YouTube by yt-dlp. If we want to one-off stream something for the kids outside of that set of content, we "cast" it from a parent's device.

The non-piracy alternative would be to go back to discs for everything, I guess.

Standard ways of interacting with "modern" media services are just awful, if you're a parent. They're so bad that it's easiest to simply abandon them.

I pretty much subscribe to your list, with the further caveat the router I got for Comcast service has a USBA network drive port that can run a 64GB thumbstick of content. A single piece of content can serve 5 devices this way before you start seeing buffering issues. Great for car trips.

Identity needs to be redesigned on the web.

A family unit should own all accounts in the family, parents should be able to reset any password to any owned account from a central dashboard without hunting down email links and 2factor. I don't want to set up a management account for each service. I want all any services management options exposed by api and displayed in my central dashboard. Of my choice.

so make it

Would it help to do it with a kid on your lap, or otherwise actively involved? Perhaps you could put a laptop on the floor and make a game of it, and certainly in our line there's never any shortage of complicated words that can be said in funny ways.

I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.

For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.

Children still need to be able to explore the world themselves, I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities.

Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.

Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.

> I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities.

3 to 4 year olds are still putting things in their mouth that they shouldn’t be.

In a village raises the kid scenario, there would be older kids and neighbors looking after the kid, presumably with good intentions since they are neighbors.

But in a world (the internet) where anyone from around the world can communicate any of their idea to everyone instantaneously, the village is no longer raising the kid, so village rules don’t apply.

I was learning dos command line on my grandfather's lap at 3/4.

Reminds me of the time I tried using pkunzip to expand a shareware demo and filled the C drive on accident.

You could be taught to use those machines respectfully, if you knew games were available.

What does a family computer with minimal internet access look like in the constantly connected modern era?

More to add, but I would like to note first that I suggested making a game of configuring an MDM profile (indeed natively miserable! Why else suggest inviting along a whole kid to try to make it tolerable, lol) and never suggested that manual filtering must be synchronous filtering.

Download tools and selfhosted video streaming tools exist for YT content. I run them myself. I learned to set them up based on a couple of HN commenters' passing mentions that it was easier than I had made it out to be, by following search terms from their comments, and by screwing around breaking things till they quit falling apart on me.

In other words, old-fashioned sysadmin work, of the kind I loudly hate and quietly love to. In aggregate, it took about two days' (ie ca 16h though not as closely tracked as if billing ofc) work, and though my notes are aides-memoires in no fit state for publication, I would be happy to share them privately and save you some of that time.

(This offer stands for any reader, and my email is in my profile here; to see those, click on the name above this or any comment. My fifty-year-old, brilliant but determinedly nontechnical, beloved catty bitch of an ex-boyfriend had much derision for the content of my library, but none for the quality of service. I confide you won't disappoint your family too badly, either.)

eta: What I wanted to add is this, a short and I hope not too dull piece which I wrote now almost a decade ago. Please excuse the state you find it in; my old website broke ages ago and this needs a rewrite anyway for that the man proved far more vile than I yet knew to paint him. But I think it still can stand as a hint of my real feelings on these matters, which might surprise you somewhat. https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.c...

16 hours is like 2-3 weeks of free time for children of young parents.

I cannot really explain to a non-parent how different the life of a parent is. We don't have the ability to sit down and do 16 hours of time in a project in 2 days.

This is why parents and especially young parents need a community.

It's nothing for example I would shy away from administering for my neighborhood, tenant per family or account per family or whatever people want in each their own case - in the same sense we share other resources as a community, from a drop cord to a car or a bedroom. Indeed I have no kids of my own in large part because I was terrified I'd be homeless by 50, if I did not focus on building the kinds of skills that make this something I can do in a couple days without mostly at any time putting in a lot of serious effort - this was second-screen stuff I did mostly in bed with a cup of one or another of the embarrassing milk-and-coffee concoctions I like.

I never knew what I would miss that way, focusing on building a reliably remunerative career instead of fostering any other kind of social connection, until too damn late. I don't need to hear (and won't receive well) anything like "it's never too late;" no one else here is competent to speak to my personal regrets, and I speak of this one here only so I can cite it as one motivation among many to try to do something with that so hard-earned skill that makes a difference for folks whose lives are embedded among those of others in just that way I never learned the hang of. What else could I do that's worth more?

No one is asking me to do that for my community, not at the moment. I don't know if anyone else here would think of it; one major reason I bought here is because I've lived here enough years to know it is mostly unattractive to tech people and fast becoming more so. That's good; no monoculture is healthy and that one metastasizes.

So sure. In theory I could build something like a Helm chart or deployable Compose file, or some such awful useless other shit that no one with a life could ever make heads nor tails of. Those are all things I wasted too much of my one and only mortal life learning how to do, but there are no tools we make that a human can use so just that alone doesn't work. So then I'd have to turn it into a business, and pitch to YC just so I could say they rejected me, and eventually Alphabet would sue me into my next incarnation for threatening one Ads PM's metrics bonus best case, and all I ever really wanted to do was help the overworked parents around me make their kids happy in a way that was safe.

To hell with all that, it's for the chumps here whom I grant are in the majority but do not mistake me for one of them. I said before if you want my notes you can email me and I'll share them, Docker Compose file and all; if you don't have time to act on them then you can try to find a friend or family member or neighbor who does, if you still remember how to speak to any such person. Or trade someone for babysitting so you do have the time. Or let your kids learn something about what Daddy does all day! And if you're embarrassed of that, well, maybe you should be. Unless you know some grave occult evil of Jellyfin or yt-dlp, I don't see why you'd feel that way, though.

Any of those you're welcome to by me, or whatever else you like. Not my problem, but for whatever you find it to be worth, I would say any or all of them seems a better use of your precious time than to waste more of it whining to me.